The winners of every category at the 2024 Brits, updated as the ceremony progresses
• Brit awards 2024: women dominate as Raye scores record-smashing six wins
• Brit awards 2024: as it happened
Blur – The Ballad of Darren
J Hus – Beautiful and Brutal Yard
Little Simz – No Thank You
Raye – My 21st Century Blues – WINNER!
Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy
‘Mission accomplished!’ says Andrew Ridgeley, while Cher becomes oldest woman to score a UK Top 40 hit
Wham! have finally earned a Christmas No 1 for Last Christmas, 39 years after the song was denied the festive top spot by Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?.
With the song’s pain and poignancy still undimmed thanks to the tangibly heartbroken performance of the late George Michael, it was streamed 13.3m times this week, and was helped along by special vinyl and CD editions.
Continue reading...Guitarist says he doesn’t know if he wants ‘to hang around that long’ to see Abba Voyage-style recreation of the band
Keith Richards has reflected on the likelihood of a hologram performance by the Rolling Stones, saying it is “bound to happen”.
In an interview with Matt Wilkinson on Apple Music 1, Wilkinson asked if “in 10, 20 years’ time, we could be watching holograms of the Stones on stage”. Richards replied: “I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. I’m pretty sure that is bound to happen. Do I want it? Now, that’s another thing. I don’t know if I want to hang around that long, man. But at the same time, it won’t be up to me, will it?”
Continue reading...Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood to be interviewed about upcoming LP Hackney Diamonds on Wednesday
The Rolling Stones are set to release details of their first studio album of original material since 2005, an LP called Hackney Diamonds.
The surviving members of the band, now in their 70s and 80s, teased the new music online and in the form of a cryptic advert in the local newspaper the Hackney Gazette.
Continue reading...Singer, 78, developed symptoms as he arrived in Dutch capital for Sixty tour, which includes dates in England
Sir Mick Jagger has tested positive for coronavirus, prompting the Rolling Stones to cancel their show in Amsterdam on Monday.
The singer, 78, began to develop symptoms as he arrived at the Johan Cruijff ArenA in the Dutch capital earlier in the day.
Continue reading...From Prohibition-busting cocktail parties to all-night raves, illegal gatherings have been at the centre of modern culture for decades. So why do they still have the power to shock?
For more than a month now, the press has been full of stories of “illegal” parties in Downing Street. The government, we are told, has almost ground to a halt because of the scandal.
Given the coverage, one might easily get the impression that the law-breaking bash is a recent invention, something that could only happen in lockdown, driven by privilege and an unhealthy sense of entitlement. Yet the modern party began life as a crime just over a century ago, when the Volstead Act banned the production and sale of alcohol in the US. As the New York Times explained in 1920:
You cannot carry a hip flask.
You cannot give away or receive a bottle of liquor as a gift.
You cannot take liquor to hotels or restaurants and drink it in the public dining rooms.
You cannot buy or sell formulas or recipes for homemade liquors.
You cannot …
“Oh,” said the Bright Young People. “Oh, oh, oh.”
“It’s just exactly like being inside a cocktail shaker,” said Miles Malpractice.
Continue reading...Carlos Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young also appear in 26 minutes of home video at event that marked end of hippy dream
Twenty-six minutes of unseen footage of the vast and notoriously violent Altamont music festival held in northern California in 1969 have been unexpectedly uncovered.
The home-movie footage – which is vividly shot on 8mm film, but frustratingly silent – has been published by the Library of Congress on its website.
Continue reading...2 June 1941 – 24 August 2021
The Rolling Stones drummer’s childhood friend and fellow musician recalls a home-loving connoisseur and collector of ephemera
I first met Charlie Watts in 1946, when I was four and he was five. We moved into new prefabs built after the war in Wembley Park – we were number 22, he was number 23 – and our mums hit it off pretty much straight away. We were very close, Charlie and me, throughout our lives. There was one point after he joined the Stones when we didn’t see each other for years, but when we did eventually reconnect, we picked up where we left off. Our relationship never really changed.
From an early age we were both interested in jazz. It was a mutual thing. I used to listen to records in Charlie’s bedroom, discovering musicians such as Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton. Later, when his dad bought him a drum kit and I got a double bass, we’d only been playing for a few months when we heard that a jazz band was doing auditions for a drummer and bass player. We did the audition and as we were the only ones that turned up we got the gig with the Jo Jones Seven and started doing weekly sessions at the Masons Arms pub in Edgware.
Continue reading...Vibrant prints, tunics and knee-high boots are back on the couture catwalk – more than 50 years after the first ‘youthquake’
The new exhibition at London’s Fashion and Textile Museum, Beautiful People: The Boutique in 1960s Counterculture, might have been 15 years in the making but it is, as head of exhibitions Dennis Nothdruft, says “timely”. The 1960s – a decade so mined for retro references that it has become the stuff of costume parties – is once again in vogue.
At Prada’s first physical show since the pandemic, the big newswas the return of the miniskirt, that classic sixties shape so associated with London designer Mary Quant. Minis have also been seen at Versace and Max Mara – and worn by celebrities including Jennifer Lopez, Selena Gomez and Adele. Last week in Paris, Maria Grazia Chuiri’s show for Christian Dior harked back to the brand’s 60s designer Marc Bohan, with miniskirts and pop colours dominating.
Continue reading...The Dome at America’s Center, St Louis, Missouri
The veteran rockers return to the road with an emotional tribute to their longtime drummer and a reinvigorated sense of purpose
For many musicians, it has been an emotional return to live music after the coronavirus pandemic put a protracted end to touring. For the Rolling Stones, picking up their No Filter tour in Chuck Berry’s hometown of St Louis, Missouri, the stakes are even higher. Not only have the stalwart performers not played in more than two years; it’s also a commemoration for drummer Charlie Watts, who died last month.
It opens with an empty stage and only a drumbeat, with photos of Watts projected on the stage backdrop. The band appear, kicking their way through Street Fighting Man and It’s Only Rock’N’Roll (But I Like It), before Mick Jagger pauses the show to devote the tour to Watts’s memory. He along with Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, walk centre stage to thank fans for the outpouring of love and support for Watts.
Continue reading...Stones post montage of clips from drummer’s almost 60-year career with band
The Rolling Stones have released a video tribute to Charlie Watts, after the drummer’s death aged 80 this week.
The world of rock and roll united to salute Watts after he died peacefully surrounded by his family at a London hospital on Tuesday.
Continue reading...The Police and Bruce Springsteen drummers share memories of their late Rolling Stones counterpart, explaining his technical brilliance, his verve – and his clothes-folding skills
I’m an early-period Stones fan, and not so much because of losing interest in them, but because when you’re 16, music is 100 times more important – and the Rolling Stones were right there when I was 16. Humans are sort of like ducks. A duck comes out of the shell, the first warm thing it sees is mama; for adolescent teenage humans, the first raucous sound of rebellion, that’s daddy. And in my generation, that sound was the Stones.
Continue reading...He may have backed the world’s most successful rock band, but the late drummer worshipped his jazz heroes through big bands and other projects
Everyone knew that Charlie Watts’s heart was always in jazz. Even when he grew his hair long and put on hippie garb while the Rolling Stones were going through their Satanic Majesties period, underneath he was still the cool bebopper who could see through the nonsense that surrounded his group and the rampaging egos at its heart.
Wisely, he never let his true musical allegiance show in his playing with the Stones. When they recruited him from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated in January 1963, not long after he’d been serving an apprenticeship with trad jazz bands, he listened to the records of Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters in order to absorb the way that master Chicago blues drummers such as Earl Phillips, Fred Below and Elgin Evans kept things simple, soon appreciating that simplicity is often the hardest thing of all to achieve.
Continue reading...Unruffled amid excess, personality clashes and musical disputes, the Rolling Stones’ exceptional drummer used technique to deepen the meaning and power of their songs
By any standards, Charlie Watts was an unlikely candidate for rock stardom.
He was quiet, drily funny and unfailingly modest, characteristics theoretically better suited to his initial profession as a graphic designer than the scream-rent world of 60s pop. Furthermore, by his own admission, he didn’t particularly care for rock’n’roll (“I didn’t know anything about it … I used to hate Elvis Presley. Miles Davis – that’s what I considered someone,” he told an interviewer in 1993) and had initially had to have the rhythm and blues so beloved of his bandmates explained to him: “I didn’t know what it was. I thought it meant Charlie Parker, played slow”.
Continue reading...Musician’s publicist says he died peacefully in a London hospital surrounded by his family
Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer who propelled the band’s sound for nearly 60 years, has died aged 80.
A statement from his London publicist, Bernard Doherty, to the PA Media news agency said: “It is with immense sadness that we announce the death of our beloved Charlie Watts.
Continue reading...A statement said the 80-year-old drummer accepted he needed more time to recuperate from unspecified medical issue
Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts appears likely to miss the band’s upcoming US tour to allow him to recover from an unspecified medical procedure.
A spokesperson for the musician said on Wednesday night that the procedure was “completely successful” but that the 80-year-old drummer needed time to recuperate.
Continue reading...Ghostwriter Barry Coleman says he was given two ‘awful’ weeks to finish an entire book with the Rolling Stone – then the singer pulled the plug in case it was too dull
Barry Coleman still remembers the day in 1983 when he was called by his editor at the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson and told: “We’ve got a problem. Can you come in … tomorrow?”
“The urgency was a bit disorienting,” he recalls. “Something had clearly gone horribly wrong.”
Continue reading...Solar Power delivers a statement of loose-limbed maturity from a mercurial star who is much imitated but utterly unique
Lorde has said she was “waiting for the right moment” to release her comeback single, Solar Power, and opted for 11 June to coincide with the year’s only solar eclipse (although leaks may have forced her hand). Her chosen date resonates beyond the obvious thematic associations of her hazy, sun-worshipping comeback single and its cheeky cover art.
Pop stars, especially young women, are expected to be available, relatable, always on. Lorde has defied this with an old-school release rate (just three albums in nine years) and such a low-key public presence that a recent update of her Instagram account on which she reviews onions rings generated headlines. (She benefits, too, from New Zealand’s minimal paparazzi culture.) The rare arrival of new music from the 24-year-old, last heard from in 2017, has come to feel like its own celestial event.
Continue reading...Filled with product placement and advertising, the band’s newly reissued 1967 album put the pop in pop art, by showing how closely music was entwined with capital
These days, we think of the period between 1965 and 1967 as one of white-hot musical progress, a dizzying three-year period during which innovation followed innovation, a succession of totemic albums and singles were released and pop music changed irrevocably. But, as Jon Savage’s superb book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded made clear, not everyone at the time was impressed with how things were going. Savage’s research revealed a succession of contemporary naysayers, devoted to “ringing the death knell” as he put it: 1966 – The Year Pop Went Flat was noted music journalist Maureen Cleave’s assessment of 12 months that had seen the release of Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Reach Out (I’ll Be There), Eight Miles High, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and 19th Nervous Breakdown.
The most striking contemporary quote of all might be one that didn’t appear in Savage’s book. “People aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more, like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’,” it lamented, before qualifying: “I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music.”
Continue reading...The singer who backed the Rolling Stones, Coldplay and more weathered a miscarriage, then the loss of her legs in a car accident – but her new album Beautiful Scars shows she refuses to give up
Merry Clayton has an excellent memory. The 72-year-old singer tells tales with such particular detail: the warmth of falling asleep between gospel legends Mahalia Jackson and Linda Hopkins in the pews of her father’s church in Louisiana; the recording sessions with Bobby Darin, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Rolling Stones, for whom she delivered the searing holler of Gimme Shelter.
What Clayton has no memory of is the 2014 car accident that was so severe that doctors were forced to amputate both of her legs below the knee. She remembers waking up in hospital, but the incident itself, and much of the five months she spent recovering, is lost. “It was like I was in another place,” she explains, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “I knew I was here in the world, but it was just like I was somewhere else. I was in la-la land.”
Continue reading...