Real and ‘virtual’ married partners who made pop music history.
It all started with Orpheus and Euridyce, the Greek myth of love, death and music that has inspired western melodrama since it made singing believable on stage. Since then duets between singing lovers have moved and intrigued audiences, who see them as a meeting of real life and fiction. Five famous couples of modern day popular music are described below.
Johnny and June Cash
“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout”. “If I were a carpenter and you were a Lady/ Would you marry me anyway, would you have my baby?”. These are the first verses of Jackson and If I were a carpenter, two of the most famous songs by the couple that ‘invented’ all the popular music love duos. In the 60’s the duets between Johnny Cash – the “man in black” – and June Carter, singer and author of smash hits such as Ring of Fire, have multiplied in the highly popular American television programs dedicated to Country Music. The two married in 1968, both with other failed marriages to their name. They stayed together for 35 years and died a few months apart.
Suggested song: “If I were a carpenter”
Al Bano and Romina
They married in 1970 right after singing Story of two lovers on TV looking each other tenderly in the eye. She was the daughter of Hollywood actor Tyrone Power, a princess of nocturnal Rome and he was an immigrant from the south, a former waiter and factory worker with a true soul voice. The song, better known as Forbidden games, had distant Renaissance origins. Albano Carrisi and Romina Power met on a film set. They moved to a farm in Cellino San Marco, the village where he grew up. They lived a kind of eco-folk village idyll, and garnered vast popularity throughout the 80’s. They sold 25 million copies of Felicità. They sang together the last time in front of the Pope, at the Maracanà Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. They broke up in 1999 after the mysterious disappearance of their eldest daughter Ylenia in New Orleans. Fifteen years later, they got back together in the Crocus City Hall in Moscow, in October 2013. It was the international triumph of the schlager Italian style, trash pop. During the 80’s, Soviet television had the brilliant idea of airing a few duly sanitized editions of the Sanremo Festival: this led to the vast popularity throughout the former USSR of all the now forgotten Italian pop stars, which lasts to this day.
Suggested song: “Storia di due innamorati“
Jagjit Aand Chitra Singh
They married in 1969 in Mumbai. Their love blossomed in the studio where they recorded advertising jingles to which they lent their voice and talent, but purely to make ends meet. He’d fled from his Sikh family, cut his hair and removed his turban in order to work in Bollywood. She had just got out of an unhappy marriage with a daughter. Together they sang ghazal, an ancient poetic genre about unrequited and heartrending love. They performed as a duo, an unusual formula for Indian music but perfect for their attempt to update and popularise what up to then had been a very sophisticated and aristocratic music form. In 1976 their album The Unforgettable met with huge success as did their subsequent records. They become vastly wealthy, Bollywood welcomed them with open arms, their popularity travelled beyond national boundaries and almost rivalled that of Ravi Shankar. In 1990 their only son Vivek died in a car accident. Chitra, overwhelmed by her anguish, abandoned the stage forever. Jagjit, despite bouts of depression, kept singing mainly religiously inspired material. He died in 2011 aged 70.
Suggested song: “Kothe Te Aa” (live at the BBC, on YouTube)
Nicole and Hugo
In 1971 Nicole Josy and Hugo Sigal recorded a song for the national Eurofestival selections. It was entitled “Goodday, day”. They were selected to represent their country, Belgium, in the final that was to take place in Dublin. A few days before Nicole fell sick with jaundice, and the song was performed by another couple cobbled together at the last minute. Nicole and Hugo married at the end of the year. In 1974 they managed to take part in the Eurofestival once again with “Baby, Baby”. The text was in Dutch with a refrain in English, Spanish and French. It came last in the competition, but in 2000 Baby, Baby reappeared thanks to a few discotheque remixes and found its way back into the limelight.
Suggested song: “Baby, Baby“
Jo Kwon And Gain
Jo Kwon and Gain are the respective leaders of the 2am and the Brown Eyed Girls, two superstar vocal groups included in the Korean K-Pop, a surprising combination of pop song and television talent show. They appeared as a couple in September 2009 in the television program We got Married. This is a format in which famous males and fe-males partici- pate in a fake marriage scenario in front of an audience and a panel of judges. The program’s ratings were so high that the fake couple stayed on the show for 60 episodes, over a year. At the time of their first appearance on the show they recorded the single We feel in love, which they sang in studio as they climbed out of a kind of wedding cake. The song turned out to be one of the biggest hits of the season, particularly popular as a ringtone. No one actually knows whether the two of them ac- tually ‘got together’ during (or after) the program, but the matter was of little interest to the very young Korean audiences who clearly preferred to continue dreaming.
Suggested Song: “We feel in love“.
Real and ‘virtual’ married partners who made pop music history.
