Bangles Are Finally on Board for Reunion

Name a guitar-pop quartet whose name starts with B that had multiple hits, broke up on the heels of a No. 1 single, resisted many lucrative offers for a reunion.

Other than the Beatles.

If you’re thinking of an ‘80s Los Angeles band featuring four women, bingo.

And now Susanna Hoffs, Vicki Peterson, Debbie Peterson and Michael Steele are reactivating the Bangles. They have been writing songs together and are preparing for a short September club tour to get their feet wet again, including a three-night stand starting Sept. 21 at the House of Blues.

The four will hold a press conference Tuesday at the Sunset Strip club to officially announce the details of the tour, as well as plans for a new album and a full tour next year. Having signed for management with former Capitol Records executive Bruce Kirkland, the group will explore a variety of major-label and independent record deal options.

The group turned down offers last year to co-headline a national tour with the Go-Go’s and to play some Lilith Fair dates. But it did reconvene to record a new song, “Get the Girl,” for the soundtrack of “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”--directed by Hoffs’ husband, Jay Roach--and then again to sing Beatles songs in a tribute to producer George Martin at the Hollywood Bowl.

Vicki Peterson, who moved to New Orleans in the mid-’90s and is in the critically acclaimed Americana-pop band Continental Drifters, says that she was the most resistant of the four to a Bangles return.

“I wasn’t interested in accepting the offers that came in over the last several years, lucrative offers, to get out there and sell the name and cash in on the wave of ‘80s nostalgia,” she says. “But we’ve spent a couple of years now writing on and off, and it was important that we write things up to our standards and that all four members were involved.”

Hoffs acknowledges that she long wanted to end the hiatus, but says the wait allowed the members to work out some of the issues that led to the 1989 split.

“Everyone went in different directions and we needed time to explore, get a life in a way,” Hoffs says. “The concerns were how it would function, could we learn from the things that were painful and difficult and caused us to wear down in the process of being a band.”

The old conflicts will be covered in a VH1 “Behind the Music” premiering July 30, and while the group’s story doesn’t sport the tragedy and debauchery that the series favors, it is full of jealousies and conflicts with record executives and producers who brought in outside songwriters and musicians. All the big Bangles hits had non-Bangles writers--including “Manic Monday” by Prince, “Walk Like an Egyptian” by Liam Sternberg, and “Eternal Flame,” by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly with Hoffs.

There’s no doubt in any of their minds that it’s fully a group effort now and that they will stay in control of creative decisions.

Says Peterson, “We’re steering the boat this time.”

SLASH ‘N BURN: Having assembled a new version of his band Snakepit, with a new album due Oct. 10, guitarist Slash is having what to him are some unusual experiences.

“The guys in the band are great--there are no rock stars,” he says. “Everyone’s very level-headed, we have the same aspirations. Everyone’s just so enthusiastic and moving in the same direction, including our singer, which I’m not used to.”

That, of course, is a swipe at Axl Rose, Slash’s former Guns N’ Roses partner. Rose wanted to take GNR in new directions, so Slash quit the band five years ago and the singer has been working on a still-unfinished album with new musicians.

Slash, though still perplexed about why Rose would “systematically eliminate or alienate everyone so Guns N’ Roses wasn’t fun anymore,” shows no bitterness about the new GNR. In fact, he’s eager to hear the results of Rose’s sessions.

“I’m a huge Axl Rose fan,” he says. “I’d love to hear what it is that he decimated a band of that stature for. . . . There has to be some sort of method to the madness.”

For his own music, though, Slash says there’s no mystery.

“I’m a rocker through and through,” he says. “What I do is what I do.”

The fact that his style of rock is out of favor with radio, MTV and major record companies these days actually excites him. In fact, he says, he turned down several major-label offers to sign with independent KOCH Records for his first album since leaving GNR because it seemed to have more of the upstart spirit that Geffen Records had in 1985 when GNR signed there.

“You can call me crazy, but I enjoyed battling the corporate radio stuff that was going on in ‘85,” he says. “We were the antithesis of everything going on back then. I dug the challenge, and now it’s like doing it all over again. I don’t want to sound too nostalgic, but this band is definitely not like the bands that are out there selling a lot of records today.”

NEW VISTAS: After more than a year of trying to make an unlikely relationship work, electronica-oriented 1500 Records--home to techno-rock group God Lives Underwater, Irish DJ David Holmes and buzzed-about Long Beach alternative rap group Ugly Ducklings--has parted ways with Interscope, which to the surprise of many kept it on after absorbing its original parent, A&M; Records. Now 1500 is resurfacing in partnership with Bay Area Internet company Riffage.com.

“They gave me an amazing opportunity,” says 1500 President Gary Richards of Interscope. “But it’s a different playing field and it wasn’t going to work. I learned a lot in the year I was there, but there’s not much room there for artists that sell 50,000 to 100,000.”

With brick-and-mortar distribution to go through independent distributor RED, fall releases are planned for God Lives Underwater’s third album, Ugly Ducklings’ debut album, “Journey to Anywhere,” and the soundtrack to the upcoming Robert De Niro film “15 Minutes,” featuring a God Lives Underwater version of David Bowie’s “Fame.”