Latest news with #1973
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Legendary ‘60s Rock Band Still Holds Album Record 50 Years Later
Legendary '60s Rock Band Still Holds Album Record 50 Years Later originally appeared on Parade. Over 50 years after its release, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon still holds one of the most impressive records in Billboard history. The legendary 1973 album, which includes iconic tracks like 'Money,' 'Us and Them' and 'The Great Gig in the Sky," has spent 989 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart. Recently, The Dark Side of the Moon made a notable jump from No. 42 to No. 24 on Billboard's Top Album Sales chart, which only counts physical purchases. The numbers prove fans aren't just streaming the album — they're still buying it in droves, even decades later. With vinyl making a major comeback, the record also landed at No. 15 on the Vinyl Albums Chart. 🎬SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox🎬 In terms of overall sales, The Dark Side of the Moon continues to outshine the competition. With over 45 million copies sold worldwide, it's surpassed classic albums like The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Michael Jackson's Bad. When Pink Floyd, made up of David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Richard Wright and Roger Waters, first introduced the album in 1973, the title wasn't guaranteed. Another band, Medicine Head, had released an album called The Dark Side of the Moon a year earlier, nearly forcing Pink Floyd to scrap the name altogether. 'We were annoyed because we had already thought of the title before the Medicine Head album came out,' Gilmour reportedly once said. Fortunately for Pink Floyd, Medicine Head's version didn't gain traction — and the iconic title was up for grabs. If things had gone differently, the album might've been called Eclipse, according to the guitarist. While reflecting on the album's lasting impact, Wright explained why it continues to resonate with fans in a 2001 interview. 'I think it is a combination of the lyrics and the feeling of some of the music with the lyrics. Obviously, that's what makes a good song," he said. Adding, "I think it's the continuity of it, this kind of whole musical and lyrical story, if you like. It all made sense and even some songs weren't related to the other. 'Money' wasn't related to 'Us and Them', or whatever.' Legendary '60s Rock Band Still Holds Album Record 50 Years Later first appeared on Parade on Jun 7, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 7, 2025, where it first appeared.
Telegraph
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘I hope one of your family members dies': when artists bite back at their critics
In 1973, the theatre critic John Simon wrote a negative review of a performance by Sylvia Miles, mocking the actress as 'one of New York's leading party girls and gate-crashers'. Unfortunately for Simon, he happened to be dining in the same restaurant as Miles soon afterwards. On seeing him, she dumped her plate of steak tartare and brie over his head. 'Now you can call me a plate-crasher, too,' she said. Childish? Funny? A fair response to an overly harsh personal comment rendered in print for the world to see? Or maybe… all of those things? Sure, nobody likes being criticised. But, for artists and performers, it generally comes with the job. The question is how, and whether, to respond. I've spent more than a decade as a journalist writing about arts and culture, most recently as this newspaper's radio critic. I've also written about the unique power dynamics between performers and critics in Bring the House Down, my debut novel about a theatre critic who experiences a sensational comeuppance from an actress at the Edinburgh Fringe who decides to give him a taste of his own medicine. The events of the novel and its characters are pure fiction, but gut-churning human responses to personal criticism are a fact of life. There have been plenty of times when I've reviewed a show in a way that the person behind it has hated. Sometimes, they've let me know about it. I've had comedians cheerfully mock me, my family and my personal life on stage for months and even years after I've reviewed them. I've received long, anguished emails from TV presenters calling me 'disappointingly shallow' after I'd said their documentaries were opaque and navel-gazing. To some extent – and somewhat paradoxically – receiving criticism is an inevitable part of being a critic. But sometimes, a negative critical response can drive creative people into the realm of irrational fury. For instance, both Robbie Collin and Tim Robey, this newspaper's film critics, have experienced their share of vicious bite-back over the years. After writing a few less-than-positive reviews of films released by a major film studio in the US, Collin learned from a friend that he was being referred to by marketing executives over there as 'that British c---'. Robey, on the other hand, once so annoyed Harry Enfield by questioning the artistic merit of Kevin & Perry Go Large (2000) that he received a stiff letter from Enfield himself angrily defending the film. The theatre critic Kate Wyver gave one production three stars out of a possible five, which most critics would agree is a positive review. The production team, however, didn't see it that way. When the show began touring shortly afterwards, the performers handed out badges to the audience emblazoned with the slogan: 'Don't be like Kate Wyver.' Some responses are more extreme. When The Guardian's Phil Daoust gave Tim Minchin a one-star review, the comedian responded on stage with a freshly minted composition called The Song for Phil Daoust, in which he called Daoust a 'poo-face' who 'should quit and get a job that you'd be better at / Like killing yourself', continuing with 'I hope one of your family members dies'. Daoust took exception to the cruelty of that last line, but overall his response was philosophical: 'I slagged him off in the platform I had access to, and he did the same to me. What's sauce for the goose, etc. And he took the trouble to spell my name correctly, which was nice.' That's a more generous response than that given by the French critic Stéphane Capron last year after Angélica Liddell, the Spanish theatre-maker, called him a 'bastard' and demanded that he 'face [his] own vileness' on stage at the Avignon performing arts festival, before exposing her bare behind to the crowd. Capron sued her for defamation. Sometimes, critic-performer spats become a drawn-out war of words, such as the famous feud between Vincent Gallo and the film critic Roger Ebert. Ebert negatively reviewed Gallo's explicit film The Brown Bunny at Cannes in 2003, singling it out as 'the worst film in the history of the festival'. In response, Gallo called Ebert 'a fat pig' and said he had put a curse on Ebert's colon. 'I am not too worried,' Ebert responded in print. 'I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.' It's understandable that artists, who put great stores of effort and energy into their work, are hurt by such critical reviews, even though most would also concede that if every single review was a five-star rave, they would lose all value. Bad reviews can cripple the fortunes of a piece of creative work. Just look at the film Cats (2019), which essentially sparked a contest among the critics to see who could write the most devastating review. It was 'an all-time disaster', according to The Telegraph's Robey in his zero-star drubbing. The New York Post's Johnny Oleksinski begged someone to 'please wipe this movie from my Memory', while The Boston Globe's Ty Burr reported that 'My eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes'. NPR's headline was, simply, 'Spay it'. The film bombed at the box office. Or take Elton John 's stage musical Tammy Faye, which the New York Post called 'god-awful' and 'a disaster of biblical proportions', and which closed on Broadway last year just five days after opening. Or Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bad Cinderella, the Broadway run of which was cut short in 2023 after a review in The New York Times that began with the line: 'First: bring earplugs', before going on to add 'for that matter, bring eye plugs'. Negative criticism doesn't always spell doom, however. The Great Gatsby, on publication in 1925, famously met a lukewarm initial response, and, well, look how that turned out. The original stage production of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag at the Edinburgh Fringe, likewise, had an unenthusiastic early reception, but still went on to become an international television mega-hit. Would any of those works' fortunes, good or bad, have been improved by their creators lashing out at the critical naysayers? Or would it just have made things worse? And how far is too far? The Stranglers are said to have once gaffer-taped the French rock magazine editor Philippe Manoeuvre to the Eiffel Tower, with bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel describing him as 'an annoying little oik'. In 2023, the ballet director Marco Goecke was suspended from his post at Hanover State Opera after he smeared dog excrement in the face of critic Wiebke Hüster, in retaliation for a review in which she described his work as boring. The police got involved with that one. And the journalist Bernard Levin once reportedly feared for his life when he found himself on a railway platform with the late playwright John Osborne, who famously hated critics, and threatened to push Levin under an oncoming train. Emotions and tempers can run high in the arts and in journalism, but it's hard to argue that this means cultural criticism shouldn't exist at all. The alternative is a world in which only adoring quotes from anonymous social media users adorn theatre, film and comedy posters. And would that tell us anything useful? It's never enjoyable to receive a bad review, nor is it nice for a critic to feel that they've suddenly become a target. Perhaps the relationship between performance and criticism was healthier in Ancient Greece, where writers largely lampooned one another through their actual plays, with the critical conversation playing out on stage as part of the entertainment. A modern equivalent might be the German film director Uwe Boll's approach, which involved challenging each of his five fiercest critics to face him in the boxing ring in 2006. In a filmed event dubbed 'Raging Boll', Boll won all five matches. In a press conference afterwards, he said 'I now like the critics... Everybody who was in the ring showed guts.' Surely nobody should be throwing actual punches at all – but maybe artists aren't the only ones who suffer for art. Maybe straddling the line between honesty and cruelty is the hardest job a critic has to undertake, and maybe accepting criticism with grace is, likewise, the hardest part of any artist's work. But, when both of them achieve it, we all benefit from a rich cultural conversation. Still, there's a good reason that the word 'theatre' is applied to war zones and surgical operating rooms as well as to performance spaces: it's an easy place to draw blood.
Indian Express
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Indian Express
Delhi govt tightens SOP for felling trees: Court panel's nod mandatory to cut down 50 or more
In a major shift, the Delhi Government has introduced a new Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) which stipulates that no project involving the removal of 50 or more trees in the Capital can go ahead without approval from the Central Empowered Committee (CEC), a body set up by the Supreme Court in 2002 to oversee environmental matters. The Department of Forests and Wildlife issued the new SOP through a gazette notification on April 24 this year. Under the new rules, even if a tree officer — an official who grants permission under the Delhi Preservation of Trees Act,1973 — clears a proposal, the permission 'shall not be acted upon unless the same is approved by the CEC,' the order states. Marking a break from the earlier SOP which gave tree officers full authority to allow felling, irrespective of the number of trees, the revised rules have shifted the final decision-making to the CEC for larger projects. This means no physical removal of trees can begin until the CEC has reviewed the file and approved the plan. The SOP states that felling permission 'can be granted only by way of an exception and not in a routine manner.' It adds that even the illegal felling of a single full-grown tree 'hurts the environment and the society as a whole.' In December last year, the Supreme Court had mandated that tree felling permission for 50 or more trees require CEC clearance. Once a tree officer clears any application involving 50 or more trees, they must send the full set of documents to the CEC right away. The CEC may ask for more details or changes and has the power to approve, reject, or modify the permission. The order also says that no tree can be cut unless the required compensatory plantation — planting of new trees in exchange — is completed. 'While granting permission to fell/ transplant 50 or more trees, unless the case is exceptional, actual tree-cutting work shall not be undertaken unless compliance is made with the requirement of planting trees by way of compensatory afforestation,' the SOP stated. If trees are removed illegally in large numbers, the response must be immediate. The SOP said: 'In case of any illicit felling of 50 or more trees, the CEC will be informed by the tree officer within 24 hours.' Applicants must follow detailed steps before applying to cut or transplant trees. These include uploading a fully filled form, ownership records, an exact count and location of all trees involved (with geo-tagged photos), and a detailed map of where replacement trees will be planted. If the project is related to construction or infrastructure, architectural plans showing how trees are impacted must also be submitted. The SOP laid out how many trees must be planted to make up for those removed, and who will be responsible for maintaining them. For up to 25 trees, the applicant can carry out the plantation themselves. For more than 25, the applicant must provide land, pay for planting, and maintain the new trees for seven years. The health and location of each sapling must be tracked, and geo-tagged progress photos uploaded annually. If an applicant fails to maintain the new trees, their security deposit will be forfeited, and the forest department will take over. The department can also demand additional funds to improve the site if needed. The SOP has also placed limits on how many permissions can be granted from the same land. Only two permissions per year can be granted from the same area, and the total land cannot exceed one hectare. Even if two applications are filed separately in the same year — and the second one alone involves fewer than 50 trees — if the total across both exceeds 49 trees, CEC approval is still required. Tree officers must visit each project site, check whether any trees can be saved, and list which trees are to be cut, transplanted, or kept. The SOP has also said, 'The tree officers shall make an effort to save as many trees as possible. The tree officers shall consider whether; by pruning or by some other methods, the trees can be saved from felling/transplantation.' These trees must be marked — red for felling, yellow for transplantation — before final permission is given. The SOP said a 'Speaking Order' must be issued and permissions will be valid for two years, with a possible extension of one more year if justified.
