Paul Simon: The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)

Considered a Simon & Garfunkel classic, there is one line in the classic song that Paul Simon hates. In a recent episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert he said: “As it’s coming up, I’m thinking, ‘Here it comes, here it comes’ — ‘Life, I love you.’ Ugh! ‘All is groovy.’ Oh!…. In my own shows, I don’t do it unless I make a mistake and I do it to punish myself.” He went on to recall an anecdote about Frank Sinatra’s 1969 cover of Mrs. Robinson. “He changed the lyric,” Simon said. Sinatra’s version substitutes the word ‘Jesus’ with “‘And ring-a-ding-ding, Mrs Robinson / Jilly loves you more than you will know.’ … I said, ‘You can’t do that!’” Ultimately Simon fell in love with Sinatra’s version.

Billy Joel: We Didn’t Start The Fire

After the River of Dreams album in 1993, Billy Joel’s only pop releases were All My Life (which he wrote for Tony Bennett) and Christmas in Fallujah (which was sung by Cass Dillon), both from 2007. All that changed this year when he released the song Turn the Lights Back On. Even with an enviable catalogue, there is one song the man dislikes — We Didn’t Start The Fire. During a 2014 performance of the song he said: “All you gotta do is f**k up one word in that song and it’s a train wreck. It’s the same thing verse after verse…. Just the words change. It’s one of the worst melodies I ever wrote.”

Billie Joel

Nirvana: Smells Like Teen Spirit

Kurt Cobain

Any compilation from the 1990s features the Nirvana track Smells Like Teen Spirit but somehow the group’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, didn’t like the song. He said: “Once it got into the mainstream, it was over. I’m just tired of being embarrassed by it. I’m beyond that.” Later, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl said: “Kurt probably wanted to sell 20 million records and be the biggest band in the world, but I’m sure he didn’t want all the baggage that came along with it. I’m sure he didn’t even realise what baggage came along with it. Nobody did. I didn’t.” Perhaps the song took the attention away from other songs the group had recorded.

Radiohead: Creep

Radiohead

Radiohead has a love-hate relationship with the song, which was released in1992. Later, the band got tired of performing one of their biggest hits: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying,” guitarist and keyboardist Johnny Greenwood said. Thom Yorke has even refused to perform the song while announcing: “F**k off, we’re tired of it.” The song was written in 1987 while Yorke was studying at Exeter University. The song is about being in love with someone while assuming you’re not good enough for them. In 1993, Yorke said: “I have a real problem being a man in the ’90s… Any man with any sensitivity or conscience toward the opposite sex would have a problem. To actually assert yourself in a masculine way without looking like you’re in a hard-rock band is a very difficult thing to do… It comes back to the music we write, which is not effeminate, but it’s not brutal in its arrogance. It is one of the things I’m always trying: To assert a sexual persona and on the other hand trying desperately to negate it.”

Oasis: Wonderwall

Oasis

How can you not like Wonderwall? Unless, of course, you ask Liam Gallagher. He was being interviewed around the release of Dig Out Your Soul and the man said: “At least there’s no Wonderwall on there. I can’t f**king stand that f**king song. Every time I have to sing it I want to gag. Problem is, it was a big, big tune for us. You go to America and they’re like: ‘Are you Mr Wonderwall?’ You want to chin someone.”

Led Zeppelin: Stairway to Heaven

In Hollywood films, coders feel like coders when they do an all-nighter listening to Stairway to Heaven. Many learnt to play the guitar only to impress crowds with this Led Zeppelin number. But Robert Plant, the man behind the song, hates it. He said: “I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show.” In fact, when an Oregon radio station announced they would never again play the song, he made a donation.

Jon Bon Jovi: Livin’ On A Prayer

You can’t have a Bon Jovi conert without this song but John Francis Bongiovi Jr. hates something about the track.The singer almost scrapped the song. “Ultimately, the song was so unique,” he said during a Q&A session onboard the Norwegian Pearl. “It didn’t sound like anything. You know, Runaway had eight notes, like a lot of songs on the radio at the time. Even [You Give Love a] Bad Name was reminiscent of other songs that were on the radio. Livin’ on a Prayer didn’t sound like anything. So, I was sort of indifferent. I thought, ‘Well, it’s different, but is it a rock song? Is it us?” Though he ultimately fell for the song, he thought there is something off about it — the memorable key change.

Ariana Grande: Put Your Hearts Up

Ariana Grande was signed by Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, in 2013, but her professional music career began with 2011’s Put Your Hearts Up. She told Rolling Stone: “It was geared toward kids and felt so inauthentic and fake…. That was the worst moment of my life. For the video, they gave me a bad spray tan and put me in a princess dress and had me frolic around the street. The whole thing was straight out of hell. I still have nightmares about it, and I made them hide it on my Vevo page.”

Lady Gaga: Telephone

Telephone is one of her big hits but Lady Gaga hates the video. “I can’t even watch the Telephone video, I hate it so much. Beyoncé and I are great together. But there are so many ideas in that video and all I see in that video is my brain throbbing with ideas and I wish I had edited myself a little bit more.” However she hates it, Telephone took home a prize for best collaboration at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.

Nicki Minaj: Starships

On New Year’s Eve last year, Nicki Minaj was performing at the Miami nightclub E11EVEN and she rolled into Starships but stopped after a few seconds. “I don’t perform that song no more, y’all. I don’t like it. Stupid song.”

Lorde: Royals

Lorde without Royals? She doesn’t hate the song but the 27-year-old believes that it sounds better when other people sing it. The singer said: “I listen to people covering the song and putting their own spin on it and I listen to it in every single form except the one I put out… and I realise that actually it sounds horrible! It sounds like a ringtone from a 2006 Nokia! None of the melodies are cool or good! It’s disastrous. Awful… But for some reason, in the context of the way I released it, it just worked.”

Miley Cyrus: Wrecking Ball

Despite having a number of hit songs to flaunt, Wrecking Ball will be part of her legacy, especially the video to the track. “I’m never living that down. I will always be the naked girl on a wrecking ball. No matter how much I just frolic with Emu, I’m always the naked girl on the wrecking ball … I should have thought how long that was going to have to follow me around,” she said

Jay Z: Kingdom Come

In 2013, he celebrated his birthday by ranking his 12 solo albums (till that point). He had put Reasonable Doubt at the top and Kingdom Come at the bottom. And next to the album, he wrote: “First game back, don’t shoot me.” Putting it at the bottom could have been a slight exaggeration but it’s definitely not his best album.

John Lennon: Good Morning, Good Morning

The 1967 song was inspired by a Kellogg’s cereal television commercial that was playing in the background. Lennon’s tale concludes with a roaring stampede of animals. He had the choicest of words for the track: “It’s a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought. I always had the TV on very low in the background when I was writing and it came over, and then I wrote the song.” He had asked engineer Geoff Emerick to arrange the animal noises in a way that each animal heard was capable of frightening the animal preceding it.

The Who: Pinball Wizard

Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend both hate the classic Who number. Townshend said: “I knocked it off. I thought, ‘Oh, my God this is awful, the most clumsy piece of writing I’ve ever done. Oh my God, I’m embarrassed. This sounds like a Music Hall song. I scribbled it out and all the verses were the same length and there was no kind of middle eight. It was going to be a complete dud, but I carried on.” He didn’t stop there: “I attempted the same mock baroque guitar beginning that’s on I’m a Boy and then a bit of vigorous kind of flamenco guitar. I was just grabbing at ideas. I knocked a demo together and took it to the studio, and everyone loved it. Damon Lyon-Shaw (the engineer on Tommy) said, ‘Pete, that’s a hit.’ Everybody was really excited, and I suddenly thought, ‘Have I written a hit?’ It was just because the only person that we knew would give us a good review was a pinball fanatic.”

Beastie Boys: Fight For Your Right To Party

The band’s 1986 album Licensed To Ill is considered one of the finest recordings ever, containing hits like Brass Monkey and No Sleep Til Brooklyn. But the most played song from the album, Fight For Your Right To Party, is something they don’t like. Speaking about the parody of the frat culture of the day Mike D said in 1987: “It was summer 1986. We wrote it in about five minutes. We were in the Palladium with Rick Rubin, drinking vodka and grapefruit juice, and Fight for Your Right was written in the Michael Todd Room on napkins on top of those s***ty lacy tables. I remember we made a point there of like, ‘Look, we gotta get s**t done,’ and we sat at one table, really determined to accomplish something.”

Queen: Don’t Stop Me Now

It’s a song that’s meant to be played in arenas and Freddie Mercury did justice to the song. But Brian May had reservations about the track. Speaking to Guitar Player in 2021, the guitarist said: “I didn’t really take to it in the beginning. I didn’t feel totally comfortable with what Freddie was singing at the time. I found it a little bit too flippant in view of the dangers of AIDS and stuff. But as time went on, I began to realise that it gave people great joy…. I had to give in. It’s a great song — there’s no way around it. I think that’s what Freddie had an amazing knack of doing: he could put his button on things that make people feel a bit more alive…. I don’t have any quarrel with it now — I enjoy playing it onstage. It’s wonderful that everyone wants to sing it. In singing with us, they express their own joy and their own determination to make the best out of their lives, and to keep on and not get knocked down by things.”

Frank Sinatra: Strangers In The Night

Strangers in the Night is one of the most romantic ballads from Ol’ Blue Eyes and though he performed the number throughout his career, he didn’t feel good about the track, calling it “a piece of s**t” and “the worst f**king song I have ever heard”. Sometimes, when singing the song live, he’d talk about how much he hated it.

Wham!: Bad Boys

During the Wham! Era, Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael stuck to middle-of-the-road pop but one song didn’t make George happy. He said: “I hate it. It’s like an albatross around my neck. It’s too formularised. Those couple of months — that record and the Fantastic album — were the worst point in my career. I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. I didn’t know what I was doing. Still, I think Fantastic was a reasonably good first album made under a lot of pressure.”

Berlin: Take My Breath Away

You can’t think of the film Top Gun without thinking about this song, which won an Academy Award for best original song. The new wave band Berlin has plenty to say about the song. Band leader Teri Nunn said in 2016: “Take My Breath Away came along and that was another reason to fight. John (Crawford) was like ‘That’s not our song, we have our own songs.’ I said ‘Who cares? It’s Giorgio Moroder (he wrote it with Tom Whitlock), if he farts, I’ll sing it. I love that guy.’ We fought about that, then we fought about the fact we had to play it in concerts, John didn’t like that either. We were just fighting to fight.”