The Who’s Pete Townshend will be in New York to attend the 77th annual Tony Awards, which will air Sunday live on CBS at 8 p.m. ET.
Townshend is confirmed as a presenter on the telecast, where the cast of The Who’s Tommy is set to perform. The show has been nominated for Best Revival of a Musical, where it will compete with Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, Gutenberg! The Musical! and Merrily We Roll Along.
This isn’t Townshend’s first encounter with the Tonys. The 1993 original run of The Who’s Tommy won five Tony Awards, including Best Original Score for Townshend.
The Who’s Tommy is currently running at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre.
The Police are looking back on their hit album Synchronicity and just shared the original promotional short film used over 40 years ago to celebrate the album’s release.
“They don’t make album promo like they did in 1983,” the band shares on social media. “A burning telephone, eggs on the piano, a taxidermy goat. It’s got to be The Police.”
The almost four-minute black-and-white clip includes all of those things mentioned, as well as a dinosaur skeleton, a collage of images of the band and more, and features clips of tracks like “Walking In Your Footsteps,” “Mother” and “Synchronicity II.”
It ends with snippets of the music videos for their future #1 single, “Every Breath You Take,” and “Wrapped Around Your Finger.”
The release of the video comes as The Police are set to reissue Synchronicity in honor of its 40th anniversary. The release comes out July 26 in a variety of different formats, including six-CD and four-LP sets. A six-CD super deluxe box set features 55 previously unreleased tracks — alternate takes, instrumentals, demos and live recordings — along with new liner notes, interviews and previously unseen photographs.
In an extensive interview on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Kevin Spacey opened up about the support he received from Elton John and his husband, David Furnish, following the sexual assault allegations that derailed his Oscar-winning career.
Spacey was exonerated in courts in both the U.S. and the U.K., and told Morgan both stars have stood by him through it all.
“Elton was the first email I got on Oct. 30 of 2017 after the [Anthony] Rapp story had come out, saying, ‘We love you, whatever you need, we’re here for you,'” Spacey said.
The former House of Cards star also revealed he “didn’t ask” the pair to testify in his defense in the U.K. case, but they “insisted.”
“I told them a piece of information that one of the accusers had said about them, which was not true, and Elton and David said, ‘Well, we have to testify. … We have to let the jury know that this individual is not telling the truth,'” he shared.
The trio had a reunion last summer in France, Spacey recalled, calling their dinner together “very beautiful.”
But while Elton and David have stood by Spacey, he says he’s been shunned by many in Hollywood.
“Yeah, there are some people who definitely ran into the forest, but … I continually find myself very moved by people who take the time and to reach out to find out how I’m doing,” he said.
While artists like Billy Joel, Michael Jackson and Tina Turner have had Broadway musicals written around their songs, it doesn’t sound like you’ll ever see one featuring the Bon Jovi catalog.
“I’ve been asked to do that 100 times,” Jon Bon Jovi tells Variety about the possibility of doing a jukebox musical. “Everybody wanted to write the story of Tommy and Gina [from ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’], but I’m going to guess that ABBA did it and Jersey Boys did it, and they did it really well many, many years ago. So I have turned down that opportunity time and again.”
It seems Jon feels like the band’s story has already been told on the stage.
“I do recall all those years ago when I saw Jersey Boys, and I went, ‘Oh, that’s our story.’ That’s every band’s story. So our story isn’t that unique,” he explains. “And then I thought, OK, if you take the characters of Tommy and Gina and build two and a half hours around the catalog and their life, then it’s Mamma Mia. So that’s not unique.”
Instead, Jon is working hard to get his voice back after having vocal surgery two years ago. And when he does, he hopes to get his band back onstage for a tour.
“I know that none of us can achieve perfection, but I have to achieve excellence in order for me to do it on that level again, or I won’t,” he says. “I don’t want to pretend to be something I was … I don’t try to be that boy from 29 years ago, but I want to be the very best version of the 2024 version of me.”
The four members of R.E.M. – Michael Stipe, Mike Mills, Bill Berry and Peter Buck – sit down with CBS Mornings Thursday for what will be their first interview together in almost 30 years.
The band is set to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame that night, and in a preview of the interview they discuss how it feels to be recognized for their songwriting.
“We lived or died on the strength of our songs, so this is a huge honor,” Mills shares, with Buck adding, “It is the hardest thing that we do and it’s the thing that we worked on the most from the very beginning.”
“Because we had to,” Berry chimes in. “I mean early on just to put food on the table we had to write songs as fast as we could.”
When asked if they ever look at their body of work as a whole, Mills noted that they aren’t quite that self-indulgent, to which Stipe interrupted with, “OK I am.”
“And then I wind up on YouTube and I watch some live performance, I’m like, ‘Wow I can’t believe we did that,’” he says. “Like we did, we did things and we did it really well from time to time.”
The Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction and Awards Gala takes place Thursday in New York City. This year’s other inductees include Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and the late Walter Becker, Timbaland, Hillary Lindsey and Dean Pitchford.
The model who inspired the cover of Duran Duran’s 1982 album, Rio, has been identified, 42 years after the album’s release.
The Instagram account @nagel_angel shared a post revealing that artist and illustrator Patrick Nagel used a 1981 multipage editorial from Vogue Paris featuring model Marcie Hunt for the cover. The info was confirmed by the late Nagel’s assistant, Barry Hahn, who replied to them, “Great Catch!”
“We suspect the model and maybe the band Duran Duran had no idea Nagel was influenced and used this image to create the cover of their musical masterpiece, ‘Rio,’” the post shares. “He certainly changed many things, most specifically removing her glasses, but he obviously loved her smile. And that smile has been an iconic piece of Duran Duran history for decades.”
And it appears the suggestion that Duran Duran didn’t know could be right, as they shared the post on Instagram with the comment, “WOW!”
Marcie also commented on the revelation, writing, “This is so cool! I absolutely did not know until now that this photo of me was used for the Rio cover. Very exciting! Love Duran Duran, and danced to their music often in the 80s. And later at my husband, Tom’s and my wedding. Thank you all for your wonderful comments. And yes, I’m still alive!”
Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt and Gary U.S. Bonds performed for a million protesters at the Rally for Nuclear Disarmament on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park.
The rally was timed to coincide with a United Nations Special Session on Disarmament.
The gathering was the largest anti-nuclear weapons demonstration in U.S. history.
In 2018, a two-CD set featuring highlights from the rally was released, including performances of Springsteen’s “Promised Land,” Browne’s “Running On Empty,” Ronstadt’s “Blue Bayou” and Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend.”
Blondie is bringing two of their albums back to digital services.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band announced on Instagram that Ghosts of Download and Panic of Girls will both be returning to all digital streaming platforms on Friday.
Panic of Girls, Blondie’s ninth studio album, was released in 2011 and was the band’s first album of new material in almost eight years.
Ghosts of Download was the band’s 10th studio album and was released in 2014 as part of a double album put out in honor of Blondie’s 40th anniversary. The other LP, Greatest Hits Deluxe Redux, was made up of reworked versions of their classic singles.
The news of the albums’ digital return comes as Blondie co-founder Chris Stein just released his new autobiography, Under A Rock: A Memoir, which features a foreword by the band’s frontwoman, Debbie Harry. Stein and Harry will sit down for a conversation promoting the book in New York on June 27.
Blondie is currently on tour overseas and will play the Mallorca Live Festival in Mallorca, Spain, on Thursday. A complete list of shows can be found at blondie.net.
AC/DC’s 50th anniversary is being celebrated with a new luxury watch collection.
Swiss luxury watchmaker Franck Muller has just unveiled the AC/DC 50th Anniversary limited-edition collection, which, according to the description, was created to “honor the band’s global acclaim and enduring legacy.”
The collection includes 50 watches in polished stainless steel and another 50 in brushed black titanium. All feature AC/DC’s 1974 logo with the words “50 Years” underneath, with red numbers that are a homage to the first AC/DC lightning bolt.
There are also guitar strings at the center inspired by Angus Young’s Gibson, with a buckle that features the AC/DC lightning bolt. The watches come with an outer box that looks like a concert flight case, with the AC/DC logo on it.
But these watches don’t come cheap, with both versions costing over $10,000. They are available online, and at Franck Muller Boutiques or authorized retailers worldwide.
The band’s new album, FOREVER, is currently the front-runner to top the U.K. Official Album chart, which would make it the New Jersey rockers’ sixth U.K. #1.
But while Bon Jovi is currently leading the race, they’re facing some stiff competition from Charli XCX’s new album, BRAT, which as of Tuesday is only 1,300 chart units behind FOREVER.
If Bon Jovi’s album indeed nabs the top spot, it will be their first U.K. #1 since 2000’s Crush. They first landed on the top of the chart with 1988’s New Jersey, which was followed by 1992’s Keep The Faith, the 1994 greatest hits album Cross Road and 1995’s These Days.
