Although Susanna Hoffs famously recorded the Bangles’ hit “Everlasting Flame” while naked, her most up-to-date creative process is less risqué.
“I didn’t sit within the nude once I was writing,” she laughed. “I got to be in my pajamas and slippers at home, just wandering across the house. It was not a really fashion forward look, but it surely was actually comfortable.”
The singer’s just-released debut novel, “This Bird Has Flown,” follows singer Jane Start, a one-hit wonder who found fame in her early 20s but is now forced to play bachelor parties in Las Vegas to make ends meet.
There’s a rom-com element, as well, as Jane falls in love with a dashing Brit.
Hoffs was inspired by her own high-profile loves and losses and swift rise to fame, she said in a revealing interview with The Post.
The final word ’80s rock babe, Hoffs — now a youthful 64 — said: “It’s almost like rock musicians can only live in the last decade from 20 to 30. There’s a sweet spot that seems to go away when you get deeper into your 30s. I don’t know what that’s. It’s only a cultural box and the culture sets those standards one way or the other.
“I did discover with Jane very deeply … ultimately I fearful for her because I even have had a taste of what that appears like to be many a long time after you were in your ‘prime.’”
Hoffs, who has been married to her director husband, Jay Roach (“Austin Powers,” “Meet the Fockers”), since 1993, said she definitely felt pressure to be sexy in her youth: “There’ll all the time be that element to the music business. [The red carpet] looks so effortless. I do know from my very own experience of being in the general public eye that truly it’s fraught with greater than that.”
The pop star was born into and grew up in Los Angeles privilege, the daughter of a filmmaker mother and psychoanalyst dad.
After graduating UC Berkeley as an art major in 1980, she moved back to LA and told her parents she was going to start out a band — putting an ad in The Recycler, a “throwaway paper that was for purchasing used cars and sofas and in search of roommates.”
That’s how she met Vicki Peterson, who would turn out to be the Bangles’ lead guitarist, together with Vicki’s sister Debbi on drums and Michael Steele on bass.
The Bangles became one among the best groups of the ’80s, yet Hoffs mused: “We were all the time the opening band. We all the time wondered, ‘Is it because we’re girls that we’re the opener?’ … But opening at Slane Castle in Ireland for Queen in 1986, that was amazing.
“There have been fun adventures, particularly the Sanremo Festival, I think it was 1987, Duran Duran and the Bangles were each performing. We met backstage and John Taylor and Simon Le Bon said, ‘Let’s go have dinner together.’ They were swarmed, it was like Beatlemania, it was exactly like what you see in ‘Hard Day’s Night.’ They were such huge stars, and we were just coming up. We’d finally had a primary hit, which I think was ‘Walk Like an Egyptian,’ and it was very ‘La Dolce Vita.’
In that famous 1960 film, director Federico Fellini coined the term “paparazzi” — a phenomenon Hoffs would come to know well.
“We had our first paparazzi photo-op where it was just flash bulbs going off blinding us … But Duran Duran were old-hat at it, and all of us squeezed of their limo. I sat on Simon Le Bon’s lap, because there was no room anywhere else. We go to the restaurant and we could hardly hear one another because girls were banging on the windows outside going, ‘John! Simon!’ I even have a pair of images of me and John Taylor with the large bottle of champagne. There was a variety of champagne!
“It was probably the most iconic moments of my life … Since it was a recent phenomenon, we all the time considered ourselves as a scrappy club band. We weren’t very polished.”
While she can have loved the champagne, Hoffs never fell into the rock ’n’ roll sinkhole of substance abuse.
“We definitely had a good time on the road with wine — we liked our wine,” she said. “We had our ‘chardy’ and I normally would lean upon that.” (She quit drinking 11 years ago and said: “I had to seek out one other method to have a sense that was similarly wonderful. So I began to go, ‘Well, I’ll just watch a movie every night, or I’ll start binging one other season of ‘Inspector Morse’ … I began to simply replace the wine with something similarly diverting.”)
The band had their first big hit in 1986 with “Manic Monday,” written for them by Prince, who was said to be smitten with Hoffs.
Hoffs’ book character Jane also takes a song from an elusive megastar and turns it right into a smash.
When Prince died aged 57 from an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2016, Hoffs said, “I used to be devastated. I had just been with Tom Petty doing his radio show and we had talked about Prince. A day or two later, I’m walking home from my local coffee shop and my phone rings with an unrecognized number.
“Someone said, ‘Do you might have anything to say about Prince?’ I’m like, ‘Who is that this? What is that this regarding?’ They said, ‘He’s died.’ Then they began asking me things, and I just shut off my phone. I used to be shaking and I started to cry.”
Calling Prince’s talent “supernaturally amazing,” Hoffs continued, “Once I got that phone call … I just immediately called Tom and we sat together … We were each so saddened and traumatized. Then to lose Tom just a few years after that [also of an overdose, brought on by drugs including fentanyl], it was just so tough.”
Hoffs had high-profile romances with Donovan Leitch, the actor son of ’60s folk singer Donovan and brother of Ione Skye, in 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 Flown,” Hoffs’ important character has also had a string of romances and is left reeling from a bitter break-up with a Hollywood producer.
Asked whether she drew from her own past, Hoffs grinned and said “Yes.
“It was cathartic to drag from, and sometimes I didn’t know that I used to be pulling from it … after which I’d realize, ‘Oh, that was that person within the ’80s.”
Hoffs also wrote some highly-charged sex scenes and admitted she needed to throw her husband out of the home while she wrote.
“That was really a fun a part of the book for me. Jay would walk in and I’d be sitting on the kitchen table giggling,” she recalled. “He’s like, ‘Who has fun writing?’ I’d say to him, ‘Well, I’m writing this really sexy scene straight away with my character’s fictional boyfriend. Please leave so I can keep going.’
“Nevertheless it was so fun to write down about romantic love and that first flush of a recent romance where there’s a lot yummy sex that I desired to dig into and just explore. For me, it was endlessly gratifying and delicious to write down. I did pinch myself: ‘Do I say that? Do I’m going there?!”
Hoffs, who has been writing fiction since 1989, has two grown sons with Roach — Jackson, 28, and Sam 24. The couple met at a feast in 1991, two years after the Bangles broke up. While the singer launched a solo profession that very same yr, she said she will be able to relate to the emotions of her character as she tries to work out life after being on top of the charts.
“I assumed… ‘Jane Start needs to be a musician’, because I understand that world, and I could bring something of my knowledge to the character,” Hoffs said. “She feels small and washed up, a washed up musician who just can’t appear to recover from all of the rejections.”
Hoffs has managed to chart her own path, though. She just released her fifth solo album, “The Deep End,” and stays close friends together with her fellow Bangles, including Annette Zilinskas, the band’s original and current bassist.
The Bangles reunited in 1999 — on the request of Hoffs’ director husband, Roach — to record a song for “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.” They’ve since played several live shows.
A documentary and book are being made in regards to the band, and Hoffs is crossing her fingers that sooner or later they will likely be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
She’s already sold the film rights to her novel to Universal Pictures and written the screenplay — and has a “sexy fun” idea for a recent novel.
“I’m embracing being 64. I’m not so inclined to wear a miniskirt anymore, but who knows? Possibly 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 I did once I was younger, because I felt more pressure …
“I don’t regret any of my selections, I’m just saying that I feel like I believe times have modified in an excellent way … If [celebrities] need to walk a red carpet in a T-shirt and jeans, that goes too.”
