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20. Katy B – Lights On (ft Ms Dynamite) (2010)
Most pop/hip-hop collaborations don’t qualify here – commissioning a verse from a rapper to increase your single’s “reach” does not a duet make – but Lights On does. It moves back and forth between both participants, and moreover, it’s superb: a perfect evocation of the night ending before the stimulants have worn off.
19. Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell – Mornin’ Glory (1968)
The whole of Gentry and Campbell’s eponymous duets album is a delight, but if you had to pick a highlight, their version of the Gentry-penned Morning Glory is the one. It’s a spectacularly lovely song, its drowsy but glowing mood – a one-night-stand gone right, a rarity in pop – amplified by the twin vocals.
18. Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle – Picking Up After You (1982)
There’s an argument that Tom Waits’ soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart is significantly better than the film itself. The weary after-hours jazz of Picking Up After You – in which a marriage gone stale is picked over with scabrous relish by both parties – is particularly splendid.
17. Otis Redding and Carla Thomas – Tramp (1967)
The genius of Otis Redding and Carla Thomas’s splendidly argumentative take on the old Lowell Folson blues number (aside from its implausibly funky breakbeat) is the way Thomas’s disparaging vocal undercuts Redding’s super-slick soul-man image: “You know what, Otis? You’re country … you wear overalls … and you need a haircut!”
16. Prince (with Sheena Easton) – U Got the Look (1987)
The kind of improbable masterpiece that only Prince in his pomp could have dreamed up, then executed so convincingly: funk with squealing rock guitars, former MOR favourite Sheena Easton recast as strutting temptress, the whole thing held together by spoken-word sections that compare sex to baseball. The end result is, unaccountably, incredible.
15. Roberta Flack – Back Together Again (ft Donny Hathaway) (1980)
Infamously, Back Together Again was recorded the day Donny Hathaway took his own life: the studio session had already been abandoned due to his erratic behaviour. And yet the song is a joy-bringing delight. That such transcendent, life-affirming music could have emerged from such desperate circumstances is testament to the singers’ power and chemistry.
14. George Michael and Elton John – Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me (1991)
George Michael’s Cover to Cover tour saw him tackling everything from David Bowie’s Fame to Adamski’s Killer, but a surprise London guest appearance by Elton John deservedly provided a transatlantic No 1. The song’s considerable emotional heft was further amplified by the fact that John had only recently emerged from rehab.
13. Dan Hartman (with Loleatta Holloway) – Vertigo/Relight My Fire (1979)
Take That’s cover might be better known, but the original is the masterpiece: an epic of high-drama disco delirium, squelching synth and cinematic strings. The moment, three minutes in, when the familiar riff kicks in is euphoric, the arrival of the queen of Salsoul three minutes later unfeasibly thrilling.
12. Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood – Some Velvet Morning (1967)
You’re spoilt for choice when it comes to Sinatra/Hazlewood duets – from the hilarious Jackson to the drowsily erotic Summer Wine, they’re all great. But Some Velvet Morning is the best: darkly sexual and faintly baffling, filled with disorientating shifts in time signature and references to Phaedra (“a sad-assed broad,” as Hazlewood once put it bluntly).
11. William Bell and Judy Clay – Private Number (1968)
Late-60s Stax at its vertiginous height. Everything about Private Number is exquisite, from its atmospheric intro to the subtle orchestration to Bell and Clay’s vocals, pleading but restrained. The lyrical plot twist is neatly done, and the song’s emotional shift from moody verses to jubilant chorus offers guaranteed elation.
10. The Pogues – Fairytale of New York (ft Kirsty MacColl) (1988)
Try to banish the thought of its festive ubiquity for a moment and instead luxuriate in its exemplary use of the duet as a storytelling device, gradually dragging the grim saga of its dissolute relationship from early optimism through furious rancour to a kind of battered, unpromising reconciliation.
9. Charli xcx and Lorde – The Girl, So Confusing Version With Lorde (2024)
Charli xcx rerecorded her song about her fraught relationship with Lorde days after its release, with its subject answering all her accusations. Equal parts psychodrama and fourth-wall-breaking play on fans’ obsession with linking pop lyrics to IRL events, it is unequivocal evidence of its authors’ mastery of modern pop stardom, and all that comes with it.
8. Brandy and Monica – The Boy Is Mine (1998)
The negative image of Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney’s similarly titled but hopelessly drippy The Girl Is Mine. Brandy and Monica dish up five minutes of acidic fingernails-in-the-hair spite (“there is no way you could mistake him for your man – are you insane?”) over a superb, bumping Rodney Jerkins beat.
7. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds + Kylie Minogue – Where the Wild Roses Grow (1995)
Cave’s 1996 duet with PJ Harvey, Henry Lee, is magnificent, but Where the Wild Roses Grow has the extra improbability factor. At the time of its release, the very idea of Kylie recording a brooding murder ballad with Nick Cave seemed quite remarkable, let alone with results this powerful.
6. Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash – Girl From the North Country (1969)
First recorded six years earlier on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Girl From the North Country was powerfully reinvented in Cash’s company. Slower and sadder, it now sounds impossibly careworn, as if the two of them are competing to see who can sound the most dejected and heartsick.
5. Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton – Islands in the Stream (1983)
The Bee Gees’ post-disco era of writing songs for other artists offers an embarrassment of riches, but Islands in the Stream is the jewel. It was originally a Motown pastiche intended for Diana Ross, but Parton and Rogers’ country reading is so definitive, it’s hard to imagine it any other way. When Rogers played Glastonbury, the crowd insisted he sing it twice.
4. Queen and David Bowie – Under Pressure (1981)
A duet in which the voices appear to be singing completely different songs – Bowie’s angsty state-of-the-world address alternating with Freddie Mercury’s airy scat vocals – before they suddenly turn to the same page two-and-a-half minutes in, leading to a fantastically powerful finale. It was an unlikely chart-topper, but then so was Bohemian Rhapsody.
3. Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell – You’re All I Need to Get By (1968)
It’s hard to pick a favourite from the succession of fabulous duets Gaye and Terrell recorded: Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, California Soul, Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing. But the glorious You’re All I Need to Get By – more obviously gospel-influenced than your usual Motown track – just clinches it.
2. Pet Shop Boys with Dusty Springfield – What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1987)
Dusty Springfield’s stock was so low that the Pet Shop Boys’ label argued they should record What Have I Done to Deserve This? with Tina Turner instead. What that would have sounded like boggles the mind. It certainly couldn’t have improved on the magical blend of Springfield’s husky pleading and Neil Tennant’s icy lugubriousness.
1. Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush – Don’t Give Up (1986)
Compiling a list of the greatest duets is a thankless task: even if you confine yourself to rock and pop, and exclude artists for whom duetting is inbuilt or internal (so no Ashford and Simpson or Sam and Dave and no Don’t You Want Me) it’s a vast area to narrow down. Picking a chart-topper is more thankless still, but Don’t Give Up exudes an extraordinary emotional power, linked to the contrast between Gabriel’s utter hopelessness and misery and Bush’s patient expressions of unconditional love: “You still have us”; “You worry too much.” That the latter don’t seem to impact on the former at all makes it devastating, but unforgettable.
