Jimmy Page's daughter 'hits right note' with portraits
Scarlet is showcasing her portraits of 33 legendary guitarists at Ards International Guitar Festival this weekend.
The Resonators project first exhibited 10 years ago and features the likes of Jack White, Chrissie Hynde and, of course, her famous father.
"I've never really gone in going, 'Do you know who my dad is?' It's really not my style but for this particular project obviously it made sense," she said.
Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster programme, she said that exhibiting her work at Ards Art Centre was a "great opportunity to mark 10 years, and get to come over and spend time in Belfast with family".
As Scarlet says, "it totally made sense to have it displayed at the festival".
That's because Newtownards, in County Down, has a long-standing association with the guitar.
A factory in the town which made the instrument inspired the beginning of the Ards International Guitar Festival almost 30 years ago.
Emily Crawford has been the director of the festival for the past 19 years.
"Not everybody knows that there is a guitar factory in Newtownards," she told BBC News NI.
"Going back 30 years ago, it was the Lowden guitar factory, it was later taken over by Avalon which is still there today.
"Then, it was a real cultural and economic driver to have the festival and let people know Newtownards was somewhere that world class guitars are made, and still are today.
"It's something to celebrate."
Emily says the festival gives local musicians opportunities to share a stage with international artists.
"We're not Belfast or Dublin, so it can be difficult to convince an audience to come to Newtownards rather than go to Belfast, but we have such a wealth of talent right here on our doorstep," she said.
Being able to bring musicians such as Ricky Warwick, of Thin Lizzy, back home to Newtownards is "inspiring", she added.
"It shows people insight into a local boy who's made it on a an international stage," she added.
Tom Adair has been a big fan of the festival's events over the years.
"I'm a big blues music man, I was brought up listening to that music," he told BBC News NI.
"It's been great to be able to go down the Arts Centre when it's on and see some fantastic blues artists that are both local and international, and have them on our doorstep."
As the owner of The Ivy Bar, Ian Falls hosts some of the festival's events in his pub. He said it is "well loved" by his customers.
"We've always had live music in the pub, and when the guitar festival started almost 30 years ago we were more than happy to host," he said.
"We get families coming, old faces, new faces. It's so great for the community to just get together and appreciate great music and fantastic guitarists."
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New York Times
a day ago
- New York Times
Rock's Legends Were Messy. You'd Never Know That From Today's Movies.
Like any qualified rock 'n' roll dork, I began consuming the lore around the music early. I was a tenderhearted tween Beatlemaniac when I picked up Albert Goldman's 1988 biography, 'The Lives of John Lennon,' still a landmark of salaciousness. There followed, in some rough order, 'The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,' by Stanley Booth; 'Hellfire,' Nick Tosches' incendiary character study of Jerry Lee Lewis; and 'Hammer of the Gods,' Stephen Davis's blow-by-blow exegesis of Led Zeppelin. I am strait-laced by disposition, so I was rendered slack jawed by the toxic excesses of rock stardom described in these books, or at least the parts I could grasp well enough to conjure a mental picture. Some things — things you should never Google about Led Zeppelin and mud sharks — remain blissfully outside my ken. I'm strait-laced but not a prude. Over time, I came to understand that sex and drugs and sharks are among the ancillary consequences of taking the world's most gifted, vain and emotionally marginal people, placing them in stressful situations and giving them bottomless expense accounts. Nature simply takes its course. People used to seem endlessly entertained by hearing appalling stories about the results. The feral behavior of even middling musicians was the draw for VH1 programs like 'Behind the Music,' which was light on music but quite detailed about behinds, or '100 Most Shocking Music Moments.' (No. 97 featured Chuck Negron, of Three Dog Night, explaining how a certain part of his body 'exploded' following an exceedingly ambitious surfeit of human contact.) I will admit that I, too, came to relish these tales. I like Mötley Crüe just fine, but I loved Neil Strauss's medium-ironic group history, 'The Dirt,' from 2001 — again, light on music and heavy on dirt, including things you should never Google about Mötley Crüe and burritos. Music documentaries and biopics now feel like a larger part of the entertainment ecosystem than ever, but they've traveled a long distance from that tabloid bonanza. Today's rock historians echo groundbreaking filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers, treating rock 'n' roll as serious intellectual business. Early this year, 'A Complete Unknown,' James Mangold's biopic of Bob Dylan, did respectably at the box office, bringing figures like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie into a modern frame. Soon after, in Bernard MacMahon's documentary 'Becoming Led Zeppelin,' you could watch that band coalesce, transforming from an also-ran version of the Yardbirds into a juggernaut whose unique combination of brute force and strange, feminine vulnerability has rendered them an insoluble legend. Yet in both, something seems to be missing. If you, like me, have mentally cataloged the countless forms of bad behavior that marked the Dylan and Zeppelin years these films cover, you find yourself practically jonesing for a scene of rampant chemical intake or at least a television being hurled through a hotel window. Aside from Robert Plant's glancing mention of the ambient feeling of drugs and girls arriving on the scene as Zeppelin's fame grew, a blissful innocent could watch MacMahon's film and believe the individuals on the screen endured the Caligula-like high-water mark of their fame with the quiet dignity of devoted family men. 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But perhaps more than any other band of the era — an enormously high bar — the Beach Boys' story only got stranger, with problems ranging from the typical (drugs, alcohol, fights, lawsuits) to the infamous (Brian Wilson's yearslong breakdown) to the bizarre (Dennis Wilson's brief acquaintance with Charles Manson, whose song 'Cease to Exist' the band recorded a version of). In 1983, the secretary of the interior, James Watt, banned the group from performing a Fourth of July concert on the Washington Mall, on the basis of their degeneracy. Very little of this is covered in the documentary. By its very nature, it needs to see the Beach Boys the way their fellow Californian Ronald Reagan must have when he moved to restore their annual Washington gig — as a sunny redoubt of wholesome Americana, a totem of nostalgia too sturdy for those details to topple. One simple explanation for today's hagiographies is that everyone involved is eager to cement a musical legacy, not sort through unflattering gossip. The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin are in their 70s and 80s now, fathers and grandfathers; they have, in various ways, assumed an austere dignity. As for filmmakers, looking at some of the band's past behavior through today's eyes must be just as unappetizing. Their films would be expected to devote half their run time to weighty moral investigations; almost inevitably, the music would be subsumed by the outrage. But there is also, increasingly, the question of brand value, the preservation of intellectual property for maximum future profit. 'A Complete Unknown,' for instance, skirts the speedy, druggy side of Dylan's early work; it even massages the particulars of Dylan's personal life such that within the film's love triangle, there is no mention at all of his pregnant soon-to-be-wife, Sara Lownds. My 79-year-old mother, who has excellent taste, loved the film and walked out eager to engage with Dylan's music, despite being more of a show-tunes lady. She might not have been so smitten with a less tidy version of his life. It's not just the artist's reputation that is at stake. In 2020, Dylan sold his catalog of more than 600 songs to Universal Music Group for a reported $300 million. Many other big-ticket acts have cashed in their catalogs in recent years, including Bruce Springsteen (sold to Sony for an estimated $550 million) and Queen (also to Sony, for what is said to be more than $1 billion). These masses of songs are now blue-chip properties with reputations of their own; why tarnish their value with off-brand looks at their creators? There's a quote often attributed to the Illinois senator Everett Dirksen: 'A billion here, and a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.' Profit motive, fan service, squeamishness — all are present. 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Elizabeth Nelson has written for The New Yorker, The Ringer, Pitchfork and others and is a singer-songwriter for the Paranoid Style, a band based in Washington. She last wrote for the magazine about Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump. Source photographs for illustration above: Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures; Michael; Larry Hulst/Michael.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Is Rock Back? Let's Look at the Data
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Newsweek
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- Newsweek
'American Idol' Exec, Husband Killings—Police Issue Update on Suspect
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