Musical performances that nearly ruined careers

Singer-songwriter Ingrid Andress has been nominated four times for a Grammy. Like many country artists, she is particularly popular in the U.S. But a performance this week at the MLB (Major League Baseball) Home Run Derby has made her famous around the world, and not in a good way. Her rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner — a key moment for any American artist — was entirely out of tune and was met with boos from the stadium and criticism on social media. Andress apologized on Instagram, confessed she was drunk and announced she is going to check in to rehab. If it’s any consolation to Andress, she’s not the first and won’t be the last music star whose vocal talent has been put to the test when singing the national anthem. More often than not, they have been given a second chance.

The Andress bungle brings to mind the moment Fergie sang the anthem prior to an NBA game in 2018. The lead singer of The Black Eyed Peas missed the notes and the cameras panned to several of the sniggering players. “I am a risk taker artistically but clearly this performance didn’t strike the intended tone,” the singer said in a statement. Six years on, YouTube users are remarking that, compared to Andress, Fergie’s rendition really wasn’t so bad. “I’m here after listening to the national anthem at the 2024 Home Run Derby and Fergie now sounds like an angel,” wrote one user.

If singing the U.S. anthem alone is challenging, the situation becomes more complicated when singing it as a group. The Cheetah Girls, an all-female band with the Disney label, took a stab at it for another basketball game in 2008. Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, their final note is pure cringe.

The anthem also challenged Steve Tyler before an NFL game. The crowd reacted with boos as the Aerosmith frontman was unable to sing his country’s anthem correctly. His voice even cracked when he tried to reach the high notes.

Beyond the anthem

Music lovers all but unanimously agree that Whitney Houston was the best at the anthem when she sang it in Tampa in 1991, silencing an entire stadium (and country) with her rendition. But less than 20 years later, the headlines would be much crueler. The famous line, “Houston, we have a problem” was used when referring to the singer’s live performances in 2010. Her last tour received a barrage of negative reviews as it became clear that her voice was not what it used to be and that, after some very hard years and a spell in rehab that was cut short, she was not in any condition to perform her repertoire, especially the demanding I Will Always Love You. Many of her fans now believe that her last tour should never have happened or should have been postponed until the singer could perform a repertoire few others would be capable of. In 2011, she returned to rehab for drug addiction and, in 2012, passed away.

Mariah Carey, another performer from the virtuoso Houston school, has boasted endlessly about her five-octave vocal range, but not all of the diva’s performances have lived up to the public’s expectations. The culmination of a series of problems recording a Christmas concert in New York in 2014 was the leak of an audio of All I Want for Christmas Is You that was far from perfect. The Christmas queen apologized and said the situation was out of her hands: “You know I would never want to disappoint you.”

Meanwhile, Latino pop phenomenon Enrique Iglesias has had his vocal talent questioned on countless occasions: the legendary viral audio in the early 2000s of Rhythm Divine led him to go on the Howard Stern show to sing live and prove that it had been a bad day. But suspicions concerning the quality of his voice persisted, with newspaper articles in 2023 disdainfully analyzing his concerts. In 2015, he attended the Starlite Festival in Marbella and struggled to find the right note for his version of La Chica de Ayer, which was defined by the press as “a disaster.”

Another artist that garnered headlines and online criticism was Ramoncín and his version of Nirvana’s Come As You Are in 2010. The artist admitted that it had not been “a good cover,” but that, in his defense, it had always been a risk and he had not been able to rehearse properly with his band.

In 1995, Take That tried to come off as punk with a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit, by Nirvana. Gary Barlow tore his T-shirt and stepped into the role of rock star for four minutes that are hard to describe. “Beyond parody. Every second of this is absolutely unbearable,” according to one YouTube user. “As a huge Take That fan, this is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. I wish it didn’t exist,” said another.

What happens when one of your bandmates decides to wreck your performance on purpose? That’s what happened when members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers visited Saturday Night Live in 1992 to sing Under the Bridge. Guitarist John Frusciante was unhappy to be there. In a stand-off with frontman Anthony Kiedis, and angry at the success of the band, he ignored the score, played his instrument erratically and produced some screaming choruses for posterity. Vocalist Anthony Kiedis explained in his autobiography, Scar Tissue, that at that moment he felt he had been “stabbed in the back” and “hung out to dry” in front of all of America, “while this guy [Frusciante] was off in a corner in the shadow, playing some dissonant, out-of-tune experiment.” In fact, the performance did them no harm at all.

Saturday Night Live actually launched the career of Lana del Rey, albeit on the back of a flawed performance. It was in 2012, before the release of her album Born to Die, but when her songs were already going viral. Journalist Brian Williams defined her performance as one of the worst in the show’s history. Her multiple voice changes in Blue Jeans baffled the audience. “There are 20 different singers inside this woman and it’s scary,” commented one YouTube user. Another noted that in a matter of seconds she went “from West Coast rapper to country cowboy to Shakira.”

Spanish singer Rosa López has confessed on various occasions to the problems she had with her vocal cords at the beginning of her career. “I almost lost my voice due to medical negligence,” she told TV interviewer Bertín Osborne. Due to those problems, her TV performances sometimes failed to match up to her success on the Spanish talent show Operación Triunfo.

Led Zeppelin’s 1985 reunion for the massive Live Aid concert in Philadelphia left much to be desired. Phil Collins was recruited as the drummer at the last minute, without having mastered any of the group’s songs, while a chaotic Jimmy Page went his own way on guitar. But what many fans will remember about this historic reunion is that Robert Plant had lost his voice. The singer had given several solo concerts in the days running up to the event and admitted that his voice had deserted him after the Live Aid rehearsals.

A ruse that is becoming increasingly common in the pop world is the use of a pre-recorded version of the song, so that when they have to sing live, it is there to fall back on, especially if they have a demanding choreography to perform at the same time. A charity gala on British television in 2012 showed Cheryl Cole dancing and simply muttering a few verses of Call My Name. But the playback track didn’t come on and it took Cole a full minute to figure it out. Her face said it all.

The rivalry and tension between the Gallagher brothers eventually led to the separation of Oasis in 2009. Before going their separate ways, they gave a concert in Argentina in 2006 in which Liam’s surly attitude contrasts with the enthusiasm of the audience. Liam mumbled rather than sang Wonderwall (which can bee seen at minute 56:12 of the following video), something which did not go unnoticed by Noel, whose expression could not have been more telling.

The Eurovision Song Contest had an exceptional guest in 2019: queen of pop Madonna gave millions of people the chance to watch her go off-key for which she was subsequently crucified, especially since it was Like a Prayer, a song she had sung hundreds of times on tour. Naturally, when uploaded to her YouTube channel, the awryness of her vocals had been ironed out. But the video below is evidence that numerous tweaks were required.

Selena Gomez’s opening of the 2019 American Music Awards shows her singing off-key during the ballad Lose You To Love Me. It makes for uncomfortable viewing, as it becomes clear the singer is struggling. Later, it came to light that she had had a panic attack just before going on stage.

The beginning of Rihanna’s number at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2016 benefits from the fact that many of her words are censored. The singer, who has not released an album since that year’s Anti, produced a long and jarring note during her performance of Needed Me.

Almost all of these artists have gone on to have successful careers in spite of these setbacks, proving that, when it comes to pop music, the voice is just one element among many needed for success. And many of the performances that were once the targets of merciless criticism are now seen in a more sympathetic light as we learn about the personal circumstances behind the gaffe. After all, anyone can have a bad night.

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