Auctioneer Martin Hughes said the more niche records can go for big sums of money
As Oasis return to sell-out stadium gigs and slip dresses with platform shoes are everywhere, it is clear to see resurgence of 90s.
And auctioneer Martin Hughes, a music specialist at Wessex Auction Rooms in Wiltshire, said this has made vinyl from that decade also rise in price.
Mr Hughes said albums from the 90s are “the mot popular with buyers right now”, driven by a surge in nostalgia for the decade, he said.
“The likelihood of finding a Beatles record worth more than £10 is pretty slim these days. You’re better off looking for anything released from 1993 onward, even Gloria Estefan, or The Beautiful South – their Greatest Hits album is worth £150,” he added.
Speaking to BBC Radio Bristol’s John Darvall, Mr Hughes said as well as 90s albums, he has also found gems in unusual places.
“I was searching through a pile of records sent in, and found an album by an obscure Bristol band called Folkal Point.
“You would definitely walk past it but it’s a £1,200 album because it sold no copies at the time.
“If you’re a folk collector, you start to go after these records that nobody else has got because you like to show them off to your friends,” he said.
The popularity of vinyl records has increased in recent years
What should you look for?
Age doesn’t necessarily equal value, or even having things signed.
“I get unbelievable amounts of emails from people who have signed Beatles albums but so many of them were signed by managers so there aren’t that many that are genuine,” Mr Hughes said.
“The better the condition the more valuable it will be, but never write off something that isn’t great condition.
“In some genres like reggae and punk, which are very collectable genres, it’s so rare you’ll find them in lovely condition.
“I sold two warped demo discs by The Who, they were unplayable and they made £80 each, just because someone wanted to own them.
“The hottest thing right now is the 90s. I’m 43 so it’s my generation, it’s the nostalgia buying that drives so many areas of collectables.
“Oasis as an obvious example, forgetting that they got back together.
“They sold tons of records, but nobody was buying the vinyl back then, so unless you were a mega fan you’d get the CDs.
“The original pressings of their 90s material for example, their first two albums in decent condition are going to be north of £100 each.”
Amar Singh Sethi says there are “so many other genres and ideas” South Asian filmmakers can explore
“I used to steal money from my parents, buy films, keep them under my bed and hide them away – films were very much my thing from day dot.”
Amar Singh Sethi’s directorial debut has played at dozens of film festivals across the world, including the Short Film Corner at Cannes.
Bus Driver examines unconscious bias in its tale of a man caught in the middle of a terrorist stand-off on a London bus.
Sethi told the BBC’s Rena Annobil there was a “lot of room” to explore themes in a variety of genres when telling stories about South Asians.
He wrote and directed Bus Driver, and worked alongside Berkshire-based filmmakers including associate producers Dr Parvinder Shergill and Andrew St Maur, and music composer Ardie Son, to bring it to fruition.
Previously Sethi, 39, from Northwood, helmed music videos for his band, studied method acting, went to the National Film and Television School, and edited TV programmes.
“I guess I’ve accumulated a few skillsets which is useful for a film director,” he says.
Allow Google YouTube content?
This article contains content provided by Google YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read and before accepting. To view this content choose ‘accept and continue’.
The notion of Bus Driver came to Sethi as he thought about the repercussions on British Asians following terrorist attacks in London.
“We were perceived a little differently,” he explains.
“With these occurrences in the world we do have some sort of prejudice, and it was just asking that question deep down.
“That’s what sparked me to put a situation on a bus whereby you the viewer are looking at these people, and you’re trying to figure out what’s happened.”
Making the short film was strenuous, but worth it, he recalls.
“You’re in a bus first of all, and it was the hottest day of that year.
“Then you had 20 people on that bus, plus extras, so that was difficult.”
Amar Singh Sethi
Sethi recently finished the first draft of the script for his first feature film
Sethi says watching Indian films “played a big part” in his younger days, citing the acting of Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan.
Though he also remembers the first time he saw The Godfather, which he calls a “phenomenal piece of filmmaking”.
“It was about the Italians in New York, and I always felt with the immigration that happens in this country, we’ve got so many stories to tell about South Asians and we haven’t explored that just yet,” he says.
“There’s so many other genres and ideas we can play with and showcase to the world.”
Amar Singh Sethi
Bus Driver examines unconscious bias in its tale of a man caught in a terrorist stand-off
Sethi’s second short film Sweaty Hands is now showing at festivals, and he is currently putting the finishing touches to his third.
He also recently finished the first draft of the script for his first feature film.
“I’m going a little underground with our South Asian community in terms of the elements of greed, prostitution, and immigration,” he teases.
“Really dark areas, some truths that I want to just pull out. I might get slapped on the wrist for it.”
In the meantime the director has advice for any budding filmmakers who may want to follow in his footsteps.
“It’s really about finding the network around you, the right people,” he suggests.
“Get rid of the naysayers and get it off the ground. You’ve got to be really pragmatic about picking up a camera or starting work on a film.”
Lili Myers, the widow of Hairy Biker Dave, said she could not watch the final series of her husband’s cookery show following his death from cancer last year.
Myers, who was one half of the TV duo along with Si King, died aged 66 shortly after the airing of their final series during which they explored the UK’s west coast.
Ahead of a re-run, Mrs Myers said filming during his treatment had helped him regain his “sense of self” amid the many hospital appointments and physical changes like hair loss.
“What a superhuman effort he made to finish the series. But also, I’ll never forget the look on his face once filming was done. He knew it would be his last,” she said.
When she was told the series was scheduled to run again, Mrs Myers said her “stomach filled with butterflies”.
The pair had been together for nearly 20 years.
Family handout
Lili Myers said Dave always considered her first when making decisions
She remembered long talks about whether he should film the series, because he was concerned about maximising their time with each other.
“He said, ‘look, there’s this project, and if you don’t want me to do it, I won’t do it,’” Mrs Myers said.
“‘I know that this eats up from our time, and I really wouldn’t like to deprive you of anything.’
“He always considered me first.”
‘Feel himself again’
Mrs Myers said she encouraged her husband to do it “because it meant so much to him”.
“Being under treatment, he had a sense of losing his identity, his hair loss,” she said.
“Can you imagine? He was known for his hair and all of a sudden, this treatment took his hair away.”
Myers’ sense of taste changed which meant he could not “feel the same pleasure” eating food as he had done before.
His wife said: “Filming this series for him, I felt that it would make him feel himself again.
“Make him feel that he had not lost anything, that he was valuable, that he was whole and everything was normal again.”
Family photo
Lili and Dave Myers were together for nearly 20 years
King, Dave and Mrs Myers watched the first episode together when in aired in early February 2024.
“That was the first, the only episode that I watched,” Mrs Myers said.
“I couldn’t watch the rest of it because afterwards he became ill and it was very difficult to watch.”
Myers died later that month, to an outpouring of grief.
Since his passing, Myers’ friends and family have organised Dave Day and Dave Day 2, during which thousands of bikers travel from London to Myers’s home town of Barrow, raising money for charity.
This year’s event has already raised thousands of pounds for NSPCC Childline and CancerCare North Lancashire and south Cumbria.
Georgina King (right) said her mum Judy died suddenly when she was taking a nap
A woman from Shrewsbury has vowed to increase awareness of heart disease after her family was left “completely rocked” when her mother died suddenly in her sleep.
Georgina King’s mum Judy King, 57, was found dead in April after saying she was not feeling well and was going to bed “for an hour or two”.
She suffered with symptoms for years, Georgina said, but it was only after her death when doctors discovered she had ischaemic heart disease and died from a heart attack.
“It has completely rocked our family,” she said.
She described her mum as a “phenomenal” woman who loved her children and grandchildren.
“All she wanted to do was spend time with us – I was with my mum every day, I loved her so much,” Georgina said.
Her mum’s symptoms included pain in her shoulders, swelling in her legs, indigestion, heart burn, dizziness and heart palpitations.
She went to see her GP a number of times, Georgina added, but she was never diagnosed with ischaemic heart disease and her symptoms got progressively worse.
“It was extremely sudden, we had no indication this was going to happen,” she said. “She just went to bed for a nap in the daytime and that was that.”
Georgina King
Georgina King said she wanted to ensure her mother’s memory lived on
Ischaemic heart disease, also known as coronary heart disease, affects 2.3 million people in the UK, according to the British Heart Foundation.
It happens when the coronary arteries become narrowed by fatty material, which can lead to the heart not getting enough blood.
Georgina said she wanted to raise awareness of the symptoms and urged anyone who might suspect they had the illness to push the doctors for a heart exam.
“I don’t want this to keep happening to families, absolutely not,” she added. “If people even have one or two of these symptoms – go and insist your heart is checked.”
A family fun day is due to be held in Judy’s memory at the Red Lion pub in Bomere Heath on 16 August, with proceeds going towards the British Heart Foundation.
Georgina, who organised the event, said: “I want to keep my mum’s name alive as much as I can and just raise as much awareness as I can.”
The festival (pictured in a previous year) is free to all, say the organisers
One of the organisers of a two-day event celebrating traditional and modern South Asian culture says it is “not just about a particular community”.
This weekend’s Southampton Mela Festival will showcase work from communities across the Hampshire city, including Chinese dragons and African drummers, says Dahlia Jamil, chief executive of Art Asia.
“Life is quite challenging for everyone but particularly people of certain faiths and ethnicities – and by that I mean white people as well as non-white people,” she tells the BBC.
About 20,000 festival-goers are expected to attend the music and arts event at Hoglands Park.
Dahlia Jamil says it is important that the festival is free
Art Asia works across Southampton and the wider region running classes in South Asian music and dance, putting on other performances and demonstrations as well as the Mela Festival.
Ms Jamil has been organising the now two-day event for more than 20 years.
Making it free is “so important” and “brings all communities together”, she says.
“You may have a certain heritage but this is where you are going to be living, working, engaging,” she says, adding that “if you do not mix or if everybody does not talk to, or speak to everyone… the world will become more isolated”.
“For me, working in the arts, it is so important that I use it as a tool not only to engage but to enhance and build up tolerance of people.”
Dr Pooja Angra says Art Asia has always worked with diverse communities
Art Asia’s Dr Pooja Angra says the “multicultural element is one thing that I enjoy the most at Southampton Mela”.
Dr Angra, who trained in Indian classical music at the University of Delhi, will be performing at the event, playing a selection of Bollywood and Sufi music.
“What I really like about Southampton Mela is that although the focus is on South Asian music, it has created a special stage for musicians around the globe,” she says.
“We have always been working with diverse communities – African, Chinese – this year we are working with the Mexican community, flamenco artists, so it’s a wide array of musicians and art forms.”
An award-winning artist brought together a community to create a patchwork blanket using petals from two National Trust gardens.
Salma Zulfiqar invited school pupils and people from marginalised communities to create patches for the biodiversity blanket made from pressed and dried flowers from Packwood House and Baddesley Clinton on the border of Solihull and Warwickshire.
“We had almost 100 people working on this, so each piece you see if a reflection of their learning in the workshops that we did,” she said.
Ms Zulfiqar worked with Packwood’s head gardener over the last six months to gather, dry and press flowers for the project.
“We collected lots of flowers from the grounds which have medicinal value, and used them in the workshops to create the sections, which we call petals,” she said.
“We wanted the blanket to reflect all of the beautiful flowers you can find at Packwood and help people learn about their value.
“I worked with young women from around the area and it gave them an enjoyable experience and help bring them together as a community.”
A National Trust spokesperson said the flowers which were selected from the gardens were chosen because they are “useful as well as beautiful”.
“Examples of this are pressed catkins from hazel plants – corylus avellena which produce edible hazelnuts and pressed hellebore flowers which are the source of compounds which are being researched as potential future medicines,” they added.
The spring after my A-levels was not going the way I planned. I was 19, hadn’t got the required grades for any of my university choices and hadn’t saved for a gap year. My friends were off enjoying their new lives and I was stuck at home in Essex with my disappointed parents, doing occasional temp work.
Then I read Join Me by the writer and comedian Danny Wallace. I’d enjoyed another book, co-written by him, Are You Dave Gorman?. I found this joyous and silly project, about grownups stumbling their way through their own lives, comforting when I had no direction. So when a friend recommended Join Me, I thought it would be a giggle too; I didn’t realise it would change my life.
The book was more or less about how Wallace inadvertently started a “positivity cult” after posting an ad in a London newspaper that simply said “Join me”. Soon, letters started pouring in. He decided to use these people for good by rallying them to commit random acts of kindness each week. It was the mid-2000s and I spent a lot of time on internet forums. Some people started to talk about the group. The concept appealed, and I duly joined in.
Forum members organised regular real-life Join Me meets, where they would hang out in the pub for most of the day before doing random acts of kindness, such as giving a present to a stranger. I’d been to a couple and, in June 2004, took the train to London for a meet-up on Soho’s Golden Square.
I was always apprehensive about meeting a bunch of strangers I had only spoken to online. One of the first people to approach me was an unassuming, bespectacled, kind-looking young man wearing an awful green jacket. He offered me a homemade Join Me badge – Badge-It! machines were very popular at the time – and we didn’t speak again. We continued chatting on the forum, though, and I ran into him at meets in Brighton and Edinburgh.
Then a few months later, after a night out, I drunkenly started a new thread on the forum, posting that I thought he was quite fit. It was pretty cringe. His reply was something along the lines of: “Erm, thank you?” In the sober light of day we both ignored it.
skip past newsletter promotion
after newsletter promotion
Then on Good Friday 2005, I went to a meet in Nottingham, where he lived. It was the first time we’d met in person since my post, and as we moved from the pub to a club, he yelled out my name, shouted: “I like you, you’re my favourite person!” and ran up to hold my hand. We kissed – and it was the start of the rest of my life.
We texted, and I travelled back to Nottingham and went to a pub quiz with him, then a bowling date, where we had a proper, more sober kiss. After a month of dating, I moved in; five years later we got married.
During that time, I did my resits and got better grades, but I’d met so many people from Join Me who had taken different paths that I realised I didn’t need university at all. I got a job on the local council and made my life in Nottinghamshire with him.
We’ve been married 15 years now. We have a beautiful house, an assortment of cats, fish, sea monkeys and ants, and an amazing 12-year-old son who is the best person I’ve ever met. We still have a tattered copy of Join Me on our bookshelf, and I know of at least 20 human beings who exist because their parents met in that forum.
I am so grateful to Danny Wallace for those silly projects, and particularly how they brought this amazing, kind, funny – and, yes, still quite fit – man into my life.
I am obsessed with sharks. Fifty years on from Jaws, and for me no film can touch it. I trawl YouTube for unspeakable footage. On a recent holiday to France, I made my nonplussed household watch every shark documentary on National Geographic. I’ll even make time for guff like Jaws 4 or Sharknado 5: Global Swarming. I’m metaphorically chumming the water at every opportunity. Every so often, something shows up.
Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters (ITV1, Wednesday 16 July, 9pm) sees seven public figures with a fear of sharks mercilessly pushed into the water to swim with some. Say no more – I’m hooked. The victims – sorry, participants – include Lenny Henry, Lucy Punch, Ross Noble and the bassist from McFly. I like some of these people very much, and hope they don’t mind that I would love them to be ripped in half and devoured in high definition, thrashing about in a vortex of reddening water. It’s nothing personal.
It’s also unlikely, since the show is being aired. (Unless they started with eight contestants.) We are, post-Jaws, more ecologically conscious. There would be massive complaints if the show presented the sharks as primeval nightmare fuel, even though that’s what they are, what ITV wants them to be and what we want them to be. It feels somehow subversive when the consistently hilarious Lucy Punch announces, “I don’t love sharks. I think they’re savage tubes of teeth.”
The show knows that’s why we love them. You can feel it straining against its moral imperative to educate us as to why these beasts are mostly harmless, necessary and misunderstood. “Sharks are the custodians of the sea,” an expert posits at one point. “They take care of the sick, dying and injured.” I imagine this is the same way I “take care of” all the burgers at a barbecue, or foam shrimps at a pick ’n’ mix; I don’t picture the sharks in a Florence Nightingale cap. But the programme doesn’t elaborate, so who’s to say.
In the first hour alone, the celebs experience a rattling encounter with bulls, an alarming flirtation with stingrays, and a frenzy of lemons. They’re mostly uncaged – which doesn’t mean they’re all in the same boat. Paralympian Ade Adepitan does everything the others do with twice the level of physical challenge, while actor Helen George has a phobia of water itself, and hasn’t got in past her knees in 20 years. McFly clearly isn’t afraid of anything, and probably only said he was so he could have a free diving holiday.
I do wonder what the sharks make of this. Can they feel the weight of all our psychic projections? Is that why they don’t sleep? In that sense, Celebrity Infested Waters is a brilliantly cheeky subtitle, flipping the POV. Fame is the opposite of being a shark, really. Irrationally beloved, a lot of celebrities are awful once you understand them.
Rachel Riley and Ade Adepitan with the other celebs in Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters. Photograph: ITV
“This is the realest thing I’ve ever done – and I’ve done panto in Lewisham” quips Henry as the sharks circle. The actors and comedians are pretty charming, and banter gamely on boats, as they overcome their aversion. But it’s George in whom we’re invested. She looks unwell. It’s a reminder that true fear is not visually dramatic. It’s a tense sickness that grips, a private experience of trying to keep an ego from completely fragmenting. I find her panic attack in a cage more affecting and real than any amount of screaming, and I hope she’s OK.
I’m sure she’s heading for epiphany, Punch will learn to love her tubes, and Rachel Riley will be sudoku-ing with a pyjama shark at the end of five episodes. Most people don’t want to stop being afraid of sharks, though. The more convenient our lives become, the more we yearn to imagine overwhelming forces. There’s a paradoxical vitality to it. This truth in no way undermines the importance of marine protections, curbing man’s barbarism, or our commercial predation of the natural world. I’m always on the animals’ side.
Happily – and without spoilers – I can reveal that one of the celebrities does get bitten by a shark in the first episode, and there is a lot of screaming, so everyone’s a winner.
Six ribs broken in 14 places. Three breaks in the lower pelvis. Right and left ankle broken. Left tibia broken. Left wrist fractured. Left toes, three breaks. Right clavicle broken. Right shoulder blade cracked. Eye socket, jaw, mandible, all broken. Major laceration back of head. Lung collapsed. Liver pierced from rib bone. The inventory of Jeremy Renner’s injuries, documented by the twice Oscar-nominated movie star himself, was exhaustive. It was a miracle that the actor had survived; he had no right to. Renner had been crushed by his own 14,000lb (6,350kg) snowplough on New Year’s Day 2023. A neighbour who helped him at the scene believes he died momentarily. So does Renner. He tells me it was a very special moment.
“What I experienced when I passed was this collective divinity and beautiful, powerful peace. It is the most exhilarating peace you could ever feel. It’s the highest adrenaline rush. Everything stopped … maybe for 30 seconds, maybe a minute. It was definitive for me. It all made perfect sense.” Does he believe in God? “No. My dad’s a theologist and I studied all religions growing up, so I steer away from religions.”
Today, Renner is sitting in front of me in a London hotel, very much alive, looking fit, flawless and grateful. He’s written a memoir, My Next Breath. It’s not simply the story of surviving against all odds, it’s the story of a man who found a new sense of purpose in extremis. “Being here to talk about my book is so different from having to talk about Mission: Impossible!” he says before he’s even sat down. What’s the difference? “Well, we’d be talking about stunts and the joy of being in a big action movie with one of the biggest stars around, Tom Cruise.”
However much enthusiasm he tries to muster for chatting about the Mission: Impossible franchise, it’s obvious which subject he prefers. “The big difference is fiction and nonfiction. I have a real issue now with fiction. I don’t have much time in my life for it, having come back from such a pretty harrowing experience of real reality. I have to focus on reality even though I play make-believe for a living. I have to really believe in my recovery to walk again right and to breathe again right and to love and … experience … and …” He trails off, a fog of words disappearing into the ether.
Has that created an existential crisis – being an actor who doesn’t want to act? “I had a battle with that, because a year ago my real battle was with just walking, right? I had to focus so much energy just on walking.” He mumbles some more – think Elvis in Vegas. I catch half-sentences about making series two and three of the Mayor of Kingstown, in which he plays rock-hard powerbroker Mike McLusky, learning to trust his body again, getting used to the real world.
Renner posts a selfie from his hospital bed days after his accident in January 2023. Photograph: Jeremy Renner Instagram
Renner is a classic mumblecore actor. Not quite the full Brando, but he’s good. In films it gives him an easy naturalism and, often, a scary authenticity. In an interview situation, when you’re hanging on to every word, it can be frustrating. It’s not surprising that he was cast as a superhero in The Avengers films and its spin-off TV series Hawkeye. He looks like one – small, strong, compact; a nine-volt battery of a man. In so many movies, he plays the toughest in a group of toughies. Despite his size, he’s the one whom the big guy messes with at his peril. Renner’s characters are often reckless adrenaline junkies on the cusp of crazy.
He is the first person to admit that despite huge success playing these rock-hard superheroes, rock-hard military men (The Hurt Locker, which earned him a best actor Oscar nomination in 2010), rock-hard criminals (The Town, which won him a best supporting Oscar nomination a year later), rock-hard black ops agents (The Bourne Legacy) and rock-hard analysts (Mission: Impossible), he wasn’t the happiest of bunnies. He often grumbled about his work, hated being away from his daughter Ava, and had recently been involved in a humiliating public divorce in which all sorts of allegations were slung at him.
For most of the time, he just wanted to be at home relaxing with his huge extended family (Renner is the oldest of seven siblings), his friends, and most of all Ava. Which, ironically, is what he had been doing when the accident happened. He had driven over from his former home in the Hollywood Hills to his residence near Reno, Nevada, which he calls Camp Renner. This was where the family would meet to mark special occasions and enjoy skiing and snowboarding.
The six-acre estate at Lake Tahoe sits 7,300ft above sea level on a private road off the Mount Rose Highway. Renner renovated the property himself after buying it in 2012 (he has had a lucrative and satisfying sideline in renovations – or Rennervations, as he calls them – throughout his acting career).
Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian
On 30 December 2022, the Tahoe Daily Tribune reported that there could be up to 5ft of snow and the forecast had been upgraded to a winter storm with gusts possibly exceeding 100mph for Sierra ridges. By 31 December, they had no mobile phone service and no internet at Camp Renner, and they were snowed in. But with the help of his tank-like snowcat, they were still hoping to ski on New Year’s Day. The snowcat is an industrial snow remover – a cab sits above six sets of heavy wheels and two sets of galvanised steel tracks made up of 76 blades that extend outward beyond the body of the vehicle.
It was 6am when Renner jumped into the snowcat. He was hoping to clear the driveway and dig out the parked vehicles. It was a big job, so he asked his 27-year-old nephew Alex to help him. Once they were done with the driveway, they’d be fine – the main road had already been ploughed. They had cleared most of the snow when Renner got out of the snowcat to have a word with Alex. That’s when the vehicle began to slide on the icy asphalt. Renner realised he hadn’t put the brake on. The snowcat was heading straight for Alex, who was trapped between the monster machine and a pickup truck. The only chance to save his nephew was to leap across the snowcat’s 3ft metal tracks and up into the cab and hit the stop button. He remembers shouting, “Not today, motherfucker”, as he thought Alex was about to be crushed to death. The response of an action hero.
Renner missed the cab. He was catapulted forward, off the spinning metal tracks, on to the ice. The snowcat continued to charge forward, and over him. “There came terrible crunching sounds as 14,000lb of galvanised steel machinery slowly, inexorably, monotonously, ground over my body. It was a horrifying soundtrack,” he writes in My Next Breath. “Skull, jaw, cheekbones, molars; fibula, tibia, lungs, eye sockets, cranium, pelvis, ulna, legs, arms, skin; crack, snap, crack, squeeze, crack. More sounds: a ringing in the ears, as if a large-calibre gun had unloaded next to my head. A sting of bright white in my eyes – I am blinded by a coruscating lightning, a lightning that signals the break of my orbital bone, causing my left eyeball to violently burst out of my skull.”
It felt like an eternity, but within a few seconds the snowcat had passed over him. It was still surging forward, but Alex had managed to get out of its way. Would the snowcat have hit Alex if he’d not intervened? “It’s hard to say. You’ve not got time to make a rational decision. You just do it. The worst scenario is that he is crushed. So I just had to act. There was no way I was going to take that risk and see my nephew’s head on the ground cut in half. No chance. I’m not doing that. I’m not taking the chance, so that’s why I’d do it again in two seconds.”
Renner’s still not sure how he survived. So many factors played a part. He cites the Lamaze breathing class he went to aged 12 with his mother when she was pregnant; he went on to use the technique in auditions or when he was stressed. Renner used to have a placard on the wall in his apartment saying “Don’t forget to breathe”. But at the time of the accident, the act of doing so was excruciating. As he struggled for oxygen, carbon dioxide built up in his lungs and bloodstream, and he felt that he was drowning. On the recording of his neighbour’s emergency call you can hear Renner trying to breathe. Each guttural groan sounds like a death rattle. One technique he used was to repeat the expression “hookers, whores and hamburgers” in a mantra-like way, because the huffing of the “H” forced him to work his lungs.
His two neighbours, Rich Kovach and Barb Fletcher, whom he had never met before, stayed with him, keeping him alive as he lay in a pool of blood. Alex sat on his haunches, holding up Renner’s smashed arm to prevent it flopping into his crushed rib cage and punctured lung and stopping him from breathing. Renner’s left eye had landed on the ice; he could see it with the eye that was still in its socket. (Amazingly, he could also still see with the eye that was hanging out.) Dark thoughts began to intrude. “Am I going to live like I’m in some kind of petri dish, a fucking science experiment? Will I just be a brain inside a ruined body? A vegetable.” And yet part of him thought if he could just ease the cramp, he’d be able to walk back to the house.
Meanwhile, Fletcher held his head and kept talking to him, desperate for him not to lose consciousness. “Just keep breathing,” she told him. “Just take shallow breaths. Stay with us. Keep your eyes open.” It was Fletcher who was holding him when he went clammy and his skin turned green-grey.
Renner tells me today that so much of it was down to willpower. “I was bullying my body into thinking it wasn’t that bad and my mind was overcoming the greatest odds it’s ever come up against. My mind was saying, ‘Nah!’ It was part stubbornness. ‘I don’t want to lose this battle, this game’, but the deeper part, the zoomed-out part, is I had so much to live for. I had a bunch of people waiting for me to go skiing!” He smiles. He knows it was a ridiculous thing to be thinking, but it kept him going. “I didn’t want to let them down. That became such a big thing.”
Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian
But, of course, there was more to it than willpower. Last year, he released his second album of largely self-penned songs. Love and Titanium is about the accident, and so called because these are another two things that have helped him pull through – the love of family and friends, and the titanium that has helped fix all those broken bones. He was also extremely lucky. Nobody gave him much hope at the time – Alex, Kovach and Fletcher, the medical team who helicoptered him to hospital, the paramedic who pierced his chest cavity to enable him to breathe more easily, all thought he was a goner. “That guy who impaled my chest to release the pressure was a friend of a friend, and he called my friend after he did it and he said, ‘We did the best we could.’”
Almost as amazing as his survival was the fact that he only stayed 12 days in hospital. In fact, high on morphine and fentanyl, attached to drips and unable to walk, he tried to escape far earlier. “It was the slowest breakout ever,” he says, laughing. As he talks, I’m looking him up and down for signs of damage. Nothing. Eventually I spot an elegant circle around his ankle. It looks more like a bracelet than a war wound. Is that a scar, I ask. He nods. “I have a bunch of little scars, but only from the surgery to save my body. The whole leg is titanium from the knee down to the ankle.”
Is he still in pain? “My mouth is still complete chaos.” Let’s have a look, I say. He opens wide, obligingly. “It looks fine, but when I bite down it feels as if I’m going to break all my teeth.”
As an actor, Renner was famous for his athleticism and suppleness. Like Cruise, he did his own stunts. Are there things he can no longer do? “I don’t know. In my mind no, in my body probably. I’m also 54. But my mind still thinks I’m 20.”
The first song on Love and Titanium is called Lucky Man. “One day you just wake up / And finally realise / Life is so god damn beautiful / And I ain’t got nothin’ left to lose.” Renner tells me that it took him the accident to realise just how beautiful life was. Now, he says, he wakes up and knows he’s not going to have a bad day. No day alive is a bad day. But it didn’t used to be like that.
Some people are natural celebrities. Renner is not one of them. He struggled with his fame. In the TV series Hawkeye, there’s a scene where his eponymous superhero is in a public toilet, and the man peeing next to him asks for a selfie. He says this happened to him in real life. At airports, he would often eat his meals in the toilet cubicles to avoid the public. He loathed the way some fans thought they had a right to his time whatever he was doing. And then there was the way people assumed they knew him, though they tended to talk to him as if he was the character they’d last seen him playing. He felt it was diminishing. “As a celebrity, you’re a product and you’re viewed as a bunch of different things. I might be Hawkeye to somebody, I might be this to somebody else, but I’m still a man; just a human eating spaghetti with my daughter.”
Renner in TV miniseries Hawkeye, 2021. Photograph: Chuck Zlotnick/Image supplied by Capital PicturesWith Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, 2015. Photograph: Paramount/Everett/Shutterstock
That’s all changed. He loves the way people now talk to him as Jeremy Renner, the man who survived a terrible accident. He feels people can relate to him, at last. We might not have been run over by a 14,000lb snowplough, but all of us have experienced bad luck in one form or another. “There’s a beautiful intimacy and openness and vulnerability and kindness and thoughtfulness I get from people now, instead of just taking their deserved selfie. It’s a different human exchange. I think it’s given them a pathway. They feel, ‘He’s a human just like I am.’”
skip past newsletter promotion
after newsletter promotion
I tell him that I like the honesty of his book. He writes that he was a man who was hard to love. At times he comes across as grumpy, churlish and antisocial. Has that changed? “I think all the parts of the recipe that made me are still there. But I don’t think I have much time to be grumpy now.” Why was he so grumpy? “I was dissatisfied with a lot of things in my life.” Such as? “Not having my life!” In what way? “I was the one putting all the obstacles in my way. By obstacles I mean jobs. I was wildly successful, and I wanted to take advantage of every opportunity I would get. But it wasn’t healthy for a balanced life. Four birthdays in a row I didn’t see one family member. You’re always doing amazing things – Avengers, The Bourne Legacy and all these great big movies. Awesome! But the dissatisfaction was not being with those I love.”
With Anthony Mackie in The Hurt Locker, 2008. Photograph: Ken Regan/THA/ShutterstockWith Rachel Weisz in The Bourne Legacy, 2012. Photograph: Universal/Everett/Shutterstock
Why did he keep doing it if it made him unhappy? “I knew there was going to be an ending to this stuff. So I had to put these franchises as the priority. I caught fire from The Hurt Locker and then all these great opportunities came along. It was the Academy Awards two years in a row, my mom was my date, all these great blessings, and that was great. But only when the movies came out did I really get to see my family [for the premieres]. There are 25 of us. A bus has to come and pick up the family, but I was still missing out.” And when he wasn’t making movies, he was renovating houses. “I built 26 homes in 20 years. And my music was also a priority. So I had all these things spinning. I just know where my priorities lie now, and nothing can get in their way at this point.”
Renner comes across as supremely competitive in the book. In the 1980s, his father managed a bowling alley in Modesto, California where the actor grew up. By the age of 12, he says, he was good enough to bowl against professionals in a competitive league. But that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to be the best, and when he wasn’t he went into meltdown. “Self-doubt turned into hatred, hatred into anger, anger into rage,” he writes. In the end, he walked away from bowling.
He also makes it clear that he always expects the best from those around him. When he feels disappointed by friends or family members, he’d give them a good, sharp Renner Talk, “where I challenge people to improve, to commit harder, to face their failings and be better, to not be afraid”.
He has given himself plenty of Renner Talks over the years. Throughout his 20s he challenged his fears. Anything he was frightened of, he took on, whether it was fear of success, intimacy, snakes or heights. In the case of sharks, he got a scuba diving licence, then a master diver’s licence and went swimming with them. Ultimately, he says, nothing scared him.
Is he as tough as the characters he plays? “I think I’m softer.” He mulls it over. “I’ve got my mom’s toughness. She has this inner strength, this fortitude.” What about the physical toughness? “Yeah, I get that from her as well. She was an athlete. I also have the soft, curious mind of my father.”
At times, you sound terrifying, I say. I read an interview in which he talked about having to “choke out” men when they were causing him bother. He gives me a butter-wouldn’t-melt look and giggles. “The family do like having skill sets, like the girls like to do wrist locks and know how to throw a throat punch. I’ll show them how to do these things.” But no, he says, he wouldn’t do anything violent – in fact, he does the opposite. “So if somebody is acting hysterical I just touch them, and they’re like, what happened? I get their attention by touching their throat. It’s like giving someone a hug when they’re mad at you.” And he gently taps his throat by way of illustration.
I’m a bit flummoxed. Perhaps I’m confusing him with somebody else. When I get home, I check old interviews with Renner, and sure enough there it is in a 2015 Playboy piece when he says: “This guy got really drunk and pushed Julia Stiles, my co-star [in the 2005 movie A Little Trip to Heaven]. I kindly choked him out and remedied the situation. I’ve also had to choke people out because they pushed my mom or knocked my sister down, but I’ve never felt like a badass.”
Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian
Renner is famous for outre comments. In 2015, he and Jennifer Lopez presented the best actor in a television mini-series award at the Golden Globes. Lopez offered to open the envelope. “You want me to do it? I have the nails,” she said to Renner. “You got the globes, too,” he replied, staring at her chest. While many people on social media lambasted him for the comment, he told Playboy: “Actually, Jennifer thought it was fucking funny and got a little sweaty and maybe even turned on by the whole experience. Other people started running their mouths about it. Everybody’s entitled to an opinion, but I can’t be bothered. We gave zero fucks.”
In 2019, Renner met more controversy when court custody filings became public. The actor Sonni Pacheco, 20 years his junior, filed for divorce in 2014 after they had been married for 10 months, but details of their long-running custody battle didn’t emerge till five years later. Pacheco asked for sole custody, saying Renner was an “unfit parent”. She claimed he had talked about killing her and then taking his own life, and that he had bitten Ava’s shoulder. Renner described the allegations as “dramatisations” made with a “specific goal in mind” and denied biting Ava, saying the mark was from a car seatbelt that “pinched” her.
Other people provided statements in support of Pacheco. There were claims that he had put out lines of cocaine on a bathroom counter within Ava’s reach and left her unsupervised for hours. One woman admitted to having a threesome with him, and says she saw him pass out drunk. She said she was shocked when she discovered that Ava had been in the house all the time, at one point coming down the stairs to look for him. Another said she’d seen him put a gun in his mouth and fire it at the ceiling.
In the book, he describes himself as a “cranky, cynical, grubby cat motherfucker”. We’ve heard about the crankiness. Where does the cynicism come from? Spending too long on the east coast, he says. “I think it’s where innocence gets lost or weathered. It’s like east coasters will have more of a mental toughness and their sense of humour is rougher around the edges. More aggressive. You bust each other’s balls, that kind of thing.” And what about the “grubby cat motherfucker?” He bursts out laughing. “The phrase alone makes me giggle. I don’t take myself very seriously. Whatever stress I’ve had in life I’ve tried to find a way of laughing through it. And that’s where sometimes cynicism comes out – you think, I’m just going to have a laugh at this stuff.” What stuff? “Being accused of things you’ve not done, right? That doesn’t feel good to anybody. It certainly doesn’t feel good when you’re a celebrity and it’s known to everybody.”
Are you talking about the allegations in the media at the time of the divorce? “Yeah. Yeah.” Is there any truth in them? “No, and they happen all the time. It’s all the salaciousness that happens out there. It’s clickbait, and it hurts my feelings and it dehumanises people.”
To be fair, I say, you do sound as if you were a party animal. He gives me another butter-wouldn’t-melt look. I mention the stories of threesomes, drugs and boozing. “That’s not really my style,” he says. Really? “People say whatever.” Then he starts to explain. “Look, I live a carnival-type life. I don’t live a normal life. The amount of travel I have done, always living in a suitcase.” And when he was home in LA, he says, he didn’t go out because he was too well known, so he socialised at home. “The place in LA was where I was raising my child, where everyone learned to ride a bike and swim. I also had my music there. I had my meetings there. It was my dating life. It was my club. It was my home. It was all the things that encompass someone’s life. If you meet a person and grab a pint, instead of meeting up at a pub, I’d just do it at my house. It was like an open-door policy for all my family and friends. It was great for them. So that’s not a normal home. Homes aren’t usually like that or run like that way. So that’s no longer.” The way he describes it, it was both a nursery and a night club, and sometimes little distinction was made between the two.
That’s the party lifestyle I was talking about, I say. “Yeah, yeah. Hosting. I just got tired of hosting. And all the clean-up. Hehehe! So by 2019 I was tired of all that. Covid came around and helped me bounce that all out. I just wanted to slow down.”
How did he feel when the allegations emerged? “It doesn’t matter to me what people say,” he says before the question is fully out. “They’re saying it for their own reasons and not for the right reasons or the truth. And I’m used to that, because I’m a public figure. I don’t read people’s reviews, I don’t read people’s comments. I don’t care. That’s not part of my life.”
Ava clearly means so much to him. He now has joint custody with Pacheco, and the book is dedicated to his daughter (“my lifeforce … my everything, my only thing, my number one”). I ask if he feared losing her in the custody battle. “That’s just lawyers talking. That’s lawyers arguing. The custody was easy.” And then he says something surprising. “Her mom and I get along very well, and we’re in each other’s lives. It’s lovely.” Wow, I say – I had no idea. “Yeah, yeah,” he says, enthusiastically. I’ve never read that before, I say, tell me about it. “Well that’s because it’s no one’s business. It’s no one’s business.” True, I say, but then you just read the horror stories. He softens. “It’s great. She’s got a new baby and she sends me beautiful pictures.”
Photograph: Sebastian Nevols/The Guardian
Has he currently got a partner? “No, not at the moment.” (Last year, it was reported that he was dating CC Mason, a fashion journalist 28 years his junior.) A relationship is not a priority at the moment, he says. “I’m pretty focused on my daughter and the foundation for the kids.” The foundation, also called RennerVation, provides support for at-risk children and those in foster care. Shortly before the accident, he made a Disney+ series about his project renovating old school buses to meet a community’s needs, and out of that came the nonprofit foundation.
Rather than acting, this seems now to be his life’s mission. “That’s where the accident’s really shifted my focus. I can still go to work, but my primary focus is to give back and help in any way I can. That’s way more fulfilling than anything else I’ve done, outside bringing up my own child. Being able to put a smile on these kids’ faces and share that joy with them and share the growth, I can’t think of anything more rewarding.”
He feels so much more at one with the world, he says. Take the book. The last thing the old Renner would have wanted to do is share such a traumatic experience. But the accident has led him into a different way of thinking, and now he couldn’t be happier he’s written the book. “It forced me to get out of my own way of being private and a recluse to share something.” You’ve been forced back into the real world? “Yeah. I’ve never been more connected and more open and more vulnerable and more loving. And I’ve never received more goodwill. That connection was buried deep, deep, deep in my soul, beforehand, but now it’s at the forefront. It’s all that matters to me.” He takes a deep breath – long, leisurely and content. “It’s an honour to be alive,” he says.
The owner of a multi-million pound penthouse on Park Lane, central London, has been in an eight-year legal battle with companies owned by the late Mohamed Al Fayed and his family, the BBC has found.
The dispute began as a wrangle over a legal agreement relating to the installation of a new lift more than 20 years ago.
Since then, it has escalated into a row alleging leaky roofs, botched refurbishments and claims that a noisy lift was “maliciously” run at night to disturb the penthouse owner’s sleep.
Lawyers for both parties declined to comment.
The row at the exclusive Mayfair address – documented in High Court filings – shines a light on the way some business dealings were conducted in Mohamed Al Fayed’s empire in the years before he died.
Throughout his life, he was known for his combative approach, frequently resorting to legal action to resolve disagreements.
The luxury penthouse at the centre of this dispute is owned by Alan and Rosaleen Hodson. He is a property developer whose company has built thousands of homes in south-east England.
It is on the top floor of 55 Park Lane, known as “Hyde Park Residence”, a large apartment building in a prime spot – right next to the exclusive Dorchester Hotel.
The building’s website promises “an atmosphere of warmth and calm with the best of London living”. A four-bedroom apartment is currently on sale for £8.5m.
In 2003, the Mail on Sunday described the address as having “sensational” views across Hyde Park and a “marble entrance foyer [that] has to be seen to be believed”.
However, walking past the building gives a different impression. Some might consider it a little shabby for such a premium location, with peeling paint and a missing sign above the door.
Hyde Park Residence has been owned by the Fayed family since the 1980s, through Prestige Properties (PP), a company based in Liechtenstein.
This has been “under the control and held for the benefit of” Mohamed Al Fayed’s estate and family since his death in 2023, according to the accounts of a subsidiary company filed in the UK. Al Fayed’s widow Heini Wathen-Fayed is a director of this subsidiary called Hyde Park Residence Ltd, which manages some of the apartments.
Dave M Benett/Getty Images
Al Fayed’s widow Heini Wathen-Fayed, pictured with her late husband, is a director of one of the subsidiaries which manages apartments in the building
Al Fayed’s son Dodi, who died in a car crash alongside Princess Diana in 1997, reportedly used to have a flat there.
When Mohamed Al Fayed owned Harrods, he would sometimes let managers and directors live in the block, and the neighbouring building, 60 Park Lane, which he also owned.
In 2024, the BBC spoke to 13 women who said Fayed sexually assaulted them at 60 Park Lane. Four of them said they were raped.
Leaky roofs
The first issue emerged soon after Mr Hodson bought the penthouse in 2004, according to court documents seen by the BBC.
Mr Hodson made extensive improvements to the apartment when he moved in – modifying the kitchen, upgrading the roof terraces, and putting in a new lift so he wouldn’t have to use a flight of stairs to access the property.
An agreement giving him legal ownership of his new lift – by updating his lease – wasn’t honoured by Liechtenstein-based PP, Mr Hodson claimed.
Like many large buildings, the ownership of Hyde Park Residence is complicated.
The freeholder of the building is the Grosvenor Estate, which has extensive landholdings in central London. The Al Fayed family’s company PP has the right to use it for the next 110 years.
This leasehold arrangement, though time-limited, is considered a form of ownership.
Grosvenor should have been asked for permission before these improvements were started. But permission was not requested – although it agreed in 2006 to grant permission retrospectively for a payment of £100,000, which Prestige Properties paid.
Then, in 2014, Mr Hodson began to be bothered by noise from two of the buildings’ lifts. Despite his complaints, the noise grew worse, he argued, until in 2015 the building managers agreed to suspend use of one of the troublesome lifts at night.
And in 2016, the two parties fell out further. PP demanded that Mr Hodson contribute £80,000 towards the money paid to the Grosvenor Estate, some years earlier.
The penthouse is across the road from London’s famous Hyde Park
The following year, the Hodson’s took PP and two other Fayed-controlled companies to the High Court asking for a list of grievances to be met and damages paid.
Among the issues, Mr Hodson said that he had wanted to extend the flat, adding a floor. He had spent £180,000 developing a plan, but PP denied him permission to build it, despite initially encouraging the plan – his lawyers claimed.
PP’s lawyers argued the company hadn’t given Mr Hodson permission to extend his property. They said that, as a property developer, he should have known that he wouldn’t get permission without paying PP, as the landlord, millions of pounds.
Mr Hodson said that as a result of this dispute, PP allowed people to start using a noisy lift again, disturbing his sleep, which he thought was a “malicious and deliberate” response to a letter of complaint. He said on one night the lift was used 23 times between midnight and 02:00.
He also complained of poor repair work, which he said left him with a leaky roof and damage to his roof terraces.
The dispute still hasn’t been resolved. In March this year, there was another court filing from Mr Hodson claiming “the roof is still leaking. The lift is still making excessive noise… The corridors and lobby have never been finished following refurbishment.”
Lawyers for PP argue in reply that the noise from the lift is at “acceptable levels” and deny that it was restarted maliciously. They admit water leaked but say their clients have taken all reasonable steps to stop it.
PP is counterclaiming £344,000 in ground rent, plus another £286,000 of interest and costs.
The sums are trivial compared to Mohamed Al Fayed’s wealth, estimated at £1.7bn at the time of his death. And it is remarkable that a dispute of this kind should have dragged on for so long.
But Al Fayed was known for never giving an inch to those he fell out with – and that approach seems to be continuing even after his death.
Alan Hodson, Heini Wathen-Fayed, PP, and Grosvenor Estate declined to comment.
Martin Hughes
