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Scottish Sun
20 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Scots Blue Angels biker gang thugs hunted over machete murder bid attack at funeral
Cops are treating the incident as 'attempted murder' Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) MACHETE-wielding thugs from the Blue Angels biker gang are being hunted over kill bids on three men at a funeral. Witnesses told how 'vanloads' of masked brutes swooped on the send-off for crash victim Gordon Luke, 71, to confront members of the rival Mad Dogs motorcycle club. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 3 Talented musician Gordon Luke passed away after a tragic bike accident last month 3 Cops were called to The Hurlet after three men suffered 'serious injuries' Credit: © Jamie Williamson 3 Masked brutes swooped on the send-off for Gordon Credit: © Jamie Williamson When their two targets left in a bid to avoid trouble, the maniacs smashed up their car and then turned their blades and hammers on mourners. We told how a grandad, aged 65, plus two other men aged 30 and 44, were rushed to hospital with serious injuries. The mass brawl happened last Friday at The Hurlet Crematorium in Barrhead, near Glasgow. Last night, a source said: 'The Blue Angels turned up to cause terror — masked-up and armed. It was sickening. "Other mourners told them to leave, and that's when they were attacked. "The three men injured were civilians paying their respects at a friend's funeral. The Blue Angels turned up to cause terror — masked-up and armed. It was sickening... It is now being treated as attempted murder A source 'It is now being treated as attempted murder.' We told of an ongoing feud between rival biker gangs has been raging for months in the wake of high-ranking BA member Laponder leaving the mob and setting Mad Dogs. We told how heavily-tattooed Laponder blamed a 'snitch' in his old crew after being caged for bombing a rival's dad's works van in Lennoxtown, Dunbartonshire, in June last year. The gangs' feud was sparked when ex-Blue Angel Dan Laponder, 44, left to set up his own mob. Biker gang boss blames Blue Angels 'snitch' for jail stretch as video lifts lid on feud Tensions had earlier boiled when a 20-strong mob wrecked a motorbike garage in November 2023. An insider claimed Laponder then opted to switch sides as a pal was one of two men left with horror injuries in the ambush at Totally Spanners in Glasgow's Hillington. Our source said in December: 'Dan looked at who was running about with him and decided he'd had enough.' We told how the brute went on to blow up a BT van used by Blue Angels member David Rollo's father. ATTACK AFTER CRASH ORDEAL By Graham Mann GORDON Luke previously told of being attacked by a mob who burst into his home. The then 64-year-old told The Scottish Sun how he feared for his life when three blade thugs pounced in Linwood, near Paisley. Amputee Gordon - who had lost a leg in a March 2018 bike accident - thought he was a goner when the maniacs booted in his front door. Gordon said in September that year: 'I thought I was going to die. I was terrified. 'They were trying to get to me with knives. There's not much I could do because I'm vulnerable.' The biker club founder said they showed up after he was mugged by two crooks who'd offered to help with his shopping. He added: 'I'd bumped into the people who stole the money and said I wanted it back. 'My biker friends warned them to stay away then I heard kicking at the door. 'To do that to someone in a wheelchair is repulsive.' Weeks later a hooded thug hurled accelerant on a clubhouse in Airdrie in another attack linked to the feud. Laponder, now holed up at Greenock's prison, previously posed with a sawn-off shotgun. He was jailed for nine years at Glasgow's High Court in November. Police Scotland said: 'Around 3pm on Friday officers were called to a report of a disturbance in the Glasgow Road area of Hurlet, Glasgow. 'Emergency services attended and a 30-year-old man was taken to Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow with serious injuries. 'Two other men, aged 44 and 65, were taken to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, both with serious injuries. Enquiries are ongoing.'
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Your Friends & Neighbors: Jon Hamm's addictive turn as a gentleman thief is his best role since Mad Men
Jon Hamm has one of the great TV faces. Square-jawed and ruggedly suave, it's the face of a matinee idol with a dangerous edge. The quiff is well-coiffed but grey-flecked. That Marlboro Man chin looks unshaven by lunchtime. Those hooded eyes have a weary, lounge lizard quality. One of his first Hollywood parts was a 1997 episode of Ally McBeal, where he played the aptly named 'Gorgeous Guy at Bar'. A decade later, Hamm became the alpha face of a certain prestige drama. Ad Men, was it? Mad Dogs? Something like that. Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV+, 11 April) is a fitting new vehicle for Hamm's slippery good looks. The launch episode is bookended by shots of his big, mildly befuddled face in screen-filling closeup. This show knows exactly what's it's doing. It is blackly comic, frothily fun and highly moreish. It begins, as all TV dramas must nowadays, with a shock tactic scene, before flashing back a few months to show how we got here. Here, it's Hamm's character waking up in a pool of blood next to a murdered dude. He promptly rewinds to show us the 'swirling hot mess of my life and how the hell everything went so wrong, so fast'. After being fired in disgrace from his job as a hedge fund CEO, divorced dad Andrew 'Coop' Cooper struggles to maintain his megabucks Ivy Leaguer lifestyle – let alone keep his spoilt family in the comfort to which they've become accustomed. In desperation, Coop resorts to robbing his rich neighbours in upstate New York, only to discover that what happens behind those white picket fences is even murkier than he imagined. Secrets, lies, sex, daytime drinking, crushing up and snorting the children's ADHD meds – you know, the usual. The light-fingered antihero never loses our sympathy for stealing from his so-called friends because they're all obnoxiously minted and smugly punchable. Their multimillion-dollar mansions, Coop points out, are 'filled with expensive shit that would never be missed', 'piles of forgotten wealth just lying around in drawers'. He's basically Robin Hood in a Ralph Lauren cap. Super-duper Cooper also cares for his mentally unstable sister, so it's all good. He drives a Maserati and drinks Macallan 25 whisky. Meetings take place on golf courses or tennis courts, at yoga studios or Instagrammable parties. Gritty urban drama this ain't. Just to thwack viewers over the head with conspicuous consumerism, on-screen graphics break down the value of Coop's loot. As he waxes lyrical about Patek Philippe watches or Hermès handbags, it's like watching an upscale QVC. The White Lotus with a lock-pick. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Beneath the grabby pitch of a gentleman thief – as Coop's pawnbroker puts it, 'Rich guy loses his big job, has liquidity problems, turns to petty crime' – this is essentially a gossipy relationship drama. It's about extramarital affairs, midlife crises and divorcees co-parenting troublesome teenagers. It's Desperate Housewives with kleptomania. Breaking Bad meets Big Little Lies. If Hamm weren't in it, Nicole Kidman definitely would be. Midway through the nine-parter, Coop hits the 'nose candy'. Cops start sniffing around. Things get dark and deadly. It's propulsive, pulpy and soapy. So confident are Apple of the show's success that it has renewed it for a second season before the debut run has even dropped. The Hammster will soon be back on his wheel. This isn't just The Jon Hamm Show. Amanda Peet and Olivia Munn are typically terrific as Coop's ex-wife and new girlfriend. Who are we kidding? It's totally The Jon Hamm Show. When he's not on screen, attention drifts. A wordy script is made denser by his sardonic, velvet-voiced narration. He doesn't quite break the fourth wall by waggling his eyebrows but somehow it feels like he does. Of late, Hamm's TV showreel has been limited to villainous supporting turns in the likes of Fargo and The Morning Show. He's always roguishly charismatic but such gigs haven't made the most of his mercurial talents. This is his best role since you-know-who. He's gone from Don Draper to crime caper. It suits him.
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Jack Vettriano, self-taught artist who was derided by the critics but had huge commercial success
Jack Vettriano, who has died aged 73, was a self-taught Scottish painter who was treated with contempt by the art establishment but became one of the most commercially successful artists of his generation. A late starter who did not sell a painting until he was 38, Vettriano established a signature style that, though reminiscent of Edward Hopper, was indisputably his own. His work paid little heed to temporal or topographical concerns; rather, he inhabited the landscape of his imagination, a mysterious, nostalgic, exotic world peopled by elegant ladies and predatory men located on windswept beaches and esplanades, or in bars, bedrooms and dance halls. His paintings had a strong narrative content and were suffused with glamour, but there was also melancholy, and the cold, seedy eroticism of fetishism and loveless passion. Vettriano's obsession was women, and his interest lay in their relationships with men. But many critics objected that there were no relationships in his paintings, simply people existing in space, their togetherness no more than an artistic trope, an empty narrative devoid of significance. Some went further: one described his work as 'slick pornography', while another, alluding to the imperfections of his autodidactic technique, accused him of 'just colouring in'. His supporters claimed that such criticism was fuelled by jealousy and artistic snobbery, and there could be little doubt that the artist embodied the divide between high and low culture. Vettriano's life and work were inextricable. While emphasising his reclusive nature, the artist was happy to tell interviewers about his inability to maintain relationships, his visits to brothels, his casual sex. These were at the core of his art and its voyeuristic nature. But if his art divided the critics, no one could dispute its popularity. His most famous painting, the enigmatic The Singing Butler (1991), which depicted a couple dancing on a beach with a butler and maid in attendance, was sold by Sotheby's in 2004 for £744,800. The artist's income from posters, mugs, umbrellas, T-shirts, mobile phone skins and place mats adorned with the image was reportedly more than £250,000 a year. For good measure, another beach scene, Mad Dogs, was one of the most popular posters of the age. But when critics set his commercial success against his perceived technical, aesthetic and artistic shortcomings, Vettriano's art raised eternal questions about the relationship between art and commerce. He was born Jack Hoggan in St Andrews, Fife, on November 17 1951. His father, William, was a miner 'who used to say that whenever one of us was born they put another cup of water in the soup' and who provided his early drawing materials – betting slips and wooden pencils – from the bookmakers. His mother was Charlotte. He was educated at Kirkcaldy Technical College but left aged 14 to become a miner. He lasted two years, 'smoking, skiving and thinking about women', before working as an apprentice mechanical engineer, magazine-subscription salesman, trainee chef, barman and personnel officer. He fuelled his imagination on the beaches and in the ballrooms of Fife. A girlfriend inspired him by giving him a set of paints for his 21st birthday and telling him: 'If you don't do something you're going to live and die in this town.' He became obsessed by painting, and despite being turned down by Edinburgh School of Art taught himself by painting rotting fruit and copying the great artists. In 1979 he moved to Bahrain to work as a management consultant, attracted by its tax-free status and lack of distractions, and exhibited locally. Returning to Scotland the following year, he married Gail Cormack and began working for his father-in-law's newspaper distribution business. The couple also invested in property, buying, redecorating and selling, revealing the financial acuity that would characterise his artistic career. In the mid-1980s he moved to Edinburgh to pursue art full-time, which he did with a ruthlessness that destroyed his marriage. Developing a style loosely based on film noir, he completed each work in a single session, often working through the night. To distance himself from the copied works he had sold, Hoggan changed his name to Vettriano – taken from his maternal grandfather, Peter Vettrino, with an 'a' added 'for effect' – and exhibited Model in a White Slip, a portrait of his ex-wife, and Saturday Night, a couple in a dance hall, at the Royal Scottish Academy's 1988 summer exhibition. Both sold immediately, and the fledgling painter found a champion in the art critic for Scotland on Sunday, W Gordon Smith. Over the next three years Vettriano built a following, attracting little critical enthusiasm but steady buyers for his romantic, allusive scenes of elegantly dressed gentlemen of uncertain intent engaged with exotic or scantily clad women. If his technique occasionally betrayed his lack of formal education, there was, from the first, evidence of a singular vision. But if his influences ranged from the sparse settings, ennui and open narrative of Hopper to the brasserie nostalgia of the young Scottish painter Stephen Conroy, Vettriano displayed an obsession with the alienation of casual sex that was entirely his own. And while his subject matter and style were unchanging, his technique gradually improved. He looked back on The Singing Butler and concluded that although it had 'a certain charm', he believed that if he painted it again 'it would be better '. But with its evocation of a lost, more genteel world, the painting attained an iconic status that superseded its technical immaturity. In 1993 Vettriano joined the Portland Gallery, attracted by the dealer Tom Hewlett's assertion that his best work should be selling 'for £10,000 not £4,000'. Very soon it was, but still the critics sniffed. Hewlett believed that that was because 'if you have a painting that the ordinary man can understand, it rather puts the critic out of a job.' The academic Duncan MacMillan countered: 'He's welcome to paint as long as no one takes him seriously.' Vettriano considered MacMillan and his ilk to be 'breathtakingly arrogant', and said: 'They're trying to kill my spirit. That's not on.' But he was a skilful manipulator of the media whom it suited to play the underdog. He attracted vast coverage as interviewers probed the links between his solitary, nocturnal foraging and the whiff of sexual intent depicted in works such as Back Where You Belong Jack, Suddenly One Summer and The Big Tease – or, more overtly, Wicked Games and Passion Overflow. The artist, who described his work as 'strictly for voyeurs', knew his market. He kept a cupboard full of stilettos in his studio, always painted his models in stockings and suspenders rather than tights and often included a third party, sometimes himself, removed from the action, quietly observing. Through the 1990s his work developed a darker hue. The sense of the erotic was more overt and a whiff of danger or cruelty replaced the elusive romanticism and jilted disappointment of earlier works such as Dance Me to the End of Love or Table For One, and he painted no beach scenes after 1996. But beyond its undoubted sexiness and escapism, there remained an identifiable atmosphere in Vettriano's work. His work had a stylistic unity that shifted easily between his favoured locations, and the stagey eroticism of strangers' rooms even pervaded the sunlit beach. The whiff of danger was not always confined to his work. In 1999 a Scottish tabloid claimed that the artist had stalked a woman, with whom he admitted brief contact. When The Spectator repeated the story Vettriano threatened to sue, and the allegations were retracted. It was for such reasons – and not, he maintained, to avoid the Scottish art establishment – that he left Edinburgh for the 'anonymity' of London. In his Knightsbridge house he continued to paint obsessively, never straying from the knowledge that 'the only thing that really interests me is women. And also a sort of melancholic, rose-coloured look at the past.' He also had an apartment in Nice, where he died. Despite his self-proclaimed 'outsider' status, Vettriano was appointed OBE in 2003 and was the subject of a hagiographical South Bank Show, as well as monographs and a biography. When he exhibited in New York in 2002, although he attracted scant press interest, buyers flew over from Britain and demand was so great that the event had to be ticketed. In 2008 he painted a portrait of Zara Phillips for Sport Relief. In 2012 he was convicted of drink-driving and amphetamine possession. That year, The Singing Butler went on display at the Aberdeen Art Gallery as part of an exhibition entitled From Van Gogh to Vettriano. The following year, Jack Vettriano: A Retrospective, opened at the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow. In 2017, Vettriano was one of three artists commissioned to paint portraits of Billy Connolly to celebrate the comedian's 75th birthday. The images were transferred to murals in the centre of Glasgow; Vettriano's is in Dixon Street. Jack Vettriano married Gail Cormack, who had a daughter, in 1980; they later separated. Jack Vettriano, born November 17 1951, death announced March 3 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
