Breakups in rock rarely feel permanent. Some bands drift apart quietly, others fall out loudly, and a few stay silent for so long that fans stop hoping.
Then, sometimes, the lineup walks back on stage. These seven bands came back after long gaps, and each return played out in a different way.
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin ended in December 1980, after drummer John Bonham died that September. The surviving members said they couldn’t continue without him. They did appear together in short, loosely rehearsed sets at Live Aid in 1985 and at an Atlantic Records anniversary show in 1988, but neither was a real return.
The full reunion came on December 10, 2007, at London’s O2 Arena. Bonham’s son Jason played drums with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, in a tribute to Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. The show drew a huge demand for tickets, and Guinness World Records recorded it as the highest demand for a single concert. The band filmed it and released it as the concert film Celebration Day in 2012.
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd’s classic lineup had been fractured since Roger Waters left the group in the mid 1980s, and the legal fights that followed were bitter. The four core members of the classic era, Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright, hadn’t shared a stage since 1981.
That changed on July 2, 2005, at Live 8 in London’s Hyde Park. They played a short set of four songs, including Wish You Were Here and Comfortably Numb. It was brief, and it never turned into a tour. Wright died in 2008, which made the performance the last time the classic lineup played together.
The Police
The Police split in 1984, not long after the success of Synchronicity. Sting went solo, and Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers drifted into other projects. For more than twenty years, a reunion looked unlikely.
The trio reunited at the Grammy Awards in February 2007 and then launched a world tour that ran into 2008. It became one of the biggest concert tours of the decade. The band didn’t record new music, though, and the tour stayed a one time celebration of the catalog.
Guns N’ Roses
Guns N’ Roses fell apart in stages. Slash left in 1996 and Duff McKagan followed in 1997, leaving Axl Rose to continue under the name with a different lineup. The relationship between Rose and Slash stayed famously strained for years.
In 2016 the trio came back together for the Not in This Lifetime tour, which ran through 2019. It ranks among the highest grossing tours in history, with reported earnings of more than half a billion dollars. Since then the reunited lineup has continued to play occasionally, mostly on the strength of the Appetite for Destruction era songs.
ABBA
ABBA’s last public activity as a group came in 1982, and the four members went separate ways. For decades they turned down huge offers to reunite. They repeatedly said they preferred to be remembered as they were.
Then in 2021 they released Voyage, their first studio album in about forty years. The following year they launched ABBA Voyage, a London concert where digital avatars of the band perform alongside a live band. It’s a reunion with a twist, since the members don’t actually appear on stage in person.
My Bloody Valentine
My Bloody Valentine released Loveless in 1991, an album that shaped shoegaze and became a standard reference for guitar noise. The band then went quiet, and by the late 1990s it had effectively stopped. Years went by with no sign of a follow up.
The group reunited for live shows in 2007 and became known for extraordinarily loud performances. In 2013 they surprised fans by releasing mbv, their first album in 22 years, and they put it out directly through their own website. The long wait made the record feel like an event rather than a routine comeback.
Slowdive
Slowdive formed in 1989 and split in 1995, after their sound fell out of fashion in a British music scene that had moved on to Britpop. For years the band sat in relative obscurity, though a new generation of listeners kept finding its records.
The group announced its return in January 2014, almost two decades after the split. They released a self titled album in 2017 and followed it with Everything Is Alive in 2023. Rather than just reviving old songs, the band proved it still had new material worth hearing.
