Showing results for "white" in Entertainment & Celebrities

In early 1955, Colonel Tom Parker (the manager of the number-one country music star of the day) heard that an unknown teenager from Memphis had just drawn a crowd of more than 800 people to a Texas schoolhouse and headed south to investigate. Within a matter of days, Parker was sending out telegrams and letters to promoters and booking agents: 'We have a new boy that is absolutely going to be one of the biggest things in the business in a very short time. His name is ELVIS PRESLEY.'

Ian Fraser Kilmister was born on Christmas Eve, 1945. Learning from an early age that chicks do appreciate a guy with a guitar, and inspired by the music of Elvis and Buddy Holly, Lemmy outgrew his local bands in Wales, choosing instead to head to Manchester to experience everything he could get his hands on. And he never looked back. White Line Fever, a headbanging tour of the excesses of a man being true to his music and his pleasures, offers a sometimes hilarious, often outrageous, but always highly entertaining ride with the frontman of the loudest rock band in the world.

As a member of Big in Japan, The Slits and, most famously, Siouxsie and The Banshees and The Creatures, 'Budgie' became one of the era-defining drummers in the much-mythologised post punk scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. A man and musician whose creativity and singular style came to define the goth-pop 1980s as much as any other individual, Budgie's life is both fabulously glamorous and a tawdry cautionary tale. For the first time the story of this most exalted and mysterious of bands has been told by one who survived inside the belly of the beast.

Born into a working-class Glaswegian family in the summer of 1961, TENEMENT KID begins in the district of Springburn, soon to be evacuated in Edward Heath's brutal slum clearances. Leaving school at 16 and going to work as a printers' apprentice, Bobby's rock n roll epiphany arrives like a bolt of lightning shining from Phil Lynott's mirrored pickguard at his first gig at the Apollo in Glasgow.

The Stig gets his kit off and reveals how he came to be Top Gear's iconic racing driver and so much more - including what it's like to thrash an Aston Martin DBS, train for the Army and face the terror of Jeremy Clarkson's underwear…When the Black Stig disappeared off the end of an aircraft carrier in 2003, we were introduced to The White Stig. Faster. Stranger. Harder to keep clean. And ever since, millions have wondered – who is The Man in the White Suit? They're about to find out.

If I'm going to tell the story of a life, my life, then I need to tell it warts and all. If the tale is too saccharine sweet then what can the reader take away from it? What do they learn about you? I've written everything down. The shit, the death, fun, naughtiness, addiction, laughter, laughter, laughter, some tears and lots of love and happiness. That, to me, is a better reflection of a human's life.

It's the story of how he threw himself into the joyous and idealistic world of stand-up comedy, leading to a television career, but how echoes from the past, and the thought that everyone might prefer it if he disappeared, saw him repeatedly dismantle everything around him. With a cast of well-known comedians, actors, agents and producers, Alan awkwardly navigates his life from the camaraderie of the comedy circuit via life-changing fame as TV's Jonathan Creek, to the unwelcome realisation that most people know him from a bank advert and think he's had a perm.

Joe Boyd tells of his journey through Sixties music, from tour managing Muddy Waters and Coleman Hawkins, to plugging in Bob Dylan's electric guitar while working as production manager at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, to becoming a leading record producer. His first session was Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood's "Crossroads" followed by Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny and many more.

For over 12 years, Phillipa Sage worked alongside Clarkson, Hammond and May as their PA, gofer and fixer, where she saw the boys at their best and, hilariously, at their worst. A closet petrol head, Phillipa started working in the motor industry on live events over 20 years ago and first worked with Jeremy Clarkson and Andy Wilman (formerly Top Gear and now the Grand Tour’s executive producer) in 1997.

The Blues Brothers hit theatres on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local Chicago orphanage; but Aykroyd, who conceived and wrote much of the film, had a greater mission: to honour the then-seemingly forgotten tradition of rhythm and blues, some of whose greatest artists.

Art students Gina Birch and Ana da Silva formed The Raincoats in 1977. Since the release of their seminal early records, the 'godmothers of grunge' have been revered by punk, queer, feminist and indie pop artists alike. The Raincoats reimagined the nature of experimental music and DIY design and went on to inspire Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and an entire generation of Riot Grrrl and queercore musicians.

Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, is synonymous with the Kennedy family. It is where, for a hundred years, America’s most storied political family has come to celebrate, bond, play, and grieve. It is also the setting of so many events we remember: JFK giving his presidential acceptance speech, Jackie speaking with a Life magazine reporter just days after her husband’s assassination, Senator Edward Kennedy seeking refuge after the Chappaquiddick crash, Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger tying the knot—and even Conor Kennedy courting pop star Taylor Swift.

About 50km outside of Cape Town lies the beautiful town of Stellenbosch, nestled against vineyards and blue mountains that stretch to the sky. Here reside some of South Africa’s wealthiest individuals: all male, all Afrikaans - and all stinking rich. Johann Rupert, Jannie Mouton, Markus Jooste and Christo Weise, to name a few. Julius Malema refers to them scathingly as ‘The Stellenbosch Mafia’, the very worst example of white monopoly capital. But who really are these mega-wealthy individuals, and what influence do they exert?

Rebellion always starts somewhere, and in the music world of the transgressive teen whether it be the 1960s of the 2020s, The Velvet Underground represent ground zero. Crystallizing the idea of the bohemian, urban, narcissistic art school gang, around a psychedelic rock and roll band - a stylistic idea that evolved in the rarefied environs of Andy Warhol's Factory - The Velvet Underground were the first major American rock group with a mixed gender line-up; they never smiled in photographs, wore sunglasses indoors, and in the process invented the archetype that would be copied by everyone.

Tells the story of Alex Gray, a woman possessed by several varied personalities, and who sees life through a shifting kaleidoscope of reality. The last Patrick White novel published in his lifetime, Memoirs of Many in One presents the eccentric, often fantastical recollections of the ageing actor, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray. These are ‘edited’ by the writer Patrick White, her friend and executor, who is often the target of her scorn. Witty and affecting, Memoirs reveals another side of White’s fiction even as it echoes many of the themes running through his work.

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker magazine has met this challenge more often and more successfully than any other modern American journal. Starting with its light fantastic evocations of the glamorous and the idiosyncratic in the '20s and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Marlon Brando and Richard Pryor, The New Yorker's Profiles have presented readers with a vast and brilliant portrait gallery.

From the mountains of Algeria to the squats of South London via sectarian Northern Ireland, Ten Thousand Apologies is the sordid and thrilling story of the country's most notorious cult band, Fat White Family. Loved and loathed in equal measure since their formation in 2011, the relentlessly provocative, stunningly dysfunctional 'drug band with a rock problem' have dedicated themselves to constant chaos and total creative freedom at all costs.

Arguably the most influential force in Jamaican music, Lee Perry brought Bob Marley to international stardom and collaborated with artists such as Sir Paul McCartney, The Clash and The Beastie Boys. The book delves behind the myth of Perry to give a fuller examination of his life and work through extensive interviews with family members, fellow artists, friends, lovers, enemies, as well as the man himself to present a complex portrait of a unique soul driven by unseen spiritual forces.

To Ease My Troubled Mind is a mosaic portrait collated over a year of interviews with Childish, as well as with close family, ex-girlfriends, bandmembers past and present, friends, foes, collaborators, even his therapist. It is an unflinching, yet frequently spiritual and funny portrait of an artist whose obstacle-strewn upbringing formed the backbone of his work: raised in a broken home and abused as a child, Childish was an undiagnosed dyslexic in remedial class at school who is nevertheless now Britain's most prolific and uncompromising creative force.

At the height of his initial, turn-of-the-1990's infamy as the maraca-wielding dancer with 'Madchester' giants Happy Mondays, the pop-eyed Mark Berry, forever known to the world as Bez, was visibly a danger to society. He became the so-called Chemical Generation's bug-eyed pied piper, every weekend leading millions out to oblivion and beyond, as they adopted his E-gobbling party lifestyle.