Cher believes struggle helped her snag a place in entertainment history.
The 69-year-old singer-and-actress celebrated a major milestone this summer, as her music has now been featured on Billboard music charts for 50 years. Her first single All I Really Want to Do was the initial song to have charted on July 3, 1965 and a week after this occurred, Sonny & Cher's iconic song I Got You Babe debuted on the Billboard Hot 100.
Although she and her late ex-husband Sonny Bono worked hard to make it in the mid-Sixties, the pair were starting to lose hope before they hit it big.
'Are you kidding? I mean, Jesus, it was everything that we were living for. It was what we were breathing for. It was our goal to do it,' the songstress recalled to Billboard about how she and Sonny reacted to being charted. 'We struggled and struggled and struggled because of the way we [Sonny & Cher] looked. And people didn't get it until we went to England and then came back and they thought we were English. But I mean, we looked different than anyone else. We got thrown out of every place. We couldn't get in. But you know, we struggled. We had songs that didn't do anything, and then all of a sudden we had all these songs on the [chart] at one time.'
Cher also claims she did not believe for a second that her 1998 song Believe, which is the first commercial recording to have utilised Auto-Tune, would become a hit.
Although the song peaked at number one in 23 countries, Cher claims the idea to use a vocoder on the track 'came out of desperation'.
'Mark [Taylor, Believe co-producer] hated what I was doing and he kept saying to do it better, because it didn't really pop until the chorus. I just couldn't do it. We had a huge fight. I stormed out,' she recalled. 'And then the next day I saw this boy named Roachford [on TV]. and he was [using] a vocoder.'