This week our guest is Vicki Peterson of the Bangles.
Vicki joins us to talk about the new archival release, Ladies and Gentlemen…The Bangles!, which is being released by Omnivore Recordings on June 24.
The 16 track collection pulls together a hefty stack of rarities from the ’80s, including the band’s first single, early demo recordings, live tracks and all of the songs from their self-titled debut EP, marking the first time that it has been available on physical media since its release on vinyl in 1982.
As Peterson told us during the conversation, the group’s archives were, as she put it with a laugh, “far-flung.”
“We had to dig up a lot of this stuff,” she says. “Luckily, my brother, who is an audiophile and a recording engineer/masterer, he had a lot of the early versions, because he actually recorded some of the early demos with us. For instance, the ‘Bitchen Summer‘ track, he was a teenager, I think, at the time. So he helped us track down a lot of stuff we had. Bill Inglot [also] helped, you know, we literally had to find the original masters of the EP.”
It was that EP that provided a good amount of the inspiration for putting this collection together.
“It sort of sparked from a long-seeded desire to have the EP available again. In my heart, I just wanted it available in a physical form,” she says. “We just wanted to sort of reintroduce it to the world, because we’re proud of it and it was really the birth of the Bangles in a lot of ways. It just kind of encapsulates some of the things that brought of us together initially musically and it has been recently something we’ve been playing. We’ve been dipping into this collection for our live shows in the last year or so, just because it’s so much fun to play. It expanded from there and we looked into what exists of our archives and found some other examples of baby Bangles’ stuff.”
We discuss those early beginnings during today’s interview and Peterson also shares what she’s got on tap musically, both with the Bangles and in her own work outside of the group and towards the end of our chat, there’s a great story about how the Bangles’ version of “Hazy Shade of Winter” came together with an interesting twist that might surprise you.
The Bangles will be playing shows later this summer and as Peterson tells us, they’ve got some other things in the works as well that folks can look forward to. Fans can stay in tune via the band’s official website and Facebook page to find out more details as things are announced.
The Lost Together website has an archive of all of the episodes to date and you can also find links to subscribe via RSS and iTunes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Thanks as always for listening!
Lost Together with Matt Wardlaw, Episode 20: Vicki Peterson
Photo Credit: Karen Filter
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