Event, Mail On Sunday, 6.4.14 We see his face on T-shirts and towels, posters and postcards, and for decades it has advertised everything from cars, jeans, beer and Pepsi to a bank and a credit card. The surly, hurt expression suggests the epitome of cool, the perfect marketing image for the young. Yet the man… Continue reading…
Feb 7, 2014 When Pan Am flight 101 left London’s Heathrow bound for New York on February 7, 1964, the pilot would have had a pretty good idea of the local value of four of his passengers. With Beatlemania at a hysterical crescendo in Britain, hundreds of over-excited teenage girls had turned up at the… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 6.1.14 John and Paul had their rows that lasted for years, Paul and George certainly had their musical differences, and George was furious with John on more than one occasion. But Ringo? Apart from a famous altercation in 1970 when John and George deputed the drummer to carry some bad news to Paul… Continue reading…
Daily Mail 6.1.14 They looked like a couple of teenage Mississippi riverboat gamblers, thin as blades with their white shirts, black waistcoats and luxuriant hair. But when they picked up those black guitars, stood head to head close to the microphone and sang, a generation of budding schoolboy musicians pricked up its collective ears and… Continue reading…
Mail Online 28.11.13 They don’t make many girls like Freda Kelly any more. They really don’t. But, then, her attitudes were forged in an age that’s past, a monochrome time of shining, cobbled Liverpool streets, of girls from the typing pool whose highest ambition was to become a secretary because that was pretty well the… Continue reading…
July 6, 2013 There had never been a rock concert like it. With up to half a million fans picnicking by London’s Serpentine, rumours circulating of a murder, an ad hoc security force of Hells Angels, and on stage three thousand dead or dying butterflies being crunched under foot by the lead singer, it had… Continue reading…
There was shock and disappointment in the west of Scotland this week when an absentee landlord told two employees that, after decades of service, they won’t be needed on his farm after Christmas. From the employees’ point of view this is obviously upsetting. But when the landlord is Paul McCartney and the farm is on… Continue reading…
There’s nothing Hollywood gossips enjoy so much as a flop. Not a little or medium sized flop, the sort that happens when the audiences don’t turn up at the cinemas over the first weekend and the studio starts planning the DVD release on the Monday morning. That happens so regularly it hardly warrants a mention.… Continue reading…
Daily Mail, February, 2013 We’ve all said things we’ve immediately and eternally regretted, and a sudden, thoughtless, inexplicable quip made when 14 year Paul McCartney was told that his mother had died, has haunted the former Beatle ever since. “What will we do without her money?” the teenage Paul blurted, not knowing how to handle… Continue reading…
December 4, 2012 We all know about Fifty Shades Of Grey. Many people reading this article will have bought a copy: and many more will know a friend or relative who has. And, probably, even more will know someone else, who, having read at least one of the three book trilogy, will have described it… Continue reading…
