Five songwriters who hated their singers
The romantic image of forming a band with your best mate and taking on the world together is one that still rings true, despite that it’s been about 20 years since bands mattered to anyone other than trainspotters like us. At this point, it’s more of a vibe than an actual plan. A commitment to valuing creativity and community above all else, forsaking society and the boxes it forces us into in the name of becoming icons, living forever through the medium of rock ‘n’ roll!
Which is great in theory. Then the problems start. Turns out, people are walking nightmares out to annoy you (specifically you) as much as humanly possible, especially if you live as close to them as bandmates tend to do. Not much of an issue if you’re in charge of writing and singing the songs; chances are you can just sling your partners in crime out into the cold and carry on, safe in the knowledge that you don’t need anyone but yourself. Some bands aren’t that lucky, though.
Some bands actually have to share the creative load, with one member writing the songs and another singing them. Now, ideally, you get a healthy creative partnership out of this. However, there’s a good reason that I can’t think of any healthy creative partnerships to come out of this setup. Instead, legions of toxic, co-dependent creative partnerships between singers and songwriters who can’t live with or without each other come to mind.
So, let’s have a look through the annals of rock history and find five songwriters who despised their singers!
Five songwriters who’ve hated on their singers
Noel Gallagher
I was surprised too! It turns out that underneath the Gallagher brothers’ cuddly, butter-wouldn’t-melt exterior, the kind that has all the bad blood of the Chuckle Brothers, all was not well with the Mancunian singers behind Oasis. It’s true, no matter how many times we spotted them riding tandem bicycles down Stockport Road together, how often they sported t-shirts with the other’s face on them, or how they’d end their concerts by unveiling banners proclaiming the other as the king of rock ‘n’ roll, turns out that Noel and Liam Gallagher were (whisper it), not the best of friends!
Yeah, I know you all saw this coming when you read the headline, but it’s only here because it’s true. As the last decade and a half has proven, the appeal of one Gallagher brother without the other is limited. Even when Liam was headlining Knebworth, he was only doing so because he had finally started playing his older brother’s songs, and, at the time, it was the generally accepted logic that it was the only way we were going to see them together again. It was rational thinking, too. Although enough money really can cause old grudges to be put on hold, at least for now.
Pete Townshend
By now, hate is too simple a word to describe the bizarre psychodrama that the relationship between Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who is these days. By now, they’ve seemed to begrudgingly accept that the other will be a part of their lives to their dying day and have too much love for being in The Who to quit it. Or, at the very least, get too much out of being in The Who to quit it. That antipathy is still very much there, though. The problem is that their dislike of each other sort of powered the band as Daltrey and Townshend represent both sides of The Who.
As one of the great rock singers of the age, Daltrey represents the powerful, aggressive rock band and the guitarist and songwriter, the sensitive, artistic pop dimension. Both would rather the band resemble their vision for it, but the true highs of the group come from when they reach an uneasy truce. That is, when Daltrey allows himself to open up, and Townshend allows his artistic vision to be kept in check. Throughout the band’s history, they have come after several punch-ups and arguments, leading to some of the best music in the history of British rock. Whether or not that’s worth it is up to you to decide.
Roger Waters
Stepping straight into a minefield here, but here we go. Most of the time, when you get a feud between songwriters and singers, the songwriter is broadly speaking the hero of the piece. They’re the sensitive, artistic ones who put in the hard graft to make the art happen, while the singers just do what comes naturally to them and soak up all the glory. The story of Roger Waters and Pink Floyd turns that on its head.
In this tale, Waters really does come across like the bad guy. A nightmarish, control freak dictator who saw his bandmates, David Gilmour in particular, as little more than a set of animatronics he had every right to programme and play whatever he wanted. Sure, that attitude gave us The Wall, but a more democratic creative process also gave us The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. The other album that Waters’ control freak ways got us: The Final Cut. Yikes.
Brian Wilson
Then, on the other end of the Roger Waters spectrum, you get Brian Wilson. An actual visionary creative genius whose spirit was constantly in battle with his undercutting, controlling, vindictive careerist of a lead singer, famed dickhead Mike Love. I know I’m being a little bit picky with this because technically every member of The Beach Boys was a singer. However, Love was the (self-described) “charmer” of the group, so from the group’s early days, he was their frontman while playing live. Lucky them.
Love took this position seriously and saw himself as the band’s leader. Thus, when their creative head Brian Wilson started writing boundary-pushing masterpieces in the mid-1960s like Pet Sounds, Love took it upon himself to start bullying the fragile songwriter into writing more xeroxed copies of ‘Surfin’ USA’ and ‘Surfer Girl’. If you want a look at what Love’s idealised vision for The Beach Boys is, look no further than their excruciating 1980s, if you can stomach the cringe. Even the famously good-natured Wilson never forgave Love for his actions, and honestly, neither should he.
Tony Iommi/Geezer Butler
It might seem strange to read this after Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, and even Bill Ward just finished razing Villa Park to the ground for their farewell show. For a long period of time, though, a full-on reunion of the original line-up of Black Sabbath seemed about as far-fetched as Johnny Marr and Morrissey patching things up for a jaunt around the world’s stadiums. Despite spending the entire 1970s as one of the world’s biggest bands, Osbourne left Black Sabbath in some toxic circumstances that most thought would never be water under the bridge.
Typically for the band, it was under a cloud of booze and drugs that threatened to take Osbourne’s very life. His alcohol dependence had gotten so all-encompassing that he lost interest in doing pretty much anything to do with the band. This was something that Butler and Iommi, the band’s primary songwriters, resented so much that they fired Osbourne in 1979. Osbourne held this against Iommi in particular, to the point where he referred to the two of them as “arch-enemies” in an interview with Apple Music in 2022.
