Modern Anthem 010: Cher's Comeback

If anyone believes in the power of a good comeback, it’s Cher. This summer she had her first movie role in eight years in Mammia Mia: Here We Go Again, her take on ‘Fernando’ breathing new life into an ABBA classic. 20 years after the launch of her biggest hit single ever, there’s a new album of ABBA covers, world tour dates in the offing, and a new Cher musical heading to Broadway.

Back in 1998, Cher was looking for a comeback vehicle too. Despite a music career that spanned the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and an acting career that earned her an Oscar in 1988, Cher’s output in the ’90s had been sparse. Though her cover of the ‘Shoop Shoop Song’ was a massive hit in Europe in 1990, only two Cher albums had arrived early in that decade. Then in the mid-90s she signed a new record deal with Warner Music UK.

Having flirted with power ballads, disco and rock ‘n’ roll over the years, she wanted to embrace a new dancefloor friendly sound as she began working on new material in London in 1997.

A demo of a song called ‘Believe’ had been floating around, created by a number of songwriters, including Brian Higgins (who would go on to form the production house Xenomania that would later pen hits for Girls Aloud, Kylie and Sugababes). Metro Productions, the production duo Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, were tasked with taking the chorus of the track and reimagining into something new.

“Everyone loved the chorus but not the rest of the song,” Taylor told Sound on Sound magazine. “The lyrics for the chorus were already there, but our guys added the lyrics, melody and chords for the verses and middle eight, then put the whole thing back together again.”

For Cher it represented a new challenge, one she thoroughly enjoyed. “I honestly think that the most fun ever had making a song was ‘Believe,” she told Billboard magazine in 2015. “Because you didn’t know it was me in the beginning, and was so excited.”

However, Cher has long confided that the signature vocoder sound for the song came out of “desperation”, recalling difficulties she had during recording.

Cher told Billboard that Taylor “hated what was doing and he kept saying to do it better, because it didn’t really pop until the chorus… He just kept going, ‘It’s not good, it’s not good’. And then said, ‘Well, if you want it better, get somebody else’, and walked out.”

It was a chance glimpse of an artist called Roachford using vocoder on a morning TV show that inspired Cher to suggest a similar trick to her producers. Taylor tried it out and thought it worked, though he confided to Sound on Sound: “It was the destruction of her voice, so was really nervous about playing it to her!”

Thankfully Cher loved it. “She was fantastic — she just said ‘it sounds great!’, so the effect stayed,” Tayor remembered. “I was amazed by her reaction, and so excited, because knew it was good.”

The vocal effects on ‘Believe’ would soon become commonplace in pop music, with Cher remarking to The Guardian in 2013: “It’s strange that an artist so old can come up with something that an artist so young is still doing.”

Whether it was the vocoder, that big chorus or just the power of Cher, the song went on to be a staggering success.

First released in Europe in October of 1998, ‘Believe’ began an incredible period of chart dominance. It landed at number one in Ireland and topped the UK charts the first week of release. The song would stay at number one in the UK for seven weeks and ended up being the biggest selling single of 1997, beating Celine Dion’s already massive ‘My Heart Will Go On’, having sold over a million copies by the end of the year.

The song enjoyed similar success in the US the following year, Cher’s first single to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 25 years and also at 52 making her the oldest female artist to top that chart, a record she still holds today.

‘Believe’ was every inch a camp gem too. The video featured Cher in various wigs as a kind of robo-alien overseeing young people finding their way back from heartbreak. For Cher, an artist who weathered lots of public breakups and setbacks, the message of striving and surviving felt apt. It was the kind of track perfectly calibrated to please her sizeable gay following

“Gay guys like a certain kind of woman,” she told The Guardian in 2013. “They like a flamboyant woman that’s broken. They like a balls-to-the-wall woman, motherly but not; sexual but not. Gay guys are like this: they either love you or they don’t even know you’re on the planet. Once you have them, you have them.”

Cher certainly had them. Her relationship with her son Chaz Bono, who became one of the most high-profile trans men in the world as he went public in 2009, showed that Cher understood the power of supporting LGBT+ people in her life and not just on stage. (Cher had admitted she initially struggled when Bono came out as lesbian in the ’90s, pre-transition, but soon came around). From offering a soundtrack for the dancefloor for queer people to supporting them in her own life, Cher is a pop icon we could truly believe in, and ‘Believe’ was the apotheosis of her gay appeal.