As Bono turns 60, we look back at how the Irish greats turned scratchy post-punk into a stadium-filling proposition – and continue to move with the times
Bafflingly left off Pop – it was released on the B-side of Staring at the Sun – North and South of the River is audibly better than swathes of that album: a low-key excursion into something resembling trip-hop, replete with breakbeat and lo-fi orchestral samples and particularly yearning Bono vocal.
Continue reading...The singer-songwriter said ‘there has to be a place in feminism for women who look and act like me’, citing her lyrics on ‘submissive roles’
Lana Del Rey has hit out at the accusations that she “glamorises abuse” that have trailed her throughout her decade-long career. In a lengthy text post to her Instagram account, the 34-year-old singer criticised “female writers and alt singers” who she says have blamed her “minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships” for “[setting] women back hundreds of years”.
She wrote: “In reality I’m just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing are very prevalent emotionally abusive relationships all over the world.” She said she had been “honest and optimistic” about her “challenging” relationships: “News flash! That’s just how it is for many women.”
Continue reading...In Listener’s digest, our writers help you explore the work of great musicians. Next up: the poet of Laurel Canyon who refused anyone’s will but her own
Blue (1971)
Continue reading...Available online
The British Museum has resurrected its blockbuster show about the deadly volcanic eruption. In the age of coronavirus, it’s more chilling and vital than ever
In AD 79, a society that thought it was modern, sophisticated and fully in control of its destiny was taught otherwise by nature. Sounds familiar? The eruption of Vesuvius that overwhelmed Pompeii, Herculaneum and many villas dotted around the Bay of Naples caught the Roman empire by surprise. The parallels with the coronavirus crisis are uncanny. So the British Museum’s release this week of Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, an online tour of its harrowing 2013 blockbuster show, offers a troubling gaze into history’s mirror.
Related: Life and death in Pompeii and Herculaneum – review
Continue reading...Art lovers may have to give 1910 version space due to damaging effect of humidity on impure paint
It is a masterpiece that seems to speak to the later horrors of war in the 20th century and even the anguishes of the 21st. Now Edvard Munch’s The Scream has another claim on modernity, after it emerged that an oversight by the artist means the 1910 version of the work needs to practise some physical distancing.
An international consortium of scientists seeking to identify the main cause of deterioration of the paint in the canvas has discovered Munch accidentally used an impure tube of cadmium yellow which can fade and flake even in relatively low humidity, including when breathed upon by crowds of art lovers.
Continue reading...Thousands of works will disappear from galleries as rent rises and a stand-off with city government take their toll
Home to some 400 galleries and an estimated 8,000 artists, Berlin has long aspired to be what its politicians call the cultural capital of Europe.
Yet in the coming year, thousands of works by artists including Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Bruce Nauman and Gerhard Richter are set to vanish from its galleries, as the city debates what lengths it should go to to protect art collectors from the sharp edge of a property boom.
Continue reading...Owners say plexiglass panels and social distancing mean they will struggle to survive in a post-lockdown age
Armando al Pantheon, a lively, family-run trattoria in the heart of Rome, counts the architect Renzo Piano among its illustrious customers. And there is no way that owner and chef Claudio Gargioli, is going to offend his sensibilities – and those of other regulars – with plexiglass.
His father, who opened the restaurant a stone’s throw away from the majestic Pantheon in 1961, would turn in his grave at such a notion, he said. “It could work as a barrier at the till, but on the table it’s not only ugly, but an insult,” Gargioli told the Observer.
Continue reading...Willard, whose career was reinvigorated by his work on the mockumentaries of Rob Reiner and Christopher Guest, was a beloved and ubiquitous presence in US comedy
Fred Willard, an actor whose career was dotted with innumerable indelible cameos playing genial buffoons in unfortunate roles of authority, has died aged 86.
The news was first broken by Jamie Lee Curtis, the wife of Christopher Guest, in whose mockumentaries – including Best in Show and A Mighty Wind – Willard won a new army of fans.
Continue reading...She’s written hits for Lizzo and Rita Ora, plus a string of her own. Next up: an album she wrote with fans while on lockdown in LA
Nineteen years post-Pop Idol, there is not much left to demystify about the way pop music is made. Fans follow the industry’s movements as obsessively as football supporters do the Premier League; songwriters and producers have their own followings. There are podcasts where artists explain a song’s path from genesis to completion. And yet, watching Charli XCX handwrite lyrics live on Instagram over the past few weeks, straight from her brain to her notebook to thousands of viewers, felt like a borderline masochistic degree of exposure – the equivalent of me livestreaming my way through every sentence of this piece. I’d rather walk down the street naked.
On 6 April, XCX – 27-year-old Cambridge-born Charlotte Aitchison – announced she was making an entire album, How I’m Feeling Now, while in lockdown at home in Los Angeles. She would share every step: lyric-writing and video-shooting; progress-stalling allergic reactions; tearful late-night Instagram confessions that she thinks she expects too much of her collaborators (later deleted). Fans were given carte blanche to give feedback and contribute visuals. “Sometimes it’s nerve-racking,” she says, when I ask if this amount of openness makes her feel vulnerable. “Other times bad comments will sway me, but I need to roll with the punches. If people don’t like it, it’s OK. The idea is to have some kind of interesting tension, to make the music feel different, and representative of the time that we’re in.”
Continue reading...Photographer Robert Ormerod uses his aerial camera to document how neighbours are finding solace in their green spaces. By Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Robert Ormerod had just moved house when lockdown began. “We lived in a flat before. We moved for a garden,” he says. “So when this kicked off, we couldn’t believe how lucky we were to have moved in time.”
As with most photographers, his ability to work has been limited, so Ormerod hit upon the idea of shooting his Edinburgh neighbours in their gardens. These outdoor spaces have been a boon for millions of families across the UK, who have over the past two months used their patch, however small, to get some fresh air, exercise, escape, grow their own food or get to know the wildlife.
Continue reading...Singer revered by David Bowie and Jimi Hendrix had complications in hospital following hip surgery
Phil May, frontman of riotous band the Pretty Things who were acclaimed peers of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones, has died aged 75.
He died in hospital in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, from complications following hip surgery after a cycling accident, that are not related to coronavirus.
Continue reading...Artist provides inspiration for competition to lift spirits during the coronavirus crisis
Locked down in France, the British artist David Hockney has been sitting in the garden of his Normandy home drawing the blossoming of spring. The cherry and other fruit trees, the hawthorns and blackthorns, all feature in his works, famously created on his iPad.
Now Hockney, 82, is the inspiration for a competition to encourage young and old to create an image that captures the season and to lift coronavirus lockdown spirits.
Continue reading...The actor’s latest movie, Capone, further builds upon his beefy and menacing screen presence, but there is another side that shines through in some of Hardy’s great roles
There aren’t as many mockney-geezery roles in Tom Hardy’s career as you might think, although he has a turn in this and also in Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake, in which he plays one of the lackadaisical members of a crew run by Daniel Craig’s icily professional cocaine dealer. In Guy Ritchie’s notorious gangster drama he plays Handsome Bob, a bit of a lairy bastard, with a secret emotional life, who works with Idris Elba. The film set my teeth on edge, but Hardy brings some of his trademarked truculent charisma.
Continue reading...Lockdown delays restoration of The Night Watch, but it can be viewed online in ‘minute detail’
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has posted online the most detailed photograph ever taken of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, revealing every brushstroke and random fleck of paint.
The so-called hyper-resolution image was launched as the museum announced a delay to the completion of the painting’s restoration, which was begun last year and live-streamed to a global audience.
Continue reading...Stéphane Bourgoin, whose books about murderers have sold millions, says he invented much of his experience, including training with FBI
An online investigation has exposed French author Stéphane Bourgoin, whose books about serial killers have sold millions of copies in France, as a serial liar.
Bourgoin is the author of more than 40 books and is widely viewed as a leading expert on murderers, having hosted a number of French television documentaries on the subject. He has claimed to have interviewed more than 70 serial killers, trained at the FBI’s base in Quantico, Virginia, and that his own wife was murdered in 1976, by a man who confessed to a dozen murders on his arrest two years later.
Continue reading...Singer had ranted at ‘wet market animal selling, virus making’ people in China in Instagram post
The Canadian singer-songwriter Bryan Adams has apologised after an outburst on Instagram where he attacked “bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards” in China for the source of the coronavirus outbreak.
The 60-year-old shared an expletive-filled post on Instagram, lamenting how his planned performances in London had been postponed due to the health crisis.
Continue reading...How did a turbaned drag queen from the sexual underground of America’s deep south ignite rock’n’roll? We unravel the mystery behind Little Richard’s subversive genius
As the world marks and mourns the passing of Little Richard, many have been asking: how was someone so unapologetically black and queer present at the origins of rock, a world-shaking music still associated, to this day, with white male musical acts like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones?
All these artists and more, including Bob Dylan in a Twitter thread, would be quick to acknowledge Little Richard’s formative influence on them. But “influence” is perhaps too weak a word here. Rock’n’roll history has never exactly neglected or ignored Little Richard: it just has never quite known what to do with him. The longstanding pissing contest over who can claim the title “King of Rock’n’Roll” – Elvis? Jerry Lee Lewis? – is a case in point. While his authorised biographer went celestial in choosing to style Richard “the Quasar of Rock”, perhaps we might do better to listen to the artist, introducing himself at the Club Matinee in Houston, Texas, in 1953: “Little Richard, King of the Blues … and the Queen, too!”
Continue reading...Canadian pop-rocker conflates various unproven theories about source of disease in expletive-filled rant on Instagram
Bryan Adams has made an expletive-filled attack on Chinese people over coronavirus, in the week he was due to start a concert residency at the Royal Albert Hall, London, that was cancelled due to the outbreak.
Introducing an acoustic performance of the song Cuts Like a Knife on his Instagram page, the Canadian singer wrote:
Continue reading...As a model, she was the face of the 60s, and went on to have a busy acting career. She discusses her new podcast, and life in swinging London
So enduring is that image of Twiggy – side-swept hair, heavy eyes, delicate neck – that it’s strange to think she was a model for only four years.
But Twiggy is an expert at reinvention (or “branching out” as her joke goes). The schoolgirl known as Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, the face of the 1960s, recognised then and now by a single name. At 21, she became the all-singing, all-dancing star of Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Boy Friend, which won her two Golden Globes. She has performed on Broadway, recorded albums and been a TV presenter. In her 60s, she turned fashion designer, with several collections for Marks & Spencer. Last year, she was given a damehood.
Continue reading...The musician, who died on Saturday aged 87, was a pioneer in looks as well as sounds, influencing everything from James Brown’s quiff to Prince’s midriff
‘Little Richard scared my grandmother in 1957,” wrote John Waters in 2010. While his grandmother’s fear was largely about the singer’s sound – that trademark shriek at the start of his hit Lucille – his look had a formative impact on the 11-year-old Waters. It is thanks to Little Richard that the film director has the deliciously fake pencil-thin moustache that his fans know and love today.
Waters’ moustache is just one example of Little Richard’s influence on fashion and style. Images of Little Richard, born Richard Penniman, in his 5os heyday show a proud, decade-appropriate quiff – forget Chuck Berry and Elvis, this was the best in the business – plus a mascara-ed moustache, panstick makeup and the look of kohl around his eyes. James Brown, who was a Little Richard impersonator, learned the power of good hair from him. The Godfather of Soul began his career in the late 50s with a quiff worthy of Little Richard.
Continue reading...