1 = GEORGE MICHAEL £90m ($138m)
2 = MICK HUCKNALL £35m ($54m)
3 = KYLIE MINOGUE £35m ($54m)
The richest UK popstar of all is ex-Beatle
Sir Paul McCartney £475m ($731m).
Source: Sunday Times Rich List 2010
[Alas this sound recording no longer works]
Posted in 20th century, History, influencers, musicians, Pop music, rock music, Youth culture, zeitgeist
Tagged George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Mick Huicknall, Paul McCartney
Beatles live onstage in Stockton, Nov 22, 1963: George Harrison at the microphone on the night Kennedy was shot. Note the amplifier perched on a chair!
❚ WHERE? LIVE, ONSTAGE IN STOCKTON-ON-TEES. Count the simple Vox amps behind the band and note how one is perched on a chair! This picture was taken on Friday Nov 22 1963 at the 2,400-seat Globe theatre when the Beatles played the art-deco venue on their first nationwide tour. The band’s half-hour set during twice-nightly performances at 6.15 and 8.30 was supported by seven other acts with tickets priced from 6 shillings to 10s 6d, when a workman’s weekly wage might be £7….
➢ Read on at Shapersofthe80s:
1963 ➤ With The Beatles the day Kennedy was shot
❚ HAPPY 80TH BIRTHDAY, SIR RICHARD STARKEY, aka Ringo from the Beatles… “Four drums that’s all Ringo needed”… “He’s a song drummer”… “He used his kit in a very different way”… “Ringo was the king of feel”… “Very innovative”… “It’s a Ringo swing: he washes the windshield on your high-hats”… “It’s that sloppy, swampy, falling down the stairs kind of sound that’s the coolest thing ever”.
Watch some of the world’s greatest drummers – including Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters, Stewart Copeland of the Police, Questlove of the Roots, Tré Cool of Green Day, Max Weinberg of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers – all salute Ringo Starr from behind his famous Ludwig kit.
➢ Celebrate Ringo’s 80th birthday with The Big Birthday Show on YouTube 5pm PST
Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney: the surviving Beatles go on celebrating together. (Photo: Fred Duval)
Posted in anniversary, Concert, interviews, musicians, Pop music, swinging 60s, videos
Tagged Chad Smith, Dave Grohl, drummers, Ludwig drums, Max Weinberg, Paul McCartney, Questlove, Ringo Starr, Stewart Copeland, Taylor Hawkins, Tré Cool
Zayn Malik papped last week for SplashNewsOnline leaving Gigi’s New York apartment
◼ ZAYN MALIK IS REVEALED TODAY as the poorest member of One Direction according to estimates calculated by the annual Sunday Times Rich List. Two years after the boybanders split, he seems to be feeling the cost of going solo, though at least he got back together this week with Gigi Hadid and wore his Looney Tunes T-shirt hoping to put a smile on both their faces. Among the pals in his former band Harry Styles is said now to be the richest of the five, worth £50m.
Mind you, Harry’s wealth pales beside Ed Sheeran at £80m, and Adele who is now estimated at £140m ($190m). In the week she turns 30, she becomes the top earner among the Top Dozen “under-30” pop stars in the UK and Ireland. The only other notables are Sam Smith at £24m, probably boosted by last year’s album, and Rita Ora who enters the list with £16m, presumably boosted by her deals with Adidas, DKNY and other brands.
Writing about broader shifts in wealth within society, Robert Watts, who compiles the Sunday Times Rich List, said: “Streaming services, the internet and income from endorsements are helping today’s young musicians build an international following – and with it their fortunes – far quicker than the older rockers. Some of the biggest risers [proportionately] over the past year have been amongst younger acts such as Ed Sheeran, Adele and Calvin Harris.”
Adele wowing them at last year’s Grammys. (Photo Kevin Winter/Getty)
Sheeran’s fortune leapt by 54% this year, while Adele’s rose by 12%. She is reported saying “money is of little interest” and has rejected offers of celebrity endorsement. The chart-savvy Scottish deejay and crossover producer Harris (worth £140m, up 17%) charges the mind-boggling sum of £370,000 whenever he spins discs in Las Vegas “dozens of times a year” and “seven-figure fees” when playing in Tokyo! Consequently Harris, now aged 34, has topped the Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid deejays for five consecutive years. Eat yer heart out, Rusty Egan!
The UK’s Top 40 musical wrinklies are led as usual by Paul McCartney, at £820m when valued alongside his wife Nancy Shevell, which makes him the richest musician in the history of the Rich List. He has also benefited from the deal that made The Beatles’ 13 albums available on streaming services in 2015. After him come Andrew Lloyd-Webber £740m, Elton John £300m, Mick Jagger £260m and Keith Richards £245m. Ker-ching! Only three performers survive into this year’s list from the Swinging 80s (at a stretch): Gary Barlow (£80m) of Take That, who formed in 1989; Irish singer-songwriter Enya (£104m); and Ozzy Osbourne (£140m), the heavy metallist fired as vocalist from Black Sabbath, who started his solo career in 1980 and released 11 studio albums.
* Valuations of musicians’ wealth for the Sunday Times are based on research by Cliff Dane, author of the Rock Accounts books.
Posted in Britain, Fashion, Pop music, wealth
Tagged Adele, Calvin Harris, Ed Sheeran, Enya, Gary Barlow, Harry Styles, Ozzy Osbourne, Paul McCartney, richest musicians, Sunday Times Rich List, under-30s, Zayn Malik
Pristine footage: The Beatles play Shea Stadium in August 1965. (Image: SubaFilms)
◼ LAST NIGHT AT A LONDON CINEMA I saw the most exciting live pop concert since the same band played live in the Swinging Sixties. Ron Howard’s new Beatles documentary, Eight Days A Week about the touring years 1963-66, is a sensational feast of long-lost performance footage that confronts us with the Fab Four’s raw onstage energy and pounding tempo – the audio as gorgeously restored as the images. This two-hour celebration of Beatle genius goes behind the clichés of hysteria to give us Access All Areas. It delivers one revelation after another, from Paul’s “Oh-my-God” moment when Ringo joined the band, to the jaw-dropping recording of a top-ten single in 90 minutes of studio time, to their 1964 triumph for civil rights when the band refused to tour in the US until audience segregation was abandoned at their venues.
New interviews from Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney keep dropping gems of insight about this the most commercially successful group in pop history, while vintage footage does as much justice to lippy John Lennon and “quiet” George Harrison who are no longer with us.
Throughout this joyous moptops-into-men odyssey we’re wide-eyed at the sheer cheek of these multimedia superstars, aged between 19 and 22, who created their own interview style by pinging back witty ad-libs to questions from the world’s media. The downside was mass hysteria from teenaged babyboom fans laying siege to hotels and airports where they repeatedly overwhelmed police and security on an often scarifying scale.
Beatle albums sat at No 1 in the charts for 20 to 30 weeks at a time – more No 1 albums than any other musical act. Their 20 No 1 hit singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart remain unchallenged.
Ron Howard with Paul and Ringo this week: “I love this photo that was taken yesterday at Abbey Road Studios in historic Studio 2 while we were promoting The Beatles: Eight Days a Week”
Everything The Beatles did was without precedent. Among their innovations they launched arena rock and at Shea Stadium Howard’s doc ensures that we hear George’s guitar chords above the screaming audience of 55,000 fans. As a shock reminder of Sixties technology, Vox had built three new amps for the Beatles, each souped up to 100 watts (!!!) specially for touring America, their output being relayed via microphones to feed the stadium’s tinny loudspeaker system!!!
It is a breath-taking source of inspiration to know that during The Beatles’ far from meteoric early years, this Liverpudlian band of brothers had played at least 456 live gigs before signing their recording contract with EMI. Yes, 456 !!! With that amount of practice, it should be no surprise to find that their legacy amounts to 237 original compositions – songs which most people on the planet can hum, while the most radical among them personify the Sixties counterculture. As the best-selling band in history, the Fabs revolutionised all of music for ever.
Howard’s previous reality epics include the wonderful Apollo 13 and the gripping joust, Frost/Nixon. This week he told The Guardian: “I began to think of the Beatles story as like Das Boot: they’re in it together, they have each other, they know what their objective is, but, y’know, it’s a dangerous world out there.”
➢ Ron Howard trashes the idea that there’s nothing new to say about the Beatles – The Guardian:
“ This is about the Beatles as live phenomenon, and the fact that their music was all the more remarkable because it had to be heard above the scream – that ambient sound of sex, excitement and modernity, mixed in with a thin chirrup of press envy. The scream was an important part of it. . . an almost unbroken four-year, semi-improvised multimedia performance for which there was no pre-existing template – not simply the music but the giant public spectacle and public scrutiny. ”
➢ 10 Things we learned from Eight Days a Week
– Rolling Stone:
“ In February 1964, the band and their entourage occupied nearly the entire 12th floor of the Plaza NYC, including the 10-room presidential suite. But despite the space, the four friends retired to smaller quarters. “The four of us ended up in the bathroom just to get a break from the incredible pressure,” Starr says. ”
➢ “We were force-grown, like rhubarb,” says John Lennon
– Daily Telegraph:
“ The film shrewdly draws a line between the Beatles’ mischievous sense of humour and their long-time producer George Martin’s earlier life recording alternative comedy. Martin had worked with the Goons, an enormous influence on the band’s growing lyrical eccentricity in that period, as well as their off-the-cuff ribbing of strait-laced reporters. ”
➢ No wonder The Beatles changed the shape of music after 456 sessions practising in public
➢ 1963, With The Beatles the day Kennedy was shot: “The second house was distinctly more subdued”
➢ 1966, More popular than Jesus: the fascinating Lennon interview in full
Posted in cinema, Culture, London, Media, North America, Pop music, Technology, Youth culture
Tagged documentary, Eight Days a Week, film, George Harrison, interviews, John Lennon, live concert, Paul McCartney, pop music, Ringo Starr, Ron Howard, Shea Stadium, Swinging Sixties, The Beatles, touring
✱ Deejay legend Robbie Vincent has returned to JazzFM on Sundays 1-3pm… Catch Robbie’s JazzFM August Bank Holiday 2020 session thanks to AhhhhhSoul with four hours of “nothing but essential rhythms of soul, jazz and funk”.
◆ Who was who in Spandau’s break-out year of 1980? The Invisible Hand of Shapersofthe80s draws a selective timeline for The unprecedented rise and rise of Spandau Ballet –– Turn to our inside page
✱ If you thought there was no more to know about the birth of Blitz culture in 1980 then get your hands on a sensational book by an obsessive music fan called David Barrat. It is gripping, original and epic – a spooky tale of coincidence and parallel lives as mind-tingling as a Sherlock Holmes yarn. Titled both New Romantics Who Never Were and The Untold Story of Spandau Ballet! Sample this initial taster here at Shapers of the 80s
✱ Jawing at Soho Radio on the 80s clubland revolution (from 32 mins) and on art (@55 mins) is probably the most influential shaper of the 80s, former Wag-club director Chris Sullivan (pictured) with editor of this website David Johnson
➢ Search for all on Bowie here
at Shapers of the 80s
✱ “I’m not a rock star” Bowie often said – No, David, you were a messiah – Obituaries and key videos on the godlike one
✱ Prince Rogers Nelson RIP: ‘A funny cat’ and ‘sole authentic genius’ of the 1980s
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