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The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Miles. review – soulful ode to the jazz genius behind Kind of Blue
Celebrity biographical dramas are ten a penny but it takes audacity for a performer to emulate the famous person in question. What elevates Miles., a tribute to jazz legend Miles Davis, is the role of musician Jay Phelps. Not only does he give a credible imitation of Davis's spare trumpet style, he also plays along convincingly to backing tapes of Kind of Blue, regarded by many as the definitive jazz album. Phelps is more than an incidental player. A constant presence in a production written and directed by Oliver Kaderbhai, Phelps plays a Davis acolyte trying to learn from the master, while the pressure of a record company advance looms over him. What was the secret ingredient, he wants to know, that turned Kind of Blue into a bestselling jazz album? How much did it depend on the collaborators, including John Coltrane and Bill Evans? Where did it fit into the musician's history of drug abuse and womanising? Now aged 32, the same as Davis at the recording in 1959, could he ever hope to achieve as much? Answering some of these questions – and evading others – is Benjamin Akintuyosi in the title role. With a raspy post-op voice gurgling up from deep in his throat, he plays Davis as sharp, forthright, hard to impress but passionate in his enthusiasms. His is a tale of musical obsession offset by a lack of money; creative innovation offset by racial prejudice. With his influences stretching to Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Debussy, as well as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and the street rhythms of Afro-Irish tap dance, Davis's musicality is more deeply felt than his Juilliard education might suggest. Kind of Blue, he says in the play, is 'my pain on a 78', an experiment he thought had failed. With projections by Colin J Smith adding to the period detail, the show is a fact-packed, reverent and loving testament to the complicated man behind a musical benchmark. At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 25 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews
News.com.au
10-08-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
What happened to Whitney Houston's fortune and properties
When Whitney Houston died in 2012, she was broke with a net worth of negative $US20 million ($A30.6 million). Nicknamed 'the Voice', the singer passed away at age 48 when she was found unconscious in a suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The music icon's cause of death was deemed 'accidental drowning, heart disease and cocaine use.' Six years before her passing, the Grammy winner faced eviction from her $8.2 million home after running up almost $1.02 million in mortgage arrears and unpaid taxes, according to The Sun. In the months before her death, it appeared Houston was being financially supported by record company Arista, which had given her an advance payment on her next album. A music industry source said just a few days before her death: 'Whitney should have Mariah Carey money, and she's flat broke.' Since her death, the 'How Will I Know' hitmaker's estate is estimated to be worth over $US100 million ($A153 million). Here's a closer look at how Houston's empire financially turned around and what became of her properties. Financial Troubles At her peak in the 1980s and '90s, Houston was the golden girl of the music industry — and one of the world's best-selling artists. She sold over 200 million albums and singles. The entertainer was able to earn up to $US30 million ($A45 million) a year from touring alone. In 1992, Houston made her acting debut as Rachel Marron in the blockbuster hit film, 'The Bodyguard'. While her salary as an actress for 'The Bodyguard' hasn't been confirmed, the artist made an impressive $US33 million ($A50.5 million) from the movie's soundtrack, 'The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album', Business Insider reports. The lead single, Houston's cover of Dolly Parton's 'I Will Always Love You' generated millions in royalties for Parton who wrote the song. However, the pop superstar — who was once a bigger seller than Madonna — blew her money just as fast than she earned it. Houston admitted she spent lavishly on drugs and partying. The National Enquirer reported that she forked out $US6,300 ($A9,600) a week on drugs. 'My business is sex, drugs and rock and roll. My friends … we have a good time,' she told US TV program 'Primetime.' Houston hired her father John as her manager, earning $A650,000 a year. John stole money from her. 'She found out about it, all the money he stole. She cut him off,' Houston's brother, Gary said. In retaliation John's entertainment company sued her for $A100 million in a breach of contract dispute. John claimed he was owed money from a business deal he had helped negotiate. The case was later thrown out. According to Celebrity Net Worth, the diva was flat broke in 2001 before she signed what was then the biggest record deal in music history — a $US100 million ($A153 million) six-album contract with Sony/Arista. The publication states 'When an artist signs a $100 million record contract, he/she does not receive the money all at once. 'An artist is paid in stages, and each payment is essentially a loan based on the success of future albums.' The 'Greatest Love of All' singer only earned $US40 million ($A61 million) of her $US100 million ($A153 million) contract because her records did not sell well. Houston ended up owing the record label nearly $US20 million ($A30.6 million). Sony/Arista owns the rights to her back catalogue. When the 'I Have Nothing' singer divorced Bobby Brown in 2007, she filed paperwork, stating that she had $US4 million ($A6.1 million) in debts/obligations, a life insurance policy worth $US300,000 ($A460,000), $US225,000 ($A345,000) in a stock portfolio, and just $US40,000 ($A61,000). At the time, Houston stated that she owned two properties: a $US6.5 million ($A9.9 million) house in New Jersey, which had a $US3.3 million ($A5 million) mortgage, and a $US1.2 million ($A1.8 million) townhouse in Atlanta, which had a $US1.05 million ($A1.6 million) mortgage. Houston also owned nearly $US2 million ($A3.06 million) worth of art and jewellery. She stated that she had roughly $US10 million ($A15.3 million) in assets and just over $USUS4 million ($A6.1 million) in debts, giving her a net worth in 2007 of $6 million ($A9.1 million). At the time of her death, the 'Step by Step' singer was completely broke and was rumoured to be asking her mentor, Clive Davis, for financial help. Her New Jersey home was close to foreclosure, and the townhouse in Atlanta has already been repossessed. Davis reportedly loaned Houston $1.2 million ($A1.8 million) to pay off debts and get clean from drugs after her divorce from Brown. Sadly, she never made the comeback everyone hoped for. Who inherited Whitney Houston's estate? Since her death, Houston's estate earned millions of dollars through increased album sales, streaming royalties, and other licensing deals. Nine months after her passing, the musician's estate generated an estimated $US40 million ($A61 million). The windfall was due to the huge spike in the singer's music sales and the release of the movie 'Sparkle,' in which she acted and executive produced. Houston's executers were able to settle most of her debts and set aside $US20 million ($A30.6 million) for her then 19-year-old daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, who inherited the music icon's estate. Three years later, Bobbi Kristina died at the age of 22 after being found unconscious in a bathtub in her Atlanta home. Her death was eerily similar to her mother's demise. After Bobbi's shock death, Houston's estate was transferred to her mother, Cissy, and her two brothers, Michael and Gary. However, Cissy later stepped down from her role, and Whitney's sister-in-law, Marion 'Pat' Houston, is the estate executor. Cissy died in 2024 at 91 years old while under hospice care for Alzheimer's disease. In 2019, the estate partnered with management company Primary Wave Music, which received a 50 per cent stake in Houston's estate, including her publishing rights, master recording revenue, name, likeness and brand. What happened to Whitney Houston's properties? New Jersey Houston purchased the New Jersey in 1993 for only $US537,000 ($A822,000) — a year after marrying Bobby Brown and giving birth to Bobbi. The late soul singer used this home as her guesthouse for 17 years, until 2010, when she sold it for $US940,000 ($A1.4 million), the New York Post reports. The five bedroom property also has a personalised built-in recording studio that Houston often used. 'The former recording studio is currently a media room, gym area, office and kitchenette but could have a multitude of uses as the soundproof glass walls provide unique possibilities,' a listing said at the time. Atlanta The Queen of Pop purchased the five-bedroom property in 2003 for $US1.38 million. She sold it five years later for $US1.2 million, just days after her divorce from Bobby Brown was finalised on April 24, 2007. Built in 2001, the luxurious home features a library, billiard and media rooms, a terrace and a mahogany bar. Outside, there's a resort-style swimming pool and spa. The sprawling mansion was where Brown filmed his 2005 reality show 'Being Bobby Brown.
Yahoo
07-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Arctic Monkeys appear to be preparing for a comeback
Arctic Monkeys appear to be teasing a reunion after establishing a new record company and changing their website.
Times
24-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Ozzy Osbourne obituary: hell-raising frontman of Black Sabbath
'Never mind the dog, beware of the owner,' read the sign on the gates of Ozzy Osbourne's Los Angeles mansion. It was intended as a joke. Yet at the height of the Black Sabbath singer's notoriety as one of rock's wildest hell-raisers the warning might have been construed as deadly serious. Osbourne's much-chronicled excesses included biting off the head of a bat on stage — he said he thought it was rubber — snorting a line of ants in a drunken contest with the lead singer of Mötley Crüe and being arrested for attempting to strangle his wife Sharon at their daughter's sixth birthday party after a five-day vodka bender. Sharon forgivingly declined to press charges on the grounds that 'the person who all but choked me to death was so far gone on drink and drugs that it wasn't him'. On tour in Texas he was arrested for urinating on the Alamo. He was wearing a dress at the time, which outraged the locals even further. He had been up drinking and taking drugs all night and Sharon, who was also his manager, had hidden his clothes in an attempt to get him to sleep it off. He simply borrowed hers instead. He also turned up to a meeting over dinner with the boss of his record company in Germany so wasted that he climbed on the table, disrobed to do a naked goose-step and concluded the performance by urinating in the chief executive's wine glass. • Hard rock pioneer Ozzy Osbourne dies aged 76 His saving grace was that much of this appalling behaviour was done with an earthy sense of humour. When given a rabies jab after biting the bat, he deadpanned that the poor creature had 'better get Ozzy shots'. When animal rights activists turned up at subsequent concerts to protest, he responded by throwing raw offal at them. His addictions at different times included dependency not only on alcohol but heroin, cocaine, LSD, barbiturates, amphetamines, cough mixture and a full cabinet of prescription drugs. At one point his doctor admitted to having prescribed him 13,000 doses of 32 different drugs in one year. He was 'more Spinal Tap than Spinal Tap', a reference to the spoof movie for which Black Sabbath were the partial inspiration. 'People would emigrate to get away from me. I was f***ing crazy,' he boasted. 'I was the guy parents loved to hate. They used to say: 'Lock up your daughters, dog, bat — Ozzy Osbourne is coming to town.'' When he fell in the shower and broke his leg, he was so out of it that he walked around for several days before he realised. Not for nothing did he give his solo albums titles such as Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman. When drink and drugs had not rendered him physically incapable, he was also a serial womaniser. Life on the road was, he said, 'a bag of dope, a gram of coke and as many chicks as I could bang'. He called them 'the spoils of war' and once bedded a Japanese groupie in his hotel room, forgetting that his wife was already asleep in the bed. When he imported the habits of the road closer to home and slept with two of his children's nannies, Sharon took to hiring male carers. Somehow he survived the drink, drugs and other vices of the rock'n'roll lifestyle to become an improbable 21st-century television star when he and his dysfunctional family were the subject of a fly-on-the-wall human soap opera. One of the most successful reality television programmes ever made, The Osbournes took to the air on MTV in 2002. In the show Ozzy appeared as a damaged but harmless cartoon character as he shambled around his home in a bathrobe, trying unsuccessfully to work the TV remote, wringing his hands over the lavatory habits of his numerous cats and dogs and reeling with exasperation as he tried to keep up with his wife and wayward children. 'I love you all but you're all f***ing mad,' he yelled at them. The family were dubbed 'the Munsters of rock' and the show, which ran for three years, transformed the one-time heavy metal prince of darkness into an almost respectable, mainstream celebrity, who went on to dine with President George W Bush and performed at Buckingham Palace to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II's golden jubilee. Over the years there were several spells in rehab but Ozzy invariable fell back into his old ways, until one therapist smartly turned the tables on him. 'Imagine you're the sober one and your wife is the alcoholic drug addict, f***ing all these guys. She's lying on the floor, she's pissed herself, she's f***ing wrecked the house — how do you think you'd cope?' the therapist asked. Osbourne admitted that he could not. It was a salutary lesson, reinforced when, as he approached 70, he realised that every one of his old drink and drug buddies was already dead. 'No one's come back and said, 'Hi, Oz, it's cooler on this side. Come and join us,'' he noted with uncharacteristic pragmatism. He referred to Sharon as The Controller, a term that combined her roles as manager, counsellor and a wife who was not afraid to read him the riot act. He credited her with having 'literally' saved his life and although at times he had a strange way of showing it, he appeared to love her deeply. When she was diagnosed in 2003 with colon cancer he was distraught. 'I remember holding her in my arms and thinking, God, let her get through the night,' he recalled. Once she had made a complete recovery, Ozzy reverted to type. The couple briefly separated in 2013 when she found he was doing drugs again and she kicked him out once more three years later when at the age of 67 began an affair with the celebrity hairstylist Michelle Pugh, 23 years his junior. In the end she took him back, as she had on every previous occasion. As incorrigible as ever, when asked after their reconciliation what was the secret to a long marriage, Osbourne retorted: 'Don't get caught with your mistress.' He is survived by Sharon. The pair wed in 1982 on America's Independence Day, a date he claimed to have chosen because he knew that otherwise he would never have remembered their anniversary. He is also survived by their three children. Aimee, an actress and musician, refused to participate in The Osbournes but her siblings, Kelly and Jack, became teenage celebrities as a result of the show. Both followed their father into rehab before re-emerging to become TV presenters. His first marriage was in 1971 to Thelma Riley; the pair met in a Birmingham nightclub. They had two children, Jessica and Louis, and he adopted her son Elliot from a previous relationship. However, in the 2011 documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne he freely admitted to having been an absentee father who could remember nothing about their childhood. He was born John Michael Osbourne in December 1948 in Aston, Birmingham, the fourth of sixth children, to Jack, a toolmaker, and Lillian (née Unitt), a factory worker. The family of eight lived cheek-by-jowl in a terraced house and Osbourne said his earliest memories were of fear. 'I've never been comfortable in my own skin. For some reason, I'm a frightened soul,' he complained. His brash public persona was a defence mechanism. School was a disaster and he suffered from undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and dyslexia. Obsessed with morbid fantasies, he dreamt about murdering his mother, burning his sister and hanging himself. He vented his frustration by shooting at his neighbour's cats with an air rifle and his first job on leaving school at 15 was in an abattoir. Music was his escape; he was entranced by the Beatles. 'I would sit for hours daydreaming — wouldn't it be great if Paul McCartney married my sister?' At the age of 17 he served six weeks in prison for robbery after his father refused to pay the fine imposed by the court. The experience behind bars scared him enough to turn him away from a life of petty crime and, given that his only accomplishment at school had been to appear in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, he resolved to become a singer. After working his way through a number of undistinguished 1960s Birmingham rock bands he ended up in Earth, who in 1969 changed their name to Black Sabbath after the Boris Karloff horror film. One of the first heavy metal bands, they had no time for fey hippie idealism. 'We were living in Birmingham,' Ozzy recalled. 'We had no money, we never had a car, we very rarely went on holiday — and suddenly we hear: 'If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair.' And we're thinking, 'This is bollocks — the only flower I'll wear is on my f***ing grave.'' Sabbath determined that the best way to make themselves different was to play louder and heavier than anyone else, helped by Osbourne's yelping vocals and the distorted sound of Tony Iommi's guitar underpinned by Bill Ward's thumping drums and the subterranean rumble of Geezer Butler's bass. The occult imagery of the band's name — reflected in album artwork and song lyrics — owed more to the hammy novels of Dennis Wheatley than any genuine connection with black magic. Nevertheless, Black Sabbath were branded as satanists, and Christian rock groups in America burnt their records. The band's breakthrough came in 1970 when the album Paranoid topped the British charts. The group released eight LPs during the Seventies, selling millions as relentlessly bludgeoning songs such as Paranoid, Iron Man and Into the Void struck a chord with disenfranchised and nihilistic teenagers who shared Osbourne's contempt for the love and peace slogans of flower power. By the mid-1970s Black Sabbath were in the grip of what Osbourne called 'rock star fever … limousines everywhere, groupies … dealers dropping by with bags of white powder'. Recording sessions consisted of 'being in the Jacuzzi all day doing cocaine and every now and then we'd get up and do a song'. • James Jackson: Goodbye Black Sabbath — you changed my life After a series of drunken fights with other band members, Osbourne was fired in 1979 and fell into a deep depression. He spent the next three months sitting in a hotel room in LA with the curtains closed as he drunk and drugged himself into oblivion. It was, he was convinced, his 'last party', and when the money ran out he planned to 'go back to Birmingham and the dole'. Enter Sharon Arden, daughter of Don, a notoriously violent music mogul with alleged mafia connections who at the time was Black Sabbath's manager. Her instructions were to broker a rapprochement between Osbourne and the band but instead she took over the management of his solo career and married him, resulting in a family feud in which father and daughter did not speak to each other for 15 years. Osbourne's solo success soon outstripped that of Black Sabbath, who soldiered on without him. Inevitably controversy followed his 1984 song Suicide Solution, which allegedly triggered a spate of teenage deaths; Osbourne was sued by three families claiming that his music was to blame for the suicide of their offspring. 'Parents have called me and said, 'When my son died of a drug overdose, your record was on the turntable.' I can't help that,' he protested with a regrettable lack of sympathy. 'These people are freaking out anyway and they need a vehicle.' When the cases were eventually dismissed, with typical poor taste Osbourne joked: 'If I wrote music for people who shot themselves after listening to my music, I wouldn't have much of a following.' He survived various health scares including a broken neck that put him a coma for eight days after he crashed a quad bike, and reunited with Black Sabbath on several occasions. He announced in 2020 that he had been given a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, and played a farewell concert with Black Sabbath at Villa Park in Birmingham weeks before he died. Looking back he characterised his life of hell-raising as 'fun, but selfish fun'. 'I think everybody would love to be the wild one for a weekend,' he said. 'I guess I just took it too far. Ozzy was the guy I created for the stage, but at the end of the day I was him 24/7.' Ozzy Osbourne, musician, was born on December 3, 1948. He died after suffering from Parkinson's disease on July 22, 2025, aged 76
