Bands In Relationships: 20 Groups Who Dated, Got Married (Or Divorced)

The White Stripes: Jack and Meg White

Married: Yes (1996)

Divorced: Yes (2000)

Even with the title of their 2020 greatest-hits compilation, My Sister Thanks You And I Thank You, The White Stripes perpetuated the myth that they were siblings. In reality, however, the man born John Anthony Gillis married (and took the surname of) Meg White in 1996, a year before the duo formed The White Stripes together, with “Jack” on guitar and vocals, and Meg providing the groups’ Moe Tucker-like primitive drumbeat. The pair divorced in 2000, just as they were on the cusp of a career breakthrough with the White Blood Cells album, but clung to the ruse that Meg was Jack’s “big sister”, even as a rabid music press discovered otherwise. A decade later, the group folded, too.

Must hear: Fell In Love With A Girl

Plastic Ono Band: John Lennon and Yoko Ono

Married: Yes (1969)

Divorced: No (Yoko Ono widowed in 1980)

The strength of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s love for each other is apparent in just how much the pair had to overcome – particularly in their early time together. Bar a “Lost Weekend” (read: 18-month affair) with assistant May Pang, Lennon and Ono were largely inseparable from the moment they began a relationship, in 1968, through to Lennon’s murder, in 1980. And yet, amid disgruntled claims that Ono was the cause of The Beatles’ split, and the hoop-jumping rigmarole the pair had to overcome while trying to get married (as chronicled in the song The Ballad Of John And Yoko), they embarked on a romantic and creative partnership that would continue for the rest of Lennon’s life, with Ono’s poetry and avant-garde artworks inspiring Lennon’s songwriting. The couple also waged a very public campaign for world peace, inviting friends, journalists and celebrities to the recording of the song Give Peace A Chance, recorded while they staged a “Bed-In” from their hotel room at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they spent part of their honeymoon. Released as a single in July 1969, the song was credited to Lennon and Ono’s collaborative outfit, Plastic Ono Band.

Must hear: The Ballad Of John And Yoko

Paul McCartney And Wings: Paul and Linda McCartney

Married: Yes (1969)

Divorced: No (Paul McCartney widowed in 1998)

Not to be outdone by his songwriting turned sparring partner, Paul McCartney also began writing tunes with his first wife, Linda McCartney, and installed her as a keyboardist and singer in his post-Beatles group Wings. As well as co-writing songs such as Band On The Run and Jet, Linda earned a co-credit on McCartney’s second solo album, Ram, and recorded enough solo material for an album of her own, released in October 1998 as the posthumous collection Wide Prairie. Linda had died just months before, of breast cancer; her animal-rights activism and pioneering foray into vegetarian foods, with the Linda McCartney Foods company, ensured that she made a significant cultural impact of her own.

Must hear: Silly Love Songs

ABBA: Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog; Benny Anderson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad

Married: Yes (Björn and Agnetha, 1971; Benny and Anni-Frid, 1978)

Divorced: Yes (Björn and Agnetha, 1980; Benny and Anni-Frid, 1981)

One of the most famous of all bands in relationships, ABBA consisted entirely of two couples, Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog, and Benny Anderson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Both couples were romantically involved throughout most of the Swedish four-piece’s phenomenal career (though they married in 1978, Benny and Frida had been an item for the whole decade) and, throughout the 70s, they enjoyed unions as harmonious as their voices. But the pressures of maintaining their unstoppable commercial and creative run – albums such as Arrival and Voulez-Vous; singles such as Dancing Queen and Take A Chance On Me – eventually brought both the band and the marriages to an end. Unlike the likes of Fleetwood Mac, few – if any – ABBA songs are said to have been written directly about the group’s romantic entanglement, though their 1980 hit The Winner Takes It All took experiences of divorce that all four could relate to and fashioned them into a UK chart-topping single.

Must hear: The Winner Takes It All

Talking Heads/Tom Tom Club: Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth

Married: Yes (1977)

Divorced: No

Bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz were already college sweethearts by the time they formed David Byrne, in 1975. The trio had met in earlier in the 70s, at Rhode Island School Of Design, where Frantz and Weymouth had begun dating in 1972. After a move to New York City, Weymouth was convinced to learn her instrument in order to fill the fledgling group’s vacant bass player’s slot. As the four-piece Talking Heads, with keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison, they released their debut album, Talking Heads: 77, in 1977, the year Frantz and Weymouth married. By the turn of the 80s, the husband-and-wife rhythm section were the engine room for some of the best Talking Heads songs, as comfortable traversing post-punk and art-rock abstractions as they were laying down thick funk and Afrobeat grooves.

Just as Talking Heads were riding high on their mainstream breakthrough single, Once In A Lifetime, from the 1980 album Remain In Light, Frantz and Weymouth masterminded their own side project, the hip-hop-affiliated Tom Tom Club, whose first two singles, Wordy Rappinghood and Genius Of Love, topped the US Dance chart, immediately becoming sample fodder for everything from Afrika Bambaataa’s Jazzy Sensation to Mark Morrison’s Return Of The Mack and beyond.

Must hear: Genius Of Love

Sonic Youth: Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon

Married: Yes (1984)

Divorced: Yes (2013)

A match made in alt-rock heaven, the über-cool Kim Gordon began dating noise terrorist Thurston Moore in 1981 and formed Sonic Youth that same year. Quickly becoming doyens of New York City’s No Wave scene, the group spent the next four decades leading an audio assault on all things clichéd and conventional in rock music. After a move to major label Geffen Records, Sonic Youth found fame as grunge agitators, but songs such as the no-bullshit Gordon-sung Swimsuit Issue, from their 1992 album, Dirty, eschewed macho posturing while providing a clarion call for the #MeToo movement three decades ahead of schedule. It’s no wonder that, when she found out Moore had started an affair with book editor Eva Prinz, in 2011, she wasted no time in ending their marriage. The divorce was officially finalised two years later, leaving Sonic Youth a casualty of their era’s most high-profile bands in relationships.

Must hear: Swimsuit Issue

The Revolution: Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman

Married: Yes

Divorced: Yes

In keeping with the mystique that Prince cultivated throughout his entire life, his bandmates in The Revolution were also encouraged to keep fans guessing. Longtime lovers since they were teenagers, his closest collaborators, guitarist Wendy Melvoin and keyboardist Lisa Coleman, never spoke publicly of their relationship while they were part of Prince’s group, but clues, such as the cryptic spoken-word intro to the Purple Rain song Computer Blue (“Wendy?” “Yes, Lisa?” “Is the water warm enough?” “Yes, Lisa.” “Shall we begin?” “Yes, Lisa.”), toyed with fans’ perceptions almost from the moment Melvoin joined the band, following Prince’s tour in support of the 1999 album.

“That she and Lisa were lovers… he’s got white, he’s got Black, he’s got Jewish, he’s got non-Jewish, and now he’s got a gay faction,” Brenda Bennett, singer in the Prince side projects Vanity 6 and Apollonia 6, told this author for the book Lives Of The Musicians: Prince, explaining the mixed-race, mixed-gender, mixed-sexuality approach that Prince took to putting The Revolution together. Wendy and Lisa officially broke their silence on their 20-year relationship in 2014, long after they had split – by which point they had not only helped create some of the best Prince songs of the 80s, they had also released chart hits as a duo in their own right, and scored award-winning soundtracks for both film and TV.

Must hear: Computer Blue

No Doubt: Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal

Married: No

Relationship status: Separated

Future fashion icon Gwen Stefani had an inauspicious start when she was drafted in to provide backing vocals for her brother Eric’s ska-punk band, No Doubt. As the younger sister of the group’s co-founder, Stefani initially kept her romance with bassist Tony Kanal a secret, though by the time she took over lead vocal duties, in 1988, their relationship had become a central part of the group, which had already survived the suicide, a year earlier, of original lead vocalist John Spence. When Kanal and Stefani broke up in 1994, however, No Doubt almost imploded along with them, until Stefani hit a creative streak that resulted in one of the best breakup songs of all time, Don’t Speak, along with much of the material that would end up on their multi-platinum-selling album Tragic Kingdom. No strangers to resilience, No Doubt kept going until 2015, with a brief hiatus in the mid-to-late 2000s.

Must hear: Don’t Speak

New Order: Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert

Married: Yes (1993)

Divorced: No

Manchester-born Gillian Gilbert was a punk upstart on the local scene when she first came across Stephen Morris, then the drummer with Joy Division. Writing in his memoir Fast Forward: Confession Of A Post-Punk Percussionist: Volume II, Morris recalled that Gilbert, who had formed an all-female punk four-piece in the late 70s, was “a busy girl” who had also made time for school qualifications that entirely outstripped the combined formal education of Joy Division’s male membership. The pair had been dating for two years by the time Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis took his own life, and, when the remaining members re-formed as New Order, Gilbert, who had already stepped in to provide guitar for Joy Division on stage on one occasion, was invited to help the group fill their sound out, taking the pressure of Bernard Sumner as he assumed a new role as frontman.

Bar a ten-year hiatus during which she supported her and Stephen’s daughter Grace through a serious spinal disease, and then survived her own battle with cancer, Gilbert has been with the group ever since. Going the distance as a couple, and also providing resilience through New Order’s own travails, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert have made the Manchester icons the longest-running of rock’s bands in relationships.

Must hear: Temptation

Sonny And Cher

Married: Yes (1969)

Divorced: Yes (1975)

Years before becoming an LGBTQ+ icon and making Auto-Tune an unavoidable part of the musical landscape with the dance-pop anthem Believe, Cherilyn Sarkisian was one half of the prime-time husband-and-wife duo Sonny And Cher. Originally starting out as backing singers on Phil Spector sessions (The Ronettes’ Be My Baby, The Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling), the pair took centre stage in 1964, releasing some of Salvatore Bono’s own original songs under the name Caesar And Cleo. Switching to Sonny And Cher the following year, they scored a transatlantic No.1 hit with I Got You Babe, and continued to find success with singles such as Baby Don’t Go, Laugh At Me and The Beat Goes On, the latter refashioned in 1997 as a downbeat dance cut by British electronic duo All Seeing I, who sent the song back into the UK singles chart three decades on from its original release.

When Sonny And Cher’s chart success dipped, the duo moved into television, performing songs and comedy sketches in four seasons of the hugely successful The Sonny And Cher Comedy hour, from 1971 to 1974, while Cher also pursued an acting career of her own. Despite divorcing in 1975 – and Cher remarrying, and helming her own TV series, which welcomed, among others, a Young Americans-era David Bowie as a guest – the pair would reunite for The Sonny And Cher Show, before calling it quits for good. First stepping out as an actor, and then transitioning into politics, Bono died in a skiing accident in 1998. Cher would continue to balance her acting and music careers, scoring an Academy Award for her performance in Moonstruck (1988), and a Grammy for her chart-storming late-90s comeback, Believe.

Must hear: I Got You Babe

Blondie: Debbie Harry and Chris Stein

Married: No

Relationship status: Separated

Along with Talking Heads, Television and Ramones, Blondie were at the vanguard of the punk and new wave scene centred around New York City’s CBGB club in the mid-to-late 70s. Fronted by the platinum-blonde Debbie Harry, the group would eventually mix pop, punk and disco to create their own unique sound, and even gave the nascent hip-hop scene an early boost with Harry’s shout-outs to graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy and DJ Grandmaster Flash on the 1981 hit Rapture. The epitome of New York cool, Harry and Blondie co-founder/guitarist Chris Stein were also romantically involved throughout the band’s most successful years, but when Stein fell ill with pemphigus vulgaris – a rare autoimmune disease which causes blistering of the skin – the band broke up, and Harry put her own solo career on hiatus in order to care for him. Stein and Harry called time on relationship in the late 80s, but they remain close: Blondie continue to record and tour together, and Harry is godmother to Stein’s children.

Must hear: Call Me

Ike and Tina Turner

Married: Yes (1962)

Divorced: Yes (1978)

Joining her former husband Ike Turner’s band brought Tina Turner fame, but it also found her locked in an abusive relationship that lasted for over a decade. The force of nature behind 60s hits such as River Deep – Mountain High, Proud Mary and Nutbush City Limits, Turner set the template for high-octane rock’n’soul performances for decades to come, her appearances with the Ike And Tina Turner Revue inspiring everyone from Mick Jagger to Beyoncé. But though Turner was outwardly an empowered woman blazing a trail for others to follow, in private Ike was physically abusive – an experience Turner wrote about candidly in her first memoir, I, Tina, which inspired the award-winning 1993 biopic What’s Love Got To Do With It. By that point, Turner had become the undisputed “Queen Of Rock’n’Roll”, with hit singles such as Let’s Stay Together and The Best to her name, as well as a Guinness World Record for her record-breaking performance at Rio De Janeiro in 1988. She left Ike in 1976, and their divorce was finalised in 1978. Her unflinching honesty about her life story has made her an icon to hundreds of millions of people the world over. “My legacy is that I stayed on course… from the beginning to the end,” she has said, “because I believed in something inside.”

Must hear: What’s Love Got To Do With It

Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan

Married: Yes (1980)

Divorced: No

Having spent the 70s cultivating his barfly persona, Waits was busy taking it to its end point when, in 1980, he met Kathleen Brennan on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie musical, One From The Heart. Waits, keen to pursue new creative paths, had been commissioned to pen new songs in line with the work he was best known for, and Brennan became his biggest supporter in his move into uncharted musical territory. Waits dedicated one new tune, Jersey Girl, to Brennan, and the pair married within months of meeting. After changing course with albums such as Swordfishtrombones (1983) and Rain Dogs (1985), Waits begin to officially collaborate with Brennan on songwriting and production, notably on the Franks Wild Years stage show and album, and later records such as Alice and Blood Money (both 2002). “One person holds the nail, the other swings the hammer,” Waits has said of their relationship. “We collaborate on everything, really.”

Must hear: Jersey Girl

Fugees: Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill

Married: No

Relationship status: Separated

Shortly after the three members of Fugees moved in together in order to concentrate on their music, Wyclef Jean and Lauren Hill began dating – a development that Jean felt was inevitable, as he reflected in his memoir, Purpose: An Immigrant’s Story. “Lauryn and I were pursuing a dream together, and that goal, as well as our mutual love of music, was the language that brought us together,” the rapper wrote. “Lauryn’s beautiful, and because of her looks and her talent and everything we shared with each other – from songs to books to lyrics – love was bound to grow.” Yet love had already taken root elsewhere for Jean, as he’d also begun dating his future wife, Marie Claudinette, a model who would go on to found her own design company, Fushà Designs. For her part, Hill started relationship with Rohan Marley, the son of reggae legend Bob, though she and Jean continued their romance until maintaining the overlapping love triangles became impossible. When their personal relationship dissolved, so did Fugees, who went on hiatus until reuniting briefly in the mid-2000s and then again in the early 2020s.

Must hear: Killing Me Softly With His Song

Amadou And Mariam

Married: Yes (1980)

Divorced: No

Guitarist and singer Amadou Bagayoko was 16 when he lost his vision due to cataracts; singer Mariam Doumbia was aged just five when a case of untreated measles robbed her of sight. The self-described “blind couple from Mali” met in 1975, at Mali’s Institute For Young Blind People, where they were both part of the institute’s Eclipse Orchestra, and married five years later, shortly before launching their own career as a musical duo. Largely known for playing Malian blues music throughout the 80s, the pair gained an international audience after moving to Paris in 1996 and releasing the crossover album Sou Ni Tile. Collaborations with Manu Chao (Dimanche À Bamako, 2004), Damon Albarn (Welcome To Mali, 2008) and Santigold (the song Dougou Badia, 2012) followed, along with support slots for Coldplay, Scissor Sisters and U2. The duo were also named ambassadors for the World Food Programme in 2011, and they have received a Grammy nomination (for Welcome To Mali) and taken home BBC Radio 3 Awards and Songlines Music Awards.

Must hear: Welcome To Mali

Siouxsie And The Banshees: Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie

Married: Yes (1991)

Divorced: Yes (2007)

As frontwoman of Siouxsie And The Banshees, Siouxsie Sioux was the female face of punk rock in Britain, appearing as part of Sex Pistols’ entourage during their infamous appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show in December 1976, and helping to turn backcombed hair into a fashion essential for the nascent goth-rock scene. Early Siouxsie And The Banshees albums The Scream (1978) and Join Hands (1979) pushed the envelope for post-punk music, and when the group welcomed guitarist John McGeoch and former Slits drummer Budgie into the fold, they expanded their sound into neo-psychedelic art-rock territory, beginning with 1980’s Kaleidoscope. Sioux and Budgie split their time between The Banshees and their own duo side project, The Creatures, throughout the 80s and 90s, and the pair married in 1991. Sixteen years later, as she was preparing for the release of her debut solo album, Mantaray, Sioux revealed that she and Budgie had divorced. Budgie now dissects post-punk’s musical history on the Curious Creatures podcast, with his co-host, and former member of The Cure, Lol Tolhurst; Sioux remains an icon for legions of women in rock music, with everyone from New Order’s Gillian Gilbert to Charli XCX and Paramore’s Hayley Williams citing her as an inspiration.

Must hear: Happy House

The Cramps: Lux Interior and Poison Ivy

Married: Yes (1972)

Divorced: No (Poison Ivy widowed in 2009)

Erick Lee Purkhiser didn’t just pick up a hitchhiker when he stopped to gave Kristy Wallace a ride in Sacramento, California, in 1972; he met a fellow-traveller on the comic road. Shared interests included B-movie horror, avant-garde art and rock’n’roll myth-making, and when the pair moved to New York City, in 1975, they reinvented themselves as Lux Interior (Purkhiser) and Poison Ivy (Wallace), and embarked on a decades-long assault on common decency. As the two constants in the archetypal cult band The Cramps, Interior and Ivy pioneered the psychobilly subgenre, forcing punk rock and rockabilly music together in unholy matrimony and draping the results in their own twisted take on kitsch 50s imagery. When Interior died in 2009, of aortic dissection, The Cramps died with him, though the shock waves of their pop-cultural hand grenade continue to be felt in the work of outsider acts the world over.

Must hear: Love Me

Cocteau Twins: Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie

Married: No

Relationship status: Separated

A 17-year-old Elizabeth Fraser had already left her family home in Grangemouth, Scotland, when she met guitarist Robin Guthrie while the former was DJing a club night at the town’s Hotel International. Led by Guthrie and bassist Will Heggie, Cocteau Twins were in their formative stages at the time, but when Fraser, who had become Guthrie’s girlfriend, joined as vocalist in 1981, and multi-instrumentalist Simon Raymonde replaced Heggie two years later, all the elements were in place for the group to hone their trademark dream-pop sound. However, the ethereal atmosphere of acclaimed albums such as 1990’s Heaven Or Las Vegas belied a less stable infrastructure: Guthrie and Fraser had had a daughter together, Lucy Belle, in 1989, but Guthrie’s use of substances put a strain on his relationships with both Fraser and his bandmates. Fraser and Guthrie split in 1993, the same year that Cocteau Twins released Four-Calendar Café, and the band eventually folded in 1997, during recording sessions for an unfinished ninth album. Guthrie would go on to release a string of solo albums and soundtrack work, and Fraser would become a coveted guest singer, recording with everyone from Massive Attack to This Mortal Coil and Peter Gabriel.

Must hear: Lorelei

The Mamas And The Papas: John and Michelle Phillips

Married: Yes (1962)

Divorced: Yes (1969)

Figureheads of the West Coast hippie scene, The Mamas And The Papas mastered a harmony singing style that belied the band’s tempestuous interpersonal relationships. Husband-and-wife singer-songwriters John and Michelle Phillips married on New Year’s Eve 1962 and, three years later, formed The Mamas And The Papas in Los Angeles, with Denny Doherty and “Mama” Cass Elliot. Affairs with Gene Clark, of The Byrds, and her bandmate Doherty led to Michelle’s brief ejection from the band in June 1966 (she was rehired in August), while Elliot’s own aspirations as a solo singer also caused tension within the group. The Mamas And The Papas split in 1969, the same year as John and Michelle Phillips divorced; their final album, 1971’s People Like Us, marked another contractual obligation no one wanted to fulfil.

Must hear: Dedicated To The One I Love

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Original article: 9 February 2022 

Updated: 9 February 2023