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Daily Mail
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Geri Halliwell-Horner poses at Edinburgh Castle - six years after near-identical image
At first glance you might think these photos had been taken on the same day. However, they were actually six years apart as Geri Halliwell-Horner created a near identical photo during a visit to Scotland. The 52-year-old singer - better known as Ginger Spice during her time in The Spice Girls - posted a photo taken at Edinburgh Castle ahead of a book signing in the city. In the photo, she could be seen posing next to a bagpiper, decked out in a kilt at the castle. The moment came ahead of a book signing in Edinburgh and, later in the day, St Andrews, in Fife, to promote her latest book Rosie Frost: Ice on Fire. The singer had posted a video on social media ahead of her visit to Scotland on Saturday. Alongside it, she wrote: 'I can't wait to see you all in Edinburgh for my last stop on this amazing book tour for Rosie Frost Ice on Fire. 'Thank you to everyone's love and support on the book and look forward to seeing you at Topping St Andrews.' Sharing the latest photo at the castle, she wrote: 'When in Scotland...'. In a video, filmed outside the castle and posted on social media, Halliwell-Horner stood next to the kilt-clad piper, leaning on his shoulder. Addressing the camera, she said: 'Here we are in my favourite place - Edinburgh, Scotland, on the final day of the Rosie Frost tour. As she continued, she said the book stood for 'courage, power and' before the kilt-clad man ended the sentence, shouting: 'Freedom.' The video then continues with the bagpiper explaining to the singer that he is from Glasgow, adding: 'But everyone thinks I'm English.' She could also be seen introducing the piper at her book signing, referring to him as 'James 1st' in a nod to King James, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots. During the event, Halliwell-Horner said: 'Scotland has such a special place in my heart. 'Every time I've come here the reception has been just charged and amazing. It fills me with energy. 'I met a chap earlier today and I thought 'He's wonderful' and so, hey, you have James 1st, King James 1st, came after Queen Elizabeth 1st, which is quite apt and I thought 'Well, let's celebrate that.' She then turns to the interviewer on stage, asking: 'Shall we let him in? Let's let him in. His name is James.' The musician then came in playing Scotland the Brave. Horner captioned the video, writing: 'Just a regular day in Scotland with our very own James 1st.' Halliwell-Horner posed for an unmistakably similar photo outside Edinburgh Castle in 2019 ahead of the Spice Girls gig in the Scottish Capital that year. As with the latest photo, she wore a tartan skirt in muted tones along with a white, turtleneck top. She had captioned the 2019 photo writing the world Edinburgh along with a loveheart emoji. The visit to Scotland comes after Halliwell-Horner left This Morning viewers baffled when she showed off not one, but three different accents during an appearance to promote her new book. The new book - which retails from £7.99 - is the second in a trilogy that began with the 2023 bestseller Rosie Frost And The Falcon Queen. Revealing what the book is about, she told hosts Dermot O'Leary and Alison Hammond: 'Rosie Frost, she is set in present day, she's orphaned, but this is un-airbrushed orphan grieving and she's sent to an island. 'The island is a bit like Jurassic Park but for endangered animals at a school built by Queen Elizabeth I. 'She's sent there, they are all descendants of Tudors. So if you like history it's all in there. 'It's then a page-turning action adventure, and she has to find the courage to face up to bullies. 'It's the second book and she finds out her mother was murdered and wants revenge. And there's a little bit of love in there as well.' When asked if she would ever want to play the characters she has written, the noughties star replied: 'I thought I would want to play a teacher if it became a film. I do the accents for the audio book. 'You haven't got a Brummy in there, but I do some accents.' 'What accents do you do?' Alison asked, before Halliwell-Horner said: 'I had an acting accent coach there.' She then switched into a Southern American accent as she described one of the characters. 'She's like 'oh my God Alison, you got to be out of your mind'.' She then put on an Irish accent as she said: 'Then we got a Dermot, he's kind of just Dermot, 'what are you talking about?'' Finally, the singer changed into a French accent. 'Then we have Madame Lure, 'you're just so elegant. I'm so proud of you',' she said. She also recently revealed that the film adaptation of her first Rosie Frost book could be on-screen by 2027 - confirming that the 'biggest producer in Hollywood' has the rights to the series. She said: 'We're looking at the writer now to make the scripts…I get to help choose Rosie, and they're including me and they are just amazing people.'
The Independent
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
How The Face magazine turned style into an art form
A dizzying barrage of video images of late 20th-century Britain opens this celebration of one of the most influential and controversial publications of the age: The Face . Margaret Thatcher, Boy George, The Spice Girls, Oasis, Damien Hirst, you name them, are all there in Culture Shift , all set to a gleefully tacky synth-pop soundtrack that takes us straight to the moment of the magazine's launch at the dawn of the Eighties. That most scorned of decades is suddenly everywhere in art. And if Tate Britain's exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain wants to rub our noses in the grim and gritty side of the Thatcher era, this show wants to put a big celebratory smile on our faces when we're barely through the door. And in the early stages of the exhibition, at least, it's almost impossible not to succumb. Say what you like about the UK's original music, fashion and culture magazine – and it's had many detractors – it defined the brash, high gloss, unashamedly aspirational aesthetic of the early boom-and-bust era. And before just about anyone, likely even Margaret Thatcher herself, had realised there was going to be a boom-and-bust era. Founded by former NME editor Nick Logan, The Face launched as a glossy music-centred lifestyle magazine, a sort of Vogue from the street, an idea that seemed almost unimaginable at the time. Where 'rock photography' had previously been defined by gritty documentary reportage, invariably black and white, Logan put an emphasis on colour and sumptuous large format photography. This shift in production values brought about an immediate sea change in pop image-making, judging by the stunning, and hugely evocative images in the first room. Adam Ant looks positively Pre-Raphaelite clutching a rose in a 1980 image by Jill Furmanovsky. A very young Boy George looking like he's barely holding it together is captured by Derek Ridgers, while John Lydon glowers manically in a tartan suit for Sheila Rock. If Lydon had famously sneered at Sid Vicious, 'you're not a fashion model when you're a Sex Pistol', The Face effectively turned all its subjects into models, even before its shift from a glammed-up music mag to a principally fashion-focused publication. Sade on the cover of 'The Face' in 1984, as photographed by Jamie Morgan (Jamie Morgan) In 1983, Logan introduced a new wave of fashion photographers, including Robert Erdman, Mario Testino and Jamie Morgan, used to working with stylists who turned mere images into 'narratives'. 'Buffalo style', devised by Morgan and stylist Ray Petri, from a Jamaican term for 'attitude', introduced a new kind of hyper-masculine homoeroticism, with well-muscled models – both Black and white – standing foursquare to the camera in leather skirts, kilts and the shortest of shorts. The best way of promoting Black and gay emancipation, such images implied, was by demonstrating it was already happening. While The Face aimed to respond to – and lead – what was happening on the Street, the effect, from Eddie Monsoon's ecstatically zinging Neneh Cherry (1988) to Janette Beckman's wonderful snap of Run-DMC on their home street in Queens, was like looking in on some endless über-cool party. And if you felt you weren't invited, it was because you weren't working hard enough on your 'style', that great Eighties buzzword that The Face did so much to popularise. The images in the second part of the show, on the 1990s, are generally even bigger and more technically ambitious, but feel less extraordinary, perhaps because the rest of the world had caught up with The Face 's distinctive hyper style. Kurt Cobain in a dress and Beckham's six-pack dripping blood don't feel as edgy as they're intended to be. Corinne Day's England's Dreaming depicts a young woman in tight black vinyl trousers sprawled on a sofa surrounded by fag butts, tea cups and beer cans. The shot represents a Face -pioneered trend in anti-fashion photography – sometimes dubbed 'heroin chic' – yet it is still patently a fashion photograph. The arrival of digital photography around the mid-Nineties made everything possible but left the viewer feeling that nothing was that surprising. Inez & Vinoodh's For Your Pleasure (1994), which photoshops one of the duo's quirkily provocative fashion tableaux onto an existing slide of a rocket launch is without doubt technically remarkable. Yet while the wall texts describe it as 'surreal and ambiguous', it lacks the bite and edge of real Surrealism. 'Girls on Bikes (Sarf Coastin')' by Elaine Constantine from December 1997, as featured in 'The Face: Culture Shift' (Elaine Constantine) There's barely an image here that isn't brilliant on its own terms. The level of visual invention is stunning, yet the relentless pursuit of page-turning wow factor becomes monotonous. The Face set out to emancipate the reader by reviving the Sixties Mod idea of 'the face', the working class guy who is better dressed and infinitely more stylish than the city gent. Yet by identifying itself so closely with the self-regarding world of fashion, it didn't shift the culture quite as much as it could or should have done. The Face shrank from being too closely associated with the early 21st-century convergence of instant celebrities and supermodels – arguably putting itself out of business in the process. Yet its Eighties ideal of classless aspiration enabled a new kind of everyday mega-personality, typified by the Beckhams, Naomi Campbell and Harry Styles, all of whom feature in the exhibition. And at the end of the day, however much The Face tried to convince us we could all achieve street-level stardom by taking on 'style', they're all actual superstars, while the rest of us are still in the proverbial gutter, however much cool stuff we buy. 'The Face: Culture Shift' is at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 February until 18 May
