C# minor · Camelot 12A · 108 BPM
Cruel Summer
by Bananarama
- 108
- BPM
- C# minor
- Key
- 12A
- Camelot
- 70
- Danceability
- 35
- Acousticness
Bananarama wrote "Cruel Summer" with Steve Jolley and Tony Swain, who also produced the track. The lyrics came from a real frustration: unlike their friends, the group's members could not take their annual summer holiday because promotion demands following their recent success kept them busy. Sara Dallin said the song played on the darker side of summer songs, looking at oppressive heat and the misery of wanting to be with someone as the summer ticked by.
Released in 1983 as a stand-alone single, the song reached number eight on the UK Singles Chart, and the group performed it on the BBC's Top of the Pops that July. It then appeared on their self-titled second album a year later. Its international popularity soared after it featured in the 1984 film The Karate Kid, and although Bananarama did not allow it on the film's soundtrack album, it climbed to number nine on the US Billboard Hot 100, their first top-10 hit in America. In Luxembourg it peaked at number one, its biggest chart showing anywhere.
The music video, directed by Brian Simmons, was shot in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn in mid-1983 during a heatwave. Siobhan Fahey recalled the conditions as difficult, with temperatures over one hundred degrees and the band doing their makeup in a tavern's ladies' room under the Brooklyn Bridge. It was, she said, an excuse to get them to New York for the first time.
Cruel Summer runs at 108 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.22 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 556 ms. It is in C# minor, Camelot 12A, which shares its notes with E major and mixes cleanly with F# minor and Ab minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.