Breaking: The bangles Guitarist bids farewell to members as he has officially announced Retirement due to serious Health Issues…

As guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for the Bangles, Vicki Peterson was a major part of some of the best songs of the ’80s, including “Manic Monday,” “Walk Like an Egyptian” and “Eternal Flame,” to name just a few.

After the Bangles disbanded in 1989, Peterson joined two other bands, the Continental Drifters and the Psycho Sisters, in the ’90s, and played with the Go-Go’s during their 1994 reunion tour, filling in for their guitarist, Charlotte Caffey, while she was on maternity leave. She then returned to the Bangles when the band reunited in 1998, and has been with them since.

Music is a family affair for Peterson. Her younger sister, Debbi Peterson, was the Bangles’ drummer, and after being married for 20 years, Peterson and her husband, John Cowsill (who was in the popular ’60s family band and inspiration for The Partridge Family the Cowsills as a child) have been playing as a couple for the first time. They previously played together in the band Action Skulls, and are now touring in support of their upcoming album as a duo.

Vicki Peterson and John Cowsill‘s next show will be at the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall Of Fame in Stony Brook, New York on August 9. In anticipation of the upcoming concert, Peterson spoke to Woman’s World about collaborating with her husband, her biggest inspirations and the ’80s music scene.

Vicki Peterson: It’s funny, because we’ve known each other forever, but we just avoided that aspect of our relationship. It’s still a bit of a mystery, but he was on the road for literally the first 20 years of our marriage. He just just left the road last year, so he wasn’t around a ton anyway, and we were both very busy doing other things.

For whatever reason, we did everything but sit around and play music together, and I don’t really know why. The funny thing is that we sing so naturally together, and it’s a beautiful blend. We’re really enjoying this process now, and I think it just had to happen in its own time.

We wanted to work on a recording project that was an idea we had years and years ago, and we finally started physically working on it almost haphazardly, then decided to dig in and try and finish the record. It’s a love project, the record we made together, and then everything has grown from there.