Category: 5. Entertainment

BBC

Michael Hunter

Hannah Laing

An 11-year-old Olly Murs superfan said he had the “best day” of his life when the singer personally greeted him during a concert.

Zak and his family waited six hours to secure their spot at the front of the crowds for the Trouble Maker’s show at Cartmel Racecourse in south Cumbria.

The youngster was moved to tears throughout the performance of Murs’ 15 years of hits tour, so much so that the singer paused his set to chat with the schoolboy before dedicating a song to him.

Zak, from Chorley, Lancashire, told BBC Radio Cumbria: “He asked me why I was crying… and I said because you’re my favourite.”

He previously joked to his mum, Catherine, about whether his hero would come and greet him as they secured their spot at the front of the stage.

“I said that’s never going to happen Zak,” Catherine explained.

“But he did. We were just in shock. We genuinely couldn’t believe it, we were gobsmacked.”

Zak said Murs kept on looking at him throughout the show because he was crying.

“He must of thought, ‘Is he ok?’,” Zak said.

“So when he finished his song he asked if he could come down… and then that’s when he started talking to me and that was the best day ever.

“He gave me a hug and took a picture and then he dedicated a song out to me.

“I love his music and how kind he is.”

After the show, the family said Murs gave them an autograph and also offered tickets to his concert at the Llangollen Pavilion in Wales.

“He is a genuine, honest, fantastic idol and role model for children,” Catherine said.

“There’s not many people who would come down and see if children are ok, or anybody in the audience.

“We are just so overwhelmed by the generosity and the kindness from everybody. It goes to show that there is a lot of kindness in this world.”

Pop star Katy Perry and actor Orlando Bloom have officially confirmed they have split, US media outlets say, six years after getting engaged.

The couple have been romantically linked since 2016 and have a four-year-old daughter.

A joint statement said “representatives have confirmed that Orlando and Katy have been shifting their relationship over the past many months to focus on co-parenting,” according to outlets including People magazine and USA Today.

“They will continue to be seen together as a family, as their shared priority is – and always will be – raising their daughter with love, stability and mutual respect.”

The statement was being released due to the “abundance of recent interest and conversation” surrounding their relationship, it added.

The pop star, 40, and the 48-year-old actor split in 2017 but got back together shortly afterwards. They got engaged on Valentine’s Day in 2019.

A year later Perry revealed she was pregnant in the music video for her single Never Worn White.

Their daughter Daisy Dove was born later that year, with Unicef announcing the news on its Instagram account. Both Perry and Bloom are goodwill ambassadors for the United Nations agency that helps children.

US singer Perry, who was previously married to Russell Brand, shot to fame in 2008 with the single I Kissed A Girl, which reached number one in the UK.

Her hits since then have included Roar, California Gurls, Firework and Never Really Over.

Bloom was previously married to Australian model Miranda Kerr, and they have a son, 14-year-old Flynn.

The British actor has starred in Pirates Of The Caribbean, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Here’s an example of fate putting you where you should be: there was a girl at the airline who said, “When you go to London, you can stay at a boarding house on Sloane Street for $6.” I did, and I remember walking down King’s Road and at the time everything was grey — the sky, the buildings and the way people dressed. All of a sudden, I see this door — it’s got a kind of canvas cover and it’s painted with lots of colours. I was like, “What the hell?” And this sound was coming from it — it turned out it was The Beatles. This was really early and I felt the hair on my arms go up, and I went in like a moth to the flame. I was mesmerised. It was a shop called Dandies, and it was owned — I found out later — by the Stones. There was a big motorcycle inside, and the clothes were like, whoa! I’d never seen anything like them before.

I spent every weekend in London, and it was very much like I lived there full time — I was immersed. I would bring the clothes I found in London back to New York for my friends. So then, in 1967, I decided to open a shop. I found a little basement in a sort of townhouse in New York, I painted the floors, added snakeskin wallpaper and furniture from the Salvation Army, and started putting the clothes in there that I was buying in London.

Norma Kamali in her first store at 229 East 53rd Street in New York. Photo courtesy of Norma Kamali

In retrospect it all seems so obvious. Form a band, plunder the Beatles’ back catalogue for riffs, guitar tabs, chord changes and song structures, then bang it out in a key that a stadium crowd could put their lungs into but which suited the subway busker, too.

The resulting success now looks so inevitable. In 1994, dance music flooded the UK charts but not everyone thought a rave DJ wearing oversized headphones and playing records counted as a gig. Some people – a vast number, it turned out – still yearned for meat-and-two-veg pop-rock with guitars and drums, and for songs played by groups. Throw in some Manc bluster, the death throes of a Tory government that had occupied Downing Street since for ever, and the first glimmers of a cooler Britannia, and hey presto: Oasis.

Even if the dates don’t quite stack up, that’s how cultural theorists tend to describe the preconditions for one of the world’s biggest ever acts, staring at them through the rear view mirror of musical history after their 2009 implosion. But luck must have played its part, as it always does, along with something more elemental to do with brotherhood and chemistry: the sparks that flew between the Gallaghers were the same sparks that lit their creative drive.

Oasis made seven studio albums, all hugely successful. The third, 1997’s Be Here Now, was released with so much fanfare and expectation that a commercial triumph was guaranteed. But it felt bloated and indulgent, and even if it wasn’t quite a parody of the group’s status and smugness, it had enough calculated familiarity to make them sound like their own tribute band. Upstart effrontery and spiky provocation are evidently hard to maintain when the millions are rolling in. Undeterred, Oasis pressed on, the music going through its motions with only the odd gem to be discovered here and there.

The first two records, though, remain magnificent. I can’t really remember (and don’t care) which is which – they were two halves of the same whole, both full of pounding, adrenalised songs that sounded great on a transistor radio and unbelievable on a proper stereo system. When most bands enter the studio, start dickering with all the toys and turn it up to 11, sonic elements usually get distorted or drowned out.

The audio clarity on Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory is astonishing – it feels as if you’re in the room with them. The lyrics are … interesting: rhyme-driven breeze block couplets for the most part, ranging from the rousing, to the mysterious, to the trippy, to the witty, to the laughable, to the moronic. And I’ve sung along with them all, at the top of my voice, especially in the car, where Oasis are the perfect in-vehicle karaoke. Maybe Noel and his studio engineers had figured this out; he always maintained that to be mega successful you need to appeal to the dudes and the squares, and a lot of the squares are motorists with cash to splurge.

In 1995, Oasis and Blur slagged each other off and slugged it out in the singles chart for the Battle of Britpop, Blur coming out on top among accusations of retail skulduggery on both sides. It made the news headlines, because this wasn’t just a popularity contest, it was a media-framed fight between rock’n’roll cats and dogs. Blur were the feline, slippery, ironic, unbiddable, enigmatic art school smart Alecs, and Oasis the muscular, barely-house-trained mutts with a bark and a bite (Suede’s Brett Anderson called Oasis “the singing plumbers”). Characterised by some as a battle for music’s very soul, Blur v Oasis was also seen as a conflict between north and south, and I probably wanted Oasis to triumph for regional rather than aesthetic reasons.

The Oasis back line came and went in the years that followed, with no noticeable effect. Most of its members turned out to be interchangeable and disposable, with fans not really caring who was beating the skins or twanging the bass. In essence, Oasis are the brothers Gallagher, like the twin stars of Sirius, pulsing in the firmament, forever revolving around each other in captured orbit but never able to embrace.

Liam was the couldn’t-give-a-toss gobshite, with not so much a potty mouth as the oral equivalent of a sewage works for a large metropolitan area, and that was OK because he had the cockiness and looks to back it up. He also had a fantastic voice: all tonsil, adenoid, teeth and tongue, loud enough to crowd-surf to the back of a stadium, sharp and sneery enough to enunciate. Noel took the role of scheming mastermind and ace guitarist. It was his idea to conquer the planet and his compositions that would do it. When he stepped into the rehearsal room of his kid brother’s wannabe outfit, he found a shambles, and he gave them material, discipline and direction. That’s the received wisdom, at least – he couldn’t have done it without a frontman like Liam.

The brothers’ obscenity-ridden slander was a joint enterprise, tearing into other artists and bands with merciless and sometimes hilarious savagery, calling out banality, mediocrity and inability with a refreshing lack of caution. But for all of Liam’s bladed comments and boorish behaviour there was something funny and even innocent about him. Noel, by comparison, seemed wily and defensive; the role of lovable arsehole never came as naturally to him as it did to his younger sibling.

Across two decades the weird psychodrama of their fraternal dynamic has been hard to keep up with. Noel stormed off more than once, sometimes returning to the lineup when only the diehard aficionados knew he’d quit. And the barneys weren’t just artistic flouncing or creative hissy fits, they were proper brawls with weaponised tambourines, guitars and cricket bats. It felt tiresome on occasions, especially as Oasis’s significance waned and cultural sensibilities shifted, but undoubtedly it’s one of the elements that make the planned reunion so compelling.

Because the enmity can’t simply have melted away, can it? There was genuine bad blood between Noel and Liam, which found expression through genuine violence. It’s not impossible to imagine the upcoming tour abandoned on day one, with the brothers in separate luxury hotels, one soothing a bruised fist with a packet of frozen peas, the other with a cartoon rib-eye steak on his face taking the sting out of a shiner.

But when Oasis do finally appear together after a 16-year absence, fans will be back on each other’s shoulders or arm in arm, singing gnomic phrases and occasional nonsense, united by some irresistible bond. If they play Acquiesce – the verses sung by Liam, the choruses by Noel – it’s interesting to wonder what silent thoughts might pass between the warring siblings when they get to the bit about needing and believing in each other. The roar of the crowd, hymning back the lyrics, will be telling them it’s true.

From the Thierry Mugler suit he got married in to his costumes from the Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane era, David Bowie’s most iconic looks will be available for fans to see up close as the V&A museum opens its David Bowie Centre on 13 September.

Part of the V&A’s wider archival project, the V&A East Storehouse, the Bowie archive comprises more than 90,000 items – which won’t all be on display at once. Instead, in details revealed today, visitors will be able to order up items to look at closely, while V&A archivists and star curators will make selections to go on display in a series of rotating showcases. Tickets will be free.

Nile Rodgers, the Chic bandleader and guitarist who worked with Bowie on the hit album Let’s Dance, has curated one of these areas, with items including correspondence between the two, studio images taken by Peter Gabriel during the making of Bowie’s Rodgers-assisted 1993 album Black Tie White Noise, and a bespoke suit designed by Peter Hall for the Serious Moonlight tour.

“My creative life with David Bowie provided the greatest success of his incredible career, but our friendship was just as rewarding,” Rodgers said, announcing the partnership. “Our bond was built on a love of the music that had both made and saved our lives.”

Also playing guest curators are the members of chart-topping alt-pop band the Last Dinner Party, whose selections include handwritten lyrics for the Young Americans album, studio photos by Mick Rock and – rather nerdishly – the manual for Bowie’s EMS synth, heard on the so-called Berlin trilogy of albums.

“David Bowie continues to inspire generations of artists like us to stand up for ourselves,” the band said in a joint statement. “When we first started developing ideas for TLDP, we took a similar approach to Bowie developing his Station to Station album – we had a notebook and would write words we wanted to associate with the band. It was such a thrill to explore Bowie’s archive, and see first-hand the process that went into his world-building and how he created a sense of community and belonging for those that felt like outcasts or alienated – something that’s really important to us in our work too.”

Rodgers and the band’s choices will be included in an area featuring items that are rotated every six months or so, with fresh guest curators each time.

There will also be eight other sections showcasing around 200 Bowie items curated by the V&A team in collaboration with young people from the neighbouring London boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest, with each area refreshed every few years.

These will include a look at Bowie’s unrealised projects, such as film tie-ins with the Diamond Dogs and Young Americans albums, and even a mooted adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. Other areas will spotlight iconic moments such as his 1987 Glass Spider tour, his collaborations with bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and the creation of the Ziggy Stardust persona.

There will also be an interactive installation tracing Bowie’s impact on pop cultural figures from Issey Miyake to Lady Gaga, and a film compiling live performances across his career.

What will really provoke Bowie fans’ fascination, though, is seeing objects up close, “including costumes, musical instruments, models, props and scenery” according to the V&A. Visitors will be able to book to see five items each visit, with two weeks’ notice, using the V&A’s “order an object” service. Bookings will begin in September.

More than 70,000 of the archive items are photographic prints, negatives and transparencies, and these, along with other paper-based items – “notebooks, diaries, lyrics, scripts, correspondence, project files, writings, unrealised projects, cover artwork, designs, concept drawings, fanmail and art” – will also be available to view by special appointment.

The V&A first acquired Bowie’s archive in 2023, with director Tristram Hunt promising the David Bowie Centre would be a “new sourcebook for the Bowies of tomorrow”.

He and his team will hope the centre will be a major tourist draw to its new V&A East Storehouse, which opened in May in the Olympic Park, Stratford. Like the David Bowie Centre within it, the building showcases items from the V&A’s collection, and allows visitors to book to see other items close up.

“We wanted it to feel like an immersive cabinet of curiosities,” the building’s architect Liz Diller told the Guardian. “So you land right in the middle, at the very heart of the building, flipping the usual progression from public to private.”

The Guardian’s architecture critic Oliver Wainwright said the buildings gives “a thrilling window into the sprawling stacks of our national museum of everything”, while art critic Jonathan Jones said in a five star review: “This is what the museum of the future looks like – an old idea that’s now been turned inside out, upside down, disgorging its secrets, good and bad, in an avalanche of beautiful questions, created with curiosity, generous imagination and love.”

Another V&A outpost in the Olympic Park, the more traditional gallery space of V&A East Museum, will open in spring 2026.

Sean Combs – or Puff Daddy, P Diddy or “Love”, as he has been known – was a superstar for decades. He leveraged his work as a rapper into a career as a hip-hop mogul. His parties were legendary, filled with A-list celebrities and famous for being wild.

Then, last September, he was charged with horrifyingly serious offences; one count of racketeering conspiracy, two counts of sex trafficking and two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. An eight-week trial ensued.

The Guardian breaking news reporter Anna Betts has been covering the case. She explains why the charge of racketeering – more often levied at mafia members – was brought. The court heard evidence from two women who claimed Combs had coerced them into what he called “freak offs”, and of his history of domestic violence.

Combs was found not guilty of the three most serious charges, and guilty of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. The Guardian US’s senior feature writer Andrew Lawrence tells Nosheen Iqbal about how much damage the case will do to Combs – and if the music industry is ready to reckon with the bad behaviour of its most powerful stars.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Popstar Katy Perry and actor Orlando Bloom have split, multiple media outlets reported Thursday.

Outlets including People and USA Today cited a statement that said the pair “have been shifting their relationship over the past many months to focus on co-parenting” and would continue to be seen in public with their daughter. The statement, attributed to representatives for both stars, said their priority would be raising their daughter with ”love, stability, and mutual respect.”

The statement came a week after reports of the couple’s breakup swirled ahead of the wedding of billionaire Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, which Bloom attended alone. Perry has been on a world tour.

Representatives for Perry and Bloom did not immediately respond to The Associated Press’ request for comment.

Perry, 40, and Bloom, 48, have been romantically linked since 2016. The pair split in 2017 but rekindled shortly thereafter, getting engaged on Valentine’s Day in 2019, as Perry revealed during an interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

In 2020, the pair welcomed a daughter named Daisy Dove Bloom. Perry and Bloom got UNICEF to announce the news on its Instagram account. Both are goodwill ambassadors for the United Nations agency that helps children.

Bloom and his former wife, Australian model Miranda Kerr, have a son, Flynn, who was born in 2011. Daisy is Perry’s only child.

Perry, born Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, was previously married to comedian Russell Brand.

Born and raised in California, the 13-time Grammy Award nominee helped usher in the sound of ’00s pop, quickly becoming one of the bestselling artists of all time for her campy, big, belting anthems. She has released seven studio albums, most notably 2010’s sugar-sweet “Teenage Dream.” The album produced five No. 1s that tied a record set by Michael Jackson’s 1987 album “Bad.”

Bloom, who is from Canterbury, England, is best known for his roles as the elf Legolas in “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” films as well as Will Turner in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series.