Release of early Black Sabbath tapes will show band's young talent
Titled Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes, these demos were recorded by Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward at Zella Studios in Birmingham.
The release, supervised by the band's first manager Jim Simpson, comes ahead of Black Sabbath's farewell show at Villa Park on Saturday, July 5.
Prior to their final performance, nicknamed Back To The Beginning, Black Sabbath was awarded the freedom of the city of Birmingham.
Despite health issues, Ozzy Osbourne will perform with his original bandmates for the first time in 20 years, with support from bands like Tool and Metallica.
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
British underdog uses journaling as he tries to write own Wimbledon fairytale
It is likely to be the biggest day of Oliver Tarvet 's life so far, as the lowest-ranked player in the entire Wimbledon singles draw prepares to face defending champion Carlos Alcaraz in his second-round match. Yet while many would quake at the thought of taking on the Spaniard in front of a television audience of millions, the 21-year-old will be finding focus in an unlikely activity: journaling. The British underdog even takes his notepad onto court with him. Tarvet, the world No 733, will take on world No 2 on Wednesday, but the day before the match he told journalists he was 'quietly confident I can win against anyone, Alcaraz isn't an exception to that'. He added that his pre-match routine involved waking up 'pretty early', eating soon after and listening to music to 'get into the right headspace', before 'journaling', which involves writing down thoughts, feelings and experience on paper, often as an aid to self-reflection, mental well-being and focus. 'A big thing for me, I like to journal,' he said. 'It's just a thing that I enjoy doing, you know, you can maybe see on the court.' He revealed his journal's pages 'focus on what makes me good and gives me success'. Some who practice journaling fill their notebooks with 'affirmations' – positive statements about themselves and the writer's life in an effort to reinforce their own positive beliefs. When asked by The Telegraph if he wrote affirmations in his notepad, Tarvet said: 'Yeah, it's just little triggers that keep me in the right headspace and keep me focussed, and that's given me a lot of success, but not even just matches, before and after practice. 'If there's a feeling that I like, or a thought that I like – I'll write it down so I have it on paper and that's given me a lot of comfort. 'And you know, especially when you're playing in big crowds it's important to not let the moment get too big or lose your focus and it just keeps me grounded.' The St Albans-born player cut through Leandro Riedi on an outer court match in three-straight sets on Monday, despite the Swiss player being ranked significantly higher – at 503. His surprise victory prompted questions about how much the little-known player would be able to take back in winnings. As per National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations, the University of San Diego college student is eligible to claim only $10,000 (£7,300) 'profit' a year from his winnings after expenses. The prize for reaching the second round of the championships is £99,000. It is likely that Alcaraz's team will have spent much of Tuesday frantically looking for videos of the British player to analyse. Yet, as this is his maiden Grand Slam and footage of his college matches may be hard to find, this is likely to be no easy feat. In a press conference on Monday, Alcaraz, 22, suggested he had not heard of Tarvet before the tournament, telling journalists: 'Well, first of all, I just heard his name when he qualified to the main draw.' However, while some fans may see Wednesday's match as a foregone conclusion, the Spaniard appeared to be wary of underestimating his British opponent. 'I saw… great tennis on grass, to be honest,' he said. 'I have to be ready.' Tarvet is not the first young athlete to praise the benefits of journaling, with gymnast Simone Biles and sprinter Zharnel Hughes among others who have spoken publicly about it. On Tuesday afternoon, Tarvet was seen being directed to Court 18 – a practice court in the Wimbledon grounds – after appearing to ask for directions. Wearing his University of San Diego shorts, the player was later seen carrying a pair of black headphones – no doubt to help him find the best headspace in the final 24 hours ahead of the match.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘I have a lot of sympathy for Elon Musk': Succession creator Jesse Armstrong on his tech bros AI satire Mountainhead
When he gets to his London office on the morning this piece is published, Jesse Armstrong will read it in print, or not at all. Though the building has wifi, he doesn't use it. 'If you're a procrastinator, which most writers are, it's just a killer.' Online rabbit holes swallow whole days. 'In the end, it's better to be left with the inadequacies of your thoughts.' He gives himself a mock pep talk. ''It's just you and me now, brain.'' Today, the showrunner of Succession and co-creator of Peep Show is back at home, in walking distance of his workspace. He could be any London dad: 54, salt-and-pepper beard, summer striped T-shirt. But staying offline could feel like a statement too, given Armstrong is also the writer-director of Mountainhead, a film about tech bros. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Open AI's Sam Altman, guru financiers Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen: all these and more are mixed up in the movie's characters, sharing a comic hang in a ski mansion. Outside, an AI launched by one of the group has sparked global chaos. Inside, there is snippy friction about the intra-billionaire pecking order. Mountainhead feels like a pulled-back curtain. But Armstrong also resisted another rabbit hole: spending time in Silicon Valley for research. He tried that kind of thing before. Contrary to rumour, Succession never did involve backdoor chats with the children of Rupert Murdoch. Once the show became a phenomenon, though, he did meet with masters of finance and corporate media, picking their brains for insights at luxe New York restaurants. 'And they'd be charismatic, and namedrop the 20 most famous people in the world, and I'd feel this buzz of excitement by association. Then later I'd look at my notes, and what they'd actually said read like complete inane bullshit. 'Make the move!' 'Be the balls!'' So Armstrong returned to his office and, more generally, his kind. 'I'm a writer,' he says, 'and a writer type. And I'm happy with other writer types.' In America, when Succession exploded, you could sense an assumption the mind behind it must be an English Aaron Sorkin: a slick character as glamorous as the world he wrote about. Instead, here was the dry figure who compares making Mountainhead to an early job at budget supermarket Kwik Save. (Both, he says, boiled down to managing workload.) Rather than stalk Sam Altman, he read biographies and hoovered up podcasts. Amid the oligarchs' tales of favourite Roman emperors, he kept finding a common thread: a wilful positivity about their own effect on the world. 'And it must be delightful to really believe, 'You know what? It's going to be fine. AI's going to cure cancer, and don't worry about burning up the planet powering the AI to do it, because we'll just fix that too.'' Part of the trick, he says, is perspective. At a certain level, money and power give life the feel of an eternal view from a private plane. 'Whereas reality is standing in the road, dodging cars, thinking 'Oh God! This is fucking terrifying!'' Success and Succession have not made Armstrong an optimist. But they did give him the professional heft to direct Mountainhead as well as write it, and to do so at unprecedented pace. Film and TV move achingly slowly; it was last November that he decided he wanted to make a movie about the junction of AI, crypto and libertarian politics. By May, he was preparing for it to come out. He says now he wanted Mountainhead to be 'a bobsleigh run. Short, and slightly bitter, and once you're on, you're on.' His voice quickens recalling a first meeting with Steve Carell, who he wanted to play Randall, 'the group's dark money Gandalf'. This was January. Without a script, Armstrong could only tell the actor the story he'd loosely planned. Carell sat in silence. 'I thought, 'Well, this has gone very badly.'' Then he said yes. 'At which point it was like, 'Fuck. This is actually going to happen. Now I have to write it.'' By March, the film was being shot in a 21,000 sq ft mansion in Deer Valley, Utah, then on the market for $65m. Carell aside, the cast included Cory Michael Smith, Ramy Youssef and Jason Schwartzman. For Armstrong, directing his first feature on a berserk turnaround was made easier by a deep fondness for actors. Standing in front of a camera, he says, paralyses him with self-consciousness. 'So I honestly find what they do magical.' His own lack of talent as a performer proved important to the younger Armstrong. Between 1995 and 1997, he worked as an assistant to Labour MP Doug Henderson. It was an interesting time to have the job, with Tony Blair about to enter Downing Street. Is there a Sliding Doors world where a rising star assistant becomes an MP himself? One where, by now, Jesse Armstrong is home secretary? He shakes his head for several seconds. 'I just wasn't good at the job. Fundamentally, I didn't understand politics.' He knows it sounds odd, having later written for insidery Westminster comedy The Thick of It. 'But I couldn't do the acting. I didn't get it. I always thought like a writer, so in meetings where I should have been building my career, I'd just be thinking, 'That's weird. That's funny. Why did you say that?'' (Armstrong once wrote for the Guardian about a meeting with then Conservative minister Ann Widdecombe, in which she sat under two posters: one a lurid anti-abortion message, the other Garfield.) Instead, he segued into comedy, and soon after Peep Show, the beloved squirm of a sitcom co-written with Sam Bain. At first glance, Succession is the obvious prequel to Mountainhead, a former newspaper empire giving way to tech superpower. But Armstrong sees a closer link between his new film and Peep Show: 'Because it's about men, and male hierarchies, and the pathos of men trying to connect.' He is tickled by the thought of his own story world, in which characters from different projects collide. 'You can see Super Hans arriving at Mountainhead on a scooter, delivering the ketamine.' Then he pauses, suddenly anxious. Could he make sure I'll mention Bain if I talk about Peep Show? 'Because it was always Sam's show as well.' And Hans owed so much to actor Matt King too, he says, 'and then, of course, there's David Mitchell and Robert Webb.' Should Armstrong ever make an Oscar acceptance speech, we will be there a while. Making sure due credit is given is of a piece with his near-pathological modesty. (He is a keen footballer. Which position? 'Terrible.') Being fair-minded matters too. He adds a postscript to his memory of leaving Westminster. 'I'd also say I don't in any way feel superior to people who do make a career in politics. I still believe we need good, professional politicians.' Turning back to Mountainhead, his even-handedness reaches a kind of event horizon. Armstrong , it transpires, feels sorry for Elon Musk. 'Musk has done huge damage in the world, particularly with Doge, but I have a lot of sympathy for him.' The owner of X was brutally bullied as a schoolboy and according to a 2023 biography, had a difficult relationship with his father. 'This is a traumatised human being,' says Armstrong. Still, not every bullied child ends up making apparent Nazi salutes onstage. 'Yeah. That wasn't great.' But there are other sides to Armstrong. For all the hints of bumble and awkwardness, he has also had the discipline to build a stellar career. And the more measured he is in person, the more Mountainhead feels like the work of a grinning Id, rising up to take a scalpel to his subjects, with their pretensions to philosophy, and dark indifference to life. ('I'm so excited about these atrocities,' a character beams as the world goes violently awry.) But his sympathy has its limits. 'I do think the cocoon they're in makes it hard for them to remember other people are actually real. But they've also been quick to give up trying. And some definitely feel the superior person shouldn't have to try anyway.' More to the point, though, Armstrong finds the tech moguls funny. Much of the grimness of a Musk or Thiel is also brilliantly ridiculous: the epic lack of self-knowledge, the thinness of skin. Having studied them as he has, would he expect his real-life models to be enraged by the film? 'Oh no. They'd instantly dismantle it in a way that would be 50% completely fair, and 50% totally facile. But they wouldn't see any truth to it.' Still, Mountainhead is something very rare: a movie that feels as contemporary as TikTok. For Armstrong, after Succession and now this, you might think stories about the moment had become addictive. He frowns. Is a period piece next, in fact? Victorian bonnets? 'Maybe. Genuinely maybe. Because I'm not actually that drawn to ripped-from-the-headlines ideas.' The frown deepens. 'Am I not? I don't know. I'm losing faith in my own answer, because I evidently am. I mean, I'm not going to claim I don't like writing about right now. But honestly, at the same time – I'd be pleased to get out of it.' Mountainhead is available to own digitally now
BreakingNews.ie
an hour ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Jessie J says she ‘misses being active mum' as she recovers from cancer surgery
Jessie J has said she is 'missing being an active mum' as she recovers from breast cancer surgery. The Price Tag singer announced in June that she had been diagnosed with early breast cancer and that she would be undergoing treatment. Advertisement The 37-year-old posted to her Instagram story on Tuesday, providing an update after her surgery. 'For those asking for a health update,' she wrote on her Instagram story, 'I am 11 days post surgery. I'm good. Missing being an active mum/human the most.' The artist, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, and her partner Chanan Safir Colman, had a son, Sky Safir Cornish Colman, in May 2023. Jessie added: 'But it's been nice to slow down and Sky is having a blast with Nanny and Grandad. Advertisement 'It's still uncomfortable / a little painful, but I can handle that. I'm doing my exercises and taking all the healthy things. I have been trying to eat super clean.' The singer also revealed she has stopped taking pain medication, saying it is 'just not my thing'. The story featured a picture of Jessie's wound drain, a tube which helps remove excess fluid or blood that can accumulate after surgery. She asked her followers: 'Anyone else who has had this, did you feel like you are walking around one of those dog / duck toys. I carry mine on the floor when I'm home so the gravity can help the drain. Hoping it's out by the end of the week.' Advertisement The artist has battled with ill health throughout her life, having been diagnosed with a heart condition aged eight, suffering a minor stroke aged 18 and having briefly gone deaf in 2020. The Domino singer said she is 'feeling positive and grateful', and asked fans not to worry if she 'seems a little out of it' in public. 'If you do see me out, sitting in a park or coming out of a doctor's appointment or eating or walking or anything, and I seem a little out of it. I am,' Jessie said. 'It's not personal. Advertisement 'I don't have what I usually have to give energy wise, understandably. I will get there. It's a slow road.'
