While Susanna Hoffs was famous for recording the Bangles hit “Everlasting Flame” nude, her recent creative process is less adventurous.
“I wasn’t naked once I wrote it,” she laughed. “I even have to be in my pajamas and slippers at home, just wandering around the house. It wasn’t a really fashionable look, nevertheless it was definitely comfortable.”
The singer’s just-released debut novel, This Bird Has Flown, follows singer Jane Start, a one-hit wonder who rose to fame in her twenties but is now forced to play bachelor parties in Las Vegas to make ends meet.
There’s also a component of romantic comedy as Jane falls in love with a handsome British man.
Hoffs was inspired by her high-profile loves and losses and her rapid rise to fame, she said in a revealing interview with The Post.
The best rock chick of the 80s, Hoffs – now a youthful 64 – said: “It’s almost as if rock musicians can only live to be 20 to 30 years old. There is a sweet spot that seems to vanish as you approach your thirties. I do not know what it’s. It’s only a culture box, and culture one way or the other sets these standards.
![Susan Hoffs](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009212171.jpg?w=965)
![Susan Hoffs](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009212170-edited.jpg)
“I identified with Jane very deeply … I sort of apprehensive about her because I got a taste of what it was wish to be many a long time after you were at your prime.”
Hoffs, who has been married to her director Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meet the Fockers) since 1993, said she definitely felt pressured to be sexy in her youth: the music industry. [The red carpet] looks so effortless. I do know from my very own experience of being in the public eye that there may be actually more to it than that.
The pop star was born and raised in Los Angeles to a filmmaker mother and psychoanalyst father.
After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, she returned to Los Angeles in 1980 and told her parents that she intended to start out a band. roommates.
![bracelets](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009297490.jpg?w=1024)
![Susanna Hoffs, Vicki Peterson, Debbi Peterson, Michael Steele](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009297484.jpg?w=1024)
That is how she met Vicki Peterson, who became the lead guitarist of The Bangles, together with Vicki’s sister Debbi on drums and Michael Steele on bass.
The Bangles became one among the coolest bands of the Eighties, but Hoffs mused, “We were all the time the first band. We all the time wondered, “Is it because we’re girls that we’re an opener?” … But opening at Slane Castle in Ireland for Queen in 1986 was amazing.
“There have been fun adventures, especially the festival in Sanremo, I feel it was 1987, Duran Duran and The Bangles were performing. We met backstage and John Taylor and Simon Le Bon said, “Let’s go have dinner together.” They were swarming with them, it was like Beatlemania, identical to Hard Day’s Night. They were such big stars and we were just getting closer. We finally had a primary hit, which I feel was “Walk Like an Egyptian” and it was very much “La Dolce Vita”.
![John Taylor, Susanna Hoffs](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009297498.jpg?w=1024)
![Susanna Hoffs, Simon Le Bon](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009297497.jpg?w=1024)
On this famous 1960 film, director Federico Fellini coined the term “paparazzi” – a phenomenon Hoffs was well acquainted with.
“We had our first paparazzi photo shoot where we were only blinded by the flashes of the flash lights … But Duran Duran was in that old hat and all of us squeezed into their limo. I sat on Simon Le Bon’s lap because there was nowhere else to go. We went to the restaurant and we barely heard one another because the girls were banging on the windows outside shouting ‘John! Simon!’ I even have some pictures of me and John Taylor with a giant bottle of champagne. There was plenty of champagne!
“It was one among the most iconic moments of my life… Because it was a recent phenomenon, we all the time considered ourselves as a feisty club band. We weren’t very refined.”
![Michael J. Fox, Susanna Hoffs](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009297493.jpg?w=683)
While she can have liked champagne, Hoffs never fell right into a rock ‘n’ roll addiction pit.
“We definitely had a good time on the wine tour – we enjoyed our wine,” she said. “We had a chardy and I often relied on that.” (She stopped drinking 11 years ago and said, “I had to search out one other technique to get that great feeling. So I began saying, ‘Well, I’ll just watch a movie every night or start devouring the next season of Inspector Morse…’ I just began substituting wine.” something similarly distracting.”
The band had their first major hit in 1986 with “Manic Monday”, written for them by Prince, which was said to be infatuated with Hoffs.
![Susanna Hoffs, Jay Roach, Jackson Roach, Sam Roach](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009297466.jpg?w=658)
Hoffs’ book heroine Jane also takes a song from the elusive megastar and turns it right into a smash hit.
When The prince died at the age of 57 after by accident overdosing on fentanyl in 2016, Hoffs said: “I used to be devastated. I used to be just with Tom Petty on his radio show and we were talking about Prince. A day or two later, I come home from a close-by coffee shop and my phone rings with an unrecognizable number.
“Someone said, ‘Do you could have anything to say about Prince? I’m like, “Who is that this? What’s it about? They said, “He died.” Then they began asking me about things and I just turned off my phone. I used to be shaking and commenced crying.”
![Chris Martin, Susanna Hoffs](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009298021.jpg?w=1024)
Calling Prince’s talent “incredibly amazing”, Hoffs continued, “Once I got that decision … I just called Tom immediately and we sat down together … We were each very saddened and traumatized.” After which losing Tom a number of years later [also of an overdose, brought on by drugs including fentanyl]it was just so hard.”
Hoffs had high-profile affairs with Donovan Leitch, an actor and the son of a Nineteen Sixties folk singer. Iona Skyein addition to Michael J. Fox before meeting Roach on a blind date. They are going to rejoice their thirtieth anniversary on April 17.
In This Bird Has Flyn, the important character played by Hoffs has also had a string of affairs and is shaken by a bitter breakup with a Hollywood producer.
![Sam Roach, Susanna Hoffs, Jay Roach](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009298038.jpg?w=1024)
When asked if she draws from her own past, Hoffs smiled and replied, “Yes.
“The withdrawal was cathartic, and sometimes I didn’t know I used to be doing it … and that is when I noticed, ‘Oh, that was that person in the ’80s.”
Hoffs also wrote some very charged sex scenes and admitted that she needed to kick her husband out of the house while writing.
“That was the really fun a part of the book for me. Jay would are available and I’d sit at the kitchen table and giggle,” she recalls. “He says, ‘Who has fun writing? I used to be telling him, ‘Well, I’m writing this really sexy scene with my character’s fictional boyfriend at once. Please leave so I can go on.
![Susan Hoffs](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009297978.jpg?w=1024)
“But it surely was so fun to jot down about romantic love and that first glimpse of a recent romance that has a lot delicious sex that I desired to dig in and just explore. For me, writing was infinitely satisfying and delicious. I pinched myself: “Am I saying that? Shall I am going there?!”
Hoffs, who has been writing novels since 1989, has two adult sons with Roach, Jackson, 28, and Sam, 24. The couple met at a celebration in 1991, two years after The Bangles broke up. While the singer launched her solo profession later that 12 months, she said she will be able to relate to her character’s feelings as she tries to make sense of life after she topped the charts.
“I believed … ‘Jane Start needs to be a musician’ because I understand this world and I could bring something of my knowledge to this character,” said Hoffs. “She feels small and drained, like a finished musician who just cannot recover from all the rejections.”
![Susan Hoffs](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009212157-edited-1.jpg)
Hoffs, nevertheless, managed to forge his own path. She just released her fifth solo album The Deep End and stays close friends with the other Bangles, including Annette Zilinskas, the band’s original and current bassist.
The Bangles reunited in 1999 – at the request of Hoffs director’s husband Roach – to record a song for “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”. Since then, they’ve played several concert events.
A documentary and book about the band are in the making, and Hoffs is keeping his fingers crossed that the band will in the future be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
She has already sold the film rights to her novel to Universal Pictures and has written the screenplay – and is having “sexy fun” for a recent novel.
![Susanna Hoffs book](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/NYPICHPDPICT000009212153.jpg?w=660)
“I understand that I’m 64 years old. I do not feel like wearing miniskirts anymore, but who knows? Perhaps I’ll if I feel prefer it,” she said. “But I feel more comfortable in my very own skin at this age, dare I say it, than once I was younger because I felt more pressure…
“I do not regret any of my selections, I’m just saying that I feel times have modified for good… If [celebrities] you must walk the red carpet in a T-shirt and jeans, that is advantageous too.”