obituary
Kieron Tyler
The death of Robin Gibb was announced last night. He had been diagnosed with cancer following surgery for a blocked intestine in 2010, when it was discovered that he had cancer of the colon. This April, it was announced he had contracted pneumonia. His death leaves brother Barry as the only surviving Bee Gee.Although influenced by The Beatles, The Bee Gees did, in time, become as big. From the beginning, Robin’s distinctive, soulful and emotional voice was always crucial to their edge. Scissor Sisters' Jake Shears said of Robin, “You are and forever will be a massive influence and inspiration Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Being pigeonholed as "disco" became the kiss of death for many of the genre's lesser lights, but a select handful were able to transcend its limitations. Chic and the Bee Gees managed it, and so did Donna Summer, disco's so-called "First Lady of Love" whose career stretched over four decades. Having hooked up with Giorgio Moroder to help define the hypnotic, hedonistic message of disco, Summer was subsequently able to embrace pop, rock and gospel music. Her powerful, soulful voice lent conviction wherever her musical explorations led her.Her background and upbringing had left her equipped to Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's hard to process the news that Adam "MCA" Yauch of the Beastie Boys has died - even though he had been fighting cancer since 2009. The Beastie Boys seemed to mirror my youth: exploding into the public eye just as I hit adolescence, they were the epitome of bratty rebellion for my generation, but also led us to their Def Jam labelmates Run DMC and LL Cool J, and thus into hip-hop culture as a whole.Their second album - and perhaps their masterpiece - Paul's Boutique was one of the defining records of leftfield hip-hop sample-collage, and through the Nineties they became fixtures Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Robert Sherman, who has died at the age of 86, was three years older than his brother Richard, and much quieter. Indeed, on the two occasions I interviewed the songwriting brothers – once in person, the other time on the phone from California – his personality felt intriguingly at odds with the benignity of their songbook, mostly consisting of the cheery children’s anthems they wrote for the likes of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book and The Aristocats.When they first began working on Poppins, Pamela Travers, whose first set of Poppins stories were published in 1934, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The death of Davy Jones is a surprise. A horrible surprise. Less than a year ago he was on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in the reunited Monkees, full of life, hogging the stage, hamming it up and celebrating the wonderful songs of America’s manufactured answer to The Beatles.He was English of course, born in Manchester, and brought into The Monkees to add some British sparkle. Good-looking, cheeky and mop-topped, he always got the girl. His pop voice and maracca-shaking were the focus for American girls looking for a Beatle type on their home soil.He didn’t get there from nowhere. Before Read more ...
paul.mcgee
Of the many statements and tributes coming from peers and fans following the death of Whitney Houston last Saturday, perhaps the most unlikely of all was the one from the website of Diamanda Galás. One mightn't have imagined the most fiercely uncompromising singer of her (or any other) generation rushing to the defence of someone widely seen as the patron saint of the just-add-water divas of The X Factor age. But Galás knows a thing or two about death and decay, and has also praised Houston in the past, declaring her to have "ended the line" for modern R&B singers.So there she was, in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Cesaria Evora was one of the great singers, her lived-in voice and poignant, heart-wrenching music affecting nearly all who heard it. She had been in poor health after a heart attack in 2008 and a stroke last year, and died on the island of São Vicente in Cape Verde where she was born. I had the honour and pleasure of meeting her in Lisbon in 2001, on the occasion of the release of one of her best albums, São Vicente Di Longe. She seemed hugely modest and rather amazed at the fact that she had become a global star. I started by talking to her manager, José Da Silva.José Da Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In Rock’n’Roll, the play by Tom Stoppard, two characters haunt the stage without actually appearing on it. One of them, Syd Barrett, absconded from Pink Floyd to lead the life of a hermit. The other, Václav Havel, gave up the life of an internationally acclaimed, domestically banned playwright to become a head of state. Only one of them was in the audience for the premiere at the Royal Court. And it wasn’t the hermit.A few days later, I had the great privilege of interviewing the dissident playwright who took the Czech Republic into NATO. The accidental president cut an unpresidential figure Read more ...
Jasper Rees
When he was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, Christopher Hitchens carried on talking. He gave a number of riveting interviews – with Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times, Andrew Anthony in The Observer, Mick Brown in The Telegraph – as he prepared himself for a journey which, for the author of the bestselling God Is Not Great, would not involve meeting any sort of maker. I had my own encounter with the essayist, polemicist, self-styled contrarian, Bush-supporting apostate, drinker and smoker in 2005 as he made his annual pilgrimage - if that's not too devotional a word - to the Hay Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Without Hubert Sumlin there would have been no Yardbirds, Captain Beefheart, Led Zeppelin, T-Rex or White Stripes. He was also an essential ingredient for The Rolling Stones. As Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist, his straightforward power was the perfect foil to Wolf’s guttural vocal roar. The combination of Sumlin’s razor-wire distortion and bouncy riffing was irresistible and prefigured – influenced – the hard rock which evolved in the late Sixties. It also gave Marc Bolan his electric guitar style when Tyrannosaurus Rex became T-Rex.The songs Sumlin played on became classics and were influential. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2006 the thatched house in Lymington on the Hampshire coast which had been the home of Ken Russell (b 1927) for 30 years burned down. All of the director’s original film scripts, including Women in Love, The Devils and Tommy, were destroyed. So was the bulk of the music collection which inspired him to make his groundbreaking films about composers in the 1960s. There is, however, one part of the Russell archive which has survived, for the simple reason that for 50 years it had never once been in his possession.In the 1950s, after giving up on a career as a dancer, Russell freelanced as a Read more ...