Watch the Chaotic Rolling Stones Video That Helped Make Sonny & Cher Famous

We don’t often associate the Rolling Stones with Sonny & Cher, thanks partially to their different genres and mostly to the fact that the former band has continued their career nearly five decades after the latter split up. Nevertheless, the Stones and Sonny & Cher were musical contemporaries. And in fact, if it hadn’t been for the Stones’ frontman, Mick Jagger, we might have never known who Sonny & Cher were at all.

Cher’s 2024 memoir revealed just how much Jagger helped the struggling pop duo find their footing in the highly competitive music industry. While he could have stopped there, the Rolling Stones took their support one step further with a hilariously chaotic and quintessentially 1960s appearance on the popular British television music show Ready Steady Go!

How The Rolling Stones Helped Make Sonny & Cher Famous

When Sonny & Cher first started trying to break into the music industry together in the early 1960s, they were met with lackluster responses at best. In a November 2024 interview with Howard Stern, the latter half of the pop duo explained how Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger gave them a bit of career advice that would turn their luck around: move to England. England, Jagger argued, would “get” Sonny & Cher. “They’ll think you’re cool,” Cher recalled Jagger telling her. “That’s how you’ll become Sonny & Cher.”

So, that’s precisely what Sonny & Cher did. But their career didn’t take off as soon as they crossed the pond. In fact, as Cher recounts in her memoir, the duo were turned away from the first hotel they tried to stay in because of their looks. Despite having reservations under their name, the hotel clerk told them there was no availability for them and directed them back onto the street.

“By the time we reached the Hilton’s revolving doors, escorted in person by the manager, there were two reporters standing outside,” Cher wrote in her book. “‘Sonny, Cher, did the Hilton just kick you out?’ They asked. ‘Was it because of how you look?’ Too exhausted to speak, I let Sonny handle everything. When the journalists had what they wanted, he hailed a taxi to take us to another hotel where the bed was lumpy, there was no TV, and water trickled out of the shower. We slept for 12 hours straight, and by the time we’d bathed and dressed, we were famous.”

The song that would propel them to global fame seemingly overnight, of course, was their iconic duet, “I Got You Babe.”

The Chaotic Television Clip That Helped Seal The Deal For The Pop Duo

​​In September 1965, only a few months after Sonny & Cher made the two massive career moves of releasing their eponymous debut and cutting their teeth in England, the Rolling Stones would once again help push the pop duo into households across the U.K. That month, the Stones appeared on the popular British music television show Ready Steady Go!

By the time the Stones were on RSG! in 1965, the show had transitioned from their early schtick of having performers lip-sync to popular songs to having strictly live performances. But in the fall of that year, Stones frontman Mick Jagger helped introduce Sonny & Cher’s music to households across the U.K. by bringing back the miming portion of the program. “We haven’t had any miming competitions for a long time,” Jagger said, “but here we’ve got a new lot from Leighton Buzzard who’re going to do their best for you.”

As two performers dressed like Sonny & Cher lip-synced for the cameras, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards stood beside them, pretending to play a sousaphone with no mouthpiece. (He did have the puffy cheek look down pat, though.) With the performance interrupted by pictures of literal babies (“I Got You, Babe,” get it?), the wacky clip is a beautiful testament to how weird television was back in the 1960s—and to the unlikely way the Rolling Stones helped elevate Sonny & Cher’s star power more than once.

Photo by Gunter Zint/K & K Ulf Kruger OHG/Redferns