Neil Young says that those who stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC, had been ‘manipulated’.
In a message posted to his website, he says:I feel empathy for the people who have been so manipulated and had their beliefs used as political weapons. I may be among them. I wish internet news was two-sided. Both sides represented on the same programs. Social media, at the hands of powerful people – influencers, amplifying lies and untruths, is crippling our belief system, turning us against one another. We are not enemies. We must find a way home.
The veteran rock star criticised the outgoing president, saying he “has betrayed the people, exaggerated and amplified the truth to foment hatred”, but said his feelings are now “beyond” Trump.
“Resentment of the Democratic party among the insurrectionists at the Capitol was rampant. We don’t need this hate,” he wrote. “We need discussion and solutions. Respect for one another’s beliefs. Not hatred … With social media, issues are turned to psychological weapons and used to gather hatred in support of one side or the other. This is what Donald J Trump has as his legacy.”
He also criticised the “double standard” that saw heavy crackdowns against Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington in 2020, and relatively light policing of last week’s Capitol breach.
#neilyoung #trump #capitolhill#seige#riot
Leigh and Rodney investigate what really happened on Capitol Hill…
The one and only time I met Scott Walker – who would have celebrated his 77th birthday recently – was after one of his solo performances in Manchester. We were both very drunk indeed.
But that was the fashionable way to be after midnight all those years ago in the early 1970s.
I was working on the Stockport Advertiser and for some reason Scott had agreed to meet me after his show for a chat.
Big deal for me – believe me!
So, I got to Fagins on Oxford Street unfashionably early and alone. I found myself a table next to the dance floor, lit a cigarette and began downing pints of warm fizzy lager. I felt cool, tall, well-dressed, hair cascading below my ears and making notes in my spiral reporter’s pad.
I was around 20 and people could tell I was a journalist, on my first steps to my journey to being a writer.
Fagins, like all the underground nightclubs across the UK was brash and noisy, deadly smokey. And the beer was rubbish. But it was a step up from the beer kellar.
And Scott Walker was performing there tonight … and I was his guest of honour (in a way, in my mind).
The club went silent, there was the odd obligatory scream of course and a lot of coughing in the fug of fag smoke. The smoke had a spooky affect as it played in the stage light that focussed on Scott’s lonesome barstool and mic stand on the tiny stage.
He barely looked at the audience as he crossed the stage, took his seat and launched into a sonorous, sombre, deeply moving solo version of Johanna (I seem to remember).
I have to say Scott was beautiful. Skinny enough to snap, handsome enough to break anybody’s heart and as romantic as a first kiss.
His career was on the wane already and he’d only been going as a chart topper in the UK for less than a decade.
But he will always be remembered as the voice on some of the most dramatic singles of the era like Make It Easy on Yourself (1965) and The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore performed with the so-called Walker Brothers.
By the time we had a few drinks at the bar after his show, the Walkers Bros were falling stars and Scott said he missed them.
He was drinking heavily, something he had always done. I remember him shouting to me above the hullabaloo and waving in-between signing breasts and bras, beer mats and menus for his fans. In fact I think I signed a few lightly sweaty thighs on his behalf.
We ordered a few beers and chasers and Scott asked for them to be taken to a backstage room where we could talk.
The club was still throbbing in the distance but we chatted in what was little more than a cupboard about his new songs, like the mysterious Montague Terrace in Blue and Big Louis. He was charming and witty but given to long silences that I tried clumsily to fill.
He told me too that he didn’t like live performances, they took too much out of him and, like now, he was physically and emotionally drained.
I never saw him again. And rarely did his fans. He made some comebacks and some very good albums, a television advert and a couple of promotional documentaries. But true his words to me… he proved he wanted to be alone.
To be Mr Invisible.
He went on to be a successful record producer and made the odd – some say very odd – album. And lived a quite life in the UK and Europe.
He died last year aged 76.
I am glad he granted me some time in his company and was so warm and charming.
Lou Reed said with his usual acid-faced aplomb: ‘If I hadn’t heard rock and roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet.’
And he was right. Is right.
Almost all of us, even in this digital age, hear music for the first time on a car radio or on the air floating from the kitchen. And it became the background wall of noise to our lives as we blundered in to sex, in to love, in to drugs, in to alcohol, in to heartbreak, in to life itself.
Lou died unbelievably almost a decade ago, in 2013.
But 2020, the year of the Covid catastrophe, has continued the cull of those greats who kept on keeping on.
The Covid year has taken some of the greats, John Prine, Bucky Baxter, Peter Green.
Scroll down the landing page to read short separate tributes to these fallen stars and listen to some of their music…
I will always remember the five minutes I spent with the funny and mournful John Prine who has died due to complications from coronavirus. (see video inside).
He was 73 years old.
Prine had been in hospital in Nashville since last week with coronavirus symptoms, with his wife and manager, Fiona Whelan Prine, posting updates about his condition online.
I met him briefly… he was touring the UK with Nanci Griffiths. It was many years ago now and I had just witnessed them performing a beautiful version of Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.
When we met after the show, Nanci was smiley and reserved and Prine was husky and funny, sharing tales of his rumbustious life on the road and while making records… he told about spending days making an album, then forgetting all about it.
“We were all so high,” he said.
But Prine was revered by his peers including Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.
He also said that his success was down to luck. “And when the luck and timing comes along, you’ve got to have the goods.”
It was a good meeting which lasted barely five minutes. But I will always remember him.
Following news of his tragic death, many musical icons and fans alike have taken to social media to voice their sadness and share their condolences with his loved ones.
Pretty Things singer, Phil, dies aged 75 after bike accident
Phil May, singer with The Pretty Things has died from surgery after a cycling accident.
He was 75.
The English rock band who were massive in the 60s released this statement:
“Phil May passed away at 7.05 a.m. on Friday 15 May at the Queen Elizabeth hospital, Kings Lynn, Norfolk. He had been locked down in Norfolk with his family and, during the week Phil had suffered a fall from his bike and had undergone emergency hip surgery, after which complications set in.
“Phil had been in poor health for some time when the Pretty Things played their last live concert, ‘The Final Bow,’ on 13 December 2018 at the Indigo, O2 where they were joined onstage by old friends David Gilmour and Van Morrison.” The Pretty Things had UK hits “Don’t Bring Me Down,” “Honey I Need,” and “Cry to Me” but are now best known for 1968’s classic
SF Sorrow, which is widely regarded as the first rock opera. The Pretty Things never broke up and continued to play, in various incarnations, through 2018.
They were cited as an influence by a wide range of artists from David Bowie to Jimi Hendrix to Kasabian.
They took their name from Willie Dixon’s 1955 song “Pretty Thing”. A pure rhythm and blues band in their early years, with several singles charting in the United Kingdom.
TAGS: #PhilMay #PrettyThings #60s #rock #pop
Sadness as Bucky Baxter, the man who put real steel into Bob’s act, dies aged 65
Steel guitarist Bucky Baxter, who has died at the woefully young age of 65, was an integral part of Bob Dylan’s band for eight years.
He had played almost 100 concerts year since picking up the ‘dream’ gig back in 1992.
In an interview, Bucky, who was playing for Steve Earle as the opener on the Never Ending Tour that year, seems to have had a relatively distant relationship with Bob.
But said that he had grown as a musician after spending almost a decade with him.
The 1992 tour was described as schizophrenic and dogged by rumours of drinking and drug taking.
Certainly it had many faces, variously known as Southern Sympathizer Tour, Why Do You Look At Me So Strangely Tour – that was in Europe – The One Sad Cry Of Pity Tour – in Australia and West Coast America. It ended up as the Outburst Of Consciousness Tour.
Bucky told Scott Marshall of b-dylan.com: “We’d opened up a whole tour for Bob with Steve Earle and he asked me to get him a steel guitar, so I bought him one in Nashville and gave him some lessons.
“Then when that tour was over he got my phone number and, I thought, ‘Well, cool, I’m going to get this great gig.’
“But then he never called.”
Sounds about right for Mr Dylan who can sometimes make his old mate Van Morrison look smiley!
But two years later the phone rang and Bucky – called Bucky after a cartoon character with similar hair – was given two days to prepare to join the Australian leg.
Bucky, originally from Melbourne in Florida, admitted that before joining the band he hadn’t been a particular fan of the wandering troubadour, particularly his singing.
He said: “I wasn’t crazy about him – but I like his singing a lot more now that I’ve actually worked with him.”
He also played on Time Out Of Mind which won a Grammy as album of the year, but declined to talk about the time he spent with Bob in the studio.
“Nah, I don’t want to talk about that,” he was quoted as saying.
But Bucky did say he grew as a musician ‘because Bob lets you do whatever you want, you know, experiment’.
Bucky, born in Melbourne, Florida, in 1955 lived in a cabin in White’s Creek, Tennessee.
His son, Rayland Baxter, confirmed he had died in an Instagram post.
No cause of death was given.
Rayland posted: “He is my everything and now he is an angel. My heart is broken yet I am blinded by joy.”
The Manchester police officer who hunted Moors Murders Ian Brady and Myra Hindley has died, aged 80.
Detective Chief Supt Peter Topping was famous for dragging Brady to Saddleworth Moor in July 1987 to get him to pinpoint where he buried the youngster as part of Th the probe into the killing of Keith Bennett and Pauline Reade.
But it was a grand gesture in vain.
And the chilling case continued to haunt him even after he retired to Scotland.
Until now, his death, in June has gone largely unnoticed and only a short obituary appeared in the Oban Times.
I met Topping a couple of times when I was reporting on the the on-going moors investigations and it is fair to say that he often adopted a brusque and sometimes overpowering nature.
Topping led the team that reopened the probe into the slayings of Keith and Pauline.
He admitted Brady’s death hadn’t brought him any closure as the monstrous killer took the secret of where he buried Keith to his grave.
And a couple of years ago he told how he still craved a breakthrough in the case which would allow the Keith’s loved ones to lay the 12-year-old schoolboy to rest, half a century after he vanished.
Speaking after the death of Glasgow-born Brady, 79, the former head of Greater Manchester CID admitted: “Brady’s passing, frankly, is a good thing, as he was never going to give any more information.
“He is no longer able to manipulate and use people. That is a form of closure but, as far as the case is concerned, I will never get closure.
“My team that worked on it in the Sixties — and others who worked on it after that — you can only get closure if and when we recover Keith Bennett’s body.”
Peter, who led a team of more than 900 CID officers said: “When we recovered the body of Pauline Reade that had a tremendous effect on the health of her mother Joan, who had been really suffering not knowing what had happened to her daughter.”
Alan Bennett’s powerful message to Pauline Reade’s family…
“On this day ( July 1st ) in 1987 the body of Pauline Reade was discovered and brought off Saddleworth Moor, 24 years after Pauline had been murdered and buried on the moor by Brady and Hindley. After being returned to her family Pauline’s mum, Joan, told us that ‘It was like a big dark cloud had been lifted off my shoulders.’ Joan found some small peace of mind eventually and the change in her life after Pauline was found was so very good to see. I met Pauline’s immediate family and I can honestly say that Pauline’s mum, Joan, who I met and got hugs from quite a few times, was one of the nicest and most sincere people I have ever met. Thinking of and remembering Pauline and her family today.”
Peter R.I.P. the great Peter Green, the original guitarist of Fleetwood Mac.
The Fleetwoods co-founder has died aged 73.
Solicitors acting on behalf of his family said in a statement: “It is with great sadness that the family of Peter Green announce his death this weekend, peacefully in his sleep.
“A further statement will be provided in the coming days.”
Green, from Bethnal Green in east London, formed Fleetwood Mac with drummer Mick Fleetwood in 1967.
Green’s had been in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, where he filled in for Eric Clapton.
Green and Fleetwood convinced John McVie to join the band as bass guitarist, in part by naming the band Fleetwood Mac.
Under Green’s direction, they produced three albums and a series of well-loved tracks including Albatross, Black Magic Woman and Oh Well.
Green left the band after a last performance in 1970, as he struggled with his mental health. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent time in hospital in the mid-70s.
Shall I tell you about my life They say I’m a man of the world I’ve flown across every tide And I’ve seen lots of pretty girls
I guess I’ve got everything I need I wouldn’t ask for more And there’s no one I’d rather be But I just wish that I’d never been born
And I need a good woman To make me feel like a good man should I don’t say I’m a good man Oh, but I would be if I…
