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The Biggest, Messiest Band Breakups in Music History

From the Beatles to N.W.A to Fifth Harmony

Biggest, messiest band breakups

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TRACY ALLISON FOR ROLLING STONE. IMAGES IN ILLUSTRATION BY DAVE HOGAN/GETTY IMAGES; PAUL NATKIN/GETTY IMAGES; ANTHONY BARBOZA/GETTY IMAGES; RICHARD E. AARON/REDFERNS; ROBERT KNIGHT ARCHIVE/REDFERNS; KOH HASEBE/SHINKO MUSIC/GETTY IMAGES; SILVER SCREEN COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; ADOBE STOCK

“BEING IN A band is tricky,” Bono said earlier this year. “The older you get, it gets even trickier, because when you grow up together, you’re used to taking bits out of each other. You’re as good as the arguments you get, but at a certain point, when people are doing well, the male loves to be the lord of his own domain. It’s rough. And you can just imagine why people say, ‘Ah, fuck this, I’m outta here.’”

U2 are one of the few bands in rock history where not a single member has said “fuck this, I’m outta here” at any point, even if drummer Larry Mullen Jr. is on break right now while he recovers from back surgery. Going back to the days of the Everly Brothers in the 1950s, bands have been melting down, often in spectacular fashion. The arguments are often about money or creative control, but everything from religious differences to disagreements over how often to tour can also rip a group apart.

There’s also the simple fact that many bands were formed when the members were teenagers. Imagine spending decades with your high school buddies, unable to make major life and career decisions unless everyone agrees. Throw millions of dollars and global adulation into the mix, and things get dicey very fast.  And when a group like Fleetwood Mac, Sonic Youth, or ABBA features romantic partners, the breakup can really get messy.

This list is our attempt to rank the 50 ugliest breakups in rock history, counting down from least to most acrimonious, with the top spots occupied by the truly legendary meltdowns. And since some groups never learn their lesson and keep reuniting even after it’s clear the members probably shouldn’t be allowed in the same room together, several acts will be featured here more than once. We’ve also picked a few cases where a pivotal member left a band even if the band carried on without them. The list covers pretty much every genre, from classic rock to teen pop to hip-hop. It’s proof that if there’s one thing that unites us all, it’s that eventually we all come to resent our co-workers.

From Rolling Stone US

4

Sonic Youth

As Richard and Linda Thompson, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, and Sonny and Cher can attest, forming a musical act with your spouse is a very dangerous proposition. It can be a lot of fun when the marriage is thriving, but what happens when you hit a bumpy path or separate? Who wants to be in a band with their ex? This didn’t seem like it would ever be an issue for Sonic Youth because the marriage of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore lasted for decades. But in 2010, Gordon discovered text messages on Moore’s phone from another woman, leading to their divorce after 27 years of marriage. “One morning I got up to do yoga,” Gordon wrote in her memoir Girl in a Band. “Thurston was still asleep, and I looked down at his cell[phone]. It was then that I saw her texts about their wonderful weekend together, about how much she loved him, and his writing back the same things.” She eventually went onto his laptop and discovered many more exchanges and even a “porno-like” video. The band carried on for a couple more months, but called it quits a few months later.

3

Live

By 2020, Nineties alt-rock band Live should have been an efficient money-making machine. They had enough hits (“Lightning Crashes,” “I Alone,” “Selling the Drama”) to keep them on the road for eternity, and the four members were childhood friends with deep roots. But guitarist Chad Taylor, drummer Chad Gracey, and bassist Patrick Dalheimer brought an investor named Bill Hynes into their business orbit a decade earlier. They are bitterly divided over what happened next, but what’s clear is that Hynes created such a mess that frontman Ed Kowalczyk felt he had little choice but to fire all three of them and reboot Live with new musicians. Odds of a reunion feel very slim. “I don’t ever want to play with Chad Taylor again,” Gracey told Rolling Stone. “The best way to deal with a narcissist is to not deal with him, so I don’t want to. Every time he opens his mouth, he’s either manipulating you, trying to control you, or bully you.”

2

Oasis

Liam and Noel Gallagher had a combative relationship before the two brothers even formed Oasis in 1991, but they managed to stick together throughout the group’s many ups and downs over the next two decades. “[Liam is] the angriest man you’ll ever meet,” Noel once said. “He’s like a man with a fork in a world of soup.” It wasn’t until a backstage incident August 28, 2009, in Paris that the partnership finally splintered for good. They were at the end of a long tour, and had recently had to cancel an appearance because Liam had laryngitis (Noel claimed he was merely hungover). That night in Paris, Liam lunged at Noel with a guitar in hand as they waited to go on. “He started wielding it like an ax, and I’m not fuckin’ kidding,” Noel said in 2015. “And I’m making light of it because it’s kind of what I do, but it was a real unnecessary violent act, and he’s swinging this guitar around, he nearly took my face off with it. And it ended up on the floor, and I put it out of its misery.” After smashing the guitar, Noel stormed out of the venue. They didn’t play that night, and they haven’t played since.

1

The Beatles

The Beatles essentially invented the concept of a band breaking up, and the ugliness surrounding it set the tone for every breakup that followed. Rock historians have been arguing about the exact cause of their split for over 50 years, and even the members of the band can’t agree on what did it. “After Brian died, we collapsed,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone in December 1970, in reference to manager Brian Epstein, who had guided the band through most of the Sixties until his death in 1967. “Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? We broke up then. That was the disintegration.”In a 2018 interview with Howard Stern, Paul McCartney said that Lennon was the actual cause of the breakup. “There was a meeting where John came in and said, ‘Hey guys, I’m leaving the group,’ ” Paul said. “All that money we’d earned, and all that fame we earned, was going down the pan. There was this guy that was going to take it all. It was that close. I was going, ‘No guys. We can keep it. We don’t have to give it to this guy.’ ”He was talking about Epstein’s eventual replacement, Allen Klein, an incredibly divisive figure in rock history who briefly managed both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. McCartney was the one member of the group opposed to bringing him on board. The others would eventually realize that McCartney was right to have doubts, but not before Klein’s negative influence drove a major wedge between McCartney and the other Beatles. McCartney was especially upset at Klein’s decision to let Phil Spector come in and complete what would become Let It Be, adding strings to “The Long and Wind Road” without his permission.Yoko Ono has been wrongly accused of breaking up the group up at several points in the past. And while there’s no doubt that her presence alongside Lennon at recording sessions late in the band’s career rankled the other members, pinning the entire dissolution on Ono is grossly unfair and simply ahistorical. “She certainly didn’t break the group up,” McCartney said in 2013. “I don’t think you can blame her for anything.”“I don’t think you could have broken up four very strong people like them,” Ono said, “even if you tried. So there must have been something that happened within them — not an outside force at all.”In the end, what broke up the Beatles was being the Beatles. They were four men who were simply exhausted by fame, fights over money and control, and, sadly, each other.