“I’m not a Cher fan”: The band Cher wanted to sound like
Having gained notoriety during the 1960s for providing her distinctive contralto vocals in a duo with her then-husband, Sonny Bono, Cher was seemingly nailed on to have a successful career in the subsequent decades after the couple separated. Releasing songs such as ‘Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves’, ‘Half-Breed’ and ‘Dark Lady’ in the early part of the ‘70s and reaching number one in the US for all three, the prediction that Cher would be able to forge a path of her own was seemingly correct.
However, the latter half of the decade saw her fade into relative obscurity, failing to achieve the same level of success with any of her releases until she returned to form in 1989 with ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’, and then had her biggest success with the 1998 global smash hit, ‘Believe’. With four solo US number ones to her name and a lifetime of notoriety, you’d think there might be plenty of cause for celebration in Cher’s career.
The trouble is, not every artist who achieves immense levels of success with their work is actually proud of what they’ve presented to the world, and while Cher’s lengthy spells in the spotlight brought her plenty of accolades, she can’t necessarily say that she was ever pursuing what she really wanted to be doing. Often, working alongside other songwriters can be something of a curse for singers, and when they’re insistent on you performing songs of a certain style, you can’t guarantee that you’ll always be performing something in the style that excites you most.
When performing live these days, the aforementioned hits that kick-started her solo career in the 1970s are often performed with a lack of verve and excitement or are shortened to a length that is suggestive of the fact that she wants to get them out of the way. Record label executive and former love interest David Geffen confirmed that both of these were the case with Cher, stating that “she didn’t like a lot of her big hits,” and that she “wanted to sing rock ‘n’ roll.”
In a 2017 interview with Billboard, Cher was still cold towards her biggest successes of the ‘70s, and when quizzed on whether she agreed with the notion that ‘Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves’ was one of the best pop songs of the previous decade, her defiant dismissal of it was indicative that Geffen wasn’t lying about Cher’s hatred of her most adored work.
There were plenty of other artists that Cher had previously expressed an interest in emulating who were dramatically different from what she was producing during the 1970s, with the likes of Bruce Springsteen and her close friend Joni Mitchell being among those that she had an artistic admiration for during the period. On top of this, her favourite band that she was particularly interested in emulating were the Eagles, suggesting that Cher had acquired more of a taste for country rock.
“I’m not a Cher fan,” she told the interviewer, bizarrely choosing to speak in the third person. “I just don’t think my aesthetic taste lies in her direction.” While her later career revival saw her achieve even more success with undoubtedly poppier tracks, she would never truly get the opportunity to explore the style of her idols on record. When discussing the success of ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’, she even lamented this fact, stating, “By that time, I figured out I wasn’t going to ever be The Eagles.”
