Sonny Bono & Cher perform on the TV show ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’ in London in 1965 (Image: Getty)
Cher has revealed how she initially dismissed the song that would make her a superstar – because she didn’t think it was a hit.
The US singer and actress admits I Got You Babe, which spent three weeks at the top of the US charts and sold more than a million copies, didn’t immediately grab her when her husband woke her in the middle of the night to sing it to her.
Writing in her autobiography, she reveals how her then husband, the singer and songwriter Sonny Bono, played her the new song in early 1965.
“He had a habit of scrawling lyrics on old shirt cardboard, filling in both the white and brown sides before handing it to me,” she reveals in Cher: The Memoir, Part One, which has just been published. “He had the worst handwriting in the world, so as I squinted at it through sleepy eyes, I tried to make sense of what he’d written.”
Cher, 78, continues: “Then I listened to him singing it and, can I tell you, Sonny’s voice wasn’t amazing in the daytime, so imagine having to listen to it at 2am. ‘I got you babe,’ he sang, a little off-key. On first hearing, I wasn’t impressed. ‘I don’t like it,’ I declared, yawning. ‘I don’t think it’s a hit’.”
Fortunately, Sonny kept working on the song and, two hours later, woke his wife up again with a new version. “With one eye open, I listened to the new version and nodded. ‘That’s better’. I loved the modulation, and I liked that he used ‘babe,’ the term of endearment my mom had passed on to me, but overall I still didn’t think much of the song. It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.”
Within weeks, the pair had recorded I Got You Babe and the song was released in the summer of 1965. It went to number one in America, the UK and Canada.
Subsequently The Beach Boys invited the couple to tour with them and they played a series of huge concerts, including the Bowl. But it wasn’t always the music that attracted fans.
“Everywhere we went, the teenage audience went wild for our look, rather than our music, which pleased me more than it did Sonny,” she adds.
Cher: The Memoir, Part One is out now via HarperCollins priced £25. For free UK P&P, visit