Account of kidnap and rape will help to stop others suffering in silence, says charity
A national rape charity has praised the bravery of the pop singer Duffy for going public with harrowing details of how she was drugged, held captive and raped early in her career.
On Sunday Duffy posted details of an ordeal which she kept secret for a decade, hoping that it might bring comfort to others that it is possible to “come out of the darkness”.
Continue reading...Singer Helin Bolek, 28, of Grup Yorum, was protesting against government’s treatment of group
A member of a popular folk music group that is banned in Turkey has died on the 288th day of a hunger strike. The singer and a colleague had started the strike while imprisoned to protest at the government’s treatment of their band, according to a post on the group’s Twitter account.
Grup Yorum, known for their protest songs, said Helin Bolek, 28, had died on Friday at a home in Istanbul where she had been staging the hunger strike in an attempt to pressure the government into reversing its position on the band and its members.
Continue reading...Lean on Me and Lovely Day singer dies of heart complications, according to a family statement
Bill Withers, the influential US soul singer who wrote Lean on Me, Ain’t No Sunshine and Lovely Day has died aged 81 of heart complications, according to a statement from his family.
Withers wrote and recorded several other major hits including Use Me and Just the Two of Us, before retiring in the mid-1980s and staying out of the public eye.
Continue reading...The humble eight-holed work boot has won over everyone from postal workers to punks, teens to today’s celebrities and influencers. How did it stride to world dominance?
Tony Benn wore them. So did Agyness Deyn. Suggs loved them, also Kathleen Hanna and Joe Strummer. And Jordan Catalano. Hailey Baldwin, Rihanna and Bella Hadid still do. Once you start looking, Dr Martens are everywhere. Sixty years after launching the eight-hole 1460 boot – on, as the name suggests, the 1 April 1960 – it is an undisputed classic, one of those rare-as-hen’s-teeth designs that is as likely to be spotted in a museum as it is (until recently, of course) on the streets outside. It is up there with Levi’s 501s, the Fred Perry polo shirt, the Converse All Star and the Harrington jacket.
And, like these other items, the 1460 is enjoying a fashion moment beyond its classic status. Perhaps because the past decade has been so turbulent – even before we had a global pandemic to contend with – fashion has returned to the dependable. The Hadids, Baldwin and Kaia Gerber are all endorsing Dr Martens. In other words, as Vogue declared in October, they have become “model off-duty staple”. While the vegan range and patterned designs have been credited with a 70% rise in profit for the brand in 2019, the 1460 remains the bestseller and it is this history that is likely to have attracted rumours in March of a potential £300m sale to a US private equity firm.
Continue reading...Musician has been hospitalized since Thursday and has been placed on a ventilator
The country musician John Prine has been hospitalised in a critical condition after experiencing symptoms of coronavirus. A post to his official Twitter account said that Prine, 73, had been hospitalised on Thursday and intubated on Saturday.
“This is hard news for us to share,” it says. “But so many of you have loved and supported John over the years, we wanted to let you know, and give you the chance to send on more of that love and support now. And know that we love you, and John loves you.”
Continue reading...The sons and daughters of John Wayne, John Lennon, Caitlyn Jenner and others tell us what it was like to grow up with a world-famous dad
A lot of the happy memories of my father are from the late 1960s at Kenwood, the old Tudor house we had in Surrey, when I was a little boy. Without knowing it, I probably saw some of the greatest musicians in the world come and go through that house.
Continue reading...Polish musician won numerous awards, scored The Exorcist, and was admired by rock stars
Leading composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki has died at the age of 86 after a long illness, his family announced this morning.
The Polish-born Penderecki was a major figure in contemporary music whose compositions reached millions through celebrated film scores, which included for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.
Continue reading...Council workers take advantage of the empty streets to spruce up the crossing featured on the cover of the 1969 Beatles album
The iconic Abbey Road zebra crossing made famous by the 1969 Beatles album of the same name has been repainted while the streets of London are empty because of the coronavirus pandemic.
A highways maintenance crew quietly repainted the normally busy zebra crossing on 24 March, the day after the prime minister ordered Britain to go on lockdown in an attempt to stem the spread of the virus.
Continue reading...It’s true the singer isn’t everyone’s favourite, but the online pasting she’s been subjected to leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth
In a way I’m glad that Kim Kardashian has reignited a four-year-old feud with Taylor Swift based on an 11-year-old feud with Taylor Swift that was all started by Kanye West, a man who has hardly been involved in it since about 2017. In a way, that’s good.
It’s hard not to [gestures at current reality] be constantly thinking about, you know, rather more pressing matters. The cleanliness of door handles, for example. The intensity of other people’s coughs, or how far to veer away from each other on the pavements while out on your government-mandated walk. Whether you have enough food in the cupboards to last two weeks. Whether daytime TV will ever go back to normal. How deeply we can possibly scrape the bottom of the Netflix barrel. How desperate for entertainment we will have to be to plunge ourselves into going on YouTube and watching a vlog. Right now, these are my worries. It’s nice of Kim Kardashian to try to distract me with something totally and utterly facile and pointless at a time of global crisis.
Continue reading...Traoré is in an international custody battle over her daughter after a Belgian court awarded sole guardianship to the child’s father
Malian musician Rokia Traoré has been released from a French prison, after being detained since 10 March for the alleged kidnap of her daughter in a child custody dispute. Her freedom is dependent on her delivery to Belgian authorities, once travel restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic are lifted.
Traoré was arrested under a European warrant issued by a judge in Brussels, where a court had ordered her to surrender her five-year-old daughter to the child’s father, Jan Goossens, who is Belgian. Traoré was held in Paris after getting off a plane there.
Continue reading...Rapper says anger over his views reminds him of racial assumptions he once faced: ‘You’re black, so you’re a Democrat’
Kanye West has reaffirmed his support for Donald Trump, whom he has previously called “his brother”, in a new interview with the Wall Street Journal.
West says people make assumptions about his political views because of his race, automatically assuming he would disagree with Trump’s views.
Continue reading...In Listener’s Digest, our writers help you explore the work of great pop musicians. As fans eagerly await the album known as R9, here’s a guide to pop superstar Rihanna
Rated R (2009)
Continue reading...Musician who influenced Michael Jackson dies in Paris hospital from Covid-19 infection
Manu Dibango, the Cameroonian musician celebrated for his blend of jazz, funk and traditional west African styles, has died aged 86 in a Paris hospital after contracting Covid-19.
A message on his Facebook page announced the news with “deep sadness”, and added: “His funeral service will be held in strict privacy, and a tribute to his memory will be organised when possible.”
Continue reading...The actor, comedian and musician Donald Glover has made the first truly outstanding album of the decade, offsetting cultural examinations with moments of sweet levity
In hindsight, music has always been Donald Glover’s true calling. Before the sitcoms, the Star Wars movie, the Saturday Night Live hosting gigs, and the well-worn gifs of the performer walking horrified into a burning room with a stack of pizza boxes, you could find him on YouTube as a member of Derrick Comedy. The group’s greatest sketch, B-Boy Stance, saw Glover play an ageing hip-hop pioneer who had his arms surgically attached to his back, ensuring he was forever pulling the iconic pose – it riffs on the distance between the New York acolytes who witnessed the birth of hip-hop and those who came to the music after it was commodified. Glover’s understanding of American culture shines with diamond clarity; Atlanta, his comedy-drama that goes deep into the city’s rap scene, is the evolution of those ideas.
Glover’s early forays into rap were corny and forgettable. The Childish Gambino project felt like the side hustle of a talented kid eager to test every limit of his creativity – that the moniker was taken from an online Wu-Tang Clan name generator seemed to reflect how low it fell on his list of priorities. In 2016, the funk record Awaken, My Love! was an artistic breakthrough. Then came 2017’s vicious This Is America and a video that encapsulates the racial prejudice, police brutality and vicious gun lust freezing the soul of the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world. The clip became a pop cultural juggernaut, anointing Glover as spokesman for the Black Lives Matter generation.
Continue reading...Musicians including Damon Albarn and Salif Keita call for release of singer, who is in an international battle over custody of her daughter
There are growing concerns for the health of Rokia Traoré, the internationally celebrated Malian singer, who has been on hunger strike at the Fleury-Mérogis prison near Paris since she was arrested on 10 March on allegations of kidnapping her daughter in a child-custody dispute.
Her lawyer, Kenneth Feliho, said: “I am very worried. She is only drinking. She has not been eating for over a week and her immune system is weak.”
Continue reading...People from all walks of life are mobilising to support those coping with isolation
Amy Tan is preparing to burst into song with two fellow musicians on a deserted street in Acton, west London.
“We’ll do anything by Frank Sinatra or Ella Fitzgerald – the Rat Pack,” she says. “Or maybe they would like a song by Elton John or the Beatles?”
Continue reading...Representatives of Rogers’ family said the singer died peacefully at home from natural causes
Kenny Rogers, the American country music star with hits popular across the world, has died of natural causes at the age of 81 at his home in Sandy Springs, Georgia.
The husky voice and down-home narrative style of Rogers won him three Grammy awards and put him at the top of the American music business for more than four decades. The tracks he made famous, such as Lucille and Islands in the Stream, have been karaoke standards for almost as long.
Continue reading...Welsh star’s song Something Beautiful played on Radio 2 to ‘lift spirits during these troubling times’
Duffy, the pop star who recently said she retreated from public life due to a kidnap and rape ordeal, has debuted her first new music since the announcement.
Related: Duffy has made peace. But social media won't let her
Continue reading...What more could you ask for, at this bizarre, unnerving and outlandish time, than a roundup of the greatest hits of one of the most bizarre, unnerving and outlandish musicians of all time
A rejected single finally released on a 1970 cash-in compilation, Bowie’s first collaboration with the producer Tony Visconti is better than anything on his debut album. Driven by acoustic guitar, its sound points the way ahead and there’s something appealingly odd, even sinister about the lyrical come-ons: “Wear the dress your mother wore.”
Continue reading...Judge rules against jury verdict in case over song Dark Horse, which had previously been found in favour of rapper Marcus Gray
Katy Perry has won an appeal in a copyright case involving damages of $2.8m (£2.3m).
In July 2014, Perry was accused of plagiarising the song Joyful Noise by a Christian rapper named Marcus Gray (AKA Flame), for her US No 1 hit Dark Horse, which was the second biggest-selling song worldwide that year. The songwriters sued, with Perry and her team defending themselves by saying they had never heard Joyful Noise.
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