‘Siobhan had never toured with us,’ says Sara ‘she left the year before we embarked on our 1989 World Tour with Jacquie O’Sullivan, which was amazing. I never really thought about working with Siobhan again until that night when we discussed maybe doing a Xmas show but we never got round to it.
Keren and I have been making records and touring around the world for the past 20 odd years and love being on stage. ‘We had just come back from Australia and Japan ‘ continues Keren ‘and this year we just wanted to do something different. I guess it’s all about timing.’ 

In the woozy haze of that summer twilight, the threesome began imagining the reformation they never thought would happen. Sometimes, it’s just about waiting for the right time to arrive. Since their seismic last TV performance with Siobhan at the Brit Awards in 1988, celebrating their entry into the Guinness book of records as the most successful girl group of all time, clocking up 30 hit singles, Sara and Keren have continued Bananarama as a very successful duo for 28 years, releasing six studio albums and touring worldwide with their band.

Meanwhile Siobhan went on to form Shakespears Sister. She has recorded four albums to date under that name and enjoyed a string of top 40 hits, including the iconic “Stay” which remained at number 1 in the UK for a staggering eight weeks.

Though Bananarama own a corner of the 80s every bit idiosyncratic, influential and compelling as Pet Shop Boys or The Smiths, Sara and Keren had never been on the road with their oldest friend, comrade and cofounder of the group.

Sara Dallin and Siobhan Fahey met in the registration hall at the London College of Fashion in September ’80, Punk has peaked and they were signing up for a diploma in Fashion Journalism. ‘I was the youngest there,’ I’d just left school,’ says Sara.
“ I saw Siobhan - we looked very similar, same hair, same clothes, same monkey boots and discovered we both loved Patti Smith. There was an instant connection.’ For lunch, they would visit the Italian restaurant Ponti’s off Oxford Circus (‘still there,’ notes Sara) or scam their way into the subsidised BBC canteen where Sara’s best friend Keren worked in the pensions department. ‘I went in for an interview for this really tedious job in a dress that my mum made me and from then on dressed like a punk.’

Before long, they were living together. The band formed. There is not yet a commemorative blue plaque on the wall of the council flat in Lamb’s Conduit Street where Bananarama started their amazing pop life, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be. ‘I don't think any of us wanted to conform to a career path or get trapped in the system,’ says Siobhan, of the earliest days of Bananarama. ‘There was this post-punk attitude of breaking everything open and defining your own life. Why does it have to be bass, drums, guitar? Lets do it our way ”

The first Bananarama album, Deep Sea Skiving, contains a song called What a Shambles. In retrospect the title feels as gloriously close to an ethos as the girls needed. ‘It wasn’t considered at all,’ says Keren. ‘It was all impromptu.’ The first time Bananarama were in a recording studio was with Department S, as backing vocalists. The next was with Sex Pistol Paul Cook, producing their opening shot, a cover of the acrobat crate-diggers favourite, Aie A Mwana. Terry Hall from the Fun Boy 3 bought it and after seeing a photo of them in The Face and loving their moccasins he called them up and asked them to sing on his debut album. He returned the favour by singing on their hit Really Saying Something. Deep Sea Skiving contained the first of their string of immaculate, self penned, ramshackle, charmingly naive pop gemstones. Their natural propensity to talk straight and look great saw frantic commitments across the regal promo schedule of Top of the Pops, Smash Hits, the NME, and The Face. Travelling to their first international commitment in Amsterdam was Keren’s first time on an aeroplane. When visiting their record label, penniless, they would often pilfer cutlery, domestic products and whole crates of Dire Straits CDs to sell at the Soho Record and Tape Exchange.

The last Bananarama performance as the original trio was of Love in the First Degree, the song Pete Waterman still maintains is the best record to come out of The Hit Factory and the closest he ever got to realising his dream of forging a modern day Brill Building or Tamla Motown. In the midst of the mayhem, this final curtain call at The Brit Awards was the Hollywood ending the three piece deserved. Flanked by a group of muscled, greased and tanned boys in cycle shorts and black knee socks, in one feminist masterstroke Bananarama inverted strands of misogyny endemic in the music industry in one eye popping extravaganza. The trope would be copied ad infinitum, starting with the immaculate execution of the same idea on Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour the following year.

‘It really did raise a lot of brows,’ says Keren. ‘It was about reversing roles for once.’ Noel Edmunds introduced Bananarama that night with a raised eyebrow himself and the words ‘You’ve seen nothing like this.’ For Bananarama, it was ever thus.