Category Archives: London

➤ Six things some people might not know about Bowie

Posted on 28 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment
David Bowie, Mick Ronson, Ziggy

Ziggy shocker: Bowie goes down on Mick Ronson’s guitar in 1972

NME, 29 Sep 2010❚ WHAT MORE IS THERE TO SAY ABOUT BOWIE? To coincide with this week’s release of the mega-superduper collectable special edition 3-CD box set of Station to Station, an NME photo gallery of the godlike one reveals 50 things it thinks we don’t know about Bowie and here are five of them…

❏ A teenage Bowie was interviewed on a BBC programme as the founder of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men. He complained: “It’s not nice when people call you darling and that.”

Peter Frampton, Herd, Face of 68,

Bowie’s best friend: Herd guitarist Peter Frampton, hailed by Rave as the Face of ’68

❏ Peter Frampton, of Baby I Love Your Way, was Bowie’s friend at school — his dad was head of the art department.

❏ Space Oddity gave Bowie his big break. This now-famous track was used by the BBC in its coverage of the moon landing in 1969. Bowie was practically unknown back then – the song became his first UK hit.

❏ According to a recent [? Jan 24] piece in The Observer, David Bowie’s iPod contains Lorraine Ellison’s Stay With Me, Dinner At Eight by Rufus Wainwright, and Gathering Storm by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

❏ Below we see David Bowie at London’s Rules Restaurant, 1973, after receiving a presentation of six discs from RCA Records. The occasion? He had six albums in the charts that year.

David Bowie, Rules Restaurant, 1973, RCA Records, presentation

Bowie in 1973: bumper chart success

❚ HERE’S ONE OF OUR OWN: The boy wonder was profiled in 1967 by Fabulous 208 which tells us that at the age of 20 Bowie had already written more than 60 songs. Wowie!

FRONT PAGE

Leave a comment

Posted in London, Media, Pop music

Tagged ,

➤ Egan on Bowie’s legacy: ‘It’s not rocket science and it is music’

Posted on 27 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment

Today The Thin White Duke walks tall again — the god, the brand, the signifier — the three-in-one trinity that is David Bowie fired up one of the great transformative albums of the 70s, Station to Station. His 10th in a studio, it is now re-released in special edition 3-CD box set.

Bowie as The Man Who Fell to Earth, a 1976 film by Nicolas Roeg, based on the Walter Tevis novel about a humanoid alien who crash-lands on Earth. © Rex

This month the German journalist Finn Johannsen interviewed the club deejay and co-founder of the Blitz Club, Rusty Egan for the Nokia blog, Sounds Like Me. He discusses Bowie’s seminal role in 70s and 80s music, describes a typical night out at the Blitz, and what today’s clubbers can take from such an innovative chapter of music-making. Here’s a taster…

Rusty Egan, Blitz club

Rusty Egan at the Blitz, 1980: rare pic of him spinning the discs

FJ — David Bowie was always famous for continuously reinventing his career, but did this phase particularly appeal to you?

RE — Bowie’s Berlin years I believe were the foundation of the Blitz club playlist. Via Bowie I found Kraftwerk, and that lead to Neu!, Can, Cluster and Krautrock, as it was called. Bryan Ferry then led to the work of Brian Eno, and his ambient series … All this music lead to the basis of my collection. If you join the dots Bowie, Eno, Iggy, Kraftwerk, Mick Ronson, Lou Reed.

FJ — It is obvious that Bowie was heavily influenced by German experimental groups like Kraftwerk or Neu! How much of them can be found in Low and Heroes?

RE — Massive influences. Bowie is a SONGWRITER. Without songs you have music. The Germans made amazing music without lyrics. It was experimental because of the instruments used and the long, long tracks. Bowie took the basis of this experimental music and the growing feelings evoked by Möbius, Cluster, Can, Neu! and went into Hansa studios by the Wall and with Brian Eno created the Berlin sound. Heroes sung in German as Helden is a perfect example. Six minutes long, but what were the instruments used? Can you hear guitar, bass and drums? Nothing but a long, long tone changing and changing… It’s not rocket science and it is music.

➢ Read the full Egan interview at Sounds Like Me

FRONT PAGE

Leave a comment

Posted in Clubbing, London, Pop music, Youth culture

Tagged , , , , ,

➤ Slashed! Wallinger’s knife demonstrates a 25% cut on a Turner masterpiece

Posted on 21 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment
Reckless ,Mark Wallinger, The Fighting Temeraire, Turner ,National Gallery, arts cuts, petition, protest

Reckless by Mark Wallinger. Thanks to Jed Butterfield and Bob Pain at Omni Colour http://www.omnicolour.com and Nicholas Penny at the National Gallery

❚ A NEW WORK BY TURNER PRIZE-WINNING ARTIST Mark Wallinger is released today as part of a campaign supported by more than 100 leading British artists against the government’s proposed funding cuts of the arts.

Mark Wallinger’s work shows a copy of the masterpiece, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 by Joseph Mallord William Turner, in the collection of the National Gallery in London. A slash in the painting carries a notice “25% cut” and beneath it a caption reads: “If 25% were slashed from arts funding the loss would be immeasurable.”

Turner refused ever to sell The Fighting Temeraire — depicting the final journey of the 98-gun ship which played a distinguished role in Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 — until he finally donated it to the National Gallery. When the BBC asked the nation to nominate the greatest painting on show in UK museums and galleries, this came first with 25% of the votes.
Turner’s concern was to evoke a sense of loss as the great battleship was towed to the breaker’s yard.

The title of Mark Wallinger’s new work is Reckless. He explains: “I describe the cuts as a reckless adventure. In fact temeraire means reckless in French and by removing the obsolete ship from the scene I am rendering the painting wreckless.”

➢ Click for full petition details at 

savethearts-uk.blogspot.com

FRONT PAGE

Leave a comment

Posted in Culture, Europe, London, Media, Politics

Tagged , , , ,

➤ Anna declares McQueen a pioneer of dreams and drama

Posted on 20 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment
St Paul’s Cathedral, McQueen, ceremony, Anna Wintour,Hilary Alexander

A hint of gold from the doyennes attending St Paul’s Cathedral for the McQueen ceremony: Anna Wintour, Vogue editor, and Hilary Alexander, Daily Telegraph fashion director. Photographs © Glenn Copus/PA/Getty

❚ WITH LONDON FASHION WEEK IN FULL SWING, hundreds of leading fashionistas gathered in St Paul’s Cathedral today for a ceremony in memory of Alexander McQueen. A taxi driver’s son who grew up in London’s East End, he became Britain’s most confrontational, unfettered and theatrical designer. He died in February aged 40, having been appointed a CBE and named British Designer of the Year four times by the British Fashion Council.

St Paul’s Cathedral, Alexander McQueen, London Fashion Week, ceremony, tributes,

Alexander McQueen: enfant terrible of the runway

The world’s most powerful arbiter of fashion, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, led today’s tributes. Models Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, actress Sarah Jessica Parker, muse Daphne Guinness and designer Stella McCartney were among the congregation, which also included relatives and former colleagues of McQueen.

Anna Wintour is the English-born daughter of Charles — editor of the Evening Standard during the Swinging 60s when his London paper achieved international acclaim. After removing her sunglasses, something she rarely does in public, Anna paid a moving tribute to McQueen: “He was a complex and gifted young man who, as a child, liked nothing more than watching the birds from the roof of his east London tower block.

Bjork, Alexander McQueen, memorial,

Bjork performing Gloomy Sunday

“He had an 18-year-long career of pioneering his dreams and dramas. He cared what people thought of his clothes but not of him. He never appeared at ease with himself and hated to travel away from his beloved London.”

Björk sang the haunting hymn Gloomy Sunday, which reflects on the horrors of modern culture, and there were also addresses from jeweller Shaun Leane, model Annabelle Neilson, McQueen’s nephew Gary Hulyer and milliner Philip Treacy. Composer and pianist Michael Nyman and the London Community Gospel Choir gave musical performances.

➢ Fuller Evening Standard report of the McQueen service, plus gallery

➢ Backstage with Hilary — Cheek and effervescence spice the Telegraph doyenne’s videos and reports of the autumn shows in New York, London and Milan

➢ “My father really decided for me that I should work in fashion” — Anna Wintour in The September Issue. Out this week on DVD, the most gripping movie ever about editorial decisionmaking, OK, on the world’s most powerful fashion magazine, but for that very reason, junking $50k’s worth of photography is a measure of that power. [“Knocks All the President’s Men into a cocked hat” — Shapersofthe80s]

FRONT PAGE

Leave a comment

Posted in Europe, Fashion, London, Media, North America

Tagged , , ,

2010 ➤ Robinson takes the Cowell shilling — so whose bum is on the throne at Popjustice?

Posted on 13 Sep 2010 | Leave a comment
X Factor, X magazine, launch, Kelly Clarkson, American Idol, Simon Cowell

From the makers of The X Factor: a new magazine, edited by the man who toyed with Kelly Clarkson like a cat with a mouse

❚ WE LOVE HIM, THEY LOATHE HIM, the worst of them. One of the most influential and passionate commentors on the pop scene appears to have jumped ship in the direction of Simon Cowell’s entertainment goldmine. Peter Robinson, the 30-something wag and one-man Girls Aloud fanclub, has made his Popjustice blog a compelling read for fans who favour his surreal version of the truth, but a gunk tank for stars who imagine there’s any such thing as an even break.

Yet this morning’s Media Guardian unequivocally describes him as “formerly” the editor of PJ, while announcing the launch of X magazine, whose own website gives him the title of Senior Editor there. Sounds like a golden-handshake welcome to X which is to be the weekly print offshoot of the Cowell TV franchise, The X Factor. A 100-page launch issue appears tomorrow to coincide with series seven of the ITV talent show, and distribution is initially through Tesco supermarkets, price £1.95, even when the show is off-air.

Peter Robinson, Popjustice, previously editor, formerly editor,Senior Editor, X magazine

"Senior Editor" of X magazine: no, not the Peter Robinson who dresses as Marilyn, the other Peter Robinson

A “surprising” level of access to contestants is promised, though Robinson is reported to have feared that X would be “pretty much a glorified fan magazine”. The big cheese at its publisher, Haymarket Media Group, convinced him that the owners were happy for X to “not always toe the party line”. Some might think this a risky ploy. Is the cheese actually familiar with the Robinson technique? Does the cheese know how often his notoriously cringe-making interviews must have turned a star to jelly? In fact, has the cheese read the all-time car-crash sofa-chat Robinson conducted with American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson? In which he provoked her to confess: “I’m not a man and I don’t claim to be.”

There hasn’t been a decent mag purely about pop since the upstart Smash Hits doled out respect and ridicule in equal measure. It ran for almost three decades as a fortnightly, shuffling off-stage only in 2006. Channel 4’s Popworld spin-off died after two issues in 2007. Nevertheless, according to another Haymarket cheese, women’s weeklies are reckoned to be on “vibrant” form, and Robinson is talking up his new title: “Our editorial team is the strongest of any British pop magazine in almost 20 years and this certainly feels like the biggest pop magazine launch in Justin Bieber’s lifetime.”

Robinson was working as a freelance in 2000 when, for the love of it, he founded Popjustice as a music site with attitude. He has overseen its successful monetisation in cahoots with w00tmedia, and bolted on a record label called Popjustice Hi-Fi. The Times reckons PR is one of the music industry’s Top 20 star makers while The Observer rated Popjustice the world’s most powerful music blog. So has he truly relinquished the crown after 10 years? No, of course not! What? Give up the most powerful throne in pop? That was just “a mistake/assumption on Media Guardian’s part” PR assures us. Not for nothing have hacks long dubbed it the good old “Grauniad”! So rest assured that a familiar bum stills sits in the PJ hotseat, while steering the pop universe with his left hand.

FRONT PAGE

Leave a comment

Posted in London, Media, Pop music, Youth culture

Tagged , ,