Pop star who was diagnosed with tumour in 2020 had ‘infectious smile and energetic presence’, says his wife
Tom Parker, singer with the Wanted, has died aged 33 from brain cancer.
His wife, Kelsey, said on Instagram: “It is with the heaviest of hearts that we confirm Tom passed away peacefully earlier today with all of his family by his side. Our hearts are broken, Tom was the centre of our world and we can’t imagine life without his infectious smile and energetic presence.”
Continue reading...Tina Weymouth in ‘a lot of pain’ after she fractures sternum and three ribs in car crash, says husband Chris Frantz
Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, the husband and wife musicians who were core members of Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, have survived a serious car crash after a collision with a drunk driver.
According to a post from Frantz on Facebook, accompanying an image of their wrecked Ford SUV, the incident happened two weeks ago on US Route 1. He wrote:
We were struck head on by a drunk driver who was driving on the wrong side of the road. Incredibly, we walked away from the collision. Tina had a Cat scan and suffered three fractured ribs and a fractured sternum. She’s been in a lot of pain but she will get better with time. I give thanks to our guardian angels and to the Ford Motor Company for building a car that protected us from getting killed.
Continue reading...The Canadian-American singer-songwriter on why she needed to tell a different story in her candid autobiography
The rock autobiography is typically a male genre, telling tales of excess so competitive that readers could be forgiven for wishing Keith Richards, Neil Young, Roger Daltrey, et al, would break the monotony by taking up wood whittling.
But now comes Martha Wainwright, whose autobiography, published this week, is a female-gaze account of what it takes to juggle relationships, familial and domestic circumstances with life under the stage lights.
Continue reading...Singer’s anti-war song reached US Top 3 in 1973 before being widely covered and sampled by artists including Drake
Timmy Thomas, whose spellbinding anti-war song Why Can’t We Live Together was a global hit in 1973, has died aged 77.
No cause of death has been given. His family wrote on his Facebook page: “With appreciation and gratitude, the family extends a thank you for the prayers, support, precious words and other expressions of love and kindness during this time.”
Continue reading...The 90s pop star on rapping with Public Enemy, her inspirational activist granny, and the joy of making music again in her 50s
Alison Clarkson, AKA Betty Boo, 52, grew up in west London with her Scottish mother, Malaysian father and brother. At 17, she ran away to New York with her rap trio, the She Rockers, and by 21 she had three Top 10 singles and a platinum debut album, Boomania. At 24, Madonna offered to sign her to her label, Maverick Records, but Clarkson quit performing instead. Later, she co-wrote Hear’Say’s Pure and Simple and worked with Girls Aloud, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Blur’s Alex James. Now living in Wiltshire with film producer husband, Paul Toogood, she has just released her first solo single in 29 years, Get Me to the Weekend. An album follows this summer.
The Boo is back. Why now?
It suddenly dawned on me a few years ago that I was going to be 50 and deep down I always wanted to make another Betty Boo record. Getting into middle age, you also start to feel invisible and I didn’t want that to happen. If it’s OK for Mick Jagger or Rick Astley to keep going, why not me?
Growing up the daughter of a rock’n’roller, Lo Carmen was meeting stars at gigs from the age of 13. One left a life-changing impression
I was 13 when I became enamoured with Chrissy Amphlett.
It was 1983 and I had just started working for our old family friend Vince Lovegrove in the school holidays. In the late 60s Vince had been a frilly-shirted bubble-gum pop singer with the Valentines, alongside AC/DC’s Bon Scott; in the 70s, he’d transitioned to hip music scene journalist, to TV producer, to compère; and now he was managing cutting-edge rock group the Divinyls, whose song Boys in Town I was already obsessed with.
Continue reading...Zavaroni was in the charts at 11 and died after years of illness aged 35. Her father talks about their family life as a new stage show about her is about to open
There are a few recordings of television interviews with Lena Zavaroni around online. One with Russell Harty where he comments that her eating disorder must save on restaurant bills and another when Terry Wogan tells her to eat up so she can get back to “your chunky self”.
The little girl with the big voice was 10 when she appeared on Opportunity Knocks – television’s predecessor to Britain’s Got Talent and Pop Idol – singing Ma! He’s Making Eyes at Me, 11 when it was a hit and 13 when she was diagnosed with anorexia, a barely known illness then called the “slimmer’s disease”. Before she died in 1999 the girl from Rothesay on the Scottish island of Bute had hosted her own TV shows, performed at the White House and shared a stage with Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball. She remains the youngest artist ever to have a record in the Top 10 UK albums chart. Lena was huge.
Continue reading...The death of Mark Lanegan, the former vocalist with the bands Screaming Trees and Queens of the Stone Age, at the age of 57, feels painfully premature, but he had been walking a tightrope for most of his life. Last year, Covid-19 rendered him deaf, unable to walk and frequently comatose; he wrote a terrifying account of the experience in Devil in a Coma (2021). As a teenager he had numerous brushes with the law for drug and alcohol offences. A notorious drunk by the time he was 12, he admitted that he had started taking heroin as a way to beat his alcohol problem.
At 20, he was run over by a tractor; the accident came just as he was preparing to leave his native Washington state and head for Las Vegas. Instead of going to Nevada, he ended up joining the prototype grunge band Screaming Trees, which set him off on his musical career. Despite releasing a string of frequently impressive albums, which helped establish Lanegan as an expressive singer blessed with a rich and dark array of vocal tones, the group were handicapped by violent personality clashes, and never hit the commercial heights enjoyed by contemporaries such as Nirvana or Soundgarden.
Continue reading...In early 2010s, he was one of the biggest French-speaking artists in the world, but then he suddenly stopped. Now he’s ready to resume his spot at the top – and is as controversial as ever
A few months ago, Paul Van Haver, better known as the Belgian singer-songwriter/rapper Stromae, announced his comeback. In the French-speaking world, this was big news. As the 00s turned into the 2010s, Stromae had established himself as one of the biggest Francophone artists in the world. He sold 8.5m albums. His single Alors On Danse went to No 1 in 19 countries: in 2010, it was the most-played French-language song in the world. Its level of success was almost freakish, leading to the assumption that he was, as he puts it, “a one-hit wonder … when you have a hit people say it’s going to be the only hit in your life”.
But he wasn’t. His second album, 2013’s Racine Carrée, spent five years in the French chart: it was the best-selling album of the year twice on the trot. He was critically acclaimed for a kaleidoscopic sound that takes in everything from Congolese soukous to knowingly cheesy Europop to the mordant chanson of his countryman Jacques Brel, an unpredictable mishmash that he thinks is rooted in his peripatetic childhood. His largely absent father was Rwandan – he was killed in the 1994 Rwandan genocide – and his Belgian mother was an inveterate traveller. “Sometimes we loved it and sometimes it was pretty close to a nightmare, because we didn’t have a lot of money, so they weren’t all-inclusive vacations,” he says. “Sometimes good memories, sometimes really bad, but memories you don’t forget.”
Continue reading...The big, bold songs will get the airplay and crowds singing, but it is the stripped-back ones where the Aussie rockers truly shine on their third album
If Angel in Realtime is ostensibly an ode to David Le’aupepe’s late father, it reveals itself as a portrait of the son, passing back and forth between grief and searching and understanding, in his father’s wake.
In the opening track, You in Everything, Le’aupepe asks of himself: “How do I face the world or raise a fucking kid/Or see beauty in the earth and all its majesty replete/When I’ve spent the better part of my 20s doing self-indulgent bullshit on repeat?” A dozen tracks later, as he contemplates “the sum of a life” in Goal of the Century, he hasn’t found an answer but the path to it looks a little brighter: “Head down I’m writing this shit out/On my phone/A way that I can talk to you/And reach you.”
Continue reading...Confident, unpredictable and irresistible, TLC set a benchmark in a golden age for R&B. Thirty years since the release of their debut album, we count down T-Boz, Chilli and the late Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopez’s best tracks
Far sassier than your standard early 90s slow jam, blessed with a laconic Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes rap: let rumour-mongers and spreaders of “crap street yap” beware! Somethin’ You Wanna Know is the sound of a band already far more sophisticated than their cartoonish early image suggested.
Continue reading...Bumzu is one of the most influential people in K-pop, helping shape South Korea’s multibillion-dollar global music business
When Jin from the superstar boyband BTS released Super Tuna – an upbeat song about his favourite pastime, fishing – it instantly went viral.
The track, written to commemorate the star’s birthday, has logged more than 53m YouTube views since December, and on TikTok the #SuperTuna hashtag has inspired a viral dance challenge.
Continue reading...A ghostly vision in a dream prompted the Texan folk-rockers to return after a decade away. The result is their most daring album yet
The next time you’re in the city of Denton, Texas, you could do worse than swing by the speakeasy-style Paschall Bar, pull up a stool and order a Pulido Old Fashioned. “It’s my signature cocktail,” grins Midlake’s frontman Eric Pulido from under a well-worn baseball cap. “I think they just started getting tired of me saying: ‘Instead of the sugar can you do Bénédictine [a liqueur], and then can you also put in maple bitters … ’”
Pulido isn’t simply a fussy customer, but alongside the rest of Midlake actually owns this dimly lit, book-lined boozer, which, like so many others, found itself on the brink of collapse during the early stages of the pandemic. “We experienced the up and down of ‘We’re good’, ‘We’re not’, ‘Now we’re OK!’” offers Pulido with a sigh. “It was definitely a trying time, but I feel like we’re coming out of the woods now.”
Continue reading...A study that finds ‘agreeable’, ‘neurotic’ and ‘open’ types are fans of the same artists misses the point of music – and people
Does music taste reflect personality? A study from the University of Cambridge involving 350,000 participants, from 50 countries, across six continents, posits that people with similar traits across the globe are drawn to similar music genres. So, “extroverts” love Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake. The “open” thrill to Daft Punk, Radiohead and Jimi Hendrix. The “agreeable” are into Marvin Gaye, U2 and Taylor Swift. The “neurotic” enjoy, presumably as much they can, the work of David Bowie, Nirvana, and the Killers. And so on.
While the study doesn’t claim to be definitive, how strange to be allotted only one personality trait/genre each. It sounds like Colour Me Beautiful for music. “What sound best goes with my personality? Did you bring along swatches?” Certainly, back when I worked for the New Musical Express, journalists, musicians and readers alike resisted being wrangled into such rigid categories.
Continue reading...Five decades after David Bowie’s seminal tour, our music writers reflect on the concerts that have left a mark, from Billie Holiday to Billie Eilish
Café Society, New York City, early 1939
The 23-year-old Billie Holiday was mostly unknown outside the jazz loop when she began her 1939 residency at this liberal New York club. Her understated, delicately implacable debut of Strange Fruit, a terrifying depiction of lynchings in the south, made a unique new vocal sound famous worldwide. John Fordham
Get Back and Lord of the Rings director made an estimated $580m last year, topping annual list that also features Bruce Springsteen, Dwayne Johnson and Kanye West
The Lord of the Rings and Get Back director, Peter Jackson, has topped the Forbes magazine rich list as the highest paid entertainer of 2021.
Jackson made US$580m (A$809m, £428m) last year, primarily through the sale of part of his visual effects business Weta Digital to Unity Software, for $1.6bn. Forbes estimates Jackson personally made about $600m in cash and $375m in stock from the deal, making him the third person in history to become a billionaire from making films, after Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
Continue reading...Marking 30 years of their debut album, Generation Terrorists, a look back at the Welsh rockers’ best bits: from the song about the Spanish civil war that kept Steps off No 1 to their glorious duets
Manic Street Preachers were always Guns N’ Roses fans: on A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun, they collaborated with the band’s bassist Duff McKagan. Charmingly perverse as ever, they turned in one of their poppiest latterday melodies, liberally decorated with metal guitar.
Continue reading...TikTok voting and gaming stars haven’t altered the music awards’ predictable roster of chart-toppers
• News: Adele sweeps gender-neutral Brit awards
• Liveblog: Brit awards 2022 – as it happened
The actual Brit awards ceremony has changed its complexion over the years: from the old-guard backslapping of the 80s to the boozy chaos of the 90s and early 00s. Today’s offering is slickly professional – hipper than it once was, less tone-deaf when it comes to representation, but not a hair out of place to the point of seeming faintly uneventful, unless you count the sight of Anne-Marie falling over, or the sound of Ed Sheeran gamely attempting to turn Bad Habits into a metal anthem with the aid of Bring Me the Horizon: even the person in charge of the mute button for swearing had an easy night. There was a lot of talk from host Mo Gilligan about hedonistic behaviour, but not many actual signs of it. Nor did anyone attempt to say anything controversy-stirring or political.
This year, the onus appeared to have shifted slightly again. In what was clearly an attempt to attract a younger audience – an audience that don’t watch music shows on television – there were categories voted for by fans via TikTok; elsewhere, there were “afterparties” starring tweenage favourite PinkPantheress on gaming platform Roblox and the unmissable opportunity to buy Brits-related NFTs.
Continue reading...The late Indian star sang of love in all its glorious and terrible forms – but also rooted listeners in history and spirituality
Sitting in the back of my parents’ Peugeot 504 as a child, we listened to songs by the likes of Mukesh, Mohammed Rafi and, of course, Lata Mangeshkar. We were too young to understand what they were about – love, loss, and romance – but we knew all the lyrics.
Well, not quite all of them. During her 92 years, Mangeshkar recorded 50,000 songs in 18 languages, breaking records as the most recorded artist in human history. As a playback singer for Bollywood films, she was never seen on screen, but her voice, dubbed in place of the actors’, was unmistakable. She got her start in 1942, and for a woman to have a career this long and distinguished in India, Mangeshkar must have been steely beneath those silk saris – her voice, though, remained gentle, and she was known as “the nightingale”.
Continue reading...Rolling Stone said that rock’n’roll peaked with Pere Ubu’s debut album. Now, after two near-death experiences, the ‘avant garage’ band are back – with an adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
‘I’ve been dead twice,” grins Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, over Zoom from his flat in Hove. “Death is very overrated. It was like being asleep. Once I was brought back by the ambulance crew. My wife said ‘Those guys worked like demons on you.’ The other time I woke up in ICU with all this stuff attached to me and it turned out I’d died again. I woke up and the doctor said, “You’re David Thomas!’’ It turned out that he’d been at the same Pere Ubu show that Ian Rankin had seen in the 70s, and was a lifelong fan.”
Now 68, seated in front of his computer in a furry hoody, the drily-humoured Ohioan cuts a more subdued figure than the “enigmatic giant of a singer” Rankin has subsequently remembered shouting requests at during that gig at Edinburgh University in 1978. Thomas needs kidney dialysis three times a week, and when he gets up to answer the door he needs a walker. But while he may no longer bark out lyrics while careering about the stage, his spirit is indefatigable. “I’m not in the best of health, but my singing voice is better than it’s ever been,” he insists, cheerily. “I’m sort of glad that I can’t jump around any more because I don’t have to worry about falling into the drums. All my concentration goes into singing.”
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