Explode function on the_title

I have a section of my website where we post new tracks from various artists. I want to take the title of those tracks and break them down into “artist” and “song” so that I can style them differently and use them in various places in my template.

It should be a simple process; all of the post titles are formatted like you might expect (“Artist – Song name”)

For some reason, no matter what I do I cannot split this string (the_title) at the dash (” – “) and return anything of value.

I used a combination of strpos() and subsr(), I tried strstr(), and I’ve now tried using explode() — and for some reason it’s no good.

If you look at the code, $firstName[0] SHOULD be the artist name (occurring before ” – “) but for some reason it just returns the entire title.
When I used strstr() and strpos/substr it just returned blank. Someone please help me, I’m pulling my hair out!

<ul style="border-top: 1px solid #9e9e9e; width:250px; float: right; padding: 0; margin-right: 5px;">
<span style="background-color: #9e9e9e; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold; width: 250px;">NEW JOINTS</span>
<?php query_posts('showposts=10&offset=0&cat=562'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post('', '', FALSE); ?>
<li style="padding: 10px 5px; border-bottom:1px solid #9e9e9e; font-size: small; list-style-type: none;">
<?php
$firstName = explode(" – ",the_title('','',false));
echo $firstName[0];
?>
</li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>