The Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs: ‘I felt I could pull back the curtain on working in the music business’

Susanna Hoffs is in talkative, high-flying form, and why shouldn’t she be? The former Bangles singer and songwriter is luxuriating in a soft feather bed of positive reviews for her debut novel, This Bird Has Flown – described by the New York Times as a “smart, ferocious rock-chick redemption romance”. Getting to write the book, she says, has been a dream come true.

“I knew I wanted to write from a strong female point of view about a woman who knew the music industry. I grew up in Los Angeles around the movie business, and your classmates at school would be the kids of people who worked in the entertainment business, be they actors or musicians or movie and record industry people.”

She adds that being married to the film director Jay Roach, who made the Austin Powers trilogy, Meet the Parents and Bombshell, allowed her to surreptitiously witness numerous movie-business-related incidents. “I wondered if I should make the main character in the book an actress or someone in the movie industry, but then I thought I have the opportunity here to make the protagonist a musician, because I know what that’s like. I felt I could firmly pull back the curtain and go deeper into the experience of not only being a musician but one that is actually still working within the music business.”

The protagonist of This Bird Has Flown – the title is from the Beatles song Norwegian Wood – is Jane Start, a one-hit wonder 10 years out from her big song. Having just been cheated on and dumped by her long-term boyfriend, Jane is in Las Vegas for a demeaning but lucrative private gig at a bachelor party.

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I read Jane Eyre many times preceding the writing of the book and reread it during the writing. I also read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I thought had similar themes I wanted to explore

—  Susanna Hoffs

“She needs the work and the money,” Hoffs says, “yet she’s a character that sees the light and the brightness in pretty much everything.” As a template for helping her craft the story, Hoffs went to the classics. “I read Jane Eyre many times preceding the writing of the book and reread it during the writing. I also read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which I thought had similar themes I wanted to explore – can the ghosts of our past haunt us or prevent us in such a way that we can’t have happy lives? I think everybody has some version of that.”

The insights Hoffs wanted to present, she says, had to avoid cliches. “It was a good opportunity to approach industry and performer topics such as what stage fright feels like, what being washed up feels like. What was great was that I could look at the dark and dirty aspects of what lay behind the scenes for a one-hit wonder as well as writing about a person who has another chance at life.” She pauses for breath and asks for a glass of water. “That was all yummy, fun and delicious.”

We drift towards Hoffs’s life as a musician and songwriter. The Bangles may no longer be a going concern – they were a significant international success in the 1980s, most famously with their jangly pop cover of Prince’s Manic Monday – but she has maintained a career as a recording artist over the past 30 years with collaborative and solo work, including three albums with the US musician Matthew Sweet and her own latest, The Deep End.

We know that This Bird Has Flown is fiction, but how many of the book’s music-industry elements are based on personal experience? Through the character of Jane, she says, she has been able to apply her sense of how difficult it was to navigate the music business after, in Jane’s case, just one hit song and then, for Hoffs, as a member of The Bangles. “I know how hard to was for the band and also for me, personally, to recapture that time. It seems to be that once you’ve had it, then that’s it – there is a finite amount of time in the spotlight. It’s wonderful, but it’s chaotic and also weirdly challenging.”

‘Indie experience’

Her post-Bangles life was, Hoffs implies, far less problematic. “At this point I’m just an indie artist, and I’m fine with that. Writing the book was an indie experience – it was just me, my ideas and a laptop, writing my characters and learning from other books, which is the same way it was when I started in music. The music business is tough, but I’ve had nothing but luck in the book business – it has been, so far, an exceptional phase in my life.”

I live with me every day, and it gets boring, whereas Jane gets to do all kinds of things – I’ve been married for 30 years, yet she gets to saunter into hot love affairs with a cool Oxford professor

—  Susanna Hoffs

Do people confuse or conflate Jane Start and her music-industry and romantic experiences with Hoffs’s? “Ah, she’s definitely not me in so many ways. To be honest, it’s much more fun to write about an imaginary person than to write about myself. I’m sick of myself! I live with me every day, and it gets boring, whereas Jane gets to do all kinds of things – I’ve been married for 30 years, yet she gets to saunter into hot love affairs with a cool Oxford professor.

“She’s not me, but I feel for her, and I love her determination to try to find joy. In that respect, I absolutely relate to her, and, though it might be weird to say it, I learn from her. I like writing about connections and why the telling of stories is so important for people. I know the characters are figments of my imagination, but I find it rewarding to hang out with them. The process of it all is brilliant, and what’s also exciting is that I’m making loads of new friends because of it.”

The story of Jane Start isn’t about to stop – a sequel is already in the works, and Universal Pictures has optioned the book and hired Hoffs to write the screenplay. “I’ve co-written many screenplays over the years, and some have languished on shelves. Fingers crossed, the movie of this will actually be made, but” – at this point she looks as if she’d rather not recall the experiences – “you never know in the movie business.”

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There’s a line in the book that sounds more like her than any fictional character in it: “I’d never yearned for the spotlight, only the music.” That’s really Hoffs, isn’t it?

“Yes, I do identify with that, because how it all started for me was the transformative nature of music and art from my childhood, from hearing music on the radio that we listened to all day at home, studying ballet, becoming an art major at Berkeley, to loving art in all its forms. I feel uncomfortable in the spotlight until I start to connect with the audience. I need to prepare myself to face the spotlight. In that sense Jane and I are alike.”

Pop fiction: Three novels that focus on music

Daisy Jones & the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2019)

The life and times of a fictional band that defined rock and pop music in the 1970s, from intragroup relationships to their personalities and emotional baggage, is told via interview transcripts. Loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac and the travails surrounding the recording of their 1977 album, Rumours.

High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby (1995)

Does this book contain more song references than any other? Despite the (now) elder-uncle sensibility to the songs the novel mentions, music is at the core of Nick Hornby’s tale of a thirtysomething record-shop owner and music obsessive, Rob Fleming, and his equally fixated colleagues, Barry (shouty, intolerable) and Dick (introverted, harmless).

The Unravelling of Cassidy Holmes, by Elissa R Sloan (2020)

The story of the fictional US singer Cassidy Holmes and her rise from runner-up on Sing It America (an American Idol-like reality show) to international star is all too salutary in its depiction of the music industry as a cesspit. The book traces the roller-coaster ride of success as well as the fallout through the eyes of Cassidy’s bandmates, Merry, Rose and Yumi.

This Bird Has Flown, by Susanna Hoffs, is published by Piatkus