We’re back! In celebration of our return to BBC Radio, Tony and I enjoyed musical renewals, revivals, and resurrections. This week’s show explored the art of resurgence: artists who defied industry indifference, fickle fans, and personal predicaments to make triumphant returns to our ears, charts, and hearts.
Return of the King
Elvis Presley performed If I Can Dream as the finale to his concert television special that aired on NBC on December 3, 1968. Singer Presents … Elvis, which has come to be known as the ’68 Comeback Special, marked Presley’s return to live performance after a 7-year period of film appearances. The special became the most-watched show of the television season, and relaunched Elvis’ singing career. If I Can Dream was written by Walter Earl Brown of The Skylarks, and is noted for its similarities with Martin Luther King Jr.‘s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Elvis recorded the song in June 1968, only two months after King’s assassination, and also a short time after Robert Kennedy‘s assassination.
Tina Turner first rose to prominence in the 1960s as lead singer of husband-wife duo Ike & Tina Turner. After years of marital abuse, however, she left her husband in 1976, and embarked on a solo career. For years Turner was considered a nostalgia act, performing mostly at hotel ballrooms and clubs in the United States, until she released Private Dancer in 1984. The album reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 in the United Kingdom, was certified 5x Platinum in the United States, and sold 10 million copies worldwide. Tina Turner achieved her first and only No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with Private Dancer‘s second single, What’s Love Got To Do With It?. At the time, aged 44, Turner became oldest solo female artist to top the Hot 100, and the song received three awards at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards: Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. What’s Love Got to Do with It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2012 – Turner’s third Grammy Hall of Fame award.
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Cher is a master of reinvention. The “Goddess of Pop” rose to fame in 1965 as part of the folk rock duo Sonny & Cher (I Got You Babe), went solo in the ’70s with hits like Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves and Half-Breed, returned after a quiet stretch in the early ’80s with glam rock anthems like I Found Someone and If I Could Turn Back Time, and then stunned the world again with 1998’s Believe. Cher released Believe as the lead single from her eponymous 22nd studio album four years after It’s a Man’s World (1995), which had failed to impress audiences and critics. Believe symbolised both a commercial and an artistic reinvention. The upbeat dance-pop and electro-pop sound was a departure from Cher’s previous music, and the song topped the charts in over 23 countries and sold over 11 million copies worldwide. At the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards, the song was nominated for Record of the Year Grammy and won Best Dance Recording – the first and only Grammy Award that Cher has won.
Smooth was released as the lead single from Santana‘s 1999 album Supernatural. Songwriter Itaal Shur originally conceived the song as “Room 17”, before Rob Thomas rewrote the melody and lyrics, re-titled it, and recorded it as a demo for Santana, a band who had not had a Top 40 hit in the U.S. for 17 years (Hold On in 1982). Smooth entirely resurrected Santana‘s career: it spent 12 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 – the first chart-topping hit of guitarist Carlos Santana‘s career. Supernatural reached No. 1 in 11 countries, including the US for twelve non-consecutive weeks, where it is certified 15× platinum. It won 9 awards at the 42nd Annual Grammy Awards, breaking the record for most-honoured album previously held by Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
We Ended Our Hiatus
We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service (2016) is the sixth and final studio album by American hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest. The group – composed of rapper and main producer Q-Tip, rapper Phife Dawg, DJ and co-producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and rapper Jarobi White – had split up in 1998 after the release of The Love Movement due to relationship issues between group members. After various live-performance reunions, Tribe recorded their final album in secret with contributions from André 3000, Kendrick Lamar, Jack White, Elton John, Kanye West, Anderson .Paak, Talib Kweli, Consequence, and Busta Rhymes. We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service is one of the final recorded appearances of group member Phife Dawg, who died in March 2016. He performs alongside Kendrick Lamar on Conrad Tokyo, a reflection on the economical and political situation of the United States in the 2010s.
Songs of a Lost World (2024) is the 14th studio album by The Cure. It was the band’s first release of new material in 16 years since the release of 4:13 Dream in 2008, and the entire album was composed solely by singer/guitarist Robert Smith for the first time since their 1985 album The Head on the Door. Songs of a Lost World was also the band’s first album since Wish (1992) to reach number one in the UK. According to Smith, Alone was the track “that unlocked the record; as soon as we had that piece of music recorded I knew it was the opening song, and I felt the whole album come into focus.” The song is a bleak, introspective, and existential meditation heavily inspired by Ernest Dowson’s 1902 poem Dregs:
The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropped curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.
An honourable mention goes to Britney Spears. Circus, released on December 2, 2008 – coinciding with her 27th birthday – marked a significant comeback for Spears, despite the prior release of her 2007 album Blackout. In the lead-up to Circus, Spears’ career had been overshadowed by a series of personal struggles in 2007 and early 2008. After a dramatic sequence of events, Spears began work on Circus, shortly after being placed under legal guardianship. The album not only marked her return to form as an entertainer but also reaffirmed her commercial power, debuting at number 1 on the US Billboard 200 chart. Although her conservatorship would remain in place until November 2021, Circus stands as a defining moment in Spears’ artistic and personal resurgence.
The Hudson vs Landslide
This week’s soundslike looked at a harmonic and melodic similarity between The Hudson (2025), a recent single by Ashe, FINNEAS, and The Favors, and Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide (1975). As is often the case, however, these similarities are found far and wide throughout pop music history; we found similar melodic and harmonic fragments in Long As I Can See The Light by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1970), Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd (1973), and I’ve Seen I Am by Jonathan David Helser and Melissa Helser (2011).
Comeback Quiz
For our quiz this week you heard 6 songs about coming/going/being “back”. We gave you a short excerpt that contained the key phrase in question, but in reverse…
As always, find the show and blog at joebennett.net/5live, with occasional Instagram extras at @joebennettmusicology. With a new show comes a new Spotify mega-playlist, which contains all songs featured on the show:
And you can still listen to our old mega-playlist here.
- Words: Joe Bennett, John Pierce O’Reilly
- Audio production: Joe Bennett, Rafi Waters
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