TRUE BELIEVER

As Cher re-releases two of her least celebrated electro-pop LPs, Helen Brown salutes a woman who has packed endless glitz, glamour and controversy into her six decades of fame

- Helen Brown

To understand Cher - and her six decades of global stardom you have to go back to Dumbo. When the young Cherilyn Sarkisian first saw the 1941 Disney film, at the age of four in 1950, it had a profound effect on her. On screen, the animated elephant is bullied because of his large ears, but soon realises he can use them to fly. Only, though, if he truly believes in himself.

Gazing up at the screen as the soaring outsider won the admiration of his circus peers, Cher – a shy, wild, severely dyslexic child – whispered to her mum that this was what she wanted to do with her life.

In a 2022 commercial for Ugg boots, Cher recalled that her mother’s response was to laugh. “You can’t be a cartoon character!” she told her. But the determined child knew better. “I thought: why not? I can sing, I can dance, I can run around and be funny. This is what I’ll do when I grow up!”

She did it, too. Cher’s voice may have been so big that Phil Spector once asked her to stand metres back from the microphone while she sang back-up for acts such as The Ronettes. It may have also been so deep that DJs refused to play her debut single because they thought she was a man singing a love song to another man. But she harnessed all the strength of that mighty voice and took it flying to the top of the British charts in 1965 singing “I Got You Babe” with then-husband Sonny Bono.