Daryl Hall has filed a restraining order against John Oates, his partner at Hall & Oates, which could mark the end of their 50-year partnership.
The quiet world of Hall & Oates was rocked this week by news that the longtime duo is in the middle of a legal battle. The exact details are unknown, but we do know that Daryl Hall obtained a temporary restraining order against John Oates. There is also a trademark dispute. (Representatives for both artists did not respond to emails from WECB requesting feedback).
This case is shocking in more than one way. Hall & Oates are one of the few duos in music history who have seemingly always gotten along. They’re very different, but their friendship goes back 50 years, and their creative partnership has produced 29 Top 40 hits. They’re both in their seventies, and no one could have imagined they’d make the headlines this late in their career.
Yet looking back over the past year, there are signs that this partnership is crumbling. Hall & Oates have toured extensively throughout the past few decades, never taking a single year off, but they have only performed seven concerts in 2022 and have not made a single appearance together this year. When Hall participated in the podcast Club Random by Bill Maher last year, he surprisingly went after Oates.
“ John and I are brothers, but we are not creative brothersdid he declare. We are business partners. We made records as Hall & Oates together, but we were always very separate, and that’s a very important thing to me. »
When WECB spoke with them ahead of their planned 2020 tour with Squeeze, which was ultimately postponed due to Covid, there were no signs of tension and they spoke enthusiastically about their plans for a new album. “ Daryl has refocused on Hall & Oates, which is greatOates said. I’m going to give it a try, that’s for sure, but we’re only at the beginning, in the first days. »
Hall said he was going to work on the music without Oates at first, but he didn’t present it the same way on Maher’s podcast. “ We don’t write much together, we never have.did he declare. We took different paths creatively. We needed to have this separate space, in that regard, even though we never stopped playing together, but now it’s like… I don’t know how to describe it. »
Later in the interview, we asked Hall how they stayed in harmony all these years and avoided the bitter fate of most other duos in rock history. “ The difference is that we are not a duoHall replied. We are not Simon and Garfunkel. We are two people leading a group. It’s more like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. »
Jagger and Richards, of course, have had disagreements over the years. But they never broke up the group and never went to court to get a restraining order against each other.
Hall & Oates’ final concert took place on October 22, 2002 in Laughlin, Nevada. It was a standard concert centered around big hits like “ Maneater “, ” Sarah Smile “, ” Out of Touch ” And ” Rich Girl “. Here is a video of “ She’s Gone » tour by fans, during what could be their last concert.
In recent months, Oates has performed solo concerts and Hall has hit the road with Todd Rundgren. They performed an encore together, meaning Hall & Rundgren could be a reality in the future. As for Hall & Oates, we’ll have to wait and see what the legal documents contain once they’re released.
