Latest news with #ClaireNichols
Daily Mail
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Legendary Carpenters composer dies aged 84 as tributes pour in for the We've Only Just Begun hitmaker
We've Only Just Begun composer Roger Nichols has died aged 84. The multi-instrumentalist behind the Carpenters' biggest hit passed away peacefully at his home on May 17, but no cause of death has been given. His songwriting partner Paul Williams, 84, confirmed the news on Instagram on Thursday, writing: 'The first song, Roger Nichols and I wrote was called "It's hard to say goodbye…" Sadly, we hit the nail on the head. 'Roger Nichols passed away peacefully four days ago, at home with his beautiful family …his wife Terry and the daughters he was so proud of, Claire and Caitlin at his side. They were his dream come true. His greatest joy.' Together, the pair penned the music and lyrics to several of the Carpenters' best hits, including Rainy Days and Mondays and I Won't Last a Day Without You. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the Daily Mail's new Showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. Their songs were also performed by the likes of Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, Petula Clark, and The Monkees. Roger's daughter, Claire, commented on the post with her own touching tribute: 'My mom, Terri, and my sisters, Caroline and Caitlin, are all so proud of the man he was, and are in awe of the legacy he leaves.' Tributes also flooded in from fans as the news broke, one wrote: 'Rainy Days and Mondays, We've Only Just Begun, I Won't Last a Day... Your partnership left a mark, forever. 'Men like he an you are gifted with one of the most rare circumstences in a human life: inmortality through art. Each time one of your records spins, he'll live again somehow. All souls las forever (I've heard it somewhere...) Love and gratitude.'; 'My sympathies! Roger, I felt never got all the recognition for his work as he should've. 'It feels like there's too many songwriters out there who the general public doesn't know because their songs are performed by the well known singers and bands. 'I have a number of records with the names 'Roger Nichols - Paul Williams' and they make me smile quite often. Thoughts and prayers to Roger and his family/friends.'; 'This is not the news I wanted to wake up to. I have long considered Roger a genius and the two of you to be one of the greatest songwriting teams ever…PERIOD. 'There's nothing like discovering yet another perfect little Roger Nichols-Paul Williams gem I hadn't heard before. He wrote: 'The first song, Roger Nichols and I wrote was called "It's hard to say goodbye…" Sadly, we hit the nail on the head. Roger Nichols passed away peacefully four days ago, at home with his beautiful family' Roger's daughter's, Claire and Caitlin, also commented on the post with their own touching tributes They concluded: 'Thank you both endlessly and RIP to Roger. I'm glad to be among the 'small circle of friends' who understand all that he brought to the world.' One of Roger's best-known creations We've Only Just Begun, was originally a jingle for a Crocker National Bank commercial. Roger and Paul were commissioned to write it after a bank executive heard Roger's album, and it was composed in a matter of hours on the last day before the deadline. Richard Carpenter, 78, heard the jingle on TV and believed it had hit potential, so he approached Paul and asked him if he had a complete version of the track. Paul didn't have a complete version, but he soon extended it, and the Carpenters subsequently recorded a version, which became a major hit in late 1970. The hit was nominated for the Grammy Awards for Song of the Year and Best Contemporary Song. Brother-sister duo the Carpenters were fronted by the late Karen Carpenter, who tragically died in February 1983, aged just 32.
ABC News
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Charlotte McConaghy calls for climate change action in new novel Wild Dark Shore
Australian author Charlotte McConaghy's third novel, Wild Dark Shore, opens with a woman washing up on a remote island halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica. Who she is and why she's there is the mystery that propels the narrative. Claire Nichols, host of ABC Radio National's The Book Show, says it's a great read — but McConaghy found Wild Dark Shore her hardest novel to write. "I wrote the first 25,000 words four times and deleted them four times. I couldn't work out whose story it was, whose point of view it would be told in, what tense it would be in," she tells The Book Show. "It took a lot more planning than I'm used to doing … It needed to have a propulsive mystery storyline that would get you to want to turn the pages, but it also needed to have a depth of emotion and a sense of place that was vivid and compelling." It also took a research trip to a subantarctic island located halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica, accessible only by a two-week ocean voyage, to remove McConaghy's writing block. "The story was falling short," she says. "I knew that I had to get to this island." Her plan worked: Wild Dark Shore quickly became a New York Times bestseller when it was published earlier this year. As Nichols writes in her review of the novel: "Once you pick this book up, it's going to be very hard to put it down." At first, the idea of travelling to Macquarie Island — a subantarctic island governed by Tasmania, located around 1,500 kilometres north of Antarctica — seemed impossible. "There's one boat that goes at one time of year, so I had to be on that boat, or it wouldn't be happening for me," McConaghy says. And there was another problem — she couldn't leave her 16-month-old baby behind. To her surprise, the travel company gave them both the green light to travel. McConaghy travelled to the southern tip of New Zealand, where she boarded the boat with her son, clad in a huge life vest. Once on board, she approached the staff member in charge. "She took one look at me and said, 'Oh God, we told them not to let you come,'" McConaghy recalls. "That was really, really scary. [It was] a terrible start to the journey." Fortunately, the seas were unusually calm, and they made it to Macquarie Island in one piece. The moment McConaghy arrived, she was greeted by "unbelievably dramatic landscape, mountainous, green and rich". And she knew she'd made the right decision. "I just remember being hit by a wall of sound. It was extraordinary. All the seabirds, millions of penguins, hundreds of seals, they're all around you, waddling up to say hello. It has this impossibly untouched feel; it's so wild," she says. But she sensed a darkness on the island, too. Dotting the landscape were large, rusting metal barrels, relics of the oil-extraction trade that began in the late 19th century, when penguins were killed and boiled down for their oil. "You can feel the blood spilt on this island and the terrible destruction of wildlife," McConaghy says. "It really affected me and made me realise that, in fact, this place is haunted." McConaghy's time on Macquarie Island gave her the inspiration for Wild Dark Shore's setting, an isolated outpost called Shearwater Island populated with a lighthouse, a few huts and an abandoned research station. Shearwater has become uninhabitable, under siege from rising sea levels and violent weather. "The beaches are crumbling away into the ocean," McConaghy says. It's also the site of a seed vault, which McConaghy modelled on the real-life Global Seed Vault in Svalbard in northern Norway. Built in the Arctic ice, the vault was designed to preserve 930,000 seeds from around the world from extinction. "The whole idea of this vault is that it should withstand anything and last well into the future. But the insane thing is that they did not predict the rise in temperatures that would lead to melting permafrost, and [in 2017] the vault flooded," McConaghy says. "They salvaged all the seeds — it was OK — but when I read about the story, it piqued my fascination. I was interested in the question of what we would choose to save if we had the chance." It's a question the island's last remaining residents, the Salt family — Dominic, a caretaker employed by Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, and his three children, Raff, Fen and Orly — must address head on. Tasked with overseeing the seed vault and its irreplaceable treasure, they must choose which seeds to save and which to sacrifice as the vault begins to flood. "They're in a race against time," McConaghy says. "The water is coming in through the walls, and they don't have anywhere to store all these precious things, so they have to make difficult decisions." Dom and his kids have lived in the lighthouse on Shearwater Island for eight years, since the death of his wife, Claire. "A big part of him fleeing to this isolated place is a way of coping with his grief — or escaping it really," McConaghy says. Raff, the eldest child, is beset by deep rage at losing his mother. His 17-year-old sister Fen has abandoned the lighthouse and now spends her days among the seals on the black sand beach, swimming with them in the ocean. "She's a wild creature," McConaghy says, acknowledging Fen's similarity to the selkies — creatures that shapeshift between human and seal form — of Celtic mythology. The youngest is Orly, a "precociously clever" nine-year-old. Passionate about the vault's mission, Orly brings to life the seeds' stories. "But he's also haunted, too; he hears the voices of all the creatures that have died on this island. He hears them in the wind," McConaghy says. Into this unusual situation arrives Rowan, the woman who Fen rescues from the ocean during a huge storm that knocks out the island's power supply. "The family are completely baffled by her arrival and cannot fathom how she's come to be there, unless perhaps she was on her way there, which is another mystery in itself, because no boats go there. Why would anyone show up to this place? The scientists are all gone," McConaghy says. "There's a lot of suspicion around why she's there and … she's not particularly up-front about it either. She's holding her cards very close initially, because … she has a mission that she's on, and she quickly discovers that this family are not being entirely truthful with her as well." It's a pacy novel with plenty of action scenes, aided by McConaghy's background in screenwriting. "You have to be extremely clear with screenwriting about what you're seeing, what's happening on screen, what the characters are doing," she says. "I like to make my internal emotional descriptions poetic and lyrical, but I like to keep the action simple." McConaghy's past three novels are set in wild locations under threat from climate change: the Arctic in Migrations (2020), the Alaskan wilderness in Once There Were Wolves (2021), and the subantarctic island of Wild Dark Shore. It's a pattern McConaghy suspects is borne from her desire to connect with nature. But she realised she couldn't write about the natural world without addressing climate change as well. "It opened up this whole very passionate venture for me, which is to try and render the beautiful wild creatures and spaces that we still have left and inspire people to treasure those things." In this way, her books can be interpreted as calls to action to address the climate crisis. "I'm hoping that people, first of all, feel moved, and then it would be incredible if they felt moved to action," McConaghy says. "We're at a crucial point in time right now, and it's very easy to feel overwhelmed by what's happening in the natural world with the climate catastrophe. "It's also easy to become apathetic because it's very difficult to know what to do, but sometimes intimate, human stories are the things that can make us feel the most and provide us with the most hope." Charlotte McConaghy is a guest at Sydney Writers Festival, which runs from May 20-25.
