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A Beckham peace deal? Elton John acts as mediator in Brooklyn's family feud as he shakes hands with his godson after 'saying his piece' on row while treating him and his wife Nicola Peltz to a swanky lunch in St Tropez

A Beckham peace deal? Elton John acts as mediator in Brooklyn's family feud as he shakes hands with his godson after 'saying his piece' on row while treating him and his wife Nicola Peltz to a swanky lunch in St Tropez

Daily Mail​12 hours ago
Footage has emerged that showed the moment Elton John sat down for lunch with godson Brooklyn Beckham and his wife Nicola Peltz, in a bid to calm the family's escalating feud.
The legendary musician, who has been friends with David, 50, and Victoria Beckham, 51, for over 30 years, treated Brooklyn and his wife Nicola Peltz, 30, to a swanky lunch at fancy La Guerite beach club in the South of France.
New pictures show the couple wining and dining with Sir Elton and his husband David Furnish where the hitmaker reportedly took the opportunity to 'say his piece'.
The Beckham family have been at the centre of a feud that has pitted Brooklyn and his wife Nicola against the rest of the family.
According to The Sun, Sir Elton 'briefly' spoke about the family's feud in the hope Brooklyn would patch things up with his parents, and footage of the outing shared on social media showed the pair shaking hands.
Speaking about Elton's attempts to play peacekeeper in the row, a source said; 'Elton is the showbiz equivalent of Switzerland. He's utterly neutral in this row.'
'Elton of old may have relished in taking sides - in this case his young godson, Brooklyn - but two years off his 80th birthday, he's a man who has seen and done it all. He just wants everyone to be happy.
'There is no side-taking as such; he simply adores his godson, and really has a laugh with Nicola who he thinks has a great sense of humour. He wants to look after them in his role as 'spiritual adviser' as a godfather, it's a role he takes seriously.
'Elton and David think the situation is terribly sad, and has gently suggested to all involved that life is short - to patch things up.'
The source added Elton is 'adamant he doesn't want to stick his nose in' the feud, he just simply 'wants peace'.
MailOnline has contacted the Beckhams and Elton's representatives for comment.
Nicola couldn't wipe the smile off her face during the lunch as she sipped on Aperol Spritz at the fancy beach club.
Sir Elton is also said to have generously picked up the entire bill, after dining on the restaurant's signature lobster linguine which comes in at an eye-watering £190.
Nicola went onto pay tribute to Elton in a new Instagram post, as she stripped naked for a racy bath snap, while his song Cold Heart played over it.
David affectionately calls the musician 'Uncle Elton' after becoming friends in his football heyday.
Sir Elton was due to perform at the Beckhams wedding in 1999 before suffering a heart attack that prevented him from playing. He later sang at one of the children's christenings.
Meanwhile Victoria once disclosed that it was Elton who inspired her to say goodbye to the Spice Girls, penning an emotional letter to her older self where she confessed that watching her friend perform made her realise that her true calling lay beyond singing.
It comes after Nicola doubled down on the family feud as she declared Brooklyn 'her everything' on Instagram last week during their luxury St Tropez trip.
Nicola took to her Instagram Stories with snaps of the pair embracing during their sun-soaked getaway on board her billionaire father's yacht in St Tropez.
The couple only had eyes for each other as she wrapped her arms around his neck while he pulled her in close.
She wore a bikini top and skimpy white shorts while her husband shielded his eyes behind shades and a baseball cap and cheekily squeezed her bottom.
Nicola captioned the post: 'My everything @BrooklynBeckhamPeltz' with Brooklyn later resharing it with his followers.
Last week, it was revealed that Brooklyn and Nicola's Instagram accounts no longer follow his younger brothers Cruz, 20, and Romeo, 22, in the latest family drama.
Nicola doubled down amid her and husband Brooklyn's feud with his family as she declared him 'her everything' last week
However, Brooklyn's friends told MailOnline on Friday that Cruz and Romeo have actually blocked them on the social media platform.
This would make sense given that Brooklyn and Nicola are still following Victoria, 51 and David, 50.
Cruz and Romeo were still following Brooklyn and Nicola earlier this month but appeared to take action after Brooklyn posted a birthday tribute to sister Harper, sharing a family photo without them in it – which Nicola reposted.
There was much speculation whether Brooklyn would reach out to Harper on her 14th birthday on Thursday, but despite him doing so, it seems all is not well in the camp.
Brooklyn's birthday tribute to Harper marked his first public interaction with his family since he paid tribute to his grandmother Sandra on June 26, despite remaining silent and shunning his father's 50th birthday earlier that same month.
Sources close to the family have told MailOnline of their fears that Brooklyn and his wife Nicola have also distanced themselves from Harper after they failed to visit her when they flew into London in May to film an advert for French-Italian clothing brand Moncler just over a mile from the family home in Holland Park.
David and Victoria had no idea whether Brooklyn, who Harper has idolised since she was a little girl, would message her privately or publicly on Instagram because they have no communication with him.
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Horoscope today, July 24 2025: Daily star sign guide from Mystic Meg
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The Sun

time4 minutes ago

  • The Sun

Horoscope today, July 24 2025: Daily star sign guide from Mystic Meg

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Why has the world turned on the Waltz King?
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Spectator

time10 minutes ago

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Why has the world turned on the Waltz King?

On 17 June 1872, Johann Strauss II conducted the biggest concert of his life. The city was Boston, USA, and the promoters provided Strauss with an orchestra and a chorus numbering more than 20,000. One hundred assistant conductors were placed at his disposal, and a cannon shot cued The Blue Danube – the only way of silencing the expectant crowds. Estimates vary, but the audience was reckoned to number between 50,000 and 100,000; in all, there must have been a minimum of 70,000 people present. This month's Oasis reunion only played to 80,000. The result, in an age before modern amplification, was much as you might expect. 'A fearful racket that I shall never forget as long as I live,' was Strauss's own description. Still, the point stands. Johann Strauss II was famous; very famous. A Europe-wide newspaper poll, conducted in 1890, named Strauss as the third most popular individual in Europe – pipped to the top slot only by Queen Victoria and (in second place) Otto von Bismarck. Strauss died in 1899, before the era of recorded music, but within his lifetime sheet music for The Blue Danube sold upwards of one million copies. That's platinum disc territory, and in the 21st century, the phenomenon endures. The perma-tanned Dutch violinist André Rieu, whose classical pops orchestra is named after Strauss, has picked up some 500 platinum discs while his live shows – built around Strauss's music – play across the world to stadium-size audiences. His 2018 tour outgrossed Elton John, globally. Again, this is old news. I'm not here to tell you that Johann Strauss's waltzes, polkas and operetta hits were the pop music of their day: that people loved them, and continue to love them, is a matter of record. So why – in 2025, the 200th anniversary of his birth – is there a Strauss-shaped hole in the programmes of our major orchestras and opera companies? Classical music is obsessed with anniversaries and Strauss is proven box office, so where are the festivals, the rediscoveries, the operetta revivals? The Proms has a single Saturday morning concert; the Grange Festival staged Die Fledermaus – and in the UK, that's basically it. In Britain, at least, it seems that the people who decide what classical music we should hear have rather fallen out of love with this most accessible of 19th-century masters. If that's the case, they're swimming against the tide of history and the judgment of genius. The deepest divide in late 19th- century European music – a culture war of generation-defining bitterness – was between the devotees of Wagner and Brahms. Yet both composers revered Strauss. For Wagner, Strauss was 'the most musical man in Europe'. He hired a private orchestra so that he could conduct Strauss waltzes as a birthday treat, and licensed the Strauss orchestra to première excerpts from Tristan und Isolde in Vienna at a time when the city's ultra-conservative musical establishment refused all contact with Wagner's 'music of the future'. Brahms, meanwhile, was practically a fanboy, comparing Strauss to Mozart. When Strauss's stepdaughter asked him for an autograph, Brahms scribbled the opening of The Blue Danube and wrote 'Unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms'. For several generations afterwards, to be a progressive force in European music was to admire Johann Strauss. Gustav Mahler put Die Fledermaus on the stage of the Vienna Court Opera, and there's hardly a Mahler symphony that doesn't, at some point, swing into waltz time, or pause to squeeze the sadness and sweetness of life out of the succulent close harmonies – the yearning, Italianate thirds and sixths – that were Strauss's hallmark. Mahler's disciples, the arch-modernists Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, made exquisite pared-down arrangements of the Emperor Waltz, the Treasure Waltz and Wine, Women and Song. It wasn't just a German thing, either. In Paris, Ravel's La Valse portrayed the 19th century dancing to its doom, but Ravel had only love for the composer he called 'the great Strauss, not Richard, the other one – Johann'. A distinction needed to be made. The Bavarian Richard Strauss was no relation to Johann but in 1911 he'd woven a garland of waltzes into the score of Der Rosenkavalier. The opera was set in the 18th century, but that didn't matter. Like Stanley Kubrick (five decades later, in 2001: A Space Odyssey), Richard perceived that Johann's music embodied an entire civilisation. I could say more: of the eminent conductors (from Henry Wood to Christian Thielemann) who've adored Strauss; of his legacy in popular music, from the Gershwins' admiring tribute 'By Strauss' ('It laughs, it sings! The world is in rhyme/ Swinging in three-quarter time') to the way the long, poetic introductions and codas of Strauss's greatest waltzes anticipate contemporary DJ sets – building and shaping a collective mood, as well as providing a beat for dancing. Most startling of all is the knowledge that, having outlawed the works of Mendelssohn and Mahler, Goebbels suppressed evidence of Strauss's Jewish ancestry. Cancelling Johann Strauss was a step too far even for the Third Reich. Still, here we are, in a Strauss-deprived classical music world. Why? Perhaps the televising of the Vienna Philharmonic's annual New Year's Day concert has normalised the idea that Strauss is a purely seasonal treat. Most British orchestras programme a solitary Viennese evening in early January – typically under-rehearsed and delegated to a novice conductor, though artists who shortchange this music pass sentence on themselves. As with Mozart or Haydn, the superficial simplicity of Strauss's inspiration is a mirror that reveals a conductor's soul. Furtwängler's Emperor Waltz has a monumental inner logic; Karajan's Blue Danube shimmers with sensuous richness. Carlos Kleiber made the Thousand and One Nights waltz sound like a long, warm smile. The original score of Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube (1867). ART IMAGES / GETTY IMAGES And then there's our old friend snobbery. Rieu may be a factor there; likewise the high-kitsch framing of the annual New Year broadcast from Vienna. Euro-camp dance routines and crowds of Belgian retirees are just not cool. The tastemakers of the classical world say they want diverse audiences – but not that kind of diversity, and classical music social media foams with disdain on the morning of New Year's Day. It's embarrassing to witness. True, any creator as prolific as Strauss will have off days and arid patches (even Bach was no exception). But any truly musical listener should be able to discern the fundamental artistic quality of Strauss's finest work. Brahms heard it; Wagner heard it. It shouldn't be this hard. We live in an aesthetic climate that favours the arduous over the graceful, and privileges the grim over the joyous (though no one with ears to hear can miss the ever-present melancholy that offsets Strauss's sweetness). In the meantime, it's hard not to feel that we're missing out on something life-enhancing – and god knows, we could use it. Strauss can (and does) flourish even without elite orchestras and big-name maestros, but the pleasure that comes from hearing genius exploring its own lighter side shouldn't be confined to the first of January. Until the 1980s, Viennese nights used to be a regular (and best-selling) feature of the Proms, and there is a vast untapped repertoire to explore. Imagine an inventively programmed evening of Strauss rarities and favourites performed by, say, Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra (who played an exquisite sequence of Strauss waltzes in the 2014 Proms), or John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London (who delivered an exhilarating Fledermaus overture as recently as 2021). Preconceptions and prejudices would evaporate like mist on the Prater. Hope springs eternal. There's another Strauss anniversary in 2029: a second chance to celebrate some of the most perfect popular music ever created. And to join Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern, Ravel, Gershwin, Richard Strauss, Furtwängler, Karajan, Kleiber and (yes) André Rieu – plus millions of music-lovers across continents and centuries – in grateful homage to the Waltz King.

HAPs, warriors and power ponies: what to say about the Lionesses
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Times

timean hour ago

  • Times

HAPs, warriors and power ponies: what to say about the Lionesses

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