6 April 1989
If you wanted a number one single in late-1980s Ireland and you hadn’t starred in Neighbours, your up-tempo pop banger probably wasn’t going to cut it. No sirreee: to nail that final push to the summit you usually needed to wheel out a big romantic ballad. And so, just as with Whitney Houston and Sananda Maitreya, The Bangles are an excellent ’80s pop act whose excellent ’80s pop hits, though fondly remembered today, didn’t have the same Irish chart success as their trembling slowie. As I’m not in the Trembling Slowie Hits FM demographic, I don’t remember ‘Eternal Flame’ as fondly.
The Bangles themselves may not remember it all that fondly either. The outsized global success of this un-Bangley single, which made them seem like Susanna Hoffs plus backing band rather than the egalitarian quartet of ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’, actually caused The Bangles to split up before the end of the same year. Happily, they have since reformed, released new music, and got back to swaggering guitar-pop classics in the grand manner of ‘Manic Monday’, ‘Hero Takes A Fall’, ‘If She Knew What She Wants’ and plenty more.
Aside from featuring the most prominent triangle-playing since Anita Ward’s ‘Ring My Bell’, ‘Eternal Flame’ is a dreary, cliched affair. The swell at the end to an overwrought power ballad is probably what sealed its number-one fate, and that bludgeoning, reverberating snare brings home the similarity to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by another ultimately fractious pop act. ‘Eternal Flame’ has the class and substance of a lit fart; let’s not remember an enjoyable ’80s band that way.
