Latest news with #BritishInvasion
Fox News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Country icon George Strait brings fans to tears during emotional moment at concert
The "King of Country Music" George Strait made fans emotional during a recent concert. At a performance in Philadelphia last week, Strait, 72, performed his 2011 song "I'll Always Remember You," which contains a spoken bridge about his potential retirement. When a fan shared a video of the performance on social media, many fans expressed sadness at the subject matter. "I have maybe five good years to sing my songs for you folks," Strait said in the song. "But hell, it's been around 50 now. And I still love it just as much as I ever did. When I walk through those curtains and I see your smiling faces, my feet don't touch the ground again until I walk back out and get on that bus. I don't know how many more years I can do this. I figure a few. I do want you to know, though, when I do walk off this stage and I'm settled in far away from all this, I'll still hear your screams and cheers in my mind, and I will always remember you." Several fans commented on the video of the performance, emotional over hearing the country legend's touching message. "Don't make me cry George," one fan wrote on TikTok. Another comment read, "This one's gonna hurt when he goes." "Not ready for that day… the king will forever be the king," a fan wrote. While loyal fans became emotional at seeing Strait's performance of "I'll Always Remember You," his reps confirmed with Fox News Digital that he performs this at every show. In 2012, Strait announced his retirement from touring; however, he occasionally performs for his country fans from time to time. Although Strait appeared mindful of the physical toll that the road takes on a performer, he has not shown signs of slowing down. In September, he released his first album in five years, "Cowboys and Dreamers." Also in 2024, the "Amarillo by Morning" singer broke a U.S. concert attendance record for the largest U.S. ticketed show when he stepped onstage at Kyle Field at Texas A&M in College Station. At the time, Strait played to a crowd of 110,905 fans in central Texas, as he broke an all-time attendance record previously set by the Grateful Dead nearly 50 years ago. "The energy was absolutely incredible. We felt like we were making history, even before the record-breaking attendance was announced," an insider told Fox News Digital about his performance. "Kyle Field is already an amazing place, and this just took it to another level." "So many Texans grew up on George Strait, so to have him perform in the heart of Aggieland where he is so beloved, was something really special. From packed floor seats to the top rows on the highest deck, everyone was all in for George." The Texas native grew up ranching on his family's 2,000-acre cattle farm. He was inspired by British Invasion rock groups in the 1960s and began playing in garage bands in high school, where he met his longtime love, Norma. The country legend has achieved the most No. 1 albums in the history of country music, which includes 20 of his 60 No. 1 hits. Strait has 13 multiplatinum albums and 38 gold albums. His 1992 "Pure Country" catalog went six times platinum, and his highest certified album is the 1995 classic "Strait Out of the Box."
Fox News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Fox News
Country icon George Strait says he has 'maybe 5 good years' left to perform
The "King of Country Music" George Strait hinted that his time on the stage may be drawing close to an end. During a performance in Philadelphia last week, Strait, 72, opened up to his fans that the road to permanently retiring is inevitable. "I have maybe five good years to sing my songs for you folks," Strait said to the audience during his concert, as seen in a video a fan shared to social media. Despite the looming idea of retirement, Strait's love of performing remains as he laughed and smiled with his fans. "But hell, it's been around 50 [years] now," he reflected. "And I still love it just as much as I ever did. When ... I walk through those curtains and I see your smiling faces, my feet don't touch the ground again until I walk back out and get on that bus." In 2012, Strait announced his retirement from touring; however, he occasionally performs for his country fans from time to time. "I don't know how many more years I can do this. I figure a few," he continued. "I do want you to know, though, when I do walk off this stage and I'm settled in far away from all this ... I'll still hear your screams and cheers in my mind, and I will always remember you." Although Strait appeared mindful of the physical toll that the road takes on a performer, he has not shown signs of slowing down. In September, he released his first album in five years, "Cowboys and Dreamers." Also in 2024, the "Amarillo by Morning" singer broke a U.S. concert attendance record for the largest U.S. ticketed show when he stepped onstage at Kyle Field at Texas A&M in College Station. At the time, Strait played to a crowd of 110,905 fans in central Texas, as he broke an all-time attendance record previously set by the Grateful Dead nearly 50 years ago. "The energy was absolutely incredible. We felt like we were making history, even before the record-breaking attendance was announced," an insider told Fox News Digital about his performance. "Kyle Field is already an amazing place, and this just took it to another level." "So many Texans grew up on George Strait, so to have him perform in the heart of Aggieland where he is so beloved, was something really special. From packed floor seats to the top rows on the highest deck, everyone was all in for George." The Texas native grew up ranching on his family's 2,000-acre cattle farm. He was inspired by British Invasion rock groups in the 1960s and began playing in garage bands in high school, where he met his longtime love, Norma. The country legend has achieved the most No. 1 albums in the history of country music, which includes 20 of his 60 No. 1 hits. Strait has 13 multiplatinum albums and 38 gold albums. His 1992 "Pure Country" catalog went six times platinum, and his highest certified album is the 1995 classic "Strait Out of the Box."
Telegraph
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How the Telegraph predicted Swinging London
On April 16 1965, The Daily Telegraph's Weekend magazine had a cover feature by John Crosby entitled 'London: The Most Exciting City', which declared: 'Suddenly, the young own the town', and claimed that it was now the place 'where the action is, the gayest, most uninhibited – and in a wholly new, very modern sense – the most coolly elegant city in the world.' Crosby, a well-known American journalist and television critic, was the London correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, living on the King's Road in Chelsea at the heart of much that was newly fashionable. What makes his piece especially significant is that it appeared an entire year before the article that is often credited with having prompted the whole mid-1960s ' Swinging London ' legend, Time magazine's famous April 1966 US cover, 'London: The Swinging City'. These two high-profile features reflected a shift in popular culture that had been building up since the middle of the previous decade, exemplified by the recent American success of multiple 'British Invasion' bands, notably The Beatles. The initial stirrings had begun around 1955, when the UK's home-grown skiffle craze led many young people to pick up guitars and try to make music of their own, and Mary Quant opened her first boutique on the King's Road. In those days, pop music was supposed to only come from America, and ground-breaking new fashions solely from the Paris catwalks, yet during the early part of the following decade, British bands gradually began showing up on music charts worldwide, and Quant's innovative styles were breaking through internationally, as she explained when I interviewed her in 2004: 'From 1962 I started to design clothes and underwear for [American department store chain] JC Penney – as well as my own Mary Quant collection. I was commuting to New York once a month, which I loved.' The year 1962 also saw the release of the first James Bond film, Dr No, based on Ian Fleming's million-selling novels. Fleming grew up in Chelsea, and the fictional spy in his books lives in an un-named square off the King's Road. Sean Connery, star of the new film series, had cheap lodgings in the area in the late 1950s, and John Barry composed most of his classic Bond themes such as Goldfinger at his home on nearby Cadogan Square. This irreverent, wisecracking and stylish movie star appeared on the scene just as the first flush of more gritty, 'kitchen sink' films was drawing to a close. Many of the latter were the work of directors who had started out in 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square, at the eastern end of the King's Road, empowered by the shock waves created by John Osborne's debut play for the resident company there, Look Back in Anger. Moving decidedly away from middle- or upper-class drawing-room locations, and placing working-class characters at the heart of the action, such plays and films – together with the anti-heroes depicted in the so-called Angry Young Men novels of the late 1950s – helped prepare the ground for the kind of 1960s figures on-screen, in the pop charts and elsewhere in the wider culture who talked back and didn't play by the old rules. A prime example of the latter would be a group of scruffs in 1962 who were living at the cheaper reaches of the King's Road in a squalid flat and gigging around town at any venue that would let them play their own interpretation of US rhythm and blues. John Gunnell, who together with his brother Rik ran the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street, once told me he booked the band for a month of Monday night shows during that era, but sacked them after the first one after they failed to pull a crowd. Nevertheless, The Rolling Stones did not let this deter them, and within two years they had progressed from Chelsea to the US charts. John Crosby originally considered calling his 1965 Telegraph feature 'Swinging London', and a year earlier had already informed readers of his New York Herald Tribune column that Britain was a 'swinging' nation. Now, in the wake of the 1966 Time magazine cover article, the US media descended in force on London looking for stories, and at one point that year, as Mary Quant told me, 'American news magazines and TV were often filming both sides of the King's Road at the same time'. Time declared that 'in a once sedate world of faded splendour, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life', and the King's Road seemed to be the epicentre of all that had been declared groovy. 'Saturday afternoon in Chelsea, at La Rêve restaurant. Wolfing down a quick lunch are some of the most switched-on young men in town: Actor Terence Stamp, 26, star of The Collector and steady date of model Jean Shrimpton; actor Michael Caine, 33, the Mozart-loving spy in The Ipcress File; hairdresser Sassoon, 38, whose cut can be seen both at Courrèges in Paris and on Princess Meg; Ace photographer David Bailey, 27, professional associate of Antony Armstrong-Jones; and Doug Hayward, 28, Chelsea's 'innest' private tailor.' Much of the attention on the modish capital was met with predictable derision by Londoners themselves, and by the satirists at Private Eye, who printed a 'Swinging England All-Purpose Titillation Supplement' to assist the 'very small number of American periodicals which have not yet produced their 24-page survey of the Swinging, Vibrant, Thrusting New England Where Even the Hovercraft Wear Mini-Skirts etc etc'. Time's own letters column also received some scathing responses from British readers, including one that said: 'For the year's most ridiculous generalisations, you deserve to swing indeed. All of you. And not in London either.' Despite all this, the image of the capital as a wellspring of the emerging 1960s pop culture would continue to be disseminated as the decade progressed by numerous fashion articles worldwide, books such as Len Deighton's London Dossier, Karl Dallas's Swinging London – A Guide to Where the Action Is or the self-consciously trendy pulp novels of Adam Diment such as The Dolly Dolly Spy, scores of famous rock stars including Chelsea resident Keith Richards in his artfully tattered velvet jackets and scarves from hip King's Road boutique Granny Takes a Trip, by films such as Alfie or Blow-Up and stylish London-based TV shows like The Avengers (now shot in colour for the benefit of the American market), and by a blizzard of magazine articles either celebrating or decrying the myth of Swinging London. As for the man whose Telegraph feature helped unleash the hysteria, the Liverpool Echo reported in June 1966 that 'Crosby today nervously acknowledges paternity of the swinging movement but says he was only trying to be funny about one minor aspect of English life', and faced with the prospect of being interviewed by Paris Match for yet another article about the subject, Crosby himself observed: 'When Frenchmen come to England to ask an American questions about London's sex, you know the millennium has arrived.'
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Korea Herald
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
[Grace Kao] How Germany's Kraftwerk inspired K-pop
As a fan of popular music spanning from the British Invasion of the 1960s to contemporary K-pop, I ardently believe that pop music from seemingly unrelated genres and groups can, in fact, be linked. The association between Kraftwerk and aespa is one such example. Two weeks ago, I attended Kraftwerk's concert in Boston. This year marks the 50th anniversary of their first US tour, so they are even older than me. Kraftwerk was formed in 1970 in Dusseldorf, Germany, and one of its original founders, Ralf Hutter, 78, led the performance. Their shows involve the four current members (Hutter, Henning Schmitz, Falk Grieffenhagen, and Georg Bongartzeach) each standing at their own podiums lined with neon lights. Their identical jumpsuits are similarly outfitted with lights that change colors along with the podiums, matching the intricate videos displayed behind them. They appear robotic and move very little during the concert. They also do not speak to the audience until the very end. Most songs include Hutter singing a few lines unemotionally and electronically enhanced — autotune before it ever existed — that invariably include the title of the song. While Kraftwerk concerts are heavily choreographed, the musicians move as little as possible, in stark contrast to the energetic dancing by K-pop performers. Still, both are precisely planned, with little room for improvisation. It is impossible to tell how much is prerecorded and how much is being 'played' live. The audience was mostly middle-aged and white, with a sprinkling of younger men and other minorities (like me). This is very different from the K-pop concerts I attend, including the J-Hope concert that same week. So, what do they have to do with K-pop more generally and aespa in particular? Before I talk about aespa, I have to mention the other associations between Kraftwerk and K-pop. Surprisingly, Kraftwerk and first generation K-pop group H.O.T are linked in my mind. The first time I heard 'We are the Future' (H.O.T., 1997), I recognized 'Tour de France' (Kraftwerk, 1983) during the dance break. I was ecstatic to hear a sample of a classic synth song from my era. Actually, I shouldn't have been too surprised, because I later learned that Lee Soo Man, founder of H.O.T.'s label, SM records, is knowledgeable about synth music. If you don't believe me, check out his New Wave song 'Endless Moment' from 1986. You'll have to search for it by its Korean title. In 2012, Neil McCormick of the Telegraph noted that Kraftwerk was 'the most influential group in pop history.' They built some of their own electronic instruments. They are widely considered as one of the forefathers of electronic and synthesizer-based music which led to 1980s New Wave, synthpop, Euro Disco and House music. They also developed sampling methods used throughout pop music. Songs such as 'Autobahn' (1974), 'Robots' (1978), 'The Model' (1978), 'Numbers' (1981), 'Tour de France' (1983), and 'Trans-Europe Express' (1977) were the most familiar to me, a casual fan. A 2020 article from the Guardian listed 'Trans-Europe Express' as Kraftwerk's best song. This song has been sampled in more than 50 other songs. However, its most famous home is in 'Planet Rock' by Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force (1982). 'Planet Rock' is credited as 'giv(ing) birth to hip-hop and electro,' according to Spin Magazine in 2012. Strangely, it did not technically sample 'Trans-Europe Express' nor another Kraftwerk song ('Numbers'). The artists simply copied (identically) the rhythm and melody. They widely credited Kraftwerk and later paid them for the rights to use the songs. Afrika Bambaataa also acknowledges Kraftwerk as pioneers in electronic funk, which influenced him and other Afro-Futurism artists. Kraftwerk were fans of American music, and in particular named American black soul/funk musician James Brown as a musical influence. Using the metric of the number of times a song has been sampled by other songs, 'Planet Rock' is more successful than 'Trans-Europe Express.' The former has been sampled by more than 400 songs, according to It also makes heavy use of the 'orchestra hit' that appears in many 1980s pop songs, New Jack Swing, and even a few K-pop songs — see 'Wow' by BTOB (2012), 'Switch to Me' (JYP and Rain, 2020), 'Supernatural' by NewJeans (2024), or 'Leggo' by 8TURN (2025). Certainly, no one would deny that K-pop has been heavily influenced by American hip hop since Seo Taiji and Hyun Jin-young. Similarly, the influence of 'Planet Rock' on hip hop is unquestionable. Most recently, however, 'Planet Rock' was sampled by aespa in its very popular 'Supernova.' Specifically, the sample was a recognizable hook from 'Planet Rock' which is also the melody line of 'Trans-Europe Express.' Does this mean that aespa technically owes a debt to Kraftwerk? To me, the answer is a definite yes. So, all you aespa fans — give a listen to Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force's 'Planet Rock' and Kraftwerk's 'Trans-Europe Express!'
Chicago Tribune
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Sunny Afternoon' opens soon at Chicago Shakes, telling the chaotic story of Ray Davies and The Kinks
'There was The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks,' says Arnold Engelman, the New York producer who has been pursuing the story of the last band on that list for some 20 years. 'And they were all friends. That was the most incredible generation. Comedy. Fashion. Music. It was all together.' Engelman, a veteran entertainment promoter and the head of WestBeth Entertainment, is sitting in the seats at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, pondering the most defiantly British of all the so-called British Invasion bands. 'They all looked at America,' he says, wistfully, 'at all these kids having a wonderful time and thought, 'Why can't we do that?'' They could, of course. And, as the decades passed, the first three of those bands achieved a level of global stardom without comparison. But The Kinks? Well, the clue was right there in their name. Lead singer and songwriter Ray Davies was a lot more complicated but was as big a talent as Roger Daltrey, Mick Jagger or any of 'em. Mark Harrison, a British vinyl record dealer and a specialist in the era, argues that without The Kinks, bands like Blur and The Jam could not have existed and that only 'Sgt. Pepper's'-era Beatles competes. 'Is there a better British pop song than Davies' 'Waterloo Sunset?' Harrison asks. On stage at Chicago Shakespeare's Yard theater, the familiar iconography of the jukebox musical, a venerable Anglo-American genre, is being rehearsed. 'That sounds like a bloody nightmare,' shouts Danny Horn, the actor playing Davies, the lead singer of The Kinks. 'Ray, it's commercial,' says the sort of character destined to be the enemy of all true creative souls. 'We're just trying to smooth the rough edges.' 'It's poncified,' insists the Davies character. 'We all feel like ponces. You. Can't. Hear. What. I. Can. Hear.' Of course, as their fan base well knows, Davies and The Kinks were all about the rough edges. So much so that while their peers largely sold their music to American publishers, and then made myriad licensing details from Hollywood to Las Vegas and back again, Davies largely remained the same old working-class guy from Muswell Hill, London — socially aware, eccentric, elegiac, ever nostalgic for Britain's disappearing rural charms, and yet with a Monty Python-like insouciance toward anything and everything he missed. The struggles of The Kinks are all too familiar: sudden success with band members ill-prepared to handle it; bad behavior on stage; inter-band power struggles, especially between Ray and his younger brother Dave Davies; fights with anyone who tried to pigeonhole them or do any kind of 'smoothing' so as to try and make The Kinks conform to an audience more likely to buy their records. Sir Raymond Douglas Davies CBE was a remarkable iconoclast. There was the repertoire of The Kinks itself, a hefty and staggeringly diverse catalog (most written by Davies) ranging freely from pop to blues to rock to jazz to avant-garde to heavy metal to a kind of proto-punk, featuring hits like 'You Really Got Me,' 'All Day and All of the Night,' 'Lola,' 'Set Me Free,' 'Dedicated Follower of Fashion' and 'Till the End of the Day,' and encompassing singles and concept albums alike. Davies' 'unauthorized autobiography,' the 1996 memoir 'X-Ray,' consciously employed an unreliable narrator. He scored movies. He appeared in movies. He penned short stories. He wrote stage musicals, several of them, including a 1988 version of Jules Verne's 'Around the World in Eighty Days' and a 2008 show called 'Come Dancing,' based partly on his hit song of the same title but with a bunch of new songs. 'Ray wrote chronologically,' Engelman says. 'When something happened in his life, he wrote a song about it.' 'Sunny Afternoon,' the current Stateside project involving Davies, now 80, actually features a book credited to Joe Penhall, a well-respected British playwright. But over the phone from London earlier this month, Davies (who has been struggling with his health) points out that he wrote 'a few drafts' himself. 'Ray and Joe worked together,' says Hall in an interview after the rehearsal. The reason why 'Sunny Afternoon' is having its American premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, in cooperation with Engelman and the busy British producer Sonia Friedman, has everything to do with Edward Hall, the theater's new artistic director and also the man who helmed the world premiere of said title at the Hampstead Theater in London in 2014. (Talk about a show long in gestation.) 'Once Ed got the job in Chicago,' Engelman says, 'it finally all fell into place for America.' 'Sunny Afternoon,' named for one of The Kinks' most familiar songs from 1966, tells the story of the band's early years with, as is common in jukebox musicals, judiciously inserted songs at key moments. 'To understand the early years,' Davies says, by way of explanation and with the economy that comes with age, 'is to understand the later years.' Some numbers, as is typical of the genre, are played in concert settings, including The Kinks' appearance on 'Top of the Pops,' the iconic BBC music show, and a notorious 1965 appearance in Cardiff where The Kinks had a blazing internal fight in the middle of their concert between the drummer and Ray's brother. 'Mick Avory knocked Dave out with a cymbal,' Hall says, shaking his head. 'All this happened while they were playing 'Set Me Free.'' Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds was watching that night from the edge of the stage and thought he had just witnessed a murder. 'It was such a violent act,' he later told Johnny Rogan, who wrote a 2015 biography of Davies under the apt title, 'Ray Davies: A Complicated Life.' Dave Davies recovered though and, improbably, The Kinks went on with their tour, even playing Chicago's Arie Crown Theatre later that same year, their first visit to a city that quickly understood what The Kinks was all about. (The band also performed at the Auditorium Theatre in 1972 and the Uptown Theatre in 1980, among numerous other Chicago appearances over the years.) 'We wanted to try and find a way of telling the story about a bedroom band and a family that became this incredibly influential movement that changed the whole world of rock 'n' roll and had an effect on so many other musicians,' says Hall. 'Very early on, it became clear to us that it had to be all about the music, about the process of making, writing and playing the music.' In 2014, 'Jersey Boys,' the musical story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, was packing them in on both sides of the Atlantic. That show opened up the idea that artists whose careers were mostly behind them could extend their reach by creating (or approving) their own narratives, wherein their younger selves were played by more youthful performers, warbling their hits with their original arrangements for a now-aging fan base. 'Sunny Afternoon' was seen in London to be very much in that vogue, albeit more appreciative than most such shows of Davies' particular charisma and improvisational skills. And with an ability to send Kinks fans into a state of euphoria. Like 'Jersey Boys,' 'Sunny Afternoon' has paid close attention to the precise replication of The Kinks' sound, no easy feat given that the band's distinctive 'fuzzy' sound famously was created when Dave Davies, annoyed that he was stuck with a faulty Epic amplifier, aggressively slashed the speaker cone with a razor blade, accidentally (maybe) changing the sound of his guitar and creating the kind of distortion that gave the band a musical calling card, especially once Davies hooked up the jerry-rigged amp to another amp to make the sound a whole lot louder and, well, change the face of rock music forever. Especially once guitarists like Pete Townshend of The Who heard what Davies had done. Amps are the entire backdrop of the set on the stage at Chicago Shakespeare. 'I saw 'Side Man' years ago,' says Hall, 'and I remember being frustrated that although this was a great play, nobody played. So we knew we had to find the people who could play, the right guitars with the right pick-ups, the whole sound.' Davies, famously, has a way of disassociating himself from his own biography and his own work, endlessly cynical about the so-called Swinging Sixties. Hall says that during the London development process, Davies would sit there and 'talk about the Ray character.' 'He never wanted a sugar-coated version of his own self,' Hall says. 'But I think you do understand in this show the enormous amount of pressure The Kinks were under from an industry that wanted them to be another hit band doing three-chord songs and wearing fashionable clothes, here today and gone tomorrow. They weren't that. They were a round peg being squashed into a square hole. You have this groove of misfits. When they played, everything was beautiful. But when they stopped playing, stopped making music, everything would fall apart for one reason or another. If you know anything about The Kinks, you know they never did anything the same way as everyone else. They always left chaos behind.' The plan for 'Sunny Afternoon,' Engelman says, is to create a tour from this Chicago Shakespeare premiere, which features actors from the original London production and Chicago-based performers and musicians. In some ways, what happened with 'The Who's Tommy,' a rock-oriented show that premiered at Chicago's Goodman Theatre before an enthusiastic audience only to struggle on Broadway, where fans of The Who were far less evident, especially among critics, is a cautionary tale. 'Broadway a crapshoot,' Engelman says. 'The finances alone could drown you. But The Kinks have an audience all across America.' 'Lots of great memories,' Davies says when asked about The Kinks playing in Chicago. Now comes a treat for old Kinks fans, surely? 'New audiences,' he says, twice for emphasis. 'New audiences.'
