Latest news with #SgtPepper
South Wales Argus
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- South Wales Argus
Mersey Beatles set for Newport Riverfront Theatre gig
On Thursday, June 5, the band will perform at the Riverfront Theatre, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the iconic Shea Stadium concert. With a history spanning 25 years, The Mersey Beatles have delighted audiences worldwide, and this show promises to be their biggest UK tour yet. The performance will feature an array of classic hits from 1965, including beloved tracks from the albums Help! and Rubber Soul. Fans can also expect a journey through the psychedelic sounds of Sgt Pepper, a stroll down Abbey Road, and an homage to later masterpieces like Revolution, Get Back, and Hey Jude. Hailing from Liverpool, The Mersey Beatles were the resident tribute band at the famous Cavern Club for a decade, performing over 600 times at the venue where The Beatles first made their mark. (Image: DAVE NELSON) The current lineup includes Mark Bloor as John, Steven Howard as Paul, Craig McGown as George, and Brian Ambrose as Ringo. Looking ahead to the Newport show, Mr Howard said, "We cannot wait to take to the stage at the Riverfront Theatre. "We always have an amazing night in South Wales – the audiences are always up for a good night – so this will be an amazing night." Tickets for The Mersey Beatles at Riverfront Theatre are on sale now, available from the Newport Live website.
Extra.ie
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
This week in 1967: The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Although their previous studio album, Revolver, is now the more acclaimed, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is arguably The Beatles' most famous work and the one that had the most influence on the music and society of its time. It had no track breaks, a message in the run-off groove and was developed loosely from Paul McCartney's concept of an album by a fictitious band. The lyrics were printed on a lavish gatefold sleeve, with its famous front cover by Peter Blake, reflecting the tenor of the time and opening doors of both perception and excess. Having retired from touring, the band was free to use the recording studio to the ultimate, with no time or financial restrictions and limited only by their own creativity. From the suite-like 'A Day In The Life', with that long thunderous chord coaxed from a bewildered orchestra, to the alleged-and-denied drug references in 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', the beautiful 'She's Leaving Home', the sentimentality of 'When I'm Sixty Four' and George Harrison's mystical wig-out 'Within You Without You', it sparked argument and amazement in equal measure. Originally, the album was to include 'Penny Lane' and 'Strawberry Fields Forever', but that didn't stop it from becoming a benchmark; the term 'their Sgt Pepper' later applied across the board to any band's supreme lifetime achievement.
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Julie Christie at 85: her 20 best films – ranked!
There are many things wrong with Kenneth Branagh's galumphing slab of actor-manager Shakespeare, but Christie as Gertrude is not one of them. Her casting might have been conducive to the Oedipal side of the Danish prince's feelings towards his mother – if only the director's bombastic performance had allowed room for it. A mostly non-Irish cast goes full begorra in this Sean O'Casey biopic, with Christie in a brief but eye-catching turn as a sex worker called Daisy Battles. Jack Cardiff took over directing duties when John Ford fell ill; the results are rambling, but the anti-British riot scenes are ace. Irish accents again, as Christie reunites with her Don't Look Now co-star Donald Sutherland in 1980s Donegal, playing the widow Helen Cuffe, whose husband was accidentally murdered by the IRA. The pair's old chemistry is still there, and the landscape is splendid. But, alas, when it comes to the men in her life, this unfortunate woman has the worst luck ever. Three nicely calibrated female performances keep this tasteful adaptation of Rebecca West's 1918 novel afloat. Christie plays a narrow-minded snob who is outraged when her husband (Alan Bates) returns traumatised from the first world war and fails to recognise her, but reconnects instead with a working-class sweetheart (Glenda Jackson) from his youth; Ann-Margret is wonderful as a compassionate cousin. This is must for anyone studying English literature, though Christie's wilful heroine, all fringe and mascara, smacks more of swinging 60s London than of Thomas Hardy's Wessex; Terence Stamp, Christie's former off-screen boyfriend, sports a Sgt Pepper moustache as Sgt Troy. The best bit is when Alan Bates's sheep fall off a cliff. John Schlesinger's film about the rise of a good-looking but shallow playgirl epitomises all that was good-looking but shallow about the British new wave. Christie won an Oscar for looking fabulous; Frederic Raphael's misogynistic screenplay also won an Oscar, but now feels suspiciously like a petty act of revenge on some unknown woman who was once mean to him. The romance between Omar Sharif as Zhivago and Christie as Lara is the least convincing thing about David Lean's spectacular epic, set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution, but shot in sunny Spain. Once again, anachronistic hair and makeup make Christie look more like a Chelsea socialite than a Slavic muse, but it was the box office double whammy of this and Darling, in the same year, that cemented her status as an international star. The third of Christie's collaborations with Warren Beatty is a breezy remake of Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), with Beatty co-directing himself as a Los Angeles quarterback temporarily returned to Earth in the body of a murdered industrialist. Christie plays the earnest eco-activist who wins his heart. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala adapted her own Booker-winning novel for the Merchant Ivory team's first big success, part of a 1980s British fad for all things Raj. Christie (born in Assam, north-eastern India) plays an English woman visiting India, but her exploits in the present day are less compelling than the flashbacks to her great-aunt (Greta Scacchi) in the 1920s. Critics were aghast at the idea of an A-list actor playing a woman forcibly impregnated by a computer in a genre film they considered 'silly'. But Donald Cammell's sci-fi thriller couldn't be more pertinent to 2025, with its themes of domestic abuse and overreaching AI. Christie – rightly – gives it her all. Christie plays the disapproving mother of widowed Kate Winslet, whose sons inspire JM Barrie (Johnny Depp) to write Peter Pan in this weepie biopic. It's not mentioned here, of course, but Christie's character, who mellows as the film goes on, will soon be grandmother to Daphne du Maurier, who wrote Don't Look Now. Two couples in Montreal swap partners in Alan Rudolph's stilted sex comedy. Whenever Christie is working her magic on screen as the unhappy wife of handyman Nick Nolte, she makes you forget the contrived situations and clunky dialogue, and sweeps you up into a sublime, deservedly Oscar-nominated performance. A 12-year-old boy, spending the summer at a school friend's country house, is cajoled into carrying secret messages between his chum's older sister (Christie) and a tenant farmer (Alan Bates). After looking distractingly modern in other lit-flicks such as Doctor Zhivago, Christie is perfectly credible as an Edwardian aristocrat in Joseph Losey's quietly devastating film adaptation of LP Hartley's novel, scripted by Harold Pinter. Sarah Polley's directing debut, adapted from a story by Alice Munro, gives Christie the best late role of her career, as a married woman showing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. She checks into a nursing home, but her husband wonders if she's exaggerating her memory loss as revenge for his past infidelities. Ambiguous to the end, Christie makes it about more than just dementia, and earned a fourth Oscar nomination. In the real-life ex-couple's second film together, Beatty plays a philandering Beverly Hills hairdresser who still carries a torch for his former girlfriend. Hal Ashby's satire, set on the eve of Nixon's 1968 election victory, now seems more sad than funny, but Christie, rocking a backless black sequined Jean Varon gown, is a hoot as she drunkenly tries to fellate her ex at a posh dinner party. The current American trend of banning books makes François Truffaut's charmingly retro-futurist film of Ray Bradbury's novel feel like a wake-up call. Oskar Werner is a colourless leading man, but Christie makes up for it in her dual roles as his hilariously conformist wife and a rebellious neighbour who asks: 'Do you ever read the books you burn?' John Schlesinger's film of Keith Waterhouse's novel leavens its social realism (shot on the streets of Bradford!) with the fantasies of Billy (Tom Courtenay). In her breakthrough performance, Christie radiates liberation and natural glamour, but miraculously makes Liz not just a dream girl but a fully realised character. She's the girl next door – if the girl next door were a stunner. Christie dials up the kooky as an unhappily married woman who attaches herself to a San Francisco surgeon played by George C Scott. The drama starts off frothy but becomes progressively downbeat, until you belatedly realise you're watching a tragedy, nudged along by nonlinear inserts now considered more typical of the film's cinematographer, Nicolas Roeg (and editor Antony Gibbs), than its director, Richard Lester. Nonlinear inserts abound in Roeg's haunting kaleidoscope of a chiller that is also a heartbreaking portrait of a marriage under stress. Christie and Sutherland play bereaved parents who relocate to Venice, where a blind clairvoyant claims to be in contact with their dead daughter. The wife accepts what she can't see, while the husband's scepticism blinds him to the truth until it's too late. Christie came up with most of her own dialogue as the cockney brothel-keeper in Robert Altman's melancholy revisionist western, set in a muddy mining town. Whether she's tucking into fried eggs, striving to keep her relationship with McCabe (Beatty) on a business footing, or drifting away in an opium daze, this is peak Christie, and one of the funniest, saddest love stories ever filmed.
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Thank you Freddie Mercury and Roger Taylor – how my 1990s teenage self found somebody to love
I am of a generation that had no name: we slipped down the crack between the spotty cheek of gen X and the well-moisturised buttock of the millennials. We are the last generation that will wow our grandchildren by explaining that we came of age completely without the internet. We wrote letters through secondary school; we replaced these with email when we got to university and wrote 15,000-word screeds to one another, which we still keep in files in our Hotmail accounts. Some of us ended up internet dating, but I have far more friends who settled down with their first or second love. We are neurotic, and depressive, but we didn't know it until recently. The thing we do share with those who came after is that when it comes to music, we and our parents have no generation gap. The great songwriters of the 1960s soundtracked our childhoods in their best-ofs and their unfashionable 80s incarnations. In my house, the 'frog song' was given as much time as Sgt Pepper. Pop stars rose up like venerated family elders. Music was a communal activity; we were the cassette generation, and many families couldn't afford to fly. We took long car ferry trips to France for our holidays, listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue in the Volvo. The most alienating part of the traditional teenager narrative, to me, is that which claims that, at a formative age, we want to listen to stuff our parents hate. This idea informs every music documentary ever made, and every pop origin story: it is the only explanation for the power that music holds in the life of the young. I do think this was true of the generations before mine. I have asked my own parents. But it was different when we came along. Our parents were the grooving boomers. It was felt, in your heart, and with your music, that you were always striving to catch up with them. It is entirely possible that we failed to achieve the necessary rebellion against our parents because of the deathless power of their record collection. We are the forerunners of those infants today, dressed in Joy Division Babygros, who live at home for ever. My family moved from north London to rural Norfolk at the end of the 80s, around the time that Peter Mayle published A Year in Provence and many people were swapping their city houses for old barns in the middle of nowhere. My parents were both self-employed. My mother owned a vintage clothing shop called Arsenic and Old Lace, which she transferred from London to a small Norfolk town, renaming it Past Caring. My father was a journalist and went on to establish the world's leading magazine about potatoes: Potato Review. We left London in a snowdrift in February 1988 and drove our own removal van. If you look at our village, Guestwick, on Wikipedia today it says simply: 'Guestwick lies far from any high roads.' At our small primary in a neighbouring village – just 53 pupils – I was champion of a game called crab football, where players scuttled about, chest to the sky, on hands and feet, slamming a sponge ball into the wall. The strange possessiveness over music, in the lives of the young, is complex and rooted in a sense of the emerging self. Even without a generation gap, you will still try to find your own. By 1991, things had changed for me: I was attending a girls' private secondary school 20 miles away in Norwich, on one of those assisted places that Tony Blair would go on to abolish. High on exam results, and low on the kind of jollity that generally surrounds girls' schools in the popular imagination – school musicals, tuck shops, hockey – Norwich high school was a dour place. I was a tall, rather fat child with a single, thin plait that I did on Tuesdays and slept in the rest of the week. My individuality was marked out only by non-regulation, cherry-red Dr Martens shoes. I was very academic, and so tired out by my 6 am start for school, for seven years, that I never once did my homework at home. I completed it all in the library at lunchtime. After-school activities were out of the question, as there was only one bus home at 4pm. My mood was downbeat, but to be fair, so was everyone's. I came of age in the 90s, and I must say I have a bit of a problem with the 90s, because I hate them. My biggest problem with the decade was something I discovered I shared with the musician Liz Phair, writer of the cult record Exile in Guyville, when I interviewed her 30 years later. When she spoke of it, the room span, and I felt the full force of the past: 90s irony. No one lucky enough to have come of age in a different decade can truly understand 90s irony, and just how caustic it was. It is a taste, a smell, that cannot be picked up in historical revision of the decade and has been largely erased from social history – an entire way of living that might be summed up in the face of Mark Lamarr. In the 90s, the levels of irony in conversation among the young were exhausting. This was not communication; it was an exchange of taut, self-vetted opinion predicated on the understanding that one was not to express genuine enthusiasm about anything, even if one clearly loved it. In music – in Jarvis Cocker's pursed lips or Damon Albarn's feeling-free delivery – I felt a collective pressure to be joyless, which in retrospect seems so at odds with the flash, brash tone of the dominant musical culture. To create anything requires energy and joy, yet they all seemed so arch, so sneering, so over it. Perhaps it was fin de siècle ennui: after all, the secondhand nature of the music was lost on no one. While in pop culture, particularly in the work of the Young British Artists, the ironic pose was all part of the art, it was quite another thing to live in this dead-eyed way as an adolescent, to be unable to express pleasure just at the point your own heart and mind were trying to unfold. The irony of the 90s was a cultural straitjacket for me; a kind of spiritual death when I was trying to come alive. It drove me inside myself at a tender age, and – without really knowing it at the time – my heart burned for something else: for middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jackets and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before. My childhood obsession with Queen began in early December 1991, when I had just turned 11, after Freddie Mercury died, and ended when I went to university in October 1999. A BBC documentary was made about it – before Queen's revival but at the start of a cultural interest in fandom – possibly because it was clear to the producer, Mark Cooper, that the obsession veered into deeper (one could say darker) territory than many teenage obsessions, and therefore provided an unsettling, comic extreme against which viewers could measure their own experience. My own independent musical life began one night when I heard Queen's posthumous single These are the Days of Our Lives, sitting in front of Top of the Pops. I felt something within myself ignite when I looked up to see Freddie Mercury's cheeky, emaciated face in monochrome. While it was clearly the start of something for me – the start of the person I am now – it is entirely probable that the energy was driven by the sense of having just missed the boat, just missed the person. This is an energy, full of strange longing, that has driven my whole life. A modern audience will struggle to understand how unpopular Queen were in the 90s. Through the continued power of the music press, who hated them, and a barely disguised homophobic distaste, they were written out of music history. In my scrapbook, I had a cutting from a broadsheet list of rock star earnings in 1992. It put Brian May at £1m per annum and Roger Taylor at a very modest £500,000 (John Deacon, a good investor, got a cool £2m and Freddie was down for £0 because he was dead). The Ben Elton musical We Will Rock You was the start of a gigantic change in their fortunes and, after the appalling 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen were making £40m a year. But when I was a child, no one spoke of the band. I met Taylor in 2011, for the piece which follows, and the band was not yet at the peak of their revival, still slightly bemused by the change in fortune and suspicious of the sudden critical praise. In the 90s, Queen were so unfashionable that I ran my obsession with some shame around even my closest friends. God forbid I would have played them a song, or showed them one of my many VHS tapes. This secrecy produced a kind of intensity that makes me rather uncomfortable now. By the time I was an adult – certainly by the time I was a journalist and sent to interview Taylor by Mark Ellen, in my first job at The Word – Queen felt more like old flames around whom were clustered the shadow, the memory, of all sorts of stronger feelings: shame, neurosis and love. Always meet your heroes, I say: it'll help you get over them. When I interviewed Taylor, I had years of distance from the raw, painful times of yearning and I was a professional hack, yet the tone of this piece is unlike my others: oddly tender and involved. There is barely disguised eroticism in my descriptions – his wet hair, and my weird inference that he'd just got up – which I wasn't aware of at the time. I interviewed him for the Guardian years later, in another of his big houses, and it's the only interview I've ever done where I finished my questions 25 minutes early and stared at the clock in panic. I rushed my questions, transported into a place of urgency and tension that may or may not have been outwardly obvious, perhaps because on some level I will always love him, and there will always be something getting in the way. It was early December 1991, I'd just turned 11 and had no interest whatsoever in the charts. Pop music felt like growing up – it was vaguely embarrassing, to be honest, a bit like body hair. But as I sat in front of Top of the Pops that night, pretending not to be watching, it wasn't 2 Unlimited or Lisa Stansfield that caught my attention, or Simply Red with For Your Babies. It was a black-and-white video of a painfully thin man with big teeth wearing a patchwork waistcoat and singing a song called These are the Days of Our Lives. The thick cake makeup, the bird-like nose – Mercury looked like Joel Grey out of Cabaret. His frailty was at odds with his movement – he kept throwing his arms out in little bursts of energy, as though constrained by his own body. And he was grinning. What struck me about the video was its extraordinary lightness of touch. Here was an extremely sad song, yet the band communicated with little nods and smiles, as though they were having some private joke. I felt my skin prickle. I recognised Mercury from the front page of the local paper a few days earlier and retrieved it from the bin. I didn't know what Aids was (but I knew all about 'gay' because of our Joe Orton phase). A Freudian analyst might have sensed the two great mysteries of life – sex and death – colliding for an 11-year-old in the figure of Queen's frontman. Whatever, I went into overdrive, collecting newspaper cuttings, charity leaflets, red ribbons; tapes and videos followed, many from a local car boot sale. I struggled with Queen's image. My cheeks burned at the presence of Mercury's leather-clad crotch and onstage dry-humping, but for every overblown sexual gesture, there was a softer side – Brian May in his high-waisted jeans and too-short jacket, Roger Taylor acting up for the cameras, John Deacon with his bifro, looking painfully uncomfortable. This band was a really, really strange mixture. They were outrageous, yet they were straight; they were famously arrogant, but they spoke with soft, kind voices. The music was full of energy but often strangely unemotional, and I simply couldn't believe – as I worked my way through 20 years of hard rock, Byronesque storytelling, funk, disco, vaudeville, flamenco, pop and various alarming lapses of taste – that it all came out of the same four people. At first, I didn't pay much attention to Roger Taylor – he always seemed to be flashing his teeth or flicking his sunglasses – but by the age of 15, he had become the throbbing centre of my world. He had a social conscience, which I liked in a man, and he'd do strange, idealistic things, like donate cash to Manchester United in a bid to hold off the planned Murdoch takeover. He wrote a few genuinely decent songs, including, as I later discovered, that first one that pulled me in, These are the Days of Our Lives. Taylor was also the most 'available' member of the band, with a prolific, if chart-dodging, solo career. Between 1988 and 1998, he completed five solo projects. He was clearly making no money from them, but took himself out on the circuit anyway, playing tiny venues like the Waterfront in Norwich. Surprisingly, there were literally packs of teenagers in the front row of these gigs, most of them screaming girls of 18 or so. Taylor had always been good-looking – I once made a lino-cut of his face – but looking back, I wonder whether those girls had also been touched by the story of a band they'd 'only just missed', and inspired by the idea of wistful, independent discovery. 'I want him to know, even just for a matter of seconds, that I actually exist,' I wrote in my diary at 15. It's an odd experience reading over those journals now (there are seven of them) and recognising certain aspects of oneself but at the same time nothing at all. I wrote three or four letters to Taylor himself, care of the Queen fanclub – awkward, carefully wrought things which fell somewhere between Jane Austen and dull, academic analysis of his music (inexplicably, he never replied). Eleven am, Saturday 25 June 2011. Roger Taylor's house in Cornwall. The gates open. I pass the indoor swimming pool with a vague sense of children's limbs happily splashing about within (the three members of Queen have 14 kids between them) and the row of wellies lined up at the front door. Standing in Taylor's front room, I study the Japanese lacquered piano (the far east was always big with Queen) and the strange, spherical ship's clock on the coffee table, its numbers magnified by a thick glass face. I hear the familiar 'Rod Stewart after 20 Bensons gone posh' voice in the corridor. I'd love to say that I fall on the carpet in a swoon when Roger Taylor enters the room, but that's not the way it happens. The fact is, if you really loved your pop star, you'll have used a hell of a lot of intellectual energy building an astonishingly accurate picture of them. Years later, it puts you on an equal footing somehow; I certainly know him better than he knows me. He's got the casual rock-star-at-home look (jeans, white shirt and goatee), his hair is wet (I like to think he's just got up) and he has just the demeanour I pictured (relaxed, unflappable but faintly serious). He too has been fully apprised of my previous Queen obsession. It's taken me four months to pin him down for this interview. A hand shoots out: 'So lovely to meet you at last!' (We've met before but he doesn't know that. My brother and I followed him into the Plaza Cinema in Truro in 1998 and sat through the whole of Godzilla – a terrible film – just to be near him. We got an autograph afterwards.) Do you ever have that thing, I find myself saying when we're seated, where you go into a shop and there's a Queen song playing, and even though you know all the music like the back of your hand, you actually can't place which song is it? It's almost too familiar? 'I have that,' he says. 'It takes me a few seconds. I have a flash of 'God, which one is that?' Absolutely – it's almost like you know it too well, and there's so much of it.' I tell him Brian May's theory on Queen and advertising – that the Beatles should have allowed their music to be used on TV. 'I think he's right. I think it was naive of them. It's great to be part of the wallpaper of life – there's no shame in it. It's like bands who refuse to go on iTunes. Don't stand in front of the train, you're not going to stop it. If the music is in the air around people, it will get to them. What more could you want? There's a whole generation of very young kids that love Queen now.' Why is that? 'Because they relate to something in Freddie. He really didn't care, did he? He gave every molecule of himself.' I ask him about Queen's relationship with the press. 'We stopped talking to them in the late 70s because it was counterproductive, like banging your head against a wall. We decided: we don't need to be targets any more, we're already successful, the people like us and that'll do me – and maybe you'll all catch up one day.' The print media, he says, 'wasn't working as a promotional tool', so they turned to TV and radio. I've lost count of the number of people who've told me the recent acclaimed documentary on the BBC changed their minds about Queen, as though it was some independent exercise in historical revision. In fact, it was produced by superfan and comedian Rhys Thomas (who appeared on Celebrity Mastermind with Queen as his specialist subject) working closely with the band and featured very few talking heads and some rare footage from the Brian May archives. It wasn't drastically different from all the other documentaries Queen have made, but suddenly people were ready to watch it. 'I find it very cheering, the way tastes have changed towards us,' he says. 'People are much more broad-minded than they ever were before. I find it hilarious that one of the most anticipated acts at Glastonbury is the Wombles. People in this country have a great sense of humour and they're much less po-faced than they were in the past. Glastonbury took itself so seriously, it was so politically correct, and then Dame Shirl comes out on Sunday afternoon and that's actually what the people want. There is room for everything. It's only a bloody record!' Queen's final two albums, The Miracle and Innuendo, were the twin peaks of their achievement. Knowing Mercury was ill, the band decided to share all writing credits, and split all royalties, for the first time in their career. Then they turned into a kind of Fort Knox, decamping to a quiet studio in Switzerland, away from the growing paparazzi interest in his health, and recorded as much as they could against the clock. In those albums you can hear both the tremendous urgency and the strange, cocoon-like warmth of their final months together. When I listen to these songs now, I still feel like someone's putting a bicycle pump between my ribs and blasting me with air. The band were in their early 40s when it ended. 'I put my energies into organising that concert,' Taylor tells me, meaning the Freddie Mercury tribute at Wembley. 'Deciding what we would play, and persuading people to take part. It came off OK in the end, I think.' Personal inquiries are met with genuine surprise. When I ask Taylor how he felt when his musical career was ended in its prime, he goes: 'I suppose you're right, I was quite young …' Oddly enough, their fondest memories from the entire 20-year life of the band are those final weeks, tucked away working on the last album. 'We became very enclosed,' says Taylor, 'very focused, and we were in our own little world.' Our time is up. 'I've got to go and unveil a statue,' Taylor says, standing. Of himself? 'God, no. It's a drummer, though – a weird expressionist thing. I thought it would be a laugh. It's about 18ft high …' With the first band you love as a child, you experience something that adult life will never allow – a prolonged period absorbing one music to the exclusion of all others, the highs and lows, the moments of genius and the terrible errors of judgment. Records, videos and biographies merge until the voices of the band become as familiar as your own. I don't play much Queen at all these days, but it's all still there, especially the humour of it, in an image of Freddie on stage in his tiny, tiny shorts, a column of steam riding from his head. What I've taken away is the joy of recognising, and indulging, the start of these full-on musical love affairs whenever they decide to seize you. What happened on hearing that first Queen track, These Are the Days of Our Lives, nearly 20 years ago, has happened half a dozen times since, with songs by other artists – the gut recognition, familiarity and excitement rolled into one, the twang of your heartstring and the fierce desire to find out more. It's the musical equivalent of eyes meeting across a crowded room. Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell, Jesus Was a Cross Maker by Judee Sill – it will keep on happening, and the best thing is you never know when it's going to strike next. I take myself down to Lemon Street in Truro. In the centre of the town square, next to Marks & Spencer, a black tarpaulin is stretched over a strangely shaped, angular structure, with a growing crowd around it. Fifty drummers appear from nowhere, dressed like morris dancers and beating up a storm. In true English folk tradition, someone in the middle of the throng is holding a horse's skull on a stick and snapping its jaws. Taylor stands on a scaffold, next to a man from the Eden Project. The latter makes a speech about how drumming is appropriate to Cornwall, 'battered as it is by the sea and storms', adding that Roger Taylor is the perfect person to unveil this piece of art, 'a local boy who went out into the world and marched to his own beat'. Taylor steps down, pulls the tarpaulin back slowly and reveals … a naked man, cast in tin, poised atop a model of the world and beating a drum. Someone in the crowd wolf-whistles. The Queen drummer is supplied with a long stick, which he uses to beat the statue's tin drum solemnly, three times. The crowd cheers. Men of a Certain Age by Kate Mossman will be published by Nine Eight Books on 3 April (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Independent
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
London's oldest art fair marks 40th year with new works by celebrated British artists
Art fans spilled out of Somerset House as they tried to get their hands on a new work by renowned British print artist David Shrigley at the London Original Print Fair on Thursday (20 March). Now celebrating its 40th year, the fair saw iconic pieces by Picasso, Hockney, Warhol, Basquiat, Joan Miró and Tracey Emin hang walls away from Shrigley's 'I Will Not Allow The Dark Skies To Affect Me' – a yellow chick in his signature childlike style. The fair's anniversary exhibition, Prints from Private Collections: 40 years of Print Collecting, saw some 1,200 works from more than 40 exhibitors displayed in the rooms of Somerset House, with galleries bringing collections inclusive of everything from British Modernism to Indian printmaking to the walls. New work by Peter Blake – the legendary pop artist who co-created The Beatles' iconic Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – was unveiled at the fair by CCA Galleries. Elsewhere for music lovers, works by Radiohead's Thom Yorke were hung by Tin Man Art alongside pieces by the band's celebrated artwork designer Stanley Donwood, including the abstract album cover for OK Computer. For the Prints from Private Collections anniversary display, returning gallery Abbott and Holder collaborated with the Imperial War Museum to present a spotlight exhibition, 'The Great War: Britain's Efforts and Ideals'. The collection, previously held in storage at the Imperial War Museum, showcased original prints commissioned in 1917 from eighteen artists, inspired by the industry and values of wartime Britain. It had been more than 100 years since a commercial gallery had exhibited the lithographs. The London Print Fair itself is of historical note. Launched in 1985, the event holds the title for the city's oldest art fair. Its director of 38 years, Helen Rosslyn, told The Independent the fair launched because print dealers mostly didn't have shops or galleries to display in, so founder Gordon Cooke partnered with the Royal Academy of Arts (the fair's home until 2020) to host 16 exhibitors. 'It was a little stockroom, really,' she said. 'From that, it's just kept growing as people got more comfortable about buying prints.' Art consumers may once have looked down their noses at purchasing prints, thinking of the works as more like photocopies than an edition carefully created by the artist. But Rosslyn says this couldn't be more wrong. 'Printmaking is quite collaborative,' she explained. 'You get an artist and they will find a printmaker who's a specialist in the business of printing. They'll tell them the right inks, the right paper, and the relationship between a printer and an artist might go on for 40 years,' she said. 'Prints are original artworks because the artist always anticipated making an addition,' Rosslyn said while explaining the difference between a print and a copy. 'They aren't just a reproduction or something artists have made as a painting,' the art fair director added. 'It dates right back to [Albrecht] Dürer's day. He realised that if he did a great painting it would get stuck in somebody rich's house. Whereas, if he made a woodcut, just the simply carpenter could buy [a print] with a week's wages.' Addressing the print market's place in the art world, Rosslyn continued: 'I sort of like to think of prints as a well kept secret. But a lot of galleries are now setting up 'editions' wings. They're recognising that not only do prints bring in more people who can afford to buy art but it's a stable way of selling and collecting in a steady market.' It's also one of the only ways you can own a Picasso work for under £10,000 a piece.
