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Whether informed by the perspective and poignancy of one’s twilight years, or by the promise of loads of touring cash, some of pop’s most bitter feuds are being put to bed. This week Madonna, who had caught wind that Elton John was appearing on SNL, headed down to the studios and – blessed with an A-lister’s supernatural freedom of movement – confronted John backstage over his various unkind remarks about her in the past. She forgave him and a potential collaboration is in the works.
Meanwhile Oasis are getting ready to go back out on tour after years of tuber-based jibes between the Gallagher brothers, and Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel had an emotional reunion last year with the latter admitting he’d “been a fool” to berate Simon in an interview. So who might be next?
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks
The sparks between the Fleetwood Mac pair were what ignited their commercial breakthrough – and, eventually, what burned the band down. Their tempestuous romance was laid out in the songs, from Buckingham howling Go Your Own Way to Nicks chiding him with Dreams and Silver Springs – the latter a realisation, Nicks later said, “that Lindsey was going to haunt me for the rest of my life”. Buckingham left the band in 2018, alleging that Nicks was offended by him smirking as she gave an award ceremony acceptance speech, and had him ousted. Nicks later said of that night: “He wasn’t very nice to anybody; he wasn’t very nice to Harry Styles. I could hear my mom saying, ‘Are you really going to spend the next 15 years of your life with this man?’ I could hear my very pragmatic father … saying, ‘It’s time for you guys to get a divorce.’ Between those two, I said, ‘I’m done.’” Mick Fleetwood said last year: “I would love to see a healing between them,” and Buckingham himself said: “It would be very appropriate to close on a more circular note.”
50 Cent and Ja Rule
“It ain’t over till one of us is gone,” 50 Cent has claimed of one of the most long-winded beefs in hip-hop. The pair bestrode millennial rap in vests and voluminous denim, swapping diss tracks back and forth after a 50 Cent associate relieved Ja Rule of some jewellery during a video shoot in 1999. Things seemed to have simmered down when they were placed in the same row on a 2013 flight without incident, though Ja Rule has since accused 50 Cent of being a “rat” on numerous occasions, while 50 bought multiple rows of seats at the front of a Ja Rule concert to ensure there would be no fans in them. Last year 50 crowed at Ja being denied entry to the UK, with the latter telling him to “shut up” (expletives redacted). You can detect a certain amount of fondness creeping into their spat, like a couple of aged tennis rivals slugging it out on the court of an old people’s home.
Morrissey and Johnny Marr
Relations between the Smiths pair are at their lowest ever ebb. In the past, Morrissey had lamented the end of the group in sad and dignified tones, but grew irritated with Marr mentioning him in the press: “You talk as if you were my personal psychiatrist with consistent and uninterrupted access to my instincts,” he said in 2022. It all came to a head in 2024 when Morrissey laid out negotiations over a Smiths reunion tour and archival releases, claiming Marr had blocked them and applied for sole ownership of the Smiths, which Marr denied, saying: “I didn’t ignore the offer [to tour] – I said no.”
Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez
While pop’s menfolk lumber around with jibes, swear words and legal threats like pissed-up blokes sparring outside a pub, Carey and Lopez are like a pair of cool contract killers pretending the other doesn’t exist. “She’s a dancer, isn’t she? … I don’t think that as a singer, we’re in the same category as artists,” Carey said of Lopez before immortally claiming “I don’t know her” in a discussion about pop peers a few years later. Lopez used Carey’s words against her, saying on separate occasions that “we don’t know each other” and “we don’t know each other that well”, and during a Carey performance was pictured scrolling through her phone like a bored child. The passive aggression hums along so intensely it could be tapped as a renewable energy source.
David Gilmour and Roger Waters
The quarrel between the two Pink Floyd titans is now as long-winded and episodic as Dark Side of the Moon, stretching back to 1985 when Waters left and called the group “a spent force”. Waters sniped at later Floyd albums (A Momentary Lapse of Reason was called “a very facile but quite clever forgery”) and although they reunited for charity gigs in 2005 and 2010, by 2020 Waters was claiming Gilmour “banned” him from Pink Floyd’s website. Gilmour attempted a bit of “I don’t know her”-style dismissal, saying: “He left our pop group when I was in my 30s … I don’t really know his work since,” but relations massively worsened in 2023 when Gilmour tweeted to support his wife Polly Samson’s claims that Waters was “antisemitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac” – claims that Waters “refutes entirely”, he said, calling them “incendiary and wildly inaccurate”. In 2024, when Gilmour was asked by a Guardian reader if he would ever play with Waters again, he said: “Absolutely not. I tend to steer clear of people who actively support genocidal and autocratic dictators”.
Bob Dylan and Don McLean
For years many assumed McLean’s American Pie swiped at Dylan with this section: “When the jester sang for the king and queen / in a coat he borrowed from James Dean / And a voice that came from you and me / Oh, and while the king was looking down / The jester stole his thorny crown” – the jester being Dylan and the king being Elvis Presley, and McLean seen as charting the cultural shift from rock’n’roll to singer-songwriting in the mid 20th century. Dylan himself certainly thought so: “Yeah, Don McLean, American Pie, what a song that is,” he sarcastically told an interviewer in 2017. “A jester? Sure, the jester writes songs like Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, It’s Alright, Ma – some jester. I have to think he’s talking about somebody else. Ask him.” McLean smoothed things over a little by explaining the lyrics in 2022 – “I said James Dean in the song. If I meant Elvis or Bob Dylan I would have said their names” – but Dylan isn’t exactly one for hugging things out.
