Cher has teased that a new tour could be on the horizon as she credited boyfriend Alexander Edward for getting her back into the recording studio and reminding her "how much I like singing".
The Standard was in attendance at a special "In conversation" event hosted by Greatest Hits Radio’s Ken Bruce and Magic Radio’s Harriet Scott, at Odeon Luxe in London's Leicester Square, where the music icon, 77, was appearing to promote her latest album, Christmas.
It marks her 27th record and her first new music in five years.
Asked by Bruce and Scott why she had decided to finally put out a Christmas album, she didn't shy away from the truth, she admitted it had been her record company's idea.
"Everybody has wanted me to make one forever but I just didn’t want to, you know, I didn’t really feel it," she explained. "I didn’t want to do Silent Night and I didn’t want to do Jingle Bells, I didn’t have any other songs, I’d actually never looked for songs."
That all changed in May of this year when she was handed the track DJ Play A Christmas Song and the rest of the album followed from there.
The song went on to top the US charts, making her the only female artist to have a top 40 hit in seven consecutive decades.
Joining her in that milestone landmark are the Rolling Stones, who have also had at least one new number one on the Billboard charts every decade between the 1960s and 2020s.
It's not surprising therefore that her thoughts have already turned to making another album and her 37-year-old music producer other half Edwards is a key element."Well, I hadn’t made anything for a long time and Alexander said to me when we first met, 'why aren’t you singing?' I said 'I don’t know', I didn’t think of it, I wasn’t inspired," she recalled. "Then he brought me some songs that were really great that I’m going to do on this next album that I’m about to do. I feel like I’m in that groove so I might as well do it because I’d really forgot how much I like singing – you forget!
Adding: "I’m going to start recording it in February."
She also teased that a new tour was on the cards, saying: "We’re talking about it now."
Asked whether the UK was likely to be included, she declared: "I am only famous because of the UK."
She explained: "There was a man named Jack Wood, you must remember Jack Wood, he presented Ready, Steady Go. He came to America and he was lovely and wanted to have us on the show, but people didn’t like us at all. They were really frightened of us, Sonny got beaten up all of the time because we looked so different and you have no idea how different. I mean, the Beatles were cute little guys with nice haircuts and round jackets, you know, Sonny was like hair [long] down to here and we both had fur vests, people just didn’t understand us.
"So Jack said, 'go to London because they will get you there and they will love you'. We said 'well, we don’t have any money', he said 'just sell something or steal something or whatever'. So we came here and it was the truth, people loved us."
