Wendy & Lisa (briefly known as Girl Bros.) are a music duo consisting of Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. They began working with Prince in the early 1980s and were part of his band the Revolution. In interviews in 1986, the two reported they felt they were not getting the recognition and credit they deserved despite their growing contributions to his work. Prince felt spurned and as a result he had already decided he would dissolve the Revolution once the ‘Hit n Run Parade’ tour was complete. Hence, by October 1986, Melvoin and Coleman were dismissed by Prince.
In 1987 the duo released an album simply titled Wendy & Lisa. The singles released were “Honeymoon Express”, “Waterfall” and “Sideshow” but none hit the top 40 on either side of the Atlantic. The follow-up album, Fruit at the Bottom, was released in 1989. The singles released were “Are You My Baby?”, “Lolly Lolly” (remixed by Prince) and “Satisfaction”, which gave them a top 40 single in the UK. “Waterfall ’89” failed to capitalize on the success of “Satisfaction” and reached another minor placing.
In 1990, the duo signed with Virgin Records in the US (which was already their label in Europe) and released Eroica. However, this too met only minor chart success. In 1991, Virgin UK released the remix album Re-mix-In-a-Carnation, a selection of club mixes from the first three albums as remixed by producers like the Orb, William Orbit, and Nellee Hooper. In the mid-1990s, Wendy & Lisa worked on several movie projects with record producer Trevor Horn. They recorded an album with him as producer, but had a falling out (according to them, due to Horn and his wife Jill Sinclair’s alleged homophobia) and the project was shelved, leaving the master tapes in Horn’s hands and acrimony between the parties involved.
Their next solo effort – the 1998 album Girl Bros. – was the first to be independently released, with all subsequent releases also self-released. In 2004, the duo reached a rapprochement with Prince and contributed to several tracks on his Planet Earth (2007) album. In December 2008, White Flags of Winter Chimneys was released. The title is taken from a line in the Joni Mitchell song “Hejira”. 2011 saw the release of the Snapshots EP, which came with limited edition artwork, autographs and a photo book. It is a 6-track collection of songs that were recorded over the preceding 20 years of their careers but had previously never been released. In recent years they have turned their attention to writing music for film and television and have won an Emmy Award for their work on the movie Nurse Jackie.
