For Love Or Money: What Does A Band’s Reunion Mean For Their Legacy?

In case you haven’t been keeping up with much music news in 2019, here are a quick couple of headlines for you: The Spice Girls are back. The Jonas Brothers are back. The Rapture are back. Bikini Kill are back. Alexisonfire are back. Anberlin are back. Doves are back. Men at Work are back. Static-X, somehow, are back — despite the fact their singer has been dead for five years.

They join an illustrious group from the last few years that have also made returns, either as a live act or with a new album — and, in some cases, both. It’s including, but not limited to LCD Soundsystem, Refused, At the Drive-In, The Kinks, Hootie & The Blowfish, Jawbreaker, Jet, the original Misfits, Ween, Underoath, Busted, The Libertines, Break Even, Sleater-Kinney and American Football.

Hell, even The Streets got back together — proving it’s somehow possible to break-up and reunite with yourself.

The 2010s has seen bands reunite quicker than you can change the phrase “was a band” to “are a band” on their Wikipedia. With so many broken timelines and rescinded farewells, it leaves one to question aloud: Does a band breaking up mean anything anymore? Is every band on their final tour one step away from “pulling a Farnesy”?

Let’s look at the various ways a band can handle a reunion, and what it means for both their legacy and their fans.

Here Comes The Money

Okay, time to address the cashed-up elephant in the room: There is big, big money in reunions.

When At the Drive-In got back together after 11 years in 2012, guitarist Cedric Bixler-Zavala spoke openly about their motives to NME. “We’re not getting any younger, and there’s been an offer of money every year,” he was quoted as saying at the time. “You can’t avoid that. You’d be a fool and politician to pretend that wasn’t part of it.”

Time to address the cashed-up elephant in the room: There is big, big money in reunions.

Indeed, some huge figures have been thrown around as offers to get everyone on the same stage together, although it hasn’t always been successful — giants like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin swatted away the kind of money that Dr. Evil would ask for in a ransom, while ABBA famously turned down one billion dollars for a reunion in 2000.

Hell, we say everyone on the same stage — that doesn’t even have to be the case. It was reported around the time that both Slash and Duff McKagan rejoined Guns N’ Roses in 2016 that both, alongside frontman Axl Rose, were making approximately 3 million per show. Each.

Never mind that this technically wasn’t a complete reunion of the classic line-up — original drummer Steven Adler only performed at one stop of the tour, while guitarist Izzy Stradlin declined to take part entirely. As long as people could see the two most identifiable members of Guns N’ Roses on stage together, then everyone was living in Paradise City.

It’s worth noting that Gunners absolutely did not have to take that offer — in fact, as far as giants of the industry go, they’re an exception rather than the rule. With discographies that are essentially in syndication, there’s no shortage of income for the likes of ABBA or Zeppelin.

Where it seems to really hit the most, however, is in bands that primarily made their living off live shows and touring — the indie bands and the cult bands, as exemplified by At The Drive-In and more recent instances like Slowdive and Ween. In an article for The Guardian in 2017, writer Sam Wolfson posited that bands are positioning themselves for “a long, profitable goodbye.”

“While it’s easy to be cynical about these kinds of manoeuvres, options for indie bands in particular have narrowed,” he says. “Popular culture now celebrates solo artists with strong visual identities who flirt with the mainstream. Groups that have found ways to incorporate some of that are doing well, but the closer bands stick to the old formula, the harder it is.”

Unfinished Business

One of the other key directives behind a band switching to present tense is to reclaim its story on their terms.

As is well documented, many bands end acrimoniously and amid turmoil — take Refused, for instance, who famously imploded in 1998 just as their album The Shape of Punk to Come was taking off. When the band reunited 14 years later – not as nihilistic twenty-somethings, but as early-40s men with families — the Swedish band saw it as a chance to make good on their idealistic promises from their youth. It was a matter of growing as people, and allowing their music to be a part of that.

“There were those years when the ideas you’d clung to through late adolescence were beginning to ring hollow,” the band wrote in a statement on Facebook at the end of their world tour in 2012. “You got more and more confused and destructive, and the band broke up and you had rent to pay. That was among the tougher years.”

“And then slowly, over a span of time, you began to sort yourself out and your friends started making sensible decisions in their lives, and it suddenly began to seem like most of you were gonna be OK.

And then there was the year when you stopped being a petulant kid, and you got your favourite musicians together in a room again and decided that you were gonna accept the love of thousands of listeners, accept the success that was waiting there to be had, and just in general enjoy being appreciated for the exact same qualities that made you a freak to your contemporaries in your teens. This was one of the better years.”

After years of being outsiders and cult heroes, Refused returned as a legacy act. So did Neutral Milk Hotel. So did American Football. By reuniting, these acts felt validated. They filled the kind of theatres that they could have only dreamed of playing back in the late ’90s.

All of these acts became beloved well after they’d stopped making music together, and by returning to these projects as adults they were properly able to enjoy the fruits of their labour. It also served as an inter-generational handover of sorts — by performing to those that would have never been able to see them live back in the day, bands of this ilk have ostensibly been sharing their message to a new wave of fans that will no doubt introduce the band to the next. Cynicism aside, this can surely be seen as a positive thing.

Hell Freezes Over

The Eagles, the Pixies and the Smashing Pumpkins have all been reunited for longer than they were originally bands. Let that sink in for a moment.

Each faced some proper band bust-ups, tabloid drama and just about every rockstar cliché in the book. Admittedly, all of their reunions have come at the cost of a contentious member — Don Felder, Kim Deal and D’Arcy Wretzky, respectively — but the millions that each band has raked in from world tours since speaks for itself.

The relationship people have with bands like these is one of an inextricable bond to their youth and the songs that soundtracked their lives.

It doesn’t even matter that all of their reunion records have been met with the worst reviews of their career. It’s barely even a chink in their armour. The relationship people have with bands like these is one of an inextricable bond to their youth and the songs that soundtracked their lives. When people go and see these bands live, that’s what they’re looking to get out of it.

There’s an understanding there, and it’s one that these three — and the countless others like them — have adapted to. Okay, maybe it’s taken Billy Corgan a little adjusting to, but he got there in the end.

Reunited, And It Feels So…Eh?

Good? Bad? Ugly? It all really depends. The truth is there are no right or wrong answers here, such is the subjectivity of one’s relationship to a band. If you can’t imagine your present self engaging with your past self on this level, perhaps the next reunion tour isn’t for you.

If you need a little nostalgia in your life every now and then, it could be just the cure for what ails you. As a listener, you have just as much right to understand the band’s position and justification for their decision as you do to reject it and not give them your time.

Some have abandoned or even trashed LCD Soundsystem for making music again after something as definitive as 2011’s Shut Up and Play the Hits. Others saw the blink-182 reunion, while brought back under earnest conditions, quickly played out as a demonstration as to why they should have stayed broken up in the first place. Other bands, like Swans or Cynic, returned to far greater reviews and reception than they ever did in their initial run.

A reunion is all about perspective and positioning. Some bands grow and change. Some never do. Some bands are on a mission from God. Others are just looking to make ends meet. Some people bury the hatchet. Others fight like the Gallagher brothers.

Maybe band break-ups don’t mean anything anymore. Maybe they never did.

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David James Young is a writer and podcaster. At the time of writing, his bands from high school are not back together. Follow him on Twitter.