These 7 Musical Duos Ended in Disaster. Here’s What Tore Them Apart.
At least we’ll always have their music.
Getty Images
Creative partnerships can be extremely fulfilling for an musician. If you find somebody who fits, the ying to your yang, you can make great work together. But they’re also notoriously difficult to maintain. For every decades-long musical duo still cranking out hits, there’s a bevy of high-profile break-ups of the professional (and sometimes also personal) kind.
Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of creative differences, like when the Grammy-winning duo Outkast went their separate ways in pursuit of distinctly disparate sounds. Other times, matters of the heart play a part, like when the divorce of Sonny and Cher led to both a solo career and a U.S. Congressional seat. On rare occasions, these artistic flameouts can even occur fully in the public eye, as anyone who tried to see Oasis perform at the Rock en Seine festival in Paris in 2009 can attest.
Whereas some musical duos do ultimately come back together again, others have forever left us wondering what if. But either way, we’ll always have the art only their partnership could make.
Getty Images
When Salvatore Bono first met Cheryl Sarkisian in the autumn of 1962, he was working for the legendary music producer Phil Spector. The two started a romantic relationship and, simultaneously, began working together as backup singers on several Spector-produced hits, most notably Darlene Love’s “Be My Baby.” Efforts to launch a music career of their own stumbled initially under the moniker Caesar and Cleo, but when 1965 saw the release of the single “I Got You Babe” from the duo now named Sonny & Cher, everything took off.
“I Got You Babe” went to No. 1 on the charts, and the group was consistently touring and appearing on major television programs like The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand. At the height of their popularity, Sonny and Cher had five songs simultaneously on the Billboard charts, putting them in the same category as The Beatles and Elvis Presley. Offstage, their romance blossomed.
Other aspects of Sonny & Cher’s career didn’t align with the successes of the Beatles or the King. Particularly when it came to Hollywood. The duo tried multiple times to get a movie career off the ground, including the 1967 flop Good Times, to no avail. One of their intended films, Speedway, even wound up booting Sonny and Cher in favor of Nancy Sinatra and Elvis, himself.
In 1971, Sonny and Cher did manage to get a successful TV variety show, The Sonny & Cher Show, but creative tensions between the two, particularly Bono’s continued need to control every aspect of their output, coalesced with personal strife. By the show’s third season, the couple filed for divorce.
Both attempted to launch their own solo variety shows in the wake of the split (Bono’s flopped, while Cher’s found success). Cher also pursued a very successful solo music and acting career, winning an Academy Award for her role in Moonstruck. Bono, on the other hand, went a different path: politics. The former entertainer served as the U.S. representative for California’s 44th district from 1995 until his death in a skiing accident in 1998.