7 Musical Duos Who’ve Ended in Disaster

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.

For more than 15 years, from 1960 to 1976, Ike & Tina Turner electrified the music scene. Their explosive performance in the landmark 1964 music film The T.A.M.I. Show led to the duo touring with The Rolling Stones and delighting audiences their 1966 single “River Deep - Mountain High” (a hit in Europe at the time but not yet the United States). Then, turning the bluesy Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Proud Mary” into a funk-infused high-energy song earned the married couple a Grammy Award.

Today, you can’t tell the story of R&B without talking about Ike & Tina Turner. But you also can’t talk about the musical duo without mentioning the years of abuse Tina suffered at Ike’s hand. As she would outline in her 1986 autobiography I, Tina, behind the scenes of the musical phenomenon was a prolonged ordeal of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse.

It all came to a head on July 1, 1976, when Tina, her face bruised and bleeding, fled from the hotel room she was sharing with Ike, fearing for the safety of herself and their children. Tina filed for divorce on July 27 and went on to have a rich solo career in music and on film. Ike, in the depths of addiction, spent 18 months in prison on drug charges and die of an overdose in 2007.

The country music duo Florida Georgia Line was formed in 2010 by Tyler Hubbard (of Georgia) and Brian Kelley (of Florida). Originally started as Nashville, Tennessee–based cover band, the duo signed with a record label the next year. By 2012, Florida Georgia Line had released their debut single “Cruise,” which became the first country song in history to receive Diamond certification. Their first studio album, Here’s to the Good Times, then became the sixth best-selling album of 2013 and netted the team two ACM awards that year, including New Artist of the Year.

But in a case of burning bright but briefly, after just five albums, and only a decade after “Cruise” exploded onto the country music scene, Florida Georgia Line announced a hiatus in 2022. That hiatus was confirmed in 2024 to be a permanent disbanding of the group. Both Hubbard and Kelley have said it wasn’t bad blood between the two that caused the schism, but rather Kelley’s intended pursuit of a solo music career.

If you see this and think “But wait, I heard they got back together,” yes, they absolutely did. As of this writing, they appear to be on good terms once again. But the saga of the tumultuous relationship between brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher is so long, daunting, and full of instruments-used-as-weapons that no “as of this writing"”has ever been more warranted.

From almost the very beginning of the band, Oasis seemed on the verge of breaking up. There was the 1994 “Liam hits Noel with a tambourine” incident. There was the time in 1995, while the band was recording their iconic album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, that Noel picked up a cricket bat, hit Liam, and proceeded to smash everything to pieces. For a time, to see Oasis perform live was the musical equivalent of a hockey game: There’s a non-zero chance you get to see a fight break out.

But it all came to a head in 2009. Set to play the Rock En Seine festival in Paris, the brothers had reached the point where they were arriving to gigs separately to avoid backstage conflict. But on this particular day, that wasn’t enough. “[Liam] goes out the dressing room, for whatever reason, he went to his own dressing room, and he came back with a guitar, and he started wielding it like an axe,” is how Noel described it in 2015. The outburst caused Noel to retreat to his car, and he quit the group that very night.

The two went off to solo careers, and it seemed extremely unlikely that they would ever reconcile. But then, of course, they did. For now, anyway.

“Shake it like a Polaroid picture.” That this single sentence can, no matter who you are, instantly cause the 2004 hit “Hey Ya!” to play in your head, speaks more to the massive impact Outkast had on popular culture than any awards or other stats can. But let’s list some of those accolades all the same.

Formed in Atlanta by Big Boi and Andre 3000, Outkast helped popularize Southern hip-hop at a time when the East Coast–West Coast rap divide seemed all consuming. Outkast’s song “Player’s Ball,” off of their debut album Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik rocketed up the Billboard Hot Rap Song chart and immediately established them amongst “in the know” hip-hop fans as something special. Their second, third, and fourth albums—ATLiens, Aquemini, and Stankonia—routinely appear on lists of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time. Stankonia launched the hits “Ms. Jackson” and “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad),” which took on an even eerier energy after the launch of the Iraq War a few years later.

But none of that success could compare with the phenomenon that was the 2003 double-album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Reaching No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and achieving diamond certification thanks to singles like “The Way You Move,” “Roses,” and “Hey Ya!,” the album made history as the first hip-hop album to win the top prize, Album of the Year, at the Grammy Awards.

The album that provided their greatest success also preceded their ultimate dissolution. Unlike their previous, more collaborative albums, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below was structured as essentially two solo albums: The first half was a Big Boi solo record, and the latter half Andre 3000’s. The duo appeared together in the 2006 movie Idlewild and released an album of the same name but promptly thereafter decided to split.

Afterward, Big Boi created more solo music, while Andre 3000 pursued an acting career. The two have since periodically reunited, despite their creative differences.

If you’re familiar with the works of Simon & Garfunkel, you know the pair broke up in 1970 after a string of successful albums. But what you might not know is just how many times Simon & Garfunkel have broken up over the years. The first such instance actually happened before they even recorded their debut album.

Childhood friends from Queens, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel recorded their first song under the band name Tom & Jerry. That track, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” was a mild hit, and as its writer, Simon was asked if he could come up with more songs. Simon proceeded to not only write but also record more music, all without his partner’s knowledge. An upset Garfunkel left the group.

A few years later, amid New York’s burgeoning folk music scene, the two reunited and started performing under the name Simon & Garfunkel. The pair released a series of five albums between 1964 and 1970: Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.; Sounds of Silence; Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme; Bookends; and Bridge Over Troubled Water. But by that final album, things were once again strained.

This time, it was Simon who took issue with Garfunkel’s pursuit of a movie career. The latter had roles in 1970’s Catch-22 and 1971’s controversial Carnal Knowledge (several years later, Simon took an acting role in the Best Picture–winner Annie Hall). The duo played two concerts at their hometown Forest Hills Stadium in 1970, then went their separate ways.

There have been Simon & Garfunkel reunions over the years, for political rallies, benefit concerts, and the like. But every time it appears the two have reconciled, the old tensions flair up again, and they fall out. Recently, Simon indicated that we shouldn’t expect another reunion, no matter how brief, saying in 2016 “that’ll never happen again. That’s that.”

They were, perhaps, the greatest MC-DJ duo in the history of hip-hop. Their 1986 debut album, Paid in Full, revolutionized the rap game. But by 1993, Eric B. & Rakim had called it quits.

At a time when hip-hop was all about how loud and hard you could hit your rhymes, the New York duo under the mentorship of the legendary Marley Marl dropped a thrillingly chill rap record that sounded like nothing else. Eric B.’s ear for unique beats, Rakim’s smooth flow, and the album’s minimalist production style sent shockwaves through the industry and was eventually certified platinum. The sound (and look) of their follow-up album Follow the Leader from 1988 anticipated the direction hip-hop would head in the early ’90s and featured some of Rakim’s most acclaimed lyrical performances.

The early ’90s saw the pair contribute songs to the movies House Party 2 and Juice as well as release the albums Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em and Don’t Sweat the Technique. After that, the two were torn apart by the business side of the music business. Their current record contract was up, and tensions arose over the pursuit of new deals for solo records. It all culminated in a court case involving Eric B., Rakim, and their former label. In the years since, Eric B. has clarified that although the court case played a part in the split, it wasn’t a matter of financial deceptions between Eric and Rakim.

The year 1993 saw the release of some hugely innovative rap records, such as Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders, and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle. But it also saw the dissolution of one of the most important duos in the genre’s history, then or now.