The Smiths: Perhaps the most famous example of a band who will never, ever be getting back together. Photo / Getty Images
The Smiths: Perhaps the most famous example of a band who will never, ever be getting back together. Photo / Getty Images
Oasis are back. But Aerosmith? Pink Floyd, Dire Straits and Led Zeppelin...? These are the mega-acts who steadfastly refuse to reunite.
Playing vast gigs to adoring admirers is the most lucrative way for any act to make money today, thanks to the decline in album sales and vastly reduced revenue from streaming services. Many bands, like Oasis, have long since put any differences behind them and reformed for similarly profitable tours, although these are often conducted with varying degrees of enthusiasm - see, for instance, the reunions of The Police and most of the original members of Guns N’ Roses.
Yet there are still many mega-acts whose reunions would deliver vast pay-days. And yet they have steadfastly refused to do so…
The Smiths
Perhaps the most famous example of a band who will never, ever be getting back together. The band only performed together for a relatively brief time in the 80s, with guitarist Johnny Marr leaving the group in 1987 citing exhaustion, but their popularity has continued ever since.
While Marr and Morrissey maintained a wary relationship for years after the band broke up, the two now seem irreconcilable. Marr has suggested he has not seen his bandmate for decades, and although Morrissey recently stated “in June 2024, AEG Entertainment Group made a lucrative offer to both Morrissey and Marr to tour worldwide as ‘The Smiths’ throughout 2025″.
Morrissey said yes to the offer; Marr ignored the offer. Yet in truth, the severe personality differences between the two would make this an impossibility. One optimistic fan suggested that in the wake of an Oasis reunion, surely a Smiths tour was now inevitable; Marr’s response to this was to post a picture of Nigel Farage holding a pint on social media platform X, a not-so-veiled reference to Morrissey’s much-publicised and controversial political views.
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin were undoubtedly one of the great rock bands of the 70s despite, or perhaps because of, the incongruity between their hard-living personae and the bucolic whimsy of singer Robert Plant’s lyrics, so it came as a surprise that following the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980, they disbanded almost immediately. Although guitarist Jimmy Page and Plant have continued to record and perform together and relations between them and the surviving band member, bassist John Paul Jones, remained amicable, they have only reformed as Zeppelin once, for a greatly acclaimed 2007 gig at the 02 that saw Bonham’s son Jason replacing his father on drums.
Led Zeppelin, one of the great rock bands of the 70s.
Hugely lucrative offers were made to the group to reform permanently and tour, and Page and Jones were keen, but Plant hesitated, which saw the project collapse and led to a souring of the relationship between singer and guitarist. As Plant later commented, “I told them I was busy and they’d simply have to wait. I would come around eventually, which they were fine with - at least to my knowledge. But it turns out they weren’t. And what’s even more disheartening, Jimmy used it against me.”
The animosity between Pink Floyd singer and guitarist David Gilmour and songwriter and bassist Roger Waters is one of the most legendary feuds in rock music. After Waters left the band in 1985, he assumed that would be the end of the project, but instead Gilmour continued it with the aid of drummer Nick Mason and keyboardist Rick Wright, releasing another two albums amid protracted legal wrangling with Waters about who had the rights to which aspects of the band and its accoutrements.
They were thought to be wholly estranged but, thanks to the diplomatic skills of Bob Geldof, the band reformed for a one-off performance at Live 8 in 2005, and Waters and Gilmour tentatively reconciled, making occasional live appearances together; most notably at the 02 in 2011, when Gilmour guested on Comfortably Numb at a Waters performance of the album The Wall.
Pink Floyd at Hakone Aphrodite, Kanagawa on August 6, 1971. Photo / Getty Images
However, since then, Wright has died and relations between Waters and Gilmour are, once again, dismal - in large part because of Waters’ controversial political views. Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson publicly lambasted Waters last year as “a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy megalomaniac”, which her husband then endorsed by adding the comment “every word demonstrably true”. The chances of a reconciliation and Pink Floyd reunion seem negligible, to put it kindly.
Talking Heads
Talking Heads’ former frontman David Byrne remains one of the most stylish and interesting figures in modern music, a Renaissance man whose wide interests stretch into theatre and visual arts. However, one area his interests do not reach into is reforming his hugely influential new wave act Talking Heads.
The band broke up for the first time in the late 80s, in an amusingly low-key fashion; as drummer Chris Frantz put it, “As far as we’re concerned, the band never really broke up. David just decided to leave.” Although the band briefly performed, without Byrne, in the early 90s, the singer took legal action to prevent them performing under the name “The Heads”, which he described as “a pretty obvious attempt to cash in on the Talking Heads name.”
Although they did reform briefly in 2002 to perform Life During Wartime, Psycho Killer, and Burning Down the House when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Byrne shows no interest in further collaborations, saying they were “musically miles apart” and there was “bad blood” between him and Frantz. Although they have been interviewed together recently to promote the re-release of their film Stop Making Sense, the chances of their performing again seem negligible; at the beginning of this year, they turned down an US$80 million ($128m) offer for a reunion tour.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Rolling Stone magazine recently described Creedence Clearwater Revival as “the most awesomely bizarre case of a classic band that’s bigger than ever right now, without anyone really noticing”. They disbanded acrimoniously in 1972 after 13 years together, and although singer and songwriter John Fogerty continues to perform the band’s music at his solo gigs, he has never seriously attempted to reconcile with the surviving members Stu Cook and Doug Clifford, who played as a semi-tribute act, Creedence Clearwater Revisited, for years, although the four members of the band did once play together, at Fogerty’s brother’s Tom’s wedding in 1980. Despite their newfound success, Clifford has dismissed any possibility of a reunion, saying in 2017: “It would have been great 20, 25 years ago. It’s way too late now.”
Although the band’s guitarist Joe Perry has suggested he hopes that the band may continue to release music in the future, he has also said that there will be no further live performances, commenting, “On the hope scale, I’m somewhere between seven and nine. We won’t be doing any tours from now on, but I’ll always have hope that other types of opportunities will come along. This isn’t the first time black clouds have been on our horizon - and somehow the sun managed to come out. Time and hope are all we have at the moment.”
Brad Whitford, Steven Tyler, Tom Hamilton and Joe Perry of Aerosmith perform at UBS Arena on September 09, 2023 in Elmont, New York. Photo / Kevin Mazur / Getty Images
The Jam
Paul Weller - about to make his acting debut in Steve McQueen’s eagerly anticipated film Blitz - remains one of British music’s most beloved elder statesmen. Yet “the Modfather” shows no interest whatsoever in performing with The Jam, the band that originally brought him fame.
The Jam disbanded in 1982, after a relatively short time playing together, and Weller suggested that “I wanted to end it to see what else I was capable of, and I’m still sure we stopped at the right time. I’m proud of what we did but I didn’t want to dilute it, or for us to get embarrassed by trying to go on forever. We finished at our peak. I think we had achieved all we wanted or needed to, both commercially and artistically”.
This came as a shock to his bandmates Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler, who subsequently performed as the tribute act From The Jam. Weller spoke to neither man for decades, but eventually reconciled with Foxton in 2006, going so far as to perform three songs together in 2010. However, Weller and Buckler have not been in the same room together since 1982, suggesting this animosity will remain deeply entrenched and with no possibility of reconciliation.
The Kinks
If the Gallagher brothers want to take some tips from great fraternal fallings-out, and the story of Cain and Abel seems too old-school for them, then they would be well-advised to look at the saga of Ray and Dave Davies, erstwhile collaborators in The Kinks.
Although they produced some of the greatest music of the 60s, the brothers squabbled and feuded incessantly, long after the Kinks disbanded, and this may have reached its nadir at Dave’s 50th birthday party, when Ray took his birthday cake, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.
The Kinks in 1968: Dave Davies, Ray Davies, Peter Quaife and Mick Avory. Photo / Getty Images
While the relationship between the two men was so bad that they now live on separate continents - Ray in London, Dave in New Jersey - there has been something of a thawing in hostilities, with Ray telling an interviewer “the internet pulls us together. The band though, it’s like family. You argue a lot and you fight, but you love each other really. It was always us against the world”. But he remains unequivocal about the unlikely prospects for a reunion: “As for recording again, as for performing again? We’ll never be the Kinks we were, but we never really break up.”
Dire Straits
Dire Straits performed together, with a brief hiatus between 1988 to 1990, from 1977 to 1995, and since then have resisted any opportunity to reform. The major reason for the dissolution was they went on a world tour, On Every Street, which was hugely lucrative and personally destructive. As one journalist described it, “The subsequent world tour lasted nearly two years, made mountains of money and drove Dire Straits into the ground. When the tour was over, both Knopfler’s marriage and his band were gone.”
It took Knopfler two years to recover, and since then he has pursued a successful but inevitably lower-key solo career, but has continued to insist that he would never reform Dire Straits because of the stress and misery being in the band caused him. He said in an interview with the Independent earlier this year that “I had an absolute ball for as long as it lasted until it got so big that I didn’t know the names of all the roadies - it was just getting big”. Bassist John Illsley echoes these sentiments, saying that he was “mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted” at the end of the band and he sees no prospect of a reunion.
The Verve
Richard Ashcroft is a long-standing friend of the Gallagher brothers - they wrote the song Cast No Shadow about him - and he would seem an obvious choice as a support act for some of the band’s gigs next year. He would also be able to offer insight into what it’s like to be part of a mega-act that dissolves. When Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe first formed The Verve, it was a psychedelic, esoteric project, and the eccentric Ashcroft was known as “Mad Richard” in the music press.
A few years later, after the success of the atypical, excellent single History, the now Ashcroft-led band released Urban Hymns in 1997, at the height of Britpop; it was a vast commercial success and had nothing whatsoever in common with the music that they had made at the start of their career. Amid rising interpersonal tensions between Ashcroft and his bandmates, exacerbated by the demands of fame and success, McCabe and Ashcroft came to blows backstage at one concert in June 1998 and the band broke up acrimoniously the following April.
Although Ashcroft, who embarked on a solo career of variable success, once quipped that you were more likely to see the four Beatles on stage together than The Verve, the band did reform briefly between 2007 and 2009, citing “the joy of music” as what brought them together. They released an album, Forth, which was Ashcroft-dominated, and broke up in August 2009. McCabe and bassist Simon Jones were said to have been suspicious of Ashcroft’s motives for bringing about the reformation, which were thought to be in service of his solo career rather than any interest in his former band.
McCabe and Ashcroft are not on very close terms these days - when the former was interviewed for the 20th anniversary of Urban Hymns and asked about a potential reunion, he suggested, “If I can do anything that will be materially hopeful to making things work I will, but I’m not going to lose sleep over it and he shouldn’t either.”
