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Scotsman
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
There was only one concert to be at in Edinburgh on Saturday night and it wasn't Robbie Williams
There was only one concert to be at in Edinburgh on Saturday night and it wasn't Robbie Williams Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... contributed Many famous faces have played Scotland's only five star concert hall since it opened in 1914 including Ella Fitzgerald, The Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, and Led Zeppelin. But as magnificent as those gigs will have been I'm not sure anything can match what 400 Rock Choir members and their friends and families experienced in the Usher Hall on Saturday night. We're all still buzzing. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In celebration of her 15 years leading Rock Choir in Scotland Elaine Williamson coached her amateur singers to put on the performance of a lifetime in a beautiful venue, renowned for its excellent acoustics. I mean this was big for us. We're more normally to be found singing for runners at the Edinburgh Marathon, or in John Lewis Glasgow, raising money for the Beatson Institute. You might have seen us on the steps of The Dome at Christmastime. We don't normally have access to a dressing room. For many outdoor performances we store our bags at our feet, like penguins. From the instantly recognisable guitar riff of Guns N' Roses Sweet Child O' Mine which opened the show to the infectious 80s film theme to Flashdance (What a Feeling) which was the finale, we rocked, bopped, swayed and clicked our way through a two hour repertoire of Rock Choir's finest tunes. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad With choir members from Kirkintilloch, Glasgow West AM, Glasgow West PM, Edinburgh West Afternoon and Edinburgh Morningside Evening making up the performers, this was classic Rock Choir ambition achieved. Most of us don't read music. We love to sing but we have had no formal training. But we want to do Elaine proud so we rehearse our different harmony parts from soprano, upper alto, lower alto to bass and practise hard. Read more here: I spoke to my favourite member of Pulp and discovered they're Scottish We download the dance moves and work til we get it right. Along the way there is a lot of laughter, new friendships are formed and it's basically pure joy to be involved. See exhibit A - the video of us performing I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing by Aerosmith last Saturday. If you missed this gig we're going head to head with another pair of 90s icons when Oasis play Murrayfield next month and we sing on the Fringe. (We have a sense of humour, we're learning a Rock Choir arrangement of Roll With It). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Scotsman
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
When Rock Choir rocked the Usher Hall
There was only one concert to be at in Edinburgh on Saturday night and it wasn't Robbie Williams Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Many famous faces have played Scotland's only five star concert hall since it opened in 1914 including Ella Fitzgerald, The Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, and Led Zeppelin. But as magnificent as those gigs will have been I'm not sure anything can match what 400 Rock Choir members and their friends and families experienced in the Usher Hall on Saturday night. We're all still buzzing. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad In celebration of her 15 years leading Rock Choir in Scotland Elaine Williamson coached her amateur singers to put on the performance of a lifetime in a beautiful venue, renowned for its excellent acoustics. I mean this was big for us. We're more normally to be found singing for runners at the Edinburgh Marathon, or in John Lewis Glasgow, raising money for the Beatson Institute. You might have seen us on the steps of The Dome at Christmastime. We don't normally have access to a dressing room. For many outdoor performances we store our bags at our feet, like penguins. From the instantly recognisable guitar riff of Guns N' Roses Sweet Child O' Mine which opened the show to the infectious 80s film theme to Flashdance (What a Feeling) which was the finale, we rocked, bopped, swayed and clicked our way through a two hour repertoire of Rock Choir's finest tunes. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad With choir members from Kirkintilloch, Glasgow West AM, Glasgow West PM, Edinburgh West Afternoon and Edinburgh Morningside Evening making up the performers, this was classic Rock Choir ambition achieved. Most of us don't read music. We love to sing but we have had no formal training. But we want to do Elaine proud so we rehearse our different harmony parts from soprano, upper alto, lower alto to bass and practise hard. We download the dance moves and work til we get it right. Along the way there is a lot of laughter, new friendships are formed and it's basically pure joy to be involved. See exhibit A - the video of us performing I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing by Aerosmith last Saturday. If you missed this gig we're going head to head with another pair of 90s icons when Oasis play Murrayfield next month and we sing on the Fringe. (We have a sense of humour, we're learning a Rock Choir arrangement of Roll With It). Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
Khaleej Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
Life's like that: The life of the guardians of the newsroom
'You missed the Iftar?' Charles messaged closer to putting the newspaper to bed sometime in the past week. The CEO was talking about that night's Iftar party hosted by the group for its KT staff. The air in the office had been thick with all the euphoria that accompanied a mega night. Anamika was seen in her cabin unabashedly putting on another round of highlighter. Somya floated around in casual elegance with her maroon cardigan flapping its wings in the air she carried about herself. Ajanta and Meher had a spring in their steps when they put on their new abaya to add an Emirati touch to the evening and stilettoed many a heart as they played hide and seek in the newsroom and left in a jiffy. No sooner had Alia'a from HR barged in and shouted in her idiosyncratic high decibel to keep moving, than an eerie silence enveloped the newsroom. With just five print desk journos left behind, it felt as cold as a morgue. I felt like a lone pianist playing to a gore of zombies in the ungodly hours. I crooned the old number What a Feeling by Irene Cara a bit louder than usual. My office room occasionally turned into a concert hall when the world spined as dull as ditchwater with little tragedies reported to satiate our souls. To quote yours truly himself, night editors in the newsroom are like grave diggers; the business of tragedies keep them young and energetic. Or like a pack of bloodthirsty hyenas sniffing around for carcasses in the wild. Like kindergarten children merrily count, 10…20…30, the editors would keep counting death tolls to get higher numbers in headlines. Charles's query, 'You missed the Iftar?', immediately scrambled a flight of memories. 'No worries. Have been missing evenings since 1982,' I replied and continued with my production work. Yes, circa 1982. That's when I joined this profession, not really knowing it would wrench all my mornings and evenings, and other paraphernalia packaged with the phenomena. Was I really ready to miss out on such wow moments that inspire millions across the globe? I'm not sure. Thousands of years and millions of verses later, the literati are still mining words to glorify the sunrise and the sunset. Millions spend billions travelling to the best vantage points in the world such as Santorini in Greece, Uluru in Australia, Serengeti in Tanzania, Isle of Skye in Scotland, and Mount Bromo in Indonesia to capture the magical moments, while I sit in an obscure newsroom lecturing the difference between the colon and the semi-colon. Back in time in Mumbai where I initially worked, we closed the newsroom when the city shuttered most activities for the day — err night. Police would roam in the city to enforce the closing time for pubs and night clubs. Hungry and tired we would slither out of the press looking to grab something to eat, and a drink or two to satiate our egos. With pub doors slammed on the face, we would knock on 'auntie joints', or roadside huts where women moonshined to make a living. We would mostly make do with a few gulps of hootch and a boiled egg and make the beds on the wooden desks back in the newsroom. We were people who swam against the current all through our lives. When we went home sleepy-eyed after a night's work, we walked against a steady stream of fresh-looking officegoers. It was vice versa in the afternoon when we returned to our night jobs. We weren't there when our children went to school; we weren't there when they returned home; we weren't there to tutor them for exams. We failed to watch their progress from toddlers to teens. Gone with wind after choosing the profession were some of my long-nurtured ambitions. In Mumbai, I always wanted to master the violin at the iconic Shanmukhananda Hall, but the classes were in the evening. The night job again threw a spanner in my dream works when a Singapore film institute rejected my candidature on the ground that I wouldn't be available for all-night shoots. Social life was a big no-no as such things always happened in the evenings. Wellbeing was pushed under the mat as we slept through the mornings and slogged through the evenings when others were out and about. People would gradually stop inviting us, so concerts, ballets, poetry nights and such gala events never happened to us. Our existence has shrunk to a little bubble the profession has blown into our lives. We are prisoners of our own identities, our own thoughts, and our own device.
South China Morning Post
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Meet Succession star Brian Cox's third wife, climate activist Nicole Ansari
Brian Cox's wife Nicole Ansari is ready to shine. Photos: EPA-EFE; @nicole_ansari/Instagram TV shows and streaming video There has hardly been a bigger star on American television lately than Brian Cox, who plays media mogul Logan Roy in HBO's Succession . The 78-year-old Scottish actor, who has been in the industry for decades, found mainstream fame with the show but regrets losing his anonymity, says the Daily Mail. Naturally, there is now more attention paid to his personal life than ever, but his wife, Nicole Ansari, is ready for the spotlight. In an interview last year with The Times, the 56-year-old said, 'I've supported him for 25 years. Now it's my time.' Nicole Ansari is Brian Cox's third wife. Photo: @nicole_ansari/Instagram Indeed, Ansari is booked and busy. Per Variety, she has recently acted in the films Under the Stars , from Michelle Danner, Kat Rohrer's What a Feeling and Shireen Khaled's In the Night; now she's set to appear in her husband's directorial debut, Glenrothan . She is also collaborating with Khaled on her first feature film. Fun fact: she played Logan Roy's former mistress Sally Anne in one of the late episodes of Succession . What else do we know about the woman who stole Brian Cox's heart? Ansari was a child actress Nicole Ansari started acting when she was nine years old. Photo: @nicole_ansari/Instagram Nicole Ansari has been acting since she was nine years old, per IMDB. She rose to prominence with the German television show Tatort , after which she received her formal education at New York's famed HB Studio and Actors Studio and at the Stage School of Dance and Drama in Hamburg. Today, she is a producer as well as an actress, credited with co-producing the films Blumenthal (2014) and As Good as Dead (2010), both starring her and Cox, as well as the award-winning web series Messy. She describes herself as an 'actor-vist' Nicole Ansari is a staunch climate activist. Photo: @nicole_ansari/Instagram Ansari is a climate change activist and an advocate of human rights. She also takes pride in having turned Cox into a feminist, according to the Daily Mail. Her Emmy-winning husband admits she made him 'aware of the discrepancies and the gaps between men and women' and that he had to 'relearn everything' about feminism and the patriarchy. Ansari has also received The Vanya Exerjian Award for empowering women and girls and has supported Iran's 'Women, Life, Freedom' movement.
