Bananarama have spoken about why they haven’t listened to Taylor Swift’s ‘Cruel Summer’ in a new interview.
Swift’s track went to number on the Billboard chart last October – four years after it received its debut on her 2019 album, ‘Lover’.
The track shares the name with a hit song by Bananarama, whose own single first appeared in 1983. The song became the band’s first top ten hit in America after appearing on The Karate Kid soundtrack in 1984.
The track was co-written by Keren Woodward, Sara Dallin and former member Siobhan Fahey with producers Steve Jolley and Tony Swain. Lorde covered the track at Primavera festival in 2022.
The band, which is now made up of co-founders Woodward and Dallin, are aware of Swift’s hit they told People in a new interview that they still haven’t heard it yet.
“A great title, isn’t it?” Dallin replied when asked about the song.
“I have to confess I haven’t listened to it,” Woodward added. “I’ve listened to quite a lot of her songs, but that one seems, I kept thinking, ‘I must listen and hear it.’ But I haven’t. I must be one of the few people.”
Speaking about the making of the song, Dallin said of Jolley and Swain: “We loved their work with [the group] Imaginatio. They came up with a rough backing track, and then we wrote the melody and the lyrics over the top.
“It was about our friends because we just sort of made it quite big at that point. We were on Top of the Pops, and so we’re doing loads and loads of promo. We were used to going on our little annual holiday and then we couldn’t go because we had so much promo. We were just moaning because all our friends were going on holiday and we couldn’t, and the city is very oppressive in the heat in London and New York or wherever. So that was the kind of inspiration for it.”
“40 years of moaning is what we’ve done,” Woodward jokingly added. “It’s like half-and-half: half laughing, half moaning.”
In other news, Swift shared a snippet of her live performance of ‘Cardigan’ from The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version) recently.
The new never-before-seen clip of the ‘Folklore’ track serves as a teaser of Swift’s extended edition of her record-breaking ‘Eras Tour’ film. The performance had been omitted from the original version of the film.
‘Cardigan’ is one of the five songs that have been added to The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version). The film also features four new acoustic tracks that Swift performed at part of her surprise songs segment during her run of shows at the the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, last August. The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version) will be available to stream on Disney+ from Thursday March 14 at 6pm PT (1pm GMT).
Swift’s film made history by becoming the highest grossing concert movie of all time. The film overtook Michael Jackson‘s This Is It with an overall global taking of $261.6million (£206m), as reported by Variety.
After its release last October, the film scored the biggest opening weekend for a concert film in history, while the tour itself was the first ever to gross $1billion.
“The Eras Tour is a concert movie in the true sense,” NME wrote in a four-star review. “In the space of one seamless performance, Swift is at turns a playfully eccentric artist, a country star and a genuine pop icon.”
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