Rita Ora shows off her legs in red hot-pants paired with ‘I love mushrooms' tee
The 34-year-old paraded the statement on a T-shirt paired with red hot-pants and black boots.
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Rita was in Saint-Tropez in the French Riviera with her husband, film director Taika Waititi.
Rita has recently returned to the music scene with her new hit single, Heat.
The raunchy song revolves around having sex, and has gone down well with fans.
Talking about her new summer banger, the singer told The Sun: 'I wanted to really celebrate my sexuality and the way I am as a woman.
'My last album was so different, it was about my love life and getting married.
'But with this next lot of music I wanted it to be so carefree and back to how I was coming up in the industry.
'I wanted to celebrate everything I have become.
"It's not super deep, just fun.'
'Finally a cute collection' shoppers cry as Rita Ora drops summer Primark range
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BBC News
5 minutes ago
- BBC News
Surrey family to sell guitar owned by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page
A guitar given away by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page more than 50 years ago could sell for £50,000 when it is put up for auction by a Surrey family in 1957 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 electric guitar, which was the prize in a competition run by New Musical Express (NME) magazine, was held by Page like a cricket bat while posing in cricket whites on its guitar, owned by the family of Phil O'Donoghue, from Chessington, is being sold with a photo of Page giving the guitar away to the winner of the competition, Charles Luke Hobbs, who is selling the guitar, said it could exceed its valuation, adding: "The sky is the limit." Mr Reid was quoted as saying he couldn't understand why Page would give away "such a terrific guitar as this."He added: "It's the kind of instrument that every guitar player dreams of owning but can never really afford."In an interview for the magazine, Page said he bought the guitar in Nashville, USA, for £200 in entrants had to match six guitars with the famous guitarists who owned correct entry selected as the winner was from Mr Reid, of Hornsey, north kept the guitar until September 1990 when he sold it to Mr O'Donoghue for £2, O'Donoghue, a guitarist with the 1970s rock band Wild Angels, kept the instrument until his death earlier this Luke Hobbs said: "It's no exaggeration to say that Jimmy Page is a legendary guitarist and rock star."The family are understandably quite excited to find it how much it is worth. They grew up around it but its full provenance only came to light after Mr O'Donoghue passed away."It is expected to fetch between £30,000 and £50,000 when auctioned at Gardiner Houlgate in Corsham, Wiltshire, on September 9.
Times
5 minutes ago
- Times
My daughter inspired me to launch a baby skincare brand
Casyo Johnson remembers his first lesson in business, aged 13, at his school in south London. Stanley Technical High School, as it was known then, didn't have an activities room to occupy the pupils during breaks. It also didn't have any money. So Johnson, now better known as Krept from the rap duo Krept and Konan, offered to raise the cash himself. He signed up his fellow pupils to give him 20p a day. 'I had a table with names, payment dates,' he recalls of the tight operation. After three weeks he handed over enough cash to pay for the facility. 'They took the money and didn't do anything,' he says. It was a tough lesson for a 13-year-old and it understandably still rankles. Instead of ping-pong, Johnson focused on surviving the gang violence around him and on his music, teaming up with his school friend Karl Wilson, alias Konan, in 2008. Their breakthrough came in 2013 when their independently produced album Young Kingz took off. It holds a Guinness record as the highest-charting UK album by an unsigned act. Johnson, now 35 and a father of one, still performs regularly. Krept and Konan launched a new album, Young Kingz II, in February this year and the pair are playing at summer festivals across Europe. He has also been able to put the business lessons from that early experience in school to good use. In 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, Johnson and his partner at the time, Sasha Ellese Gilbert, developed a natural skincare product for their baby daughter Nala. Gilbert, in particular, bridled at the toxicity of some of the common ingredients in mainstream toiletries. She used ingredient rating apps such as Think Dirty and Yuka and did not like what she found. 'When you scan these products you see how clean they are,' Johnson says. They couldn't find any brand with a full range of excellent ratings. 'It was a lightbulb moment. We thought, 'Why don't we do it?'' Johnson discovered a world of natural alternatives and the pair created recipes that they took to a manufacturer with a lab where they could be developed and tested properly. • Meet the UK's fastest-growing companies in 2025 The next step was to decide on pricing. Johnson wanted to position the range at the affordable end of the market so he sought out retailers to be a launch partner, starting with Boots. Such a big brand would also help reassure customers, typically young mothers. After all, what does a musician from south London know about producing safe toiletries for babies? Helped by his high profile, as well as his commitment to the project, a deal was struck and the brand, Nala's Baby, was launched in June 2022. Roll forward three years and Nala's Baby is a profitable £5.5 million turnover business, stocked in supermarkets like Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury's, as well as over 1,000 Boots stores. It is also sold on Amazon and through its own website. As Krept, Johnson has just returned from playing at the Wireless festival and is off to another in Paris after we talk. In Nala's Baby, he sees a venture that can provide a legacy for his daughter in the way that music cannot. 'In music, I know that I have to be the one writing music, going on tour. But what would I be able to pass down to my daughter? In music, you have to be the entertainer at all times. It is not something you can let stand on its own two feet without you being there. So long term, I always knew I wanted to get into business.' Johnson and Wilson had tried opening a bar and restaurant in Croydon first, called Crepes & Cones, but it closed as the first Covid lockdown hit. While eating out can be taken away, people will always have babies and babies will need cleaning, he reasoned. 'You always need to wash, regardless of what happens.' Getting Nala's Baby off the ground was not easy and Johnson credits the consultant Shaz Saleem for supporting the initial phase. 'We were winging it,' he admits. Johnson has a degree in accounting and finance so could cope with the numbers, but those numbers got quite big, quite quickly. It took 18 months to develop the first eight products and the co-founders wanted to launch with an eye-catching roster of 'approved by' credentials, ranging from its efficacy on the skin to being safe for babies and suitable for vegans. The tests themselves were eye-wateringly expensive. 'I wanted to tick every single box,' Johnson says. Before long they had invested £250,000. This was enough to give them their break with Boots, but now Johnson needed more cash to begin production. The cost of the indicative orders from Boots and minimum production levels required from the manufacturer were sobering. So Johnson pitched to friends and family, including Konan and the likes of Anthony Joshua, the former heavyweight world champion. They backed him and he sold a stake, raising £1.5 million. 'There is a lot of pressure because you are taking money from people you know to invest in your dream,' he says. 'But I genuinely thought it was going to work.' Some friends were not 100 per cent convinced, though. 'Some did say this is a bit risky, man. You are going into baby skincare. This is crazy.' He admits he didn't see the baby skincare entrepreneur in him before it happened. 'I never, never saw it coming, for me to be doing this. But my life went down that road when I had a daughter. It was never planned but it felt right at the time. I became a father and so I understood the need for [Nala's Baby] even more, just being a dad, saying 'I would want this for my daughter'.' Knowing he had six months before the launch in Boots, Johnson plotted out what he would do each day to build awareness on his social media: he has more than 690,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. The effort worked. 'I wanted it to be a frenzy and that is literally what happened,' he recalls. Nala's Baby sold out online within ten minutes and many of the 400 Boots stores saw their shelves cleared. Some products started popping up on eBay, being offered at well above the retail price. Feedback from customers with skin issues was positive and by 2023 it won the Mother & Baby best baby skincare range award, as voted for by parents, beating the previous winner and market leader Childs Farm. 'It was a key moment for us,' Johnson recalls, as there were supermarket buyers in the room. Boots took its new range, called Vanilla Cloud, to more than 1,000 stores and the supermarkets followed. Nala's Baby now claims to have an 8 per cent share of the market. As the business became a more serious business venture, Johnson also used his contacts for advice, including his friend Franklin Asante, who is head of entrepreneurs at the private bank Coutts. Asante sat Johnson next to Saeb Eigner, former chairman of the Dubai Financial Services Authority, at a dinner. The two chatted and after Johnson had completed some homework to prove he was serious, Eigner introduced him to Gordon McCallum, the former chief executive of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group. He in turn introduced Johnson to Anna James, a former marketing director at Mothercare and Carphone Warehouse, who became Nala's chief operating officer. James recommended someone she had worked with, Ben Newnum, who joined as Nala's managing director in July 2023. 'He lives, eats and breathes Nala's Baby,' says Johnson, full of admiration for Newnum's attitude and work ethic. The 'introducers' have all invested in Nala's Baby, sensing a good thing. The business is now a team of eight, soon to be ten, all working out of a small office on the fourth floor of a building next to Paddington station in London. The location suits the team more than Johnson, who lives in Essex and has a 90-minute commute. Next up is the launch of a natural multi-purpose sanitiser 'that is effective as bleach but is not harmful'. Then next year is international expansion, either in Europe or the US. 'I do want it to be a global brand,' Johnson says. 'We are gearing up for 2026 to go international.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘They're rowdy. They're vibing. I rip my shirt off': the exploding career of Hanumankind, India's hottest rapper
Two weeks ago, halfway through his first ever UK show, Hanumankind instructed the crowd to mimic him by hopping to the right then to the left, back and forth, in unison. But the rapper from India slipped and fell, limping to the end of the gig in evident pain, kept upright by his DJ and inspired by the audience's singalong familiarity with his catalogue. 'We were ready to have a good time,' he sheepishly grins from an armchair at his record label's offices three days later. It turns out he has torn a ligament. 'It was a battle of internal turmoil. The show was like a fifth of what it was meant to be, but I gave it my all. London has a beautiful energy which gave me strength.' Even without the leg injury, the 32-year-old star, who was born Sooraj Cherukat, has reached a testing threshold in his short, explosive career. His tracks Big Dawgs and Run It Up, helped by action-movie music videos, have made him one of the most talked-about MCs in the world. A$AP Rocky and Fred Again are among his recent collaborators. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi even invited Cherukat to perform at an event in New York last September. But as a rare south Asian face in globally popular rap, he feels a certain responsibility. 'The past year has been hard,' he says. 'I'm trying to navigate through it.' What's more, although he expresses a deep pride about life in India, 'a lot of things are off. There is a mob mentality. There's a lot of divisiveness because of religion, background, caste. It doesn't sit well with me. I'm in a unique space to change the way people can think within my country.' Born in Malappuram, Kerala, which he remembers as a 'green, beautiful environment', Cherukat spent his childhood following his father's work abroad, from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to Britain. 'We'd traverse different countries and I'd sing songs in whatever language I was picking up,' he says. 'Wherever I went, I had to get involved and be ready to leave. I learned to connect with people. That's why the power of the word is so important to me.' At the age of 10, he landed in Houston, Texas, and found a rare stability. It was the early 2000s and the city was an engine room for rap innovation. Cherukat's set his accent to a southern drawl. Already a fan of heavy metal – which makes sense given his grungy, rockstar leanings today – he became hooked on the local chopped-and-screwed subgenre pioneered by DJ Screw, Three 6 Mafia and Project Pat. In his teens he was 'burning CDs full of beats, riding around smoking blunts and hitting hard freestyles'. He returned to south India just before hitting 20. 'The only place I had roots,' he says. He completed a university degree in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, before working a corporate job in the tech hub of Bengaluru. Seeing rap as 'a party thing, a way to de-stress and stay connected to the art form', he performed at open-mic nights, softening his US accent and perfecting his stage show for an Indian audience. 'Friends would come to watch and be like, 'Dude, you're not bad. You should lock in.'' So he did. At the end of 2019, Cherukat played his first festival: NH7 Weekender in Pune, Maharashtra. The crowd went wild, quickly morphing from a small handful into a packed moshpit. 'They're rowdy and they're fucking vibing,' he says. 'I rip my shirt off. I'm like, 'OK, I can do this!'' He quit his job and began plotting his next move, filling notebooks with lyrics throughout the pandemic. These are a blend of cheek and grit delivered with a flow that keeps respawning at different speeds and scales. Soon, Cherukat was signed by Def Jam India. Part of a movement to reject the remnants of British colonialism in favour of local expression, the proud, rebellious patchwork of Indian hip-hop encompasses the vast country's 'hundreds of languages, each as deeply rooted as the next', Cherukat explains. 'Someone who speaks Hindi or another regional language will give you a vast amount of depth and detail in what they're doing.' His decision to rap mostly in English therefore came with risks of being perceived as inauthentic at home, but it has certainly helped his global crossover. Besides, he has found other ways to communicate a homegrown aesthetic. Run It Up marches to the beat of Keralan chenda drums, while its video features martial artists from disparate corners of India. Cherukat performed it with a band of drummers at Coachella festival, his debut US gig. 'Most people don't know what is going on in my country,' he says. 'Maybe I can open up some doors, open up some eyes, break out of these bubbles and stereotypes.' Although not religious, Cherukat has a divine figure woven into his performing name. Over recent years, Hanuman, the simian-headed Hindu god of strength and devotion, has been employed everywhere from the car stickers of hypermasculine Indian nationalism to the bloody, satirical critique of Dev Patel's 2024 thriller, Monkey Man. Where does Hanumankind fit into this: traditionalist or progressive? 'I need to make music for myself first,' he says simply. 'But when you have a platform, you can bring about change through your words and actions.' Some fans were disappointed that he accepted the New York invitation from Modi – whose Hindu nationalist government has been accused of democratic backsliding and Islamophobia. Cherukat has defended his appearance, describing it as 'nothing political … We were called to represent the nation and we did that.' But today he claims his 'political ideology is pretty clear' to anyone who has been following his career. In one of his earliest singles, 2020's Catharsis, he rails against systemic corruption, police brutality and armed suppression of protest. 'I'm not just trying to speak to people who already agree with me,' he says. 'I'm trying to give people who are otherwise not going to be listening a chance to be like, 'OK, there is some logic to what he's saying.'' Monsoon Season, his new mixtape, is just out. It features the mellow likes of Holiday – performed on the massively popular YouTube series Colors – as well as raucous collaborations with US rap luminaries Denzel Curry and Maxo Kream. It is less a narrative album, more a compilation, with songs gathered over the years before the spotlight shone on him. 'I have a lot of memories of coming into Kerala during the monsoon,' says Cherukat of the project's name. 'You can have days where things are absolutely reckless, flooded, out of control. There can be days where you get introspective and think about life. There are days where you love the rain: it feels good, there's that smell in the air when it hits the mud, the soil, the flowers. Your senses are heightened. You can fall in love with that. Or it can ruin all your plans and you hate it.' Cherukat's knee will take some time to recover before he embarks on a North American tour later this year. It's clear he needs a break: not just to heal, but to continue processing fame, adapt to its changes and return to the studio. 'I'm still adjusting,' he says. 'The attention, the conversation, the responsibility, the lifestyle, all this shit. Things have been a little haywire. So I just want to go back to the source – and make music.' Monsoon Season is out now on Capitol Records/Def Jam India
