Latest news with #Tench
Powys County Times
10-05-2025
- Powys County Times
Powys train fight man charged with Victorian era offence
A Mid Wales man has been sentenced under a Victorian era law after his actions led to a train being stopped in Welshpool. Anatolijs Zurba pleaded guilty to obstructing a train using the railway after he was involved in a fight on the Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth service on the afternoon of January 25, this year. Magistrates sitting in Welshpool today (Tuesday, May 6) were told that the offence comes under the Malicious Damage Act of 1861 and is rarely seen in courts, and at one time would have been punishable with hard labour. Helen Tench, prosecuting, explained that Zurba had been drinking with a friend in Shrewsbury that day and was on the train home when he got into an argument and struck his friend. She said train staff chose to halt the train for safety reasons at Welshpool Railway Station and Zurba was restrained by passengers before being arrested and handed over to British Transport Police. Ms Tench continued: "The victim of the assault didn't wish to take any further action. "In interview, he [Zurba] said he had been drinking that day and had had two bottles of spirits. "He was asked if he was aware of the 30-minute delay he had caused and he said 'I am now', and he said he was 'sorry', for his actions." Ms Tench added that an application for £3,764 compensation had been made by Network Rail after the train was only able to continue to Machynlleth - missing out four stops, including the end of the line at Aberystwyth - due to the delay at Welshpool. She continued: "This caused disruption to a lot of people." Rob Hanratty, defending, explained that by the time reached Machynlleth it was 38 minutes behind schedule. He continued: "My client went to Shrewsbury with his friend, and they both got a bit lairy on the train home. "He very much apologises for his behavior. He had drunk for a significant amount of the day in question. "When he was arrested, he co-operated with the police and he admitted it." Zurba, 35, of Cambrian Street in Aberystwyth, was given a six-month community order, which means he must stay out of trouble during that time, and ordered to pay £85 court costs and a £26 victim surcharge. They added that no compensation would be given to Network Rail as they failed to include a breakdown of how they had reached the amount they requested.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Yahoo
1 dead, 1 hospitalized after hit-and-run crash in Gainesville
Gainesville police arrested a driver accused of crashing into two people crossing the street. One of the victims died and the other remains hospitalized. [DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks] Police said the crash happened around 11 a.m. Monday on Academy Street. Linda Tench, 77, was pushing Phillips Adams, 61, across the street in a wheelchair in the crosswalk. Police said that is when Janet Villanueva, 29, hit both Adams and Tench before she took off from the scene. Paramedics rushed both victims to Northeast Georgia Medical Center. Adams died at the hospital and Tench is stable as of Monday night. Police have charged Villanueva with homicide by vehicle 1st degree, serious injury by motor vehicle, felony hit and run, failure to yield right of way to pedestrian in a crosswalk, driver to exercise due regard. TRENDING STORIES: It'll soon cost you more to park at the Atlanta airport Police ask for help identifying woman shot, killed in Atlanta [SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Yahoo
A judge denied a plea deal in a Belmont man's death
A second judge rejected a plea deal that would have sent a man to prison for up to 2 ½ years for allegedly dumping a Belmont man's body in a dumpster after he died. Superior Court Judge George C. Bell said that he wasn't comfortable accepting 27-year-old D'Shaun Robinson's guilty plea connected to the death of 31-year-old Andy Tench. Tench went out in the early morning hours of March 25, 2024, to celebrate his birthday at The Bar at 316, an LGBTQ-friendly bar, according to his family. He never came home. Instead, he was seen in surveillance footage leaving the bar with Robinson, Assistant District Attorney Kyle Huggins said in Mecklenburg County Superior Court on Tuesday. Robinson later told police that while he was with Tench, Tench died, and he put Tench's body in a dumpster, then went shopping using Tench's financial cards, driving Tench's car around the Charlotte area. Tench's car broke down in Union County, and Robinson abandoned it there, Huggins said. Tench's body was never recovered, and prosecutors do not have the evidence to prove that Robinson is responsible for Tench's death, Huggins added. Tench's family has asked the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to search an Anson County landfill for Tench's body, as they believe that if Robinson's story is true, Tench's body would be there. The police department so far has refused to do so. A petition asking that the landfill be searched has over 6,000 signatures. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in search warrant documents that they believe Tench was murdered, but in a statement, they said they haven't been able to corroborate claims that Tench's body is actually in the landfill. Robinson pleaded guilty to charges of identity theft and concealment of death in Tench's death, as well as second-degree burglary in an unrelated case. Had Bell accepted his plea, Robinson would have been sentenced to 17-30 months in prison and two years of supervised probation. He has already spent 362 days in the Mecklenburg County Detention Center awaiting the resolution of his case. But ultimately, after presiding over the bulk of the plea hearing, Bell was swayed by arguments from Tench's family, who urged him not to accept the plea deal. Dressed in a black t-shirt emblazoned with the words, "Justice for Andy," along with a picture of Tench's face, Tench's sister, Natasha Newman, addressed Robinson directly. "What you have done is not OK, and a little bit of jail time will not hold you accountable. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that you are very much capable of doing this to someone else," Newman said. "You should be held accountable." Newman told Bell that Robinson should receive a longer prison sentence than the one offered in the plea deal. "He deserves more time," she told Bell. "This little amount of time, it's not fair to my family. It's not fair to Andy." After hearing from Newman and a family friend, reading letters other members of Tench's family wrote and reviewing the petition, Bell said he was not comfortable proceeding with the plea, and Huggins withdrew the plea offer. Newman said afterward that she was grateful to Bell for listening to the family. "We cannot call that plea deal justice for Andy, so today we're grateful that the judge has rejected the plea, along with the state withdrawing the plea. We are hoping that this is another step forward in the right direction of getting justice for Andy," Newman said. Tracie Blanton, Tench's mother, said in an interview that she wants Robinson's case to go to trial, which has the potential for a much steeper sentence. "I'm ecstatic right now. Andy's going to get justice. We won't stop until he does," Blanton said. Bell was the second judge in recent months to reject the plea deal. In March, Superior Court Judge Craig Collins also would not proceed after hearing from Tench's family. 'I'm just not going to do this,' Collins said after reading Newman's victim-impact statement, according to The Charlotte Observer. This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Family says they will continue to seek justice for Andy Tench
New York Times
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Benmont Tench, Still a Heartbreaker, Is Carrying on Solo
Ninety pounds, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, nearly kept Benmont Tench from his destiny. It was late 1971, and Tench, a native of Gainesville, Fla., was home from college for Christmas. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, was playing a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar called Dub's, and they'd finally invited him to join them onstage. He started to load his gear into his mother's station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate and then went to grab his organ. 'I picked this thing up and it was so damn heavy,' Tench recalled. For a moment, he considered blowing the whole thing off. Instead, he heaved the Farfisa into the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the Heartbreakers. 'But it almost didn't happen,' Tench said in a recent interview, shaking his head at the memory. 'I mean, it was that close.' More than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a memory: The group ended abruptly after Petty's death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac collection of songs titled 'The Melancholy Season,' will be released on March 7. The album follows a 10-year period that included a second marriage for Tench, to the writer Alice Carbone, the birth of his first child and the loss of Petty, his longtime friend and band leader. 'Tom died, and our daughter was born three months later,' said Tench, sitting in the living room of his home in the Los Feliz neighborhood. It was a late winter afternoon, and the fine-boned, soft-spoken Tench — his neck wrapped in a blue silk ascot, his head covered by a white Borsalino — was sipping tea as sunlight passed through a large picture window and onto the lid of a 1928 Mason & Hamlin piano. 'The band, the main focus of my life since I was 19 years old, was gone,' he said. 'Losing Tom was a terrible event that blew everything up. But I was damned if I wasn't going to make another record.' Tench's former bandmate Campbell, now fronting his own group the Dirty Knobs, understands his dilemma. 'The Heartbreakers had intentions of making more records, playing more shows, we would've gone on forever,' he said in a phone interview. 'Even now, the grief is still there — but I have to keep making music, because that's my lifeblood, and it's the same with Ben. This is a whole new part of our lives that we didn't choose.' More recently, Tench has faced serious health issues. In 2023, he learned that his mouth cancer — the disease he had been dealing with for more than a decade — had spread to his jaw. 'The doctors took half my jaw out,' he said, 'took a piece from my leg, muscle and bone to rebuild it.' A series of surgeries and treatments followed into 2024, delaying the release of 'The Melancholy Season.' 'I've been letting everything heal, doing a few therapeutic exercises and trying to learn to speak more clearly, and to sing again,' Tench continued, dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief. 'It's funny, if I go to the Heartbreakers clubhouse, our old rehearsal space, after an hour or so at the piano singing, my pronunciation is much better. It just goes to show that, in my life, the answer to everything is to play.' ON A WALL in Tench's stylish 1920s Tudor, there's a large framed photograph: a post-show snapshot of a joyous Petty and the Heartbreakers, after their final gig — a sold-out concert at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2017 that capped the band's 40th anniversary tour. The group was driven by the force of Petty's personality and songs, but it was the Heartbreakers' interplay that elevated the music and the band's fortunes. Campbell and Tench, in particular, could turn Petty's raw melodies and chord progressions into soulful symphonies. 'That was the beauty of Ben and I,' Campbell said. 'Also, Ben had a technical musical knowledge that Tom and I didn't have. He could fill the space between us.' After Petty's death, Tench sought refuge in his family and in the studio, working on albums for friends like Ringo Starr and Jenny Lewis. Though he's now revered as one of rock's greatest and most prolific session musicians, for the first five years of the Heartbreakers, Petty barred him from doing any outside recording. 'It was the law for the whole band,' Tench said. 'Tom felt like the Heartbreakers had a specific sound, and he didn't want other people's records sounding like us.' It wasn't until 1981, when Jimmy Iovine, who was then the Heartbreakers' producer, brought Tench into a recording session for Bob Dylan's 'Shot of Love,' that his studio career began to take off. Tench began writing and recording with Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks, helping kick-start her solo career with 'Bella Donna.' And Petty loosened his no-session rule: 'Tom said if we were going to do sessions, they had to be a real high standard,' Tench said and chuckled. 'Well, you can't get much higher than Bob or Stevie.' Tench's instinctively tasteful playing colored radio hits and cult albums alike. The Tench touch could be felt in the sparkling harpsichord on Elvis Costello's 'Veronica,' the pulsing organ in Alanis Morissette's 'You Ougtha Know,' and on records by Don Henley, Cher, Elton John, X, Ramones and the Replacements. 'He was the first famous musician, and hero, that we got to meet and jam with when Haim was just playing around L.A. to 10 people,' Danielle Haim said. (Tench played on the group's 2013 debut.) 'He's so good at slithering around all of the other instruments, but standing out on his own.' Tench tends to defer to songwriters. 'It's really all about the songs,' he insisted. 'If you play the organ on 'Refugee,' someone says, 'Hey, that's a great record, let's get that guy!' I'm not being falsely humble. I like the way I play. I do. Especially if I'm cast right.' The producer Don Was first cast him on Bonnie Raitt's 1991 album 'Luck of the Draw' — where Tench added a halting Hammond organ to 'I Can't Make You Love Me' — and continued to use him on records by the Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson and Brian Wilson. 'Benmont has a magical sense of where to play,' Was said in an interview. 'He always supports the narrative and complements it but doesn't hinder the singer's ability to communicate. That's a rare thing. Really, it's a kind of genius.' Ironically, Tench was shut out from the session for Petty's 1989 solo album, 'Full Moon Fever.' The frontman decided to record without the Heartbreakers at the last minute, and Tench heard the news secondhand. 'It triggered my possessiveness about the band,' he said. 'But I'd been playing on all these different records with other people, and Tom needed the chance to do that, too.' By the late '80s, Tench had dug himself into a deep hole of alcohol and drug addiction. 'I was bitching to a friend about not playing on Tom's record,' Tench remembered. 'And he said, 'Great, it'll take him at least six weeks to do that, which means you've got plenty of time to go to rehab.' I did go, and I got sober, which was a blessing. If I'd wound up working on that record, I'd probably be dead.' Tench has experienced his share of rock 'n' roll loss. His closest friend in the Heartbreakers, the bassist Howie Epstein, died of a heroin overdose in 2003 at 47. Petty struggled with the drug himself in the '90s. 'Howie never came back from it. But Tom did come back,' said Tench, noting Petty's later physical struggles, including a broken hip, on the Heartbreakers' final tour. 'At the end, my belief is that he was just in too much pain, and just wanted to make it stop.' For a moment, Tench was silent, as he listened to the sound of his young daughter laughing in the other room. 'I know how fortunate I am,' he said. 'That I didn't lose myself. That I'm sitting here now, that I have a wife and child. And that I get to keep making music.' OVER THE YEARS, Tench quietly became a successful songwriter in his own right. The former Undertones frontman Feargal Sharkey had an international hit with Tench's 'You Little Thief,' while Rosanne Cash and Hal Ketchum scored country chart successes with his compositions. But Tench never pushed his material to Petty. 'Tom liked some of my songs, but it wasn't like, 'Let's cut one of yours,'' he said. 'Eventually, though, I had a collection of songs that I thought ought to be recorded and given a chance to be heard.' Tench started singing his songs during regular appearances at the Los Angeles club Largo, and in 2013, the veteran British producer Glyn Johns offered to work on a solo album. Was, who also serves as president of the Blue Note label, signed Tench, putting out his debut, 'You Should Be So Lucky,' the following year. In 2019, Johns proposed work on a follow-up album in Nashville. 'But I couldn't leave, even for a couple weeks, with an infant daughter,' Tench said. 'And then the pandemic came along.' In Los Angeles, Tench had gotten to know the multi-instrumentalist and producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen) from playing on a circuit of private jam sessions over the years. 'I needed a producer who understood songs,' Tench said. 'I needed a good drummer. And I wanted to work on analog tape.' Wilson checked all the boxes. 'I told him, if you need a drummer, you could call Ringo, dude,' Wilson said in an interview, laughing. 'I think because I'm from the South like Benmont, we have a natural rhythmic bond, an unspoken thing between us — we put it in the place where the other one wants to hear it.' The sessions for 'The Melancholy Season' took place in late 2020 and early 2021 at Wilson's studio in Topanga Canyon. The core band — Tench, Wilson and the bassist Sebastian Steinberg — worked live without a net. 'There were absolutely no computers used on this record,' Wilson noted. A few of Tench's Largo mates, like Nickel Creek's Sara Watkins, the guitarist and vocalist Jenny O. and Dawes' Taylor Goldsmith came in to add overdubs. But mostly, Tench sought to keep the record in the stripped-down vein of albums he'd long admired, like Dylan's 1967's LP 'John Wesley Harding.' 'What I like about my record is that it's not crowded, the music breathes,' Tench said. 'You can hear the words, you can hear the playing.' Earlier this month, he returned to the stage, singing for the first time since his surgeries, during a residency at New York City's Café Carlyle. Though he plans to tour behind 'The Melancholy Season,' Tench suggested that his roadwork will be limited. 'I can't be away from Catherine very long,' he said of his daughter. 'The longest I've ever been away from her is a month and that was murder. I told her, 'Kid, I love you more than music and you don't know even what that means.' But it means everything.'
