Classic Hits

Janet Jackson fans are still furious at Justin Timberlake for his role in the infamous 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction,” which led to her career taking a hit while he emerged relatively unscathed. But it turns out that Janet herself isn’t angry at Justin, so she’d like her fans to move on, just as she and Justin have.

As Access Hollywood reports, in the second half of Janet’s new Lifetime documentary that aired on Saturday night, we see a video that Janet filmed for fans, in which she says, “This whole thing was blown way out of proportion. Of course, it was an accident that should not have happened, but everyone is looking for someone to blame and that’s got to stop.”

She adds, “Justin and I are very good friends and we will always be very good friends. We spoke just a few days ago and he and I have moved on, and it is time for everyone else to do the same.” 

About a year ago, Justin issued an apology via Instagram to both Janet and his ex-girlfriend Britney Spears, in which he admitted that he’d “benefited from a system that condones misogyny and racism.”

The documentary also reveals that in the aftermath of what’s now known as “Nipplegate,” Janet was “disinvited” from the Grammys, which led her then-boyfriend, Jermaine Dupri, to resign from the board of the Recording Academy. In addition, Janet shares that Justin did offer to speak out on her behalf, but she told him not to. 

Finally, the doc reveals that Justin asked Janet to perform with him when he headlined the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2018.  She declined, saying that it would have been “stretching out the past, reliving something that happened over 10 years ago.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

On Sunday, January 30, U2 frontman Bono and guitarist The Edge posted a video of them delivering a new acoustic performance of their band’s classic 1983 song “Sunday Bloody Sunday” that features a new final verse.

The debut of the updated version of the tune coincides with the 50th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” massacre — which served as the inspiration for the song — where British Army soldiers shot and killed 13 civil-rights protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland.

The black-and-white video, which was shot at one of the U2 members’ homes in Dublin, was posted on the group’s official YouTube channel along with the caption “30 January 2022 – With love, Bono & Edge.”

The newly written closing verse features the following lyrics: “Here at the murder scene/ The virus of fiction, reality TV/ Why so many mothers cry/ Religion is the enemy of the Holy Spirit guide/ And the battle just begun/ Where is the victory Jesus won.”

Here are the original lyrics of the song’s final verse: “And it’s true we are immune/ When fact is fiction and TV reality/ And today the millions cry/ We eat and drink while tomorrow they die/ The real battle just begun/ To claim the victory Jesus won.”

“Sunday Bloody Sunday” was originally featured on U2’s third studio album, War.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Joni Mitchell has joined her old friend and fellow Canadian artist Neil Young in removing her music from Spotify because the streaming service continues to host The Joe Rogan Experience.  Many in the medical community have claimed that Rogan‘s podcast spreads harmful misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines.

In an online message, Mitchell writes, “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

Joni also posted a link to an open letter that was signed by hundreds of scientists and medical professionals asking Spotify to “immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform,” after a recent episode of the podcast aired that they allege included harmful untruths regarding COVID-19.

That same letter prompted Young to demand that his music be removed from Spotify if the service didn’t stop hosting Rogan’s extremely popular podcast. Spotify granted Neil’s request, rather cut ties with Rogan.

Following Young’s decision to leave Spotify, many artists expressed support for him, while quite a few others criticized him, suggesting that Neil’s actions were anti-free speech, and that Rogan had a right to express his opinions about the pandemic and vaccines.

In response to his detractors, Young maintained in an online note, “I support free speech. I have never been in favor of censorship. Private companies have the right to choose what they profit from, just as I can choose not to have my music support a platform that disseminates harmful information.”

He added, “I am happy and proud to stand in solidarity with the front-line health care workers who risk their lives every day to help others.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Two days before his death — September 16, 1970 — Jimi Hendrix showed up unannounced at famed London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s and got onstage with Eric Burdon and War.  Now we’re able to hear that performance — his last one ever — in a new documentary called Ronnie‘s.

The doc tells the history of saxophonist Ronnie Scott and his club, which opened in 1959 and became one of the most famous musical venues in London. The film features previously unseen and unheard performances by music icons like Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, as well as rockers like Van Morrison.

The audio from a bootleg tape of the Hendrix performance, as well as interviews with the people who were there that night, are also included. As War guitarist Howard E. Scott relates in a clip from the film, that night at Ronnie’s, the band has started playing a blues cover called “Mother Earth” when he saw Jimi coming towards the stage, guitar in hand.

“Jimi lit into a guitar solo, I mean, me and Jimi were just cuttin’ the place up, we were tearin’ it up, just me and him, back and forth, back and forth…great night,” Scott recalls. “The next night, we got word that after the set, Jimi had died. It was a terrible, terrible thought right then, that I was the last guitarist to play with him.”

You can watch an excerpt from the movie that includes the audio at Rolling Stone.  Ronnie’s opens in select theaters and on-demand on February 11.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

The Beatles and India, a documentary which examines how Indian music and culture shaped the band’s music, will start streaming February 15 on BritBox.

The documentary features recordings, pictures and interviews to detail both George Harrison‘s lifelong devotion to Indian music, which he discovered in 1965, and its effect on The Beatles’ subsequent recordings.  It also explores the Beatles’ role in popularizing Indian culture and Transcendental Meditation, following their 1968 journey to Rishikesh, India to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

The documentary was named Best Film: Audience Choice and Best Music at the 2021 UK Asian Film Festival.

An accompanying soundtrack, called The Beatles and India: Songs Inspired by the Film, features 19 Beatles songs recorded by Indian artists, including Anoushka Shankar, the daughter of Harrison’s musical mentor Ravi Shankar. 

Many of the songs included on the soundtrack — “Dear Prudence,” “Sexy Sadie,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” “Back in the USSR” and “I Will” among them — were written while the Beatles were in India and later ended up on their 1968 self-titled album, aka The White Album.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Founding INXS guitarist Tim Farriss has lost a lawsuit he brought against the owners and operators of a boat he chartered in January 2015 on which he severed a finger on his left hand when it became caught in a chain as he attempted to drop the craft’s anchor.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that a six-day hearing was held in front of the Australian state of New South Wales’ Supreme Court this past August and September, during which the 64-year-old rocker’s legal team argued that the owners of the Omega Clipper and a boat charter company were liable for damages of 622,000 Australian dollars, or about $434,000.

They claimed that Farriss hadn’t received sufficient instructions on how to operate the anchor, that the equipment should have been in better working order, and that there was inadequate signage warning of potential risks.

Farriss’ lawyer noted that although the musician’s finger was reattached surgically, it “is in a state now where he cannot play guitar.” His attorney also noted that since the accident, Tim has been “unsurprisingly depressed” because he isn’t able to compose music as he once did, or work on a farm that he’d owned that’s been subsequently sold.

However, the judge found inconsistencies in Farriss’ explanation of how the accident occurred, and deemed that there was insufficient proof that the gear wasn’t in proper working order.

Farriss was ordered to pay the defendants’ legal costs. A member of his council said the musician was “very disappointed” with the ruling and was considering his options regarding further legal action.

INXS has been inactive since 2012, when they announced their retirement from touring.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

There have been a number of attempts to produce a biopic about Keith Moon over the last couple of decades, but it seems that an official film about the late Who drummer finally is moving forward.

In an exclusive report, Variety reveals that surviving Who members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are serving as executive producers on the project, called The Real Me, which is expected to be shot in the U.K. this summer.

The movie will be directed by Paul Whittington, whose credits include several episodes of The Crown, while the script will be penned by screenwriter Jeff Pope, known for his work on Stan & Ollie and the Oscar-nominated Philomena. Longtime Who manager Bill Curbishley is one of the film’s producers.

The Real Me — whose title is taken from a song on the band’s 1973 album Quadrophenia — is expected to begin shooting in June; work on assembling the cast began a few months ago.

Considered one of the greatest all-time rock drummers, Moon was also an infamous partier and prankster who battled alcohol and drug addiction. He died of a drug overdose in 1978 at age 32.  Daltrey has been talking about making a movie about Moon since the early 2000s.

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

The Dirty Knobs, the band fronted by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, will release their second studio album, External Combustion, on March 4.

The album, a follow-up to 2020’s Wreckless Abandon, can be pre-ordered now, and will be available on CD, via digital formats, and as a vinyl LP pressed on standard black vinyl or limited-edition green translucent vinyl.

The 11-track collection features guest appearances by Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople fame and acclaimed alt-country artist Margo Price on the respective songs “Dirty Job” and “State of Mind.” In addition, Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench plays piano on a tune titled “Lightning Boogie.”

Campbell wrote most of the songs on External Combustion during the past year, although two tunes date back to the 1990s, and were recently rediscovered in Mike’s vault of unreleased tracks.

The album’s lead track, “Wicked Mind,” has been released as an advance digital single, and a companion music video has premiered on Campbell’s official YouTube channel.

The amusing clip begins with Mike in a coffin that an alluring yet sinister woman is preparing to bury. Before she gets the chance, Campbell wakes up and flees his captor, making his way to a bar where his fellow Dirty Knobs are playing. He joins the band onstage, but the woman has followed him into the watering hole, where she proceeds to do a threatening dance in front of the stage. Mike then flees the bar with the woman in pursuit. Watch the full video to find out Campbell’s fate.

After multiple delays because of COVID-19, Campbell and The Dirty Knobs finally will hit the road on a U.S. tour launching March 9 in Tampa, Florida. Visit TheDirtyKnobs.com for the band’s full schedule.

Here’s the full External Combustion track list:

“Wicked Mind”
“Brigitte Bardot”
“Cheap Talk”
“External Combustion”
“Dirty Job” — featuring Ian Hunter
“State of Mind” — featuring Margo Price
“Lightning Boogie”
“Rat City”
“In This Lifetime”
“It Is Written”
“Electric Gypsy”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

When Betty White died on December 31, just weeks shy of her 100th birthday, Cher was one of the celebrities who took to social media to mourn her loss. Now she’ll be joining many other stars in helping to celebrate the award-winning TV icon in a new NBC special.

Celebrating Betty White, America’s Golden Girl airs this Monday, January 31, at 10 p.m. ET and will stream the next day on Peacock.  Along with Cher, those who’ll be sharing their favorite memories and stories of White include President Joe Biden, Tina Fey, Ted Danson, Valerie Bertinelli, Jimmy Fallon, Goldie Hawn, Jay Leno, Bryan Cranson, Ellen DeGeneres, Jean Smart and more.

When White died, Cher tweeted, “I Watched Her on her first TV Show Life With Elizabeth When I Was 7 Yrs Old. When She Did [the] Sonny & Cher [show], I Got a Chance To Tell Her. I Was Embarrassed cause tears came to my eyes. She put her arms around me, & I Felt 7 again.

“Some Ppl Are Called ICONS, BETTY IS A TRUE ICON,” Cher continued. She also posted a GIF of Betty shimmying, and wrote, “BELOVED ICON…YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.”

Cher also directed fans to a YouTube clip of Betty and her Golden Girls co-stars performing the Sonny & Cher hit “I Got You Babe” on season five on that sitcom, while fans shared a clip of Betty and Cher performing together on the Sonny & Cher Show.

On January 21, Cher apparently spilled the beans about the NBC special, which was just announced yesterday, by tweeting, “I’m So Relieved & Happy That there Will Be A Program Where We Will Talk About Betty. My one fear is…. I may cry.”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

Jethro Tull‘s latest album, The Zealot Gene, the veteran prog-rock band’s first new studio effort in over 18 years, was released today.

Frontman Ian Anderson tells ABC Audio that he considers the 12-track collection something of a concept album, because the songs are based on a list of positive and negative “extreme human emotions” he compiled, that he then recognized as “words that I remember reading in the Bible.”

Anderson explains that the list included “nice stuff, like love, fraternal love, erotic love, spiritual love, compassion, loyalty,” as well as “bad stuff, like anger and rage and jealousy and vengeance.”

Ian notes that he felt the song “The Zealot Gene” was a good choice for the album’s title track because it’s “about that extreme of emotion, the degree to which things are polarized into black and white, and opposites, especially in the populist world of politics today.”

The singer/flutist/guitarist says he began work on the album in 2017 and had recorded seven of the songs with his band in the studio before the COVID-19 pandemic started. After the pandemic began, Anderson recorded the basic tracks for the other five tunes by himself, then enlisted the group’s other members to add their parts remotely.

Ian says this resulted in an album with “a little bit more dynamic range,” because the last five songs wound up being more sparse and acoustic-based than the first seven.

Anderson made The Zealot Gene with the members of his longtime solo band, but says he decided to release the record under the Jethro Tull moniker because “it seemed appropriate to recognize the, on average, 15 years of long service that the members of the band have had playing with me over the years.”

Here’s The Zealot Gene‘s full track list:

“Mrs. Tibbets”
“Jacob’s Tales”
“Mine Is the Mountain”
“The Zealot Gene”
“Shoshana Sleeping”
“Sad City Sisters”
“Barren Beth, Wild Desert John”
“The Betrayal of Joshua Kynde”
“Where Did Saturday Go?”
“Three Loves, Three”
“In Brief Visitation”
“The Fisherman of Ephesus”

Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.