Cher is an entertainment legend who continues to dazzle audiences worldwide with her distinctive voice and magnetic stage presence. But despite selling out concerts across the globe, the Believe singer has revealed there was one show that was a “fiasco”.

The 78-year-old Mermaids star recalled the incident in her new autobiography, Cher: A Memoir, when she performed a one-off concert at the Hollywood Palladium in 1965.

Cher explained that Princess Margaret, younger sister to Queen Elizabeth II, had flown in to Los Angeles with her husband Lord Snowden for a number of charitable events and invited the singer and her then-husband, Sonny Bono, to sing after reading about the duo in English press.

“This came as a surprise, because the old guard either had no idea who we were or thought we were freaks,” Cher wrote.

“It boggled the imagination how much that wasn’t our audience.”

While Sonny did not want to accept the offer to perform, they both thought they could not “say no to Princess Margaret.”

They should have trusted their instincts, as Cher admits the event went from bad to humiliating in a series of mishaps that plagued them all evening.

Firstly, Frank Sinatra was meant to introduce the TV stars but pulled out at the last minute and was replaced by Bob Hope. Then, after starting late, they had to perform without a stage and make do with a dancefloor for space, all while Princess Margaret suffered with laryngitis.

“The acoustics were so bad that, coupled with sound problems, we performed terribly,” she wrote.

Adding insult to injury, one critic panned the performance the next day in the Saturday Evening Post, writing that the pair, “howled like a pair of coyotes.”

It seems the audience agreed, as Cher recalled few people clapped and Princess Margaret asked for the sound to be turned down halfway through their set because she had a headache.

“The engineer then accidentally cut the mic and interfered with what we could hear, which threw Sonny completely,” she wrote.

Sonny was angered by the challenges and could not wait to finish the show, while Cher admitted she was “mortified” by the whole ordeal.

“It was like a bad dream that we couldn’t get out of, we just had to stand there and wait for it to be over,” she said.

Fortunately for Cher, she put the evening behind her and went on to become one of the best selling recording artists in the 20th and 21st centuries who would eventually be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.