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Metro
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Will Young: 'When I came out in the 00s being threatened was a given'
Will Young is synonymous with 00s Britain, having won the first series of Pop Idol in 2002. Through the show, Will, now 46, earned pop superstar status with his debut track Anything is Possible, and with his nine albums that followed, he became a household name and LGBTQ+ legend. While many fans will recall the huge explosion of media interest when he came out as gay shortly after the show, if it were to happen today, Will is happy to say no one would care. 'I mean, it's like chalk and cheese now,' Will tells Metro this Pride Month. 'I don't often really remember the sort of mini traumas that would occur being openly gay and a public figure in the early 2000s. It was so different then.' Will, then, a charming 22-year-old adjusting his eyes to the spotlight, wouldn't have thought it was possible to be where we are in 2025. 'There was no legal support, you couldn't get married. You just operated within how it was then, which was like, 'Well, I'm going to get shouted out, I'm going to get threatened. No one's gonna care.' That was a given, which seems bonkers now to think like that,' he says. When Will reflects on this time, he does so with even more respect for those who came before him in the 80s and 90s; the likes of singer Jimmy Somerville, Erasure's Andy Bell, Pet Shop Boys star Neil Tennant, and actor Ian McKellen. With thousands of members from all over the world, our vibrant LGBTQ+ WhatsApp channel is a hub for all the latest news and important issues that face the LGBTQ+ community. Simply click on this link, select 'Join Chat' and you're in! Don't forget to turn on notifications! 'We have to remember those people and those before them, because they were pretty seminal,' Will says. Our chat comes just as the international human rights group ILGA-Europe ranked 49 countries on their legal and policy practices for LGBTQ+ people. The results found the UK, twice top of the ranking in 2011 and 2015, has dropped to 22nd, from 16th place last year. Has Will noticed this shift? 'Wow, that's so interesting,' he says, thinking: 'I mean, I don't think I have… That rather surprises me. But it wouldn't surprise me if it was focusing on the T part of that.' More Trending Here, Will refers to the treatment of the trans community in the UK, who are often the subject of intense political scrutiny and are more likely to be subject to harassment and violence than cis people. 'You know, that's just horrific,' Will says of the UK's treatment of trans people, with a twang of exasperation. 'That's horrific across the board, how it's been politicised. It's ridiculous. It's 0.5% of people, and it's but it's always in the top 10 of anything political. It's typical marginalisation.' Will's advocacy knows no bounds, and he recently revealed how he's considering fostering children or becoming a school counsellor, putting his parental instincts to good use. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: I partied in the most LGBT-friendly country in Europe — it puts the UK to shame MORE: I married my husband – then we both fell in love with Kasey MORE: MP kicked out of parliament for second time after trashing LGBT exhibit
Los Angeles Times
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Inside Allee Willis' fabulously kitsch party house that inspired a pop-up book
When you walk into Willis Wonderland, your eye doesn't know where to land. The North Hollywood house, which songwriter Allee Willis first purchased in 1980 and turned into a living ode to all things kitsch, is awash in trinkets and tchotchkes. But also in coveted art pieces and stylish furnishings. The living room alone features a lavender Plycraft chair and a Sputnik chandelier as well as a Weltron Space Ball Retro stereo boasting an Earth, Wind & Fire 8-Track and a 'Sock It To Me' squished beer ashtray. It's all just the way Willis had it before she died in 2019 at 72. And now, for those who have always wished they could tour this most fabulous of L.A. houses where everyone from Lily Tomlin, Paul Reubens and Cassandra Peterson once partied, comes a new pop-up book that brings it into your own, likely less fantastical, home. 'Willis Wonderland: The Legendary House of Atomic Kitsch' was written by Willis' friend Hillary Carlip and Trudi Roth, designed by Carlip, illustrated by Neal McCullough and paper-engineered by Mike Malkovas. And, like the house it hopes to capture and mythologize in equal measure, the pop-up book is a celebration of Willis' own 'more is more' sensibility. 'When you walk in, it's full of surprises,' Carlip tells me as we walk around the house on a sunny Friday morning and admire the Jason Mecier portrait of Willis made of trash trinkets. 'You keep finding new things. I've been here hundreds of times, and I saw something today I hadn't seen before. I wanted to do that with the pop-up book. To have easter eggs and things where you pull and spin and open and that kind of thing. I just think the interactivity, where you really immerse yourself in it, is really important now, especially since so much is digital.' The tactility of the book encourages you to explore every nook and cranny of the house, which does already feel like a museum of sorts. Of kitsch, perhaps, but also of Willis herself. The more you get to learn both about this well-kept building (once rumored to be an MGM party house), you also learn more about Willis' extraordinary career. Willis is perhaps best known as the songwriter behind such hits as Earth, Wind & Fire's 'September' and 'Boogie Wonderland.' But over her four-decade career, she also co-wrote the songs for Broadway musical 'The Color Purple'; penned a Grammy-winning tune for 'Beverly Hills Cop'; and worked with acts as varied as the Pet Shop Boys, Dusty Springfield, Patti LaBelle, Cyndi Lauper and Taylor Dayne. But she was also a visual artist, a designer, a sculptor and an avid collector. With her signature asymmetrical haircut, her loud, fashionable outfits and a penchant for all things off-kilter, the Detroit-born artist made little distinction between her work and her life. It makes sense her abode, a pink William Kesling single-family house (one of only 15 built in the Los Angeles area in the 1930s) dotted with bowling balls and palm trees, would serve as a continuation of her wild, wondrous aesthetic. When Willis died, the question of what to do with her Willis Wonderland was entangled with how to further cement her legacy. Her partner, animator and producer Prudence Fenton, knew the famed house would need to be cared for. And, perhaps more importantly, memorialized. When Fenton and Vincent Beggs — the executive director of the Willis Wonderland Foundation, launched in 2022 — came up with the idea of a book about the house, they knew it couldn't be just any kind of book. They toyed with a sleek coffee table book with gorgeous photos of the house. But that would've been too sterile. Too staid. Willis, they knew, deserved something bolder. The pop-up book offers as immersive a tour of the house as you can dream of. The scene at the so-called 'kitsch-en,' for instance, wonderfully captures Willis' commitment to playfulness as a central design conceit — something all too rare in a world often dressed in basic neutrals. A pink-leather dinette anchors a space that's all but drowning in tiki mugs, salt and pepper shakers and adorned with artworks (including a collection of Zel caricatures). Willis' humor is clearly prevalent throughout. That's nowhere more obvious than in her 'Rec Room.' A blue-hued linoleum floor made to look like an aquarium, replete with singing fish and turtles, brightens the dark-wooded downstairs space and echoes the nautical elements Kesling introduced into his Streamline Moderne homes. Here, this underwater space serves as a repository for 'Allee's Legendary Landfill of Esthetic Essentials.' The shelves, as the book shows, are filled to the brim with collectibles, many of them part of the collection of Black culture, which her friend James Brown first helped her curate. Lunchboxes, magazines, records, action figures and sculptures all but beg you to spend hours upon hours examining each and every one of them. This is thrifting as cultural history. Kitsch as historical remembrance. In Carlip's pop-up version of this room, you can see, among many other things, a crowned Miss America Vanessa Williams Corn Flakes box, a slew of Afro picks ready for the taking, a Harlem Globetrotters coloring book, a Diana Ross doll and a Chubby Checker Twister game. 'It's a funny thing, because Mike, the paper engineer, who's done many other books and clients and everything, kept saying, 'You can't have so much detail. You have to edit,'' Carlip shares. 'And I was like, 'Nope.' I just stood my ground. I was like, 'It's Allee. It's all got to be in there.' But then I finally relented and said, 'How about there's a downloadable poster where people can get descriptions of items and see them up close?'' In that poster, you can see 'Libby the Lovely Liberated Lady' doll, a Women's Liberation toy that's as hilarious as she sounds (you're encouraged to pull her skirt for a surprise). And you can also see a photo of the famed Riverside Market sign that adorns the house's outdoor pool next to a portable bar Willis had hand-sculpted from Motor City-found items. As the future of the house as it stands remains up in the air, with Carlip unsure what the Foundation has planned for it, the pop-up book (like last year's 'The World According To Allee Willis' documentary) hopes to make sure Willis' artistry is preserved in ways she would most enjoy. 'I just think it really captures her whimsy, her thoughtfulness, her creativity and the joy,' Carlip adds, about the house and book alike. 'Everything she created had so much joy in it. I think when people come into this house, they feel all those things, they're inspired to create. I think just the breadth of her creativity is infectious. You cannot help but be inspired by being in here.' Carlip points to a painting that sits atop the fireplace right above a Sascha Brastoff gold ceramic bull. The piece features a blue-hued woman whose irregular features (bold neon lips, perky colorful nipples) are intentionally meant to evoke a certain famed artist. It is signed 'P. Picasso.' 'People would always ask her, 'Is this …?'' Carlip recalls with a laugh. 'It's not. I mean, it's called 'Girl with Blue Period.''
New York Times
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
15 Surprising Show-Tune Covers for Broadway's Big Night
By Scott Heller Dear listeners, This is Scott Heller, the former theater editor (now I'm on The New York Times Book Review). With the Tony Awards this Sunday, I'm serving up show tunes to Amplifier readers — but not the usual fare. There are no deathless standards here, like Judy Collins singing 'Send in the Clowns' or anything from Barbra Streisand's 'Broadway Album.' And if you're the kind of person who saves your Playbills, you've already listened to the Pet Shop Boys version of 'Losing My Mind' — a lot. Rather, I'm hoping this edition of The Amplifier is full of surprising covers, and covers of show tunes you may not know as theater songs in the first place. I've mostly stayed away from pop albums designed to market the shows themselves, though I couldn't resist opening with one, from well before 'Hamilton' got into that game. And, alas, one of my favorites — Jill Sobule's 'Sunrise, Sunset,' recorded for the 'Fiddler' tribute compilation 'Knitting on the Roof' — doesn't seem to be streamable. But you can find it on her website. Laden with happiness and tears, Scott Who knew? This delightful curiosity comes from a 1968 Motown album on which the trio performed 11 songs from 'Funny Girl,' a tie-in released just as the movie version reached theaters. Take away the ugly duckling story line and the Brooklynese and it doesn't exactly add up. But who cares when greeted with brash horns, sunny vocals and a group cheer after the unforgettable rhyme, 'When a girl's incidentals / are no bigger than two lentils.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Daily Mirror
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
BBC Radio 2 in the Park location announced and DJ Rylan Clark is delighted
The event, which last year saw performances from the likes of Sting, Pet Shop Boys and Snow Patrol in Preston's Moor Park, will take place in the Essex city's Hylands Park from Friday, September 5, to Sunday, September 7 The 2025 edition of the BBC Radio 2 In The Park festival is to be held in Chelmsford. The event, which last year saw performances from the likes of Sting, Pet Shop Boys and Snow Patrol in Preston's Moor Park, will take place in the Essex city's Hylands Park from Friday, September 5, to Sunday, September 7. Announcing the location on Radio 2, presenter Rylan Clark said: 'I can't wait to welcome my Radio 2 family to Chelmsford and have this year's Radio 2 In The Park right on my doorstep. 'If there's one thing I know for certain, it's that an Essex crowd know how to party. See you all in Hylands Park.' The festival was then welcomed to Essex by Chelmsford town crier Tony Appleton, with the festival line-up set to be announced live on air on the Scott Mills Breakfast Show on Tuesday, with tickets to go on sale on Wednesday. Helen Thomas, head of Radio 2, said: 'Radio 2 In The Park is our biggest party of the year, and we're delighted to be bringing a three-day music extravaganza to Chelmsford. 'We've been busy booking some of the world 's most loved artists to perform to thousands of revellers in Hylands Park, as well as to millions of listeners and viewers at home or on the move. We can't wait to bring our family of Radio 2 presenters to Essex.' The event will see a number of Radio 2 presenters relocate to the city for the weekend, and there will be a Friday night DJ party to start the festival after it debuted at last year's event. Councillor Stephen Robinson, leader of Chelmsford City Council, said: 'Hylands Park is no stranger to music festivals, and we're thrilled to add another renowned music event to the list in 2025. ' BBC Radio 2 In The Park is a fantastic opportunity for Chelmsford – one that will lift our local economy and boost the city's position as a top events destination. 'We're looking forward to welcoming world-famous music acts and thousands of Radio 2 fans from across the UK to our brilliant city this summer for this unrivalled three-day celebration of music. 'Our teams have years of experience and expertise in facilitating major music festivals at Hylands Park, so I'm confident that this latest partnership with the BBC will present a smooth-running and highly enjoyable weekend for all involved.'
The Guardian
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Butt-naked Milton and a spot of fellatio: why William Blake became a queer icon
William Blake may be known for seeing angels up in trees, for writing the alternative national anthem Jerusalem, and for his emblematic poem The Tyger. But his story is far more subversive and far queerer than cosy fables allow. It's why Oscar Wilde hung a Blake nude on his college room wall. It's why Blake became a lyric in a Pet Shop Boys song. And it's why David Hockney is showing a Blake-inspired painting at his current exhibition in Paris. When I lived in the East End of London, I'd walk over Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields every day. It felt sort of disrespectful. Perhaps that's why he has haunted me ever since. Years later, while trying to write a book about another artist, I got ill and very low. Suddenly, echoing one of his own visions, Blake came to me and said: 'Well, how about it?' I felt I had to make amends for treading on his dreams. I've met many artists – Andy Warhol, Lucian Freud, Derek Jarman – but it is Blake whose hand I would love to have held and whose magical spirit I summon up in my new book. He even gave me my title: William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. (A friend has since pointed out that the title sounds suspiciously like a 1970s album by a certain starman from Mars). I was writing about a man who had died a long time ago, yet who still seems alive and among us. Born in 1757, dying in 1827, Blake had perfect timing: not to be confined by Victorian mores, but to live in a looser, revolutionary age. He only ever sold 61 copies of his revolutionary 'illuminated books' – which, for the first time, placed images and words together. Each would be worth £1m now. Blake might have died in poverty and obscurity, but that is exactly where his potential resides – as an unexploded but benevolent device. His posthumous influence lives on in flash-lit scenes – as if his afterlife were a movie being screened in front of us. Cut to the 1820s and Blake's young fans, called the Ancients, are led by Samuel Palmer, who bends to kiss the doorbell of their master's lodgings as he passes by. They enact their Blakean cult in the Kentish countryside, swimming naked in a river and growing their hair long. Jump forward to Manhattan in 1967 and Blake's new disciples, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, are reading his poetry to each other every night in their poverty. They're obsessed. Mapplethorpe gets a job in an antiquarian bookstore and when a copy of Blake's revolutionary America: A Prophecy comes in, he tears a page out and stuffs it down his trousers. Then, freaking out that he might be discovered, he goes to the toilet, rips it up and flushes it away. That evening, he confesses his sin to Smith, who celebrates his act, seeing it as a fabulous infection of the sewers of New York with their hero's subversion. Five years later, on the rocky coast of Dorset, Derek Jarman, deeply under Blake's influence, recreates a Blakean scene for his first narrative Super 8 film. In flickering, saturated 70s colour, Andrew Logan poses as a sea god in the deconstructed dress he'd worn for his first Alternative Miss World that year. A half-naked young sailor floats in a rock pool. A young woman, wearing only a fishing net, plays the siren who lured him to his doom. That night, the crew meet Iris Murdoch in a nearby country house. She takes them up a hill to dance around a megalith in the moonlight. Murdoch cites Blake in a half a dozen of her queer-friendly novels, and discusses him with her lover, the gay liberation hero Brigid Brophy. Flashback to Paris, 1958: Allen Ginsberg, citing Blake in his outrageously queer poem Howl, emulates his hero by reciting it in the nude outside Shakespeare and Company, the famous bookshop on the Left Bank. He's accompanied by a besuited William S Burroughs, whose cut-up writing technique is heavily influenced by Blake's proto-surrealist texts. In 1975, in the New Mexico desert, David Bowie will play a queer alien, singing and speaking Blake's words, in the Nicolas Roeg film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Like Shakespeare's Prospero or Doctor Who, Blake has the power to appear anywhere, any time, rewriting his own fate through his art. That's why one of Oscar Wilde's young lovers, W Graham Robertson, was so inspired by Blake's sensuality that he became his greatest champion, using a multimillion-pound fortune to buy up every work by Blake he could. Presenting them to the Tate 40 years later, Robertson saves Blake for the nation. Yet Blake remains a secret, hiding in plain sight. In Milton, his astoundingly beautiful and prophetic book of 1804, he creates two images of male fellatio and a butt-naked Milton. They wouldn't look out of place in a Mapplethorpe photograph. One reason Blake published his own work was to escape the censoring eye of the printer. It is this same transgression that powers James Joyce in 1920s Paris, as he deploys Blake's queerness like a grenade in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce's Leopold Bloom changes sex in a lucid dream sequence, while British grenadiers drop their trousers to bugger each other as an emblem of the anti-imperialism Joyce and Blake shared. In 1970s London, in their house that is as old as Blake, the artists Gilbert & George claim him as their saint. Like them, Blake would today be seen as one artist in two people. Misogynistic history has written his wife Catherine out of the story – but she shared his visions, printing and colouring them in. Then they'd spend the afternoon sitting naked in their backyard. 'Come on in,' they'd tell visitors. 'It's only Adam and Eve, you know.' Their neighbour is the Chevalier D'Eon, a former army officer who now performs fencing demonstrations in a black silk dress. D'Eon duly appears as Mr Femality in a witty salon skit written by Blake that today reads like a Joe Orton farce. Blake declared gender a mere earthly construction and agreed with Milton: 'Spirits when they please / Can either Sex assume or both.' Faced with this fantastical cast, I can only wonder at Blake's alchemical effect. His large colour prints – such as a nude Isaac Newton with Michelangelo thighs sitting at the bottom of the sea – have a 3D texture that still defies explanation. He was trying to make reproducible paintings. Like Andy Warhol and Albrecht Dürer, Blake trained as commercial artist. He believed in the egalitarian power of art. He even proposed a 100ft tall image of a naked 'Nelson Guiding Leviathan' to be set over the road to London like a Regency Angel of the North. Shockingly modern, Blake burned with a fire that can't be put out. His new Jerusalem was an achievable utopia, if only we shook off our 'mind-forg'd manacles' – our prejudices about gender, sex, race and class. His art still inspires us as he shoots his arrows of desire from his bow of burning gold, standing there naked, bursting out of a rainbow. Blake's new world is the one we long for, where we will all be gloriously free to love whoever and however we like. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is published by 4th Estate
