JAMES HUNTER likes his soul music old school, but he will disagree: “I feel this music is as relevant for people today as it would've been 40 years ago,” he explains. “It has a groove that makes people feel good–it makes girls want to dance. What's retro or old-sounding about that?” He's featured on Van Morrison's live album A Night in San Francisco and the studio recording Days Like This. His first US album, People Gonna Talk, drops March 7th, but you can stream a couple from the World Cafe at NPR, or the four tracks at MySpace, or clips from every track at his website.
THE BRIT AWARDS: Kaiser Chiefs led the winners, winning three prizes (including best British group and best rock act). Arctic Monkeys won best British breakthrough act. Prince did show up to play “Purple Rain” and “Let's Go Crazy.” Kanye West (best international male) performed “Gold Digger” accompanied by 77 women wearing gold body paint and bikinis. Paul Weller was presented with the outstanding contribution to music award.
PAUL WELLER: His father begged him not to break up The Jam at the height of its success, because he was convinced it would spell the end of his musical career.
J. MASCIS talks to Rolling Stone about his old school metal band, Witch, for which he plays drums — further proof of Jon Pratt's theorem that the guitarist always wants to be the drummer. You can stream a couple from TeePee Records.
DAVID BYRNE and BRIAN ENO: The duo's influential My Life in the Bush of Ghosts will be reissued March 28 on Nonesuch, with seven previously unreleased tracks that date from the original recording sessions.
AC/DC: Bon Scott's grave in western Australia was classified with a heritage listing Wednesday. Heritage listings are usually reserved for buildings, but the grave was recognized because of AC/DC's global popularity and because it is visited by thousands of fans annually. They get there by taking the Highway to Hell, natch.
SEEN YOUR VIDEO: The emblematic Replacements video for “B-stards of Young,” from the band's major-label debut, Tim.
SAM MOORE (of Sam & Dave) has inked a new deal with Rhino, with an album, Overnight Sensational, due May 16.
DARK SIDE OF THE MOON will be performed in its entirety by Roger Waters at this year's Roskilde Festival.
WILLIE NELSON not only contribured to the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack, he's now released “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,” in which the Texas country icon sings about love among men on the range. It's supposed to be available exclusively at iTunes, few things remain exclusive for long on the Internet.
BOB GELDOF has joined forces with Transparency International to better ensure global aid is not lost to corruption. They will focus on the 50 billion dollars pledged last year by the G8.
PETE DOHERTY UPDATE: The troubled singer blames his fame for his drug problems. As the BBC TOTP points out, it's more like the reverse these days.
MADONNA reportedly went from the Grammys to Cedars Sinai hospital in L.A. last week for hernia surgery. Hubby Guy Ritchie was not at her side.
GWYNETH PALTROW thinks Madonna has amazing boobs. She also reportedly said that if she ever got a “free pass” to indulge a crush, “it would be with someone like Phil Selway, my musical hero.” The Radiohead drummer may well be a better musical choice than her hubby Chris Martin, but I can't imagine it was fun at home that evening.
JENNIFER GARNER is using Britney Spears as motivation to shed her baby weight.
BRITNEY SPEARS is reportedly negotiating to become the spokeswoman for an all-natural appetite suppressant. Granted, it's the Star, but it's not difficult to see Britney using Anna Nicole Smith as a career model.
TOM-KAT UPDATE: Regarding the pair's alleged split, Cruise's his rep, Paul Bloch exclusively tells Star, “This is totally and 100 percent untrue.” Which is what Bloch also exclusively told Access Hollywood. I would think that one's credibility is diminished when everyone else thinks thy have an exclusive from you. Of course, as Gawker notes, Life & Style is not exactly the Oracle of Delphi, either.
BRADGELINA: Pitt and Jolie want to buy a second home in Paris, far from the prying lenses of the press. You can almost hear Johnny Depp grumbling, “There goes the neighborhood…”
JESSICA SIMPSON: Us Weekly claims that the pneumatic blonde has been more than canoodling with Maroon 5's Adam Levine since 2004, “while Simpson was still wed to Nick Lachey.” (Note to Us: she's still wed to Lachey.) The Daily Blabber has details from the story. TV reports have Simpson denying the story, natch. Meanwhile, Star is claiming that earlier reports of a Simpson-Levine hookup at the Chateau Marmont on Feb 7 are untrue, supposedly with pics to prove she was in NYC. The problem with this is that the walk of shame dates to January.
SIENNA MILLER was shocked when she slimmed down to play Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl because her breasts vanished. An objective observer would want to judge for himself — or herself.
TERI HATCHER complains her lovelife is “nightmarish” because she has been without romance for nearly a year. She won't run a personal ad looking for love on the Internet, “But can you imagine the National Enquirer? That would be fun.” Or maybe when a tabloid runs a story about you having a special love van parked in the driveway, you should consider it a good suggestion instead of suing for libel.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN has been passed in its entirety by the film censors in Singapore, despite the country's stringent laws against homosexuality. Gay sex is punishable by a maximum of two years imprisonment in the country. Singapore's media content director said Ang Lee's film was passed as it did not “promote or glamorise the lifestyle.”
OSCAR PREDICTIONS by computer reflect the consensus views of critics this year.
CITIZEN OPRAH: Why America’s most powerful celebrity should be more feared than loved.
WERNER HERZOG: I previously noted that the Grizzly Man director shrugged off a shot from an air rifle in the middle of an interview. The BBC has the video of the interview, complete with the shooting, posted for our enjoyment.
IRAQ: At Iraq the Model, Mohammed posts that the Shia UIA bloc risks being outnumbered and that the political map of Iraq may be about to change. Michael J. Totten is blogging from Erbil in Kurdistan — today he's got an entry with plenty of pictures of Dream City, a massive development going up on the outskirts of the city. ABC's Nightline aired portions of tape recordings of Saddam meeting with top aides during the 1990s in which Saddam put forth the future probability terrorism with weapons of mass destruction and otherwise details attempts to hide information about WMD programs from UN inspectors. FWIW, Ali Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a/k/a the “Butcher of Basra,” claims that Saddam provided Al-Qaeda with intelligence support and whatever money or munitions they could provide and that Saddam's weapons are in Syria due to certain military deals dating back to the late 1980s. he is the second ex-Iraqi commander to make claims about Syria in recent days.
CARTOON JIHAD: Three more people died in Pakistan yesterday as more than 70,000 “demonstrators” torched and ransacked franchises of Western shops and fast-food restaurants and were drawn into gun battles in several cities — all over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. In Iraq, officials condemned the airing of photos and video showing Iraqi prisoners being abused in the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, complaining that the footage would only enflame tensions in the war-ravaged country. What does that have to do with the cartoon riots? The answer is that western media have largely refused to show any of the Danish cartoons at the heart of that story, ostensibly because some of them are offensive to Muslims and could enflame tensions. Yet the same media outlets — The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN and the BBC, to name a few — have no qualms about publishing years-old photos regarding a prison the US no longer runs, where those soldiers involved have been tried and punished, at a time where the Muslim world is already inflamed. It begins to look like these outlets will publish inflammatory material that increases the risk to US troops, but will not publish such material where these outlets fear they may be subject to greater risk.
NSA SURVEILLANCE: The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to vote today on whether to start an inquiry into the NSA's eavesdropping on international telephone calls. But the panel, which was clearly leaning in favor of an inquiry last week, now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it, apparently due to last week's closed briefings of the full House and Senate intelligence committees, and to private appeals to wavering GOP senators by officials, including Vice President Cheney. Insert your Veep with a shotgun joke here. ALSO: Slate covers the pervasive wiretapping by European governments, which may suggest that international calls are not all that private in the first place.
HURRICANE KATRINA: Yesterday, a House panel released a scathing report concluding that deaths, damage and suffering could have been decreased if the White House and federal, state and local officials had responded more urgently to Katrina. Popular Mechanics finds the the report to be “riddled with poor logic, internal contradictions and exaggerations.” The report “seems designed to narrow attention onto a few individuals, ignoring larger, and frankly more important, issues—such as what role FEMA should actually take in large-scale emergencies.”
BEST IN SHOW: Hail, Rufus — the king of dogs. He wagged his tail when he won the the 130th Westminster Dog Show Tuesday, overcoming his unpopular breed as a Bull Terrirer on the strength of his perfectly egg-shaped head. Rufus (a/k/a “Champion Rocky Top's Sundance Kid”) beat out a favorite — a Norfolk terrier named Coco — and a Dandie Dinmont co-owned by Bill Cosby to reach the final ring. So where is his buzzy bee!?
ZOO SEX TOURISM: I was shocked, shocked to discover that this trend started in San Francisco. Jane Tollini, former penguin keeper at the San Francisco Zoo, came up with the idea 17 years ago: “I like to watch.”
ASSASSIN SPIDERS welcome a new member of the species from the remote forests of the African island nation of Madagascar.
MOOSE CHEESE: The Exeter News-Letter delves deep into the exotic world of moose-milking.