Category Archives: Music

Britney Spears asks for accountant to replace father as conservator

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  • Los Angeles court filing reveals singer’s request for Jason Rubin
  • Father Jamie Spears has been conservator for 13 years

An attorney for Britney Spears has asked that a new conservator be named to oversee the pop singer’s finances following recent testimony that she wanted her father ousted from the role, the New York Times reported on Monday.

In a Los Angeles court filing, lawyer Matthew Rosengart requested that accountant Jason Rubin be named the conservator of Spears’ estate, a post currently held by her father, Jamie Spears, the Times reported.

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Pink offers to pay fines for Norwegian women’s beach handball team

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European Handball Federation fined players €1,500 for wearing shorts instead of bikini bottoms

Pop star Pink has offered to pay the “sexist” fines handed out to the Norwegian women’s beach handball team after they refused to wear bikini bottoms while playing.

The European Handball Federation, the sport’s governing body, fined the team €1,500 (£1,295) last week for “improper clothing” at the European Beach Handball Championships.

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Bring it all back: why naff noughties pop is suddenly cool again

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Perhaps longing for a more carefree era, artists such as Lorde, Billie Eilish and Haim are fondly looking back to when S Club 7 and Shania Twain frolicked in low-rise denim

The turn of the millennium is not generally considered a vintage era for mainstream music in the UK. Sandwiched between Britpop and the mid-00s indie revival, it was a period dominated by talent show winners, girl- and boybands, ex-boyband and girlband members, acts with tie-ins to kids’ TV shows, and doleful singer-songwriters such as Dido and David Gray. It was sometimes trite, occasionally rapturous and – Dido and Gray aside – frivolous, family-friendly fun.

It isn’t, in other words, an era you’d expect a pop star on the cultural vanguard to be into. Yet last month Lorde revealed that her forthcoming third album was influenced by what she calls “early 00s bubblegum pop” – in particular, tween-targeted hitmakers S Club 7, Natasha Bedingfield, Natalie Imbruglia, All Saints and Nelly Furtado. She is not alone – the reclamation of late 90s and early 00s mainstream pop by young artists is now fully under way. Many heard shades of S Club in Dua Lipa’s 2020 album Future Nostalgia, and Lipa’s single Don’t Start Now had more than a bit of Spiller and Sophie Ellis Bextor’s 2000 smash Groovejet in its DNA.

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Mark Ronson on hope, hits and Amy Winehouse: ‘I loved being in her company. She was so funny’

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The superstar producer nearly quit music during lockdown. Now he’s starting a ‘new phase’ with a TV show. He discusses therapy, paparazzi – and being tucked in by Robin Williams

Mark Ronson has been a DJ longer than he hasn’t: his entire adult life, sometimes working four or five nights a week, since he was 18. “What is that?” He casts his mind back and counts. “Twenty-five – no, 27 years. Jesus.”

In this time, he has been a staple of the New York scene, the studio partner of Amy Winehouse and a superproducer of artists from Ghostface Killah to Lady Gaga. He has his own instantly recognisable, vintage-leaning sound and is the invisible touch on songs that define not just years but decades.

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R Kelly had sexual contact with underage boy as well as girls, prosecutors say

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  • Jury selection nears in sex-trafficking trial of R&B star
  • Prosecutors detail new claims but not new charges

Federal prosecutors in R Kelly’s sex trafficking case say the R&B star had sexual contact with an underage boy as well as girls, and jurors should hear those claims.

Related: Surviving R Kelly producers: 'We wanted to explain why you shouldn’t blame survivors'

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Suzi Quatro: ‘I’ll never be too old to wear a jumpsuit’

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The singer, 71, on enjoying her grandchildren, missing her mum, giving everything on stage and her need for an Ego Room

My mouth is my weapon. I can destroy somebody with a flick of my tongue. I’ve got a sharp wit and a sharp way of talking. I’m not a hitter, but when I’m mad, I’m mad. I scream it out, then I’m done.

Nobody could believe it when I once used the men’s toilet at a petrol station. I was on tour. Our bus had stopped for us to get snacks and use the loo, but there was a huge line for the ladies’ and my impatience is really bad, so I refused to wait. I walked right past everybody, into the men’s, used a stall and came out.

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Idris Elba: ‘I used work to exorcise my demons’

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The actor was working as a bouncer when he got a small part in a new show called The Wire. Two decades on, he’s a blockbuster fixture. The Suicide Squad star talks about fighting for his big break, losing his dad, and why acting helped him out of a ‘dark, weird junction’

“I appreciate my quiet time, I really do,” Idris Elba tells me, “but I didn’t choose a career in quiet time.” At 48, his life seems relentlessly full of activity, projects, causes, releases. He’s the star of an imminent summer blockbuster, The Suicide Squad. He’s a rapper who releases music online at a rate of about a track a month. He hosts a podcast. He’s just released a new line of T-shirts. Earlier in 2021, Elba signed a deal with HarperCollins to write children’s books. He and his wife, the Canadian model Sabrina Dhowre Elba, have recently been petitioning world leaders (France’s, Belgium’s) on behalf of rural farmers in Africa. The couple have also co- designed a Louboutin sandal. When Elba sits down to chat to me over Zoom, it’s during a break between night shoots on a new movie he’s making, and I’m tempted to tell him to forget about it; shut the laptop; sleep.

Is he someone who hates sitting still?

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‘Meditation and copulation’: how 90s dance act Enigma propelled a new age revolution

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Led by Romanian-German producer Michael Cretu, Enigma ushered in a mysterious new dance genre, one Gregorian chant at a time

When electronic act Enigma invaded the airwaves in 1990, nobody could explain their music’s appeal. The spiritual and erotic blended with sampling reminiscent of Jean-Michel Jarre, emanating an irresistible scent of sin. “What is this music?” Bob Mack wrote in Spin magazine. “Umberto Eco reading his works on top of a backbeat?”

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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Amy Winehouse’s 20 greatest songs – ranked!

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With the 10th anniversary of her death this week, rediscover the best of Winehouse’s discography, where heartbreak and anger are mixed up with wit and joy

After all its emotional strife, the Back to Black album concludes with a jokey paean to weed. You could construct an argument that Addicted is Winehouse once more tapping into a venerable jazz tradition – it’s easy to imagine Fats Waller singing about someone snaffling his stash in the 30s – but perhaps it’s better to just enjoy its mordant wit.

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Rapso: discover the pride and power of Trinidad’s rap-soca music

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The striking vocalist Brother Resistance, who died this month, started a politically powerful hybrid of hip-hop and soca that opened new possibilities in Caribbean music

You would expect a song called Dancing Shoes to celebrate the unfettered joy of a good boogie, but Network Rapso Riddum Band’s 1981 track did quite the opposite. Lead vocalist Brother Resistance – whose death on 13 July sent shockwaves through the Caribbean music community – used Dancing Shoes to castigate his fellow Trinidadians for embracing foreign forms such as disco, delivering caustic lyrics in a flow laden with preacherly indignation.

The song heralded the arrival of a new hybrid sound in Trinidad and Tobago – one that hasn’t had quite the global impact of dancehall, reggae or other Caribbean styles but which is the source of some of its most fascinating and political music, dubbed “rapso” for its melding of rap and soca.

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A moment that changed me: meeting the rescue dog who comforted me through unfathomable loss | Shirley Manson

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When I first held my dog Veela in my arms, I was grappling with my mother’s dementia, which was followed much too soon by her death. The teachings of my little red dog helped me survive

The first time I rescued an animal was almost 15 years ago, while I was on hiatus from my band, Garbage, in 2007. Shuffling around Los Angeles with little to occupy my time and my catastrophic imagination, my husband suggested we might consider adopting a rescue dog from one of the local shelters. I was a little hesitant at first. It struck me as a massive undertaking (I was not wrong) and I was unsure I had the emotional capacity to engage in the love of a small, defenceless, living thing.

My mother had just been diagnosed with Pick’s disease, a criminally aggressive form of dementia that can take a person, as it did my mother, out of the game in less than two years from the day of diagnosis. I was deeply disturbed by the course her disease was taking and finding it hard to connect with life in any joyful, meaningful way.

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‘I couldn’t talk about her for years’: my godmother, Amy Winehouse

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She cooked, watched Countdown and was mentored by the legendary singer. Now, 10 years after her death, Dionne Bromfield has finally addressed the grief she couldn’t deal with aged 15

Dionne Bromfield is leaning into the screen as we talk on Zoom, recounting the moment 10 years ago when she received the news that would change her life for ever. On a sunny July day, the 15-year-old singer was waiting to go on stage. She was supporting the boyband The Wanted on tour in Wales, the atmosphere backstage fizzing with energy before each show. However, that day something felt off. People were unusually quiet, and no one would meet her eyes. Eventually, she was told something was wrong: “It’s Amy.”

Amy Winehouse, whose remarkable, all-too-brief career ended with her death a decade ago this month, had been the teenager’s godmother, friend and mentor. Winehouse had nurtured Bromfield’s burgeoning vocal skills and helped her break into a notoriously competitive industry. For years after her death, Bromfield couldn’t listen to Amy’s music, let alone think about her. After two albums and a stint presenting the CBBC show Friday Download, the singer who had been marked out by many as one to watch and performed on live television with Winehouse, stepped back from music.

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‘Everyone was going full pelt’: how Giddy Stratospheres captured indie’s hedonistic 00s

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The euphoria and tragedy of the 00s indie music scene are the subject of Giddy Stratospheres. Is it accurate? Klaxons, the Long Blondes, New Young Pony Club and more look back – and give their verdict

If you ever ran for a dawn train after a narcotic all-nighter in 2007 with The Rat by the Walkmen pounding through your liquified brain and a hip flask of “breakfast vodka” in your pocket, expect flashbacks from the opening moments of Giddy Stratospheres, director Laura Jean Marsh’s debut film set amid the euphoria, hedonism and tragedy of the 00s indie rock scene.

“We were all so young, feeling invincible and wanting it not to end,” says Marsh, who put on gigs by bands such as the Horrors and Black Wire at her Dolly Rockers club night, hosted parties for the Mighty Boosh and sang with guitar pop band Screaming Ballerinas before moving on to acting and video directing.

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New York’s clubs are back, and with them a sense of community I’d forgotten existed | Larissa Pham

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As I dance, it doesn’t feel like a night out – it feels like a homecoming

In 2018, upon her return from a trip to China, my roommate gifted me a pack of black surgical masks. Affixed to the plastic packaging was an explanatory note: RAVE MASKS :)

I knew the look – the masks were purely aesthetic for certain ravers; dressed and masked in serious black, drifting past me at warehouse parties in New York, where I live. But it was a hard look to live up to, and my rave outfits leaned more toward sweaty efficiency, anyway.

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Britney Spears refuses to perform again while father retains control over career

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In the latest twist of her legal battle, the singer says she would rather share videos from her living room than go on stage

Britney Spears has refused to perform again while her father retains control over her career, and said the conservatorship she has been under for 13 years had “killed my dreams”.

Her remarks, in a lengthy Instagram post, were the latest in a series of emotional public comments about the conservatorship that controls her personal and financial affairs and which she has begged to be brought to an end.

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Biz Markie, rapper known for Just a Friend, dies at age 57

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Hip-hop star known for his personality, beatboxing and freestyle skills scored his biggest hit in 1989

Biz Markie, the New York rapper, beatboxer and producer, has died at age 57.

Markie’s representative, Jenni Izumi, said the rapper and DJ died peacefully Friday evening with his wife by his side. The cause of death has not been released.

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Casablanca Beats review – Morocco’s answer to Fame strikes a chord

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A group of talented teens push the boundaries of their religious society by putting on a concert in Nabil Ayouch’s earnest film

Franco-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch has made a likable, high-energy youth movie that could almost be called the Moroccan answer to Fame and which features that time-honoured plot device: putting on a concert.

Using nonprofessionals playing docu-fictionalised versions of themselves, Ayouch has created a drama revolving around an arts centre for young people that he himself helped to set up in the tough district of Sidi Moumen, called by someone here the Bronx of Casablanca. The school includes a special programme called the Positive School of Hip-Hop. A crowd of smart, talented teens join the class and we watch as they find out the challenges, limits and opportunities of learning self-expression through western-style rap in a Muslim society.

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Gaz Coombes: ‘It felt good that life was speeding up’

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As Supergrass return to festival stages, their frontman remembers his younger days, from the majesty of Spacemen 3 to love letters via mixtapes

This was a big thing for me: lots of recording off the radio. I’d wait for the chart show, and I’d know that Madonna’s Into the Groove was currently at No 3. I remember that pressured feeling of trying to hit record at the right time so you don’t get too much of the DJ introducing the track, and I’d build up these compilations. I did my own best-ofs – the Cure: 79-82 – or call them things like Dark Trip. I’d draw stuff and then go down to my dad’s office to use the photocopier and cut it all out, and print out homemade covers, getting the tracklisting really nice on the back.

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‘We have a hostility to being boring’: Sparks, still flying in their 70s

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Their Adam Driver musical sent Cannes into raptures and Edgar Wright has made an all-star documentary about them. The Mael brothers explain why they’ll always be hopelessly in love with pop

In 1974, John Lennon was startled as he was watching Top of the Pops. He rang Ringo Starr. “You won’t believe what’s on television,” he reportedly said. “Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler.”

This was Sparks, performing their glorious pop opus This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us. “It was equidistant between the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the Daleks on Doctor Who,” says Edgar Wright, the director of Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead, and now a documentary about the duo, The Sparks Brothers. “Fifteen million people saw it. Think of the next generation of bands watching: the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Duran Duran, Joy Division, Squeeze, Vince Clarke. They’re all watching and they’re all thinking the same thing.”

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