“I changed the sound of music forever”: Cher joins Dua Lipa to sing Believe - minus the Auto-Tune - at the Rock & Hall of Fame, as she’s inducted by Zendaya

It might have been a lengthy ceremony - there were more than five hours of it, in fact - but you certainly couldn’t accuse the 2024 Rock & Roll Induction event of taking too long to get going. Right out of the gate, there was significant star power, with Dua Lipa being joined by Cher to sing Believe, the latter’s groundbreaking 1998 hit.

Cher was in the building to get what some might say is a long overdue induction, a fact not lost on her when she joked that “It was easier getting divorced from two men than it was to get into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.” She was introduced by Zendaya, who praised Cher for her long list of incredible achievements and called her “the coolest woman on the planet”.

Backed by The Roots, Dua Lipa sang the first two verses and choruses of Believe on her own, before Cher came out for the bridge and the remainder of the song. What we didn’t get to hear, though, was that extreme, unnatural application of Auto-Tune, which has since become a music production staple.

Discussing Believe’s (at the time) unique sound in her speech at the ceremony, Cher said: “I changed the sound of music forever. It was an accident, because my producer and I were having a fight, because he said, ‘Cher, do it better,’ and Believe was kind of a bitch in the beginning, it wasn’t that good. So I said, ‘dude, if you want it better, get another singer, OK? Cos I can’t do it better.’”

Having left the studio, Cher then got a call from that producer: Mark Taylor. “He said, ‘I’ve been playing around with the pitch machine, and I think I’ve got something,’” recalls Cher. “So I went back, and, sitting down, he started to play it, and I was like ‘oh, Jesus.’ And then, when it was over, we both jumped up and we high-fived each other. It was so great - it was like a moment - and then the head of my record company, who I adored, said, ‘we can’t do that, because no one will know that it’s you.’ And I went ‘yes, that’s the deal - that’s the great part!”

Once Believe became a hit, and knowing he’d got something special on his hands, Taylor initially claimed that the robotic vocal sound was created using a Digitech Talker pedal in order to throw others off the scent. However, he would later explain to The South Bank Show what actually happened.

"I was kind of playing around with the Auto-Tune, as it's called. With this you can shift the vocal, [and] go to the nearest note. And then what it does is if you bend a note when you're singing, all this does is it goes along and it doesn't bend a note up until it reaches a certain point and then it just flicks to the nearest note, so you end up with these very 'steppy' sounds. Every note is an exact semitone. There is no sliding and that's where you get this crazy sound."

As well as Believe, Cher also sang Believe at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, which is available to watch now on Disney+. Other inductees included Foreigner, Mary J Blige, Peter Frampton, Kool & The Gang, Ozzy Osbourne and A Tribe Called Quest.