Around Valentine’s Day, I’ve occasionally looked at vaguely relevant (or downright inappropriate!) themes for /Tuesday Tens in the eighteen years since the series began, and this year is no different.

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This year, I’m looking at the airing of laundry within bands: when one band member writes about another, and let’s be honest, the results are rarely pretty, and rarely end well either. There’s some cracking songs here, mind, and it turned out to be a difficult subject for suggestions. Thanks to everyone who got involved.

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Sonny and Cher
/I Got You Babe
/Look At Us

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The story goes that Cherilyn Sarkisian and Salvatore Bono met in an LA coffee shop in 1962 – Cher just sixteen, Sonny twenty-seven – and were “married” relatively quickly. With Sonny’s work for Phil Spector, they sang on some of his compositions, and just three years after they met, I Got You Babe became their first proper hit. A saccharine, folksy pop song that just screams “young love”, the purity of the message on-show – and when recorded, how obviously they were in love – has meant it has remained an enduring hit.

Sadly, the good times didn’t last behind the scenes, and despite their wholesome image and TV shows that followed the hits, it transpired later on that Sonny Bono was a controlling, violent bully, who controlled every aspect of what went on and, according to suits filed by Cher, withheld money too.

Their careers went in wildly different directions afterward, as well. Cher became a megastar in time, with the unique status of being the only solo star to have Billboard number one singles in every decade from the 1960s to the present (2020s), and an acclaimed acting career that stacked up almost as many awards as her music did. Sonny Bono instead turned to politics, becoming the Mayor of Palm Springs in 1988 and later a Congressman, until he was killed in a skiing accident in 1998.

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/ABBA
/One of Us
/The Visitors

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In retrospect, that ABBA were coming to an end in 1981 should have been obvious. After a decade of extraordinary success from a group made up of two married couples, Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog first announced their divorce in early 1979, with Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad following suit in 1981. It was no great surprise then, that songs began to reflect the tumult in their personal lives (perhaps best shown in the towering The Winner Takes It All, but I’ve used that before on /Tuesday Ten /422) – and the last worldwide smash hit for the band was the lead single for their last album. One of Us was seen as a curious choice for the lead single at the time, and it still sounds it. Agnetha takes the lead, musing on her choices as she moves into a new, empty house, wondering whether she made the right choice after all. Seeing as Benny and Björn were the principal songwriters, I can’t help but feel that there might have been some projecting going on…

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/Fleetwood Mac
/The Chain
/Rumours

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What ABBA went through was friendly compared to the chaos that nearly tore apart Fleetwood Mac in the mid-70s. After years on tour and the escalating success thanks to their eponymous 1975 album, existing members Christine McVie and John McVie divorced, the relationship of more recently joined members Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham was a series of fights that occasionally saw peace, and Mick Fleetwood’s wife had announced she was having an affair – not to mention heavy drug use from members of the band. Somehow, they all managed to stop fighting and litigating long enough to write an album that eventually sold somewhere around 40 million copies, and perhaps the barely-disguised lyrics relating to all of their issues struck a chord with the regular lives of their listeners.

The Chain opens the second side of the album, and is the only song on the album to credit all five as songwriters, as well as seeing harmonies from the three vocalists (Nicks, Buckingham, Christine McVie) and vocal work from all three solo. But the seething bitterness of the song – the breaking of the chain here is that of a relationship – has the distinct feeling of every member settling scores within the wreckage of their own lives and commenting on their bandmates’ too. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the band was somewhat unstable following this, with members coming and going and being replaced, before Christine McVie’s death in 2022 put a stop to it all, the band finally united that they couldn’t continue without one of them.

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/The Sisterhood
/Jihad
/Gift

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The Sisters of Mercy only has ever had one constant member: Andrew Eldritch. Twenty-three other people are listed on the band’s Wiki as current or past members, and perhaps unsurprisingly, each of the three studio albums the band put out between 1985 and 1990 have completely different line-ups (and to a point, sound distinctively different too). The nastiness of the split after their debut album, though, has gone into legend.

Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams, tired of their contributions being discarded, both quit and promptly formed the band that eventually became The Mission, but originally they intended to be named The Sisterhood, a clear middle finger to Eldritch. Eldritch got wind of this and swiftly released a single under The Sisterhood, followed up by the poorly-received Gift (which due to contractual issues – something we heard a whole lot more of relating to The Sisters in the following years – meant Eldritch’s distinctive voice was absent). In retrospect, the lengthy, electro-goth tracks that make up Gift are an interesting curio, with Jihad‘s only vocal being “two-five-zero-zero-zero”, relating to the split advance that the two parties grudgingly received between them.

Remarkably, both parties had success. The rejuvenated Sisters worked with Jim Steinman and created some of the best-known Goth songs of all, while The Mission – still active and recording to this day – had a fair amount of success themselves.

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/Cocteau Twins
/Bluebeard
/Four-Calendar Café

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The lesson that’s beginning to become clear in this /Tuesday Ten? Don’t date your bandmates, as it seems to never, ever end well. Another example to add to the list is the Cocteau Twins. A band that influenced many, and across their first decade at least, sounded pretty much unique, thanks to the dense layering of their sound, drenched in effects, pedals and anything else they could do to fill any gap in the mix, and of course Elizabeth Fraser’s extraordinary, otherworldly voice.

By the time of Four-Calendar Café, though, things were strained between Fraser and Robin Guthrie – who had split before the album was released. And the single Bluebeard, a rather more straightforward song that many by the band, actually had lyrics that could be understood, and just the chorus reveals it as something of a brutal comment by Fraser on her views of Guthrie at the time. Bluebeard, incidentally, is a folk tale of a wealthy man who kills or discards wife after wife, and their efforts to stop him…

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/The Fall
/Sing! Harpy
/Extricate

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In the case of The Fall, it was probably best not to have been in the band at all, going on the reputed number of songs where Mark E. Smith took aim at former bandmates. There’s an entire Wiki page devoted to members of the band, which lists well beyond forty people, but the song that caught my eye (of the three suggestions, and there are apparently more) was the one that was rather obviously about Mark E. Smith’s former partner and bandmate Brix Smith.

They met and married quickly in 1983, and Brix was a key part of the band’s most critically adored period, but it’s clear that their falling out and divorce was not pretty (it was always obvious that Mark E. Smith was a difficult character to work with at the best of times). The gloomy, swinging bass-heavy post-punk of Sing! Harpy is a fairly clear takedown of his ex-wife, and I can’t help but feel that most bridges were burned with this – although Brix did return to the band for a second stint in the mid-nineties…

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/No Doubt
/Don’t Speak
/Tragic Kingdom

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Not a band I ever particularly loved – that ska/alt-punk hybrid that they were known for was never exactly a genre I cared for at all – but this song was the inspiration for this week’s post, so it had to be included. And yes, it’s yet another where relationship breakdown within the band inspired their biggest hit. Bassist Tony Kanal and vocalist Gwen Stefani had been dating for a few years until Kanal broke it off, and Stefani’s hurt about it was channeled into the writing of Tragic Kingdom, and most notably into Don’t Speak. It is an emotional whirlwind of a power ballad that even in the video, you can see her anger and distress poured into every line, and like a few of these songs featured this week, you have to wonder how they managed to perform at this every show afterward.

What it brought them might have helped ease the pain – Tragic Kingdom sold 16 million copies, and the single sold millions too, and topped the charts in about twenty countries, but the band didn’t last and they fairly swiftly pursued other work, before the inevitable reunion two decades later.

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/Tenacious D
/Kyle Quit The Band
/Tenacious D

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In a weird case of fiction becoming truth, the duo of Jack Black and Kyle Gass took their fake-band HBO comedy show and recorded an album, that coming in 2001 turned out to be the fun that everyone at the time apparently needed. The rock-opera lunacy of Tribute (particularly the brilliant fun of the video, directed by Liam Lynch and featuring Dave Grohl as the devil himself) is the one that everyone remembers, but elsewhere on the album, there was a throwaway track prodding fun at band splits and reunions. Kyle quits and then rejoins within a week, over a “misunderstanding”.

Then, in 2024, as the duo were in the midst of a world tour, Jack Black cancelled it after Kyle Gass made a particularly direct comment about the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Within two months, Jack Black was already saying they’d return, and a track appeared from the vaults for a charity compilation this past week…

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/Dimmu Borgir
/Born Treacherous
/Abrahadabra

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Like The Fall, Norwegian Black Metal band Dimmu Borgir have had something of a revolving door of members – beyond twenty in this case – with a particular issue with drummers (at least seven members have been the drummer at some point or another, which is heading into Spın̈al Tap territory), and by the time of Abrahadabra, the remaining core members were keen on making their frustrations plain with those that had left. Dimmu Borgir were frankly past their prime at this point – the staggering orchestral pomp of Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia and Death Cult Armageddon long past – and the turn towards picking on previous members by Shagrath seems rather petty. But there are enough echoes of their past in Born Treacherous that in hindsight, it’s kinda fun.

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/Manic Street Preachers
/Nobody Loved You
/This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours

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Thirty years ago on 01-February 1995, Richey Edwards vanished. His car left at a service area by the Severn Bridge, and no apparent trace of what happened to him. His stricken band eventually reinvented themselves and continued, starting with the rousing working class celebration of A Design For Life, and attaining the kind of success that perhaps would never have been possible if they’d continued with what the white-hot rage of The Holy Bible unleashed. Last week, on the anniversary, we had the privilege of seeing the Manics in Kingston, at what was billed as an album release show for new album Critical Thinking, but instead slyly became an obvious celebration of their missing bandmate, with Richey-penned songs peppering the set (and a few not heard in many years), to the joy of many of us there.

One song that would have fitted in nicely was the last song on arguably their most middle-of-the-road album. Mostly shorn of the spite that came before, it takes until the last song before Richey is overtly referenced, in the swooning power of Nobody Loved You, where Nicky Wire addresses his best friend with memories and love. To this day the spot to the left of the stage (where space allows) remains empty, Richey will be referenced, and the clear feeling is that despite all this time, they will never forget him. Unlike many of the other bands featured this week, this is a bond that will never break.