Cher thinks she may have just made history. “My life seems to be longer than any other human being ever,” she said. “I feel like I should be in the Guinness Book of World Records for this. And I’m still going!”
In fact, at 77, with a six-decade career behind her, Cher is still finding new ways to express herself. This week she’ll release her first Christmas album, something that has long struck her as a cynical cliche. “Everyone has done one,” she said by phone from her home in Los Angeles with a perceivable eyeroll. “So, when my manager called and said, ‘We’d like you to do this,’ my immediate answer was ‘No!’ He said, ‘Just think about it.’ So, I sat down and thought, ‘What can I do that’s different?’”
The answer, it turned out, is a holiday album “that doesn’t scream ‘Christmas’ every second and isn’t filled with songs you know by name”, she said. In fact, half the songs are new, including the catchy dance track, DJ, Play a Christmas Song, which evokes a night that’s anything but silent. Other cuts on the album are wholly unexpected, like a cover of the Zombies’ rapturous This Will Be Our Year, from their 1968 cult masterpiece Odessey and Oracle. “More than anything, I wanted this album to be fun,” Cher said.
And why not? Fun has been Cher’s brand ever since she broke through with Sonny on their bubbly 1965 song I Got You Babe. At the same time, fun, for Cher, isn’t just about pleasure. It’s also about survival. During the many dry stretches in her career, and the long years when critics saw her as a joke, Cher always found a way to have the last laugh by embracing the most garish aspects of her career – the over-the-top costumes, the self-satirizing gestures, the songs like Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves – while simultaneously delivering performances of genuine distinction, passion and pluck. In conversation, Cher reflects all those sides. For more than an hour, she spoke about everything from her goofy, 1964 debut single Ringo, I Love You to the sad litany of anti-trans legislation that has been proposed in the United States in the last year.
Even her new album has a deeper context than it may first seem. It finds an emotional high point in a cover of Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), which originally appeared on the classic Phil Spector Christmas Album in 1963, with Darlene Love on lead vocals, and a 17-year-old Cher wailing behind. Now, 60 years later, she and Love perform the song as a duet. “I hate it when people say, ‘I remember it like it was yesterday,’” Cher said of the original sessions, “but I actually do. I can see Darlene singing full-tilt boogie right in the room, not even in a booth, and me, Sonny and the other backup singers standing around one mike that was hanging down. It seems so archaic now, but it worked.”
At least it did eventually. While the album went on to become one of the holiday’s most beloved soundtracks, it had the bad fortune to be released on the same day President John F Kennedy was assassinated, blunting its initial impact. “We had been working like crazy on that album,” Cher said. “I kept thinking, I’m only 17 and I’m exhausted, what are these other people doing?’ What I didn’t realize then was they were all doing drugs! The day of the release I remember I was in bed with Sonny and the telephone rang and it was Phil, and I knew by the look on Sonny’s face that something terrible had happened. I was pretty sure somebody died but I was thinking it was somebody in our group. Then Sonny turned to me and said, ‘The president’s dead.’ And I just got hysterical.”
By then, Cher had already been a regular player in Spector’s sessions. Sonny was working for him and brought her in for the Ronettes’ Be My Baby. “The big joke was that I had to stand far back from the other singers,” said Cher. “Phil would say, ‘Cher, take a step back. And another step. And another.’ At that point, everybody said, ‘If she takes one more step, she’ll be in Studio B!’ Somehow, my voice just cut through.”
Because of her distinctive tone, Spector decided to use Cher, as well as Sonny, on a host of recordings, including the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, where she provided the lone female backing vocal. By that time Spector’s weirder side was starting to show. Yet even a teenage Cher was well-equipped to handle it. “Phil asked me, in French, if I would have sex with him,” she said. “And I said, in French, ‘Yes - for money.’ He almost fell off his chair. He didn’t expect that from anyone.”
Her tart response put him on notice to watch himself around her, though he still asked her to do sketchy things. “I was supposed to watch Ronnie, Nedra and Estelle [the Ronettes] and report back to him. I said, ‘No fucking way!’ I wasn’t going to nark on these girls. They were my friends.”
Ronnie got it the worst. “Phil was a pig when it came to her,” Cher said.
Even so, she said that, in the studio, Spector wasn’t that crazy at the time. “He was eccentric,” she said, “but not full-on nuts.”
Spector wound up producing Cher’s first solo song, a Beatles exploitation piece called Ringo, I Love You, which she cut under the name Bonnie Joe Mason. Radio stations refused to play it because, due to her low, contralto voice, they thought she was a guy singing a love song to the Beatles’ drummer. Did Cher care about the snub? “Not at all. It wasn’t a very good song anyway,” she said, “and Phil didn’t even want to do it. He wanted me to stay in my place and not do a solo thing.”
Regardless, the next year Sonny and Cher went out on their own, initially under the name Caesar & Cleo. “We were such a bizarre combination,” Cher said. “I was a terrible singer at first and Sonny was a frightening singer. But he was a good songwriter.”
He proved it after they became Sonny & Cher and he wrote I Got You Babe. “He brought it to me in the middle of the night and, with him singing it, it sounded horrible,” she said. “When I first sang it, it didn’t sound that much better. But Sonny didn’t care. He knew what he had.”
Eventually, the song went to No 1 in the US but the couple first found success in England, where, over the years, Cher has enjoyed more consistent success than she has at home. “In America, we were getting beaten up for the way we looked,” she said. “We had to go to London where people understood us and respected us. England has been lucky for me more than once.”
In fact, Cher’s most popular song of all time, Believe, which she cut when she was 52, only came about because of the support of her UK label at a time when her American company had dropped her. To commemorate the Believe album, this month will see the release of an expanded 25th anniversary edition of the set. The title song of the album made history not only for hitting No 1 in over 10 countries, but for being the first of a zillion recordings to use auto-tune as a hook. Later other artists, particularly in hip-hop, began to feature auto-tune on their recordings as not just a hook but as crutch to cover the fact that they can’t sing well. Cher said she had no idea about the latter use until the last few years when Jay-Z came up and told her, “Thanks for keeping my friends in work!”
It was Cher’s idea to change the original lyric in Believe to make the character more assertive. “I thought, ‘A girl can be sad in one verse, but she can’t be sad in two verses,’” she said. “I just won’t have it. So, then I thought of the lines, ‘I’ve had time to think it through / and maybe I’m too good for you.’ I should have asked for a writing credit. I was so stupid!”
Believe earned a new life four years ago, when Adam Lambert radically remade it as a devastating ballad at the ceremony where Cher was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor. “That’s one of the greatest vocal performances of any song by anybody,” she said of Lambert’s take, which has earned over 32m YouTube views. “To recreate it so completely with such a beautiful voice, I just thought, ‘Dude, I’m glad you weren’t around when I was doing this!’”
The self-deprecation expressed in that comment echoes Cher’s oft-stated dissatisfaction with her own singing, though she now says her opinion has evolved. “I used to not like Cher, but I’m much more used to her now,” she said. “I think she’s improved.”
In fact, her voice never sounded stronger than it does on the new album. She uses it to great effect on the album’s ecstatic duets, including one with Stevie Wonder on a Motown holiday song from 1967 titled What Christmas Means to Me. The album’s most surprising guest star is Tyga who raps on Drop Top Sleigh Ride. He was brought in by his producer, Alexander Edwards, who Cher has been dating for the last year. At 37, he’s 40 years her junior, which inspired her to tell him early on, “‘Dude, put this on paper. It doesn’t look good.’ Alexander told me, ‘Well, it couldn’t do any harm.’ I don’t know what happened, but we’re together.” She won’t say any more about it. “There are things people get to know and there are things people don’t get to know,” she said.
She’s more forthright when talking, and tweeting, about subjects like the push against trans people that has greatly escalated in this election year. “It’s something like 500 bills they’re trying to pass,” she said. “I was with two trans girls the other night – and of course my own child [Chaz is trans]. I was saying ‘We’ve got to stand together.’ I don’t know what their eventual plan is for trans people. I don’t put anything past them.”
She’s equally horrified by the possibility of Trump regaining power. “I almost got an ulcer the last time,” she said. “If he gets in, who knows? This time I will leave [the country].”
Cher has been tweeting up yet another storm lately about the issues that face Armenians as tensions flair, and a new wave of violence threatens, with its neighbor, Azerbaijan. Cher’s birth father was Armenian and though she didn’t have much of a relationship with him, she later developed a strong identification with that country after a trip she took some years ago to its capital, Yerevan. “When I got there, I thought, ‘Wow, everybody looks like me! How could I not have strong feelings about this?’” she said.
The last year saw a dramatic change in the other side of Cher’s family: her mother died after a sustained period of living in pain. “The doctor said she was never going to get better, and at that point she wasn’t even there,” Cher said. “I was just so happy that we could help her out of the insanity she was living in.”
Her mother got to the age of 96, underscoring the longevity in her daughter’s genes. “My great-aunts were 101 and 104!” Cher said. Which makes her, at 77, a relative toddler. Small wonder, she feels like she still has a lot more to accomplish. “I never thought about getting this old and still having a job!” she said. “Barbra Streisand once asked me, ‘Why are you still working?’ And I said, ‘Because some day I won’t be able to.’ So, for as long as I can work, I will.”
This article was amended on 18 October 2023. Cher’s first single was released under the name Bonnie Jo Mason, not Bobbie Jo Mason as an earlier version said.
Christmas is out on 20 October