Latest news with #punkrock
The Sun
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Jock McDonald dead at 69 – Iconic Scottish musician drowns in ‘freak swimming accident'
AN iconic Scottish musician has died at the age of 69 after drowning in a "freak swimming accident". The Bollock Brothers singer Jock McDonald passed away in Bundoran, Ireland on Saturday. 2 The tragic news was confirmed by the band's drummer Pat Pattyn on social media. He wrote: "It is with great sadness in my heart, I have to bring you this terrible news. "Sadly, our singer Jock McDonald has died in Ireland, apparently a freak swimming accident. "His children asked me to tell you all via this way. His family and all the Bollock Brothers are in shock. We are going to try and give this a place, but that won't be easy. Please don't try to call us today, give us some time, please. Rest in peace, my friend. I will miss you." The Bollock Brothers were formed in 1979 and are best known for their English-language cover of Serge Gainsbourg's French song song Harley David (Son of a B***h) and Alex Harvey's Faith Healer. Tributes have flooded in for punk rock pioneer Jock on social media. One person wrote: "He was a complete one off! "He will be missed, and somewhere up amongst the stars, his spirit flies free, forever dreaming of the next brilliant idea! "My condolences to his family and band mates." Another said: "Thanks for the great moments we shared together, Jock. "I could write a book about all the crazy stories we've been through, the beautiful memories will remain forever. "Let your star shine in the sky like you always shined on stage, shine on you crazy diamond. Rest in peace, my dear friend." A third added: "We will remember you for your kindness, your friendliness, your love for Belgium and Germany, your love of football and your involvement in punk since its very beginnings. Rest in peace and thank you."
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From punk rock to gardening classes: the cemeteries getting a new lease on life
Rodney Anonymous, lead singer of the punk rock band The Dead Milkmen, has performed in venues around the world. His favorite place to play live is filled with the dead at the Laurel Hill cemetery in Philadelphia, where he used to ride his bike as a kid. The acoustics are great, and when there's a full moon, there's no place like it, the singer said. The band, whose songs include Punk Rock Girl and Bitchin' Camaro, have played at the burial grounds at least five times since 2012, and have plans to appear again next year. 'My wife and I were there for movie night and a lightbulb went off and I thought: 'Well, let me write them and ask. What's the worst that could happen? They say no and then they bury me alive?'' said Anonymous, who described the cemetery as the 'happy place' for the couple. Cemeteries nationwide are coming up with creative ways to liven up – sorry – their wide-open green spaces. From a beekeeping collective in Seattle to 'Night of Grief' karaoke in Washington DC, cemetery owners say events help them reconnect with the local community and sometimes bring in some much-needed funds. Visitors say they enjoy the cool vibe, family- and dog-friendly areas and innovative ideas. Cemeteries have always been community spaces in the United States, said David Sloane, author of Is the Cemetery Dead? and professor at the University of Southern California. Because many were public green spaces, families would come on Sundays to picnic on the grounds or take walks along the paths, he said. In the late 20th century, that collective use faded. Sloane remembers that his father, who was superintendent of Oakwood cemetery in Syracuse, New York, got a lot of backlash from the community for letting people jog through it. Sloane sees the resurgence of cemetery culture as part of a larger shift as people move away from traditional burials to cremation, and a way to bring in some income. According to the Cremation Association of North America (CANA), 61.8% of Americans chose cremation in 2024, up from 56.2% in 2020. The Canadian rate reached 76.7%, up from 73.7% in 2020, respectively. 'There's a move from a very restrictive idea to a broader sense of what's OK [to do in a cemetery],' he said. 'Instead of just a choral group in a chapel, now it's a rock group in a mausoleum.' Brian Heinz, director of horticulture and arboriculture at Spring Grove, an 180-year-old, 750-acre (300-hectare) cemetery and arboretum in Cincinnati, Ohio, said they offer community horticulture tours, container gardening and lantern-lighting ceremonies. They also collaborate with the University of Cincinnati's horticulture program, teaching plant-identification classes. Heinz said the approach of using cemetery spaces for cultural opportunities started changing in the 1980s, and then really expanded in the 2000s. At Spring Grove for 26 years, he said that as an operating burial ground, it's sometimes a delicate balance between community and cemetery. Spring Grove operates a four-car tram to give tours, and it's critical to adjust the route to accommodate the burial schedule. 'It's a little more of a challenge for the docents, because they're more structured with their script, and they have mausoleums and people and their history – the stories that they want to talk about,' he said. 'It almost pains them a bit if they're not able to get by certain people, but the drivers and the docents will check in before the tour to our office and look at the daily schedule and adjust.' In Washington DC, Laura Lyster-Mensh is the death doula-in-residence at the 33-acre Congressional cemetery, where thecformer FBI director J Edgar Hoover and former DC mayor Marion Barry are buried. As people started moving to the suburbs, it became harder to keep up the cemetery and it became unkempt and dangerous, she said. In 1997, neighbors formed the K9 Corps, whose members pay $400-$500 a year to be able to walk their dogs off-leash during specific hours. At one point, the group had a three-year waiting list, and now dues cover 25% of the cemetery's operating costs, according to the website. It saved the cemetery, Lyster-Mensh said. Now, the cemetery offers several events, including tours, death cafes and a book club entitled Tomes and Tombs. One of the biggest events is an outdoor theater night in October called Soul Strolls, where people walk by lantern light through the grounds, and people 'appear' at the graves to tell stories. Most events are free, but the Soul Strolls tickets were $40 for general admission in 2024. 'One of my favorite activities was Bad Art Day … a lot of people are weighed down by their stuff and the things that they didn't get done, their art supplies and their aspirational crafts kind of really weigh on people,' Lyster-Mensh said. 'So we had a day where we invited people to come in and dump all their drawers and boxes of craft and art supplies, and that we would all make bad art with it.' Nancy Goldenberg, CEO of Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, said the income from ticketed events like Market of the Macabre bring in some money, but it's only a small portion of the budget. The craft show, which costs $5-$10 to attend, offers vendors selling dollhouse-sized caskets and zombie Sesame Street characters. The aim of the tours and programming is to introduce people to Laurel Hill and build visibility and awareness, particularly for first-time visitors. 'It may be really cool to go see Eraserhead in a cemetery. That was such a cool event, let's go back and go to the market,' Goldenberg said. 'It's about building affinity and building an audience and having them understand the importance of this historic site in the region and to the community.' Some cemeteries have opened up to non-paying residents. At the 145-acre Evergreen Washelli in Seattle, the Catacomb Bee Collective tends to 20 beehives on site, said Madison Opp, a beekeeper and beekeeping educator. It started in 2021 with a simple phone call to the main office, she said, adding that the grounds are particularly attractive because of the flowering trees and the longer grasses. The hives are located near a bird sanctuary, far enough away from the active part of the grounds that people sometimes have a hard time finding them, she said. Beekeepers help tend the grounds and check on the hives every other week, harvesting honey once a year, she said. The hope is to offer beekeeping classes and offer honey to those saying goodbye to loved ones, a little something to offset the sadness. 'We've actually had families who specifically request a gravesite near the bees,' said Opp. 'It's really sweet.'
Daily Mail
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Iconic British rock band CANCEL tour dates after 'unexpected and catastrophic event' at one of the bandmembers' home
British punk rock band The Damned have been forced to cancel three dates on their tour after an 'unexpected and catastrophic event'. The group - currently consisting of Dave Vanian, Captain Sensible, Paul Gray, Monty Oxymoron, and Rat Scabies - will no longer be performing in Seattle, Vancouver or Portland later this week. They announced the disappointing news in a statement posted to their official social media accounts on Tuesday. It read: 'We are very sorry to have to cancel our Seattle, Portland and Vancouver shows this weekend, due to an unexpected and catastrophic event at a member of The Damned's Home. 'We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding. Refunds will be available for our two headline shows at your point of purchase.' The group still have a number of dates scheduled on the tour, which runs until the end of September, including performances in both Europe and America. MailOnline have contacted The Damned representatives for comment. It comes just a few months after the band's legendary guitarist Brian James died at the age of 70. The musician, who founded The Damned and played with Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath, passed away peacefully in early March. Brian had been one of the band's main songwriters after they shot to stardom in the 1970s, and was hailed as the writer of the UK's first ever punk single New Rose, released in 1976. A statement on his Facebook page read: 'It is with great sadness that we announce the death of one of the true pioneers of music, guitarist, songwriter, and true gentleman, Brian James.' Brian left The Damned after the release of their second album and went on to found the short-lived band Tanz Der Youth. He later formed The Lords of the New Church with his friend and fellow rocker Stiv Bators. Together they released singles such as Open Your Eyes, Dance with Me, and Method to My Madness. He then went on to The Dripping Lips and the Brian James Gang and created more solo albums. In 2022, more than forty years after the release of New Rose, The Damned reunited for a series of shows across the UK. Throughout his career, Brian worked with a number of rock 'n' roll stars including Iggy Pop, Wayne Kramer, Stewart Copeland and Cheetah Chrome. The tribute to Brian continued: 'Incessantly creative and a musical tour de force, over a career which spanned more than six decades, with his music also gracing film and television soundtracks, in addition to The Damned and The Lords of the New Church, Brian worked with a plethora of punk and rock 'n' roll's finest, from Iggy Pop to Wayne Kramer, Stewart Copeland to Cheetah Chrome. 'Most recently, more than four decades after the release of the epoch-making New Rose, the original members of The Damned reformed for a series of very special and emotional UK shows in 2022. 'With his wife Minna, son Charlie, and daughter-in-law Alicia by his side, Brian passed peacefully on Thursday 6th March 2025.' Brian was survived by his wife Minna, son Charlie, and daughter-in-law Alicia.
New York Times
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
I Don't Know if I Believe in God, but I Believe in Gospel Music
Before I began listening to gospel music about 12 years ago, I was not the most obvious candidate to become a fan of the genre. Raised by divorced parents who were not particularly religious, I didn't give much consideration to faith. Though my father was a longtime member of the Christ Temple Baptist Church — a Black congregation in Ypsilanti, Mich. — he wasn't a regular presence at Sunday service nor did he pressure me to join him when he did go. My mother, who was a nonobservant Jewish woman, spent much of her adult life criticizing what she viewed as a patriarchal religion; we never attended synagogue, and I didn't have a bar mitzvah. My mother's iconoclasm shaped my attitude toward life, including my taste in music. As a teenager I was drawn to punk rock — loud, fast, angry music that reflected my vague and indeterminate outrage at the world. I defied authority, ranting and raving against the powers that be, including cops, politicians, security guards and my teachers at school, though my defiance usually involved little more than cutting holes in my clothes and quoting song lyrics. I was a perpetually cynical and distrustful young man who believed the world's problems could be solved by my music and clothing preferences, not by organized religion. As I matured and entered my 30s, my father and I grew closer. We bonded over Donny Hathaway, Curtis Mayfield and Aretha Franklin, artists who sang love songs distinctly informed by their respective backgrounds in the Black church. These singers were my conduit to gospel. After hearing the Swan Silvertones sing 'Mary Don't You Weep' on a compilation album of early R&B and gospel groups, I was instantly hooked, and I sought out their LPs as well as records by the Davis Sisters, Marion Williams, Brother Joe May and the Blind Boys of Alabama. I was drawn to the music not because of its religious lyrics but because its rhythms and vocal harmonies moved something deep in my core. I felt the music in my soul before I had even acknowledged the existence of a soul. Each minor chord on the piano, each impassioned cry from the singer broke through my cynicism. I was carried away — if only for a few minutes. I came to understand that the music's religious spirit was inseparable from the music: Each served the other, to help us express our connection to and yearning for the ineffable, to give form to that which is unseen. When a gospel vocalist sings of faith and love of Jesus, it sounds to my ears like a higher power is pouring out of them, using the artist as an instrument. At the top of the Staple Singers' 1965 song 'Let Jesus Lead You,' for example, the band leader, Pops Staples, launches into the opening and his three children follow, creating a simple call-and-response: 'Let Jesus lead you/Let Jesus lead you/Let Jesus lead you/All the way/All the way/All the way from Earth to glory,' before Mavis Staples takes over, her voice slowly building, from mortal earth to the heavenly realms. The sound of the Staple Singers' early records is blues-influenced, trading church organs and a large chorus for a small band, stripping the music down to its raw core. But like much gospel, the Staple Singers' music hinges on a buoyant joyfulness that invites the listener to share in their exaltation. Listening to this song, I clap my hands and stomp a foot on the backbeat. My heart swells with each repetition of the refrain, and I feel myself transported to places I've never visited but that the music conjures for me: some storefront church or a down-home revival. I'm connected to a history, to a not-so-distant past that is not a part of my personal experience but is bound up in my cultural heritage. It reached into the hidden, malnourished and underserved parts of my spirit that I so often tried to repress. To paraphrase Mahalia Jackson's memorable description of gospel, the music brought good tidings and good news to my life. In a world that increasingly fosters self-interest and social isolation, gospel points me toward something more intimate, more collective. Though I don't subscribe to any particular denomination, I aspire to lead a life of curiosity, generosity and compassion — all the best hallmarks of any faith and of great gospel music. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Irish Times
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Four music books chart unconventional lives in the industry
Musicians in the pre-punk period of the mid-'70s 'aspired to artistic status ... and rock in general had a renewed sense of ambition', according to 1975: The Year the World Forgot , by Dylan Jones (Constable, £25). This generation of music acts, which included the likes of Genesis, Steely Dan, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell and Queen, was who punk rock would fight against. It aimed to replace their mature, erudite music with pared-back, stripped-down, revved-up pop songs. Jones, a prolific chronicler of pop music and the people who created it, is refuting the perception of pre-1976 being the preserve of prog rock bands such as Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 1975 was the paragon of adult pop, he writes. A year rich with masterpieces such as Blood on the Tracks (Bob Dylan), Young Americans (David Bowie), Horses (Patti Smith), The Köln Concert (Keith Jarrett), Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen), Another Green World (Brian Eno), and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Joni Mitchell). Across 21 albums, Jones smartly covers the songs and music as well as the geocultural milieu that nurtured and enveloped them. An excellent book that, thoughtfully, closes with a '75 from '75' playlist you can listen to on Spotify. READ MORE Eamon Carr: 'I found the cumulative effect of the horror stories I was reporting on from the North difficult to shake off.' Photograph: Eric Luke Pure Gold: Memorable Conversations with Remarkable People , by Eamon Carr (Merrion Press, €16.99), contains recollections of a different but no less important time, when journalists could interview people without the presence of PRs and their clipboards. Pure Gold gathers a series of interviews (culled from an assortment of mislaid cassette tapes) that Carr, a former member of Horslips and a long-established journalist, conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s with a motley crew of people. The list is as impressive as it is eclectic: Eartha Kitt, JP Dunleavy, Josephine Hart, Brenda Fricker, Shane MacGowan, Rudolf Nureyev, Jack Charlton, 'Mad' Frankie Fraser, John Mortimer and more. The collection is much more than a conversation between two people or, God forbid, a set of predictable questions that too often receive rote responses. As well as insightfully deconstructing the interview process, Carr has a knack for going off-piste, judging the mood of the interviewee and burrowing down as far as possible. Earnest indie rock bands, he writes, answered questions with quotes that 'were homogenous, interchangeable'. Not so the interviewees here, who pounced on Carr's puckish, innate curiosity with a speed that less engaged inquisitors can only dream of. Keith Donald has played with The Pogues, Van Morrison and Ronnie Drew. There is enough of a life story in Music and Mayhem , by Keith Donald (Lilliput Press, €18.95) to fill in many hours of questions and answers, but the meat, so to speak, is in the reading. The career musician, now in his 80s, is best known, perhaps, for being a member of the groundbreaking ensemble group, Moving Hearts. Donald's peaks and troughs in life are documented with assured pragmatism. 'My days are numbered' is the kind of first chapter opening sentence that sets the scene for what follows (spoiler: it isn't pretty). From trusted boundaries being broken to grasping an instinctive love of music, from being diagnosed with lifelong PTSD to embarking on, writes Donald, 'a thirty-year internal battle between attraction and revulsion, emotionally up when the drink kicked in, down when it wasn't available, the rollercoaster of addiction'. Music courses through the book, needless to say, but the 'mayhem' of the title runs it a close second, and often the two are locked in a battle for supremacy. Stitched into the fabric of each is a distinctive history of Ireland's fledgling music industry. It is one populated by showbands ('human gramophones that rehearsed and learned three new songs every week'), Moving Hearts ('unlike any band I'd played with') and shoals of business sharks and redemption. A life lived? You bet. One could say the same for US rapper Tupac Shakur (1971-1996), who is regarded not only as one of hip-hop's most influential figures but also, through his music and activism, a torchbearer for highlighting political injustice and the marginalisation of African Americans. Late rapper Tupac Shakur was shot aged 25 in 1996 in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Photograph: Al Pereira/MichaelWith the primary motivation of presenting hip-hop's most noted nonconformist, Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur , by Dean Van Nguyen (White Rabbit, £25), maintains a firm balance between placing Shakur within the context of the Black Panther movement (both of his parents were party members) and avoiding the usual biographical cliches of hero worship or downgrading unsavoury aspects of the subject's life (including a conviction in 1994 for sexual abuse). There is also much to admire about Van Nguyen's industrious, thought-provoking research, oral histories and thorough critical analysis of Shakur's significance. Those looking for a strictly linear approach will be disappointed, but anyone (Shakur fans or not) interested in hip-hop history and Black radical political ideology will, with some justification, love it. Dean Van Nguyen places Tupac Shakur within the context of the Black Panther movement. Photograph: Daragh Soden Another unconventional life is outlined in The Absence: The Memoirs of a Banshee Drummer, by Budgie, aka Peter Clarke (White Rabbit, £25). Merseyside-born Budgie studied art in nearby Liverpool, where in the mid-1970s he joined fledgling punk bands the Spitfire Boys and Big in Japan. He is best known, however, as the drummer in Siouxsie and the Banshees, which he joined in 1979 until their dissolution in 1996. Afterwards, he and Siouxsie (with whom he was romantically attached) formed The Creatures. Following their divorce in 2007, Budgie continued in music. His most recent work was a 2023 collaborative album with former Cure drummer Lol Tolhurst and Irish musician/producer Jacknife Lee. English Punk and New Wave musicians Siouxsie Sioux and Budgie feature in the Creatures' Right Now music video. Photograph:The Absence, however, is anything but an orderly trawl through back pages. Rather, it is an evocative, lyrical memoir of boyhood; from 'on the walk back to the guesthouse along the Golden Mile, my dad and I would stop to buy a takeaway of fish and chips' to remembering after-show hangers-on 'Siouxsie might play along… almost as a game, but most times she would get irritated, snap, and tell them to f*** off'. He also reflects on a doomed marriage: 'Our intense love was real, as was our intense anger and disgust'. A bold, bracing retelling of Goth beginnings and unhappy endings.
