Babyshambles rockstar dead aged 46 as band pay tribute to the guitarist who also played for James Blunt
The band shared the devastating news to their official Facebook page on Friday night in a heartbreaking post.
They wrote: 'It is with deep regret and sadness that we share the news of Patrick Walden's death.
'We feel very fortunate to have known, loved and worked with him and we kindly ask for respect and privacy during these difficult times.
'Peter, Drew, Mik, Adam.'
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The Guardian
16 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne: Back to the Beginning review – all-star farewell to the gods of metal is epic and emotional
Fireworks burst over Villa Park's pitch, Black Sabbath wave goodbye, and the inventors of metal leave the stage for the final time. It has not been an epic show – just War Pigs, NIB, Iron Man and Paranoid – but is the farewell this extraordinary band deserve, with an undercard of stadium-fillers and festival headliners come to pay tribute. The returning Bill Ward adds the swing other Sabbath drummers have never managed, Tony Iommi churns out those monstrous riffs, Geezer Butler flits around them on bass, and Ozzy Osbourne … is Ozzy Osbourne, a baffled and discomfited force of nature. At a packed Villa Park, 40,000 metalheads – plus a peak of 5.8m more on the accompanying livestream – have seen their dreams come true in what is basically metal's Live Aid, right down to the revolving stage. They have been, as many from the stage remind us, part of history. All of Birmingham has draped itself in black for the final appearance of its prodigal sons. The four members of Sabbath were granted the freedom of the city this week, and the tourist board has declared this the 'Summer of Sabbath', with events not just this weekend, but right through the season. And, of course, there have been the other genuflections towards the group: the renaming of a bridge in their honour, the dedication of a bench, the Black Sabbath ballet (which returns to the city this autumn), and the giant 'tifo' of Ozzy Osbourne that the Holte End of Villa Park unveiled last football season. Sabbath are so indistinguishable from Birmingham at this point (the 'home of metal', as the city likes to remind us) that it was inevitable their final show should happen in the city, just as their previous last-ever shows did, in 1999 and 2017. This time, though, with Osbourne's health a matter of public concern, this surely will be the last time. Certainly, Ozzy dominates proceedings before even stepping on to the stage, in a way that leaves a slightly sour aftertaste: Ticketmaster sends punters reminders before the gig about the Ozzy Osbourne show, not the Black Sabbath show. Even the Test Match Special team, across at Edgbaston, are talking about it: there's an Ozzy standup cutout surrounded by black balloons in his hotel lobby, notes former England skipper Michael Vaughan. In truth, Sabbath's relationship with Birmingham has not been so close as both sides would like to pretend. One fan site lists all known gigs, and there were plenty of tours during which the band didn't visit their home town. During their 1970s heyday, especially, they were too busy touring America incessantly to pay more than cursory attention to the UK. It's entirely possible that more people from Cleveland or Detroit or Pittsburgh than actual Brummies have seen Sabbath live. Perhaps those years across the Atlantic also account for the composition of the bill, which is heavily weighted in favour of the US – it might have been nice to see some of their West Midlands descendants on the bill, and while KK Downing is there, his presence perhaps precludes the attendance of his former band Judas Priest, with whom relations are fraught. Nevertheless, the bill comprises a list of hard rock superstars, some of which raise questions all of their own: will Guns N' Roses, even this new, professional iteration, be able to manage a seven-minute changeover and stick to a 15-minute set? After a greeting from master of ceremonies, Hollywood actor Jason Momoa – a fitful and baffling presence through the day – Mastodon begin proceedings, in front of a stadium already nearly full by 1pm. Giant beach balls in Villa's claret and blue and Ozzy emblazoned on them bounce around the front of the crowd, as the breeze flicks the sound back and forth. To be fair, though, you wouldn't realise they had recently shed their lead singer/guitarist and replaced him with an expert YouTube shredder. And like the bands that follow them, they offer up a Sabbath cover in homage. Rival Sons' cleaner, bluesier riffs are better suited to the booming stadium sound than Mastodon's technical grinding. How Anthrax were must remain a mystery to me: sets are so short (around 15 minutes), turnarounds so quick and bar queues so immense that those who try to get a drink at the end of one set are sure to miss the whole of the next. Fronting Halestorm – who don't cut through – Lzzy Hale asks where all her 'women of heavy metal are', and maybe a twentieth of the crowd raise their hands, but for all the drinking and the testosterone, there is no lairiness or aggression in the air. Even if plastic bottles had been allowed in, no one would be bottled off today. Much of the afternoon, though, passes in a blur of growled vocals and downtuned guitars. Sets are too short to build momentum, though the inverse of that is that even the most metal-agnostic get no chance to be bored: no one has the time to be self-indulgent. And as the beer kicks in, the crowd liven up: the first circle pits appear during Lamb of God's set, 90 minutes in, and they get the first true roar for covering Children of the Grave, Sabbath's 1971 classic, though it doesn't benefit from Bill Ward's shuffles being replaced with double kick-drums. The first of the day's two all-star bands is fronted by Hale but the day is so focused on Ozzy that the big shout-out goes to his former guitarist Jake E Lee. It's a set of covers, with rotating singers and players, and A Shot in the Dark is the first sighting of the hair metal side of Osbourne's career, before a thrillingly brutal Sweet Leaf. Yungblud is a change of pace and generation, opening with Changes, the piano waltz from the fourth Sabbath record. He's sincere, passionate and wins a huge response from a crowd who might not be familiar with him, compelling a whole-stadium singalong. One song and he's gone, having stolen the first third of the show. As the day passes, Alice in Chains are sluggish, but Gojira impressively pulverising, playing with clarity and directness. Their intricate lead guitar lines somehow serve the PA and the breeze, and for Mea Culpa – accompanied by a soprano – the circle pits reopen. They seem charmingly nervous about introducing their Sabbath cover, Under the Sun, but they shouldn't be. They kill it. They're followed by a three-drummer superstar drum-off, inserted into a cursory cover of the mighty Symptom of the Universe, rearranged for multiple drum solos. No matter that Momoa insists drums are the heartbeat of heavy metal – drum solos are actually its blocked U-bend. That's followed by Billy Corgan singing Breaking the Law accompanied by local hero KK Downing and Tom Morello, at which point it's starting to feel like the metal Royal Variety show: only here would Corgan give way to Sammy Hagar, who kills the momentum stone dead. The variety show air is not quelled by Steven Tyler and Ronnie Wood assembling for Train Kept a Rollin', before Walk This Way gets the biggest cheer of the day so far, immediately surpassed when the ensemble launch into Whole Lotta Love. The wholly tribal nature of the event is illustrated when Pantera take the stage and Cowboys From Hell gets tens of thousands singing along. Thankfully, Phil Anselmo chooses not to offer any of his favourite white power slogans as accompaniment. Tool, too, are greeted like heroes, though their prog-metal is baffling to the uninitiated. One can see the stadium-readiness when the very biggest turns arrive. After Slayer – which is like listening to road works, take that as compliment or not – Guns N' Roses patrol the stage as if they own it, opening with Sabbath's Never Say Die, with Axl Rose on surprisingly good voice. They play Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, too, and only throw in a couple of their own big hits, Paradise City and Welcome to the Jungle. Metallica are fantastic – taut and aggressive from their opening cover of Hole in the Sky. It helps, too, that in For Whom the Bell Tolls they have half a dozen of metal's greatest riffs in one song. And then, at last it's Ozzy. He arrived on stage in a black throne, from which he does not stir. During Coming Home, his struggle with pitch is both painful and moving: he seems on the brink of tears as the crowd carry him home, but brings everything back with a triumphant Crazy Train. There's a clear distinction between Ozzy's set and Sabbath's set. Ozzy's, of course, is based largely on his 80s solo hits. Mr Crowley, which opens with ominous organ, is ludicrous in its cod-satanism, but equally marvellous. It is perhaps daring for Ozzy to play Suicide Solution – the song that was seen as promoting death among young metalheads – but in this crowd it's a celebration rather than a commiseration. Sabbath, by contrast, draw solely on their first two albums. Fortunately, for those who wish to hear more, throughout the show the assembled artists visit the Sabbath catalogue with great frequency and ardour. Nevertheless, none of them have the unique bludgeoning force that the forefathers of heavy music still possess. On the big screens you can see Tony Iommi's false fingertips, employed to enable him to play those downtuned chords for the decades since he lost those digits in a factory accident. And the band pay tribute to their surroundings: to close their set, Geezer Butler plays a bass in Villa's claret and blue colours with the club motto printed on the body. It's a very Birmingham way of doing things on what has been a very international day. It's affecting to see how united the crowd are behind Ozzy, with plenty of wiped tears during his solo set. But in the end, the night, rightly, belongs not just to him, but to four Brummies who changed rock music for ever.
The Guardian
16 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘Free of human logic': the modern artists inspired by surrealism's 100-year-old parlour game
Some time in the winter of 1925-1926, the French author André Breton and his comrades Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert and Marcel Duchamp invented an old-fashioned parlour game. You write a word on a piece of paper, then fold it over so the next person can't see what you've written, and you end up with a strange sentence. The game is now known as Exquisite Corpse, after the result of their first go: Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine). Exquisite Corpse gave Breton so much joy because it summed up the essence of the surrealist school of art he was trying to articulate at the time. In his first 1924 manifesto, he told budding surrealists to put themselves in 'as passive, or receptive, a state of mind' as they can and write quickly. Forget about talent, about subject, about perception or punctuation. Simply trust, he writes, 'in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur'. In the year of its centenary, the spirit of Breton's Exquisite Corpse is not just un-dead but frantically rattling the lid of its coffin from the inside. Several modern artists are continuing the surrealist tradition by composing with found materials (words, images, objects), drawn from the accidental debris of the everyday, to make the unexpected. For a recent show at Frith Street Gallery, the British artist Fiona Banner showed works made with discarded mannequin parts she'd found in an abandoned Topshop in north-west England. In a film, titled DISARM (Portrait), she has emblazoned words like 'disarm' on arms, 'obsolete' on soles, and 'delegation' on legs. At first she thought of it as a concrete poem or a Breton-esque poème objet. Then she realised, she says, that 'actually, it's more liquid than concrete'. For Banner, the power of Exquisite Corpse, 'its radical space', lies not in the finished sentence but on that fold. 'I think to not understand is a very important space,' she says. 'To be free of human logic.' Dimitri Rataud, a French actor turned artist, whose work is now on show at HIS Paris gallery, makes what he calls 'haikus marinières': surrealist-inspired concrete poems he finds by blacking out most of the words on a ripped-out page of a random book. The name itself is a word play: the pieces look like Breton tops AKA marinières because of the stripes. And the poems (et soudain … le bonheur – 'and suddenly … happiness') are as light as a feather on the breeze. The printed word, which he handles like a builder might a brick, is useful raw material. And each poem is but a moment. Rataud starts by tearing the cover off the book then opening it on the last page. He can never do the same thing twice. To his gallery's dismay, he refuses to make copies. Rataud is popular on Instagram, and you can of course see why: Breton tops, French romance, Japanese minimalism. And yet, these found poems are luminous, in the way they balance on that paper-thin edge between accident and intention. 'I've found extremely beautiful haikus in sordid books.' For the Paris surrealists of the 1920s – crawling out of the wreckage of the first world war – nonsense was a deadly serious matter. When the Centre Pompidou's exhibition, Surréalisme (a touring mega-show currently at the Hamburger Kunsthalle), opened in September 2024, co-curator Marie Sarré described the centennial movement as one of the most politically engaged of the avant gardes. 'Throughout its history, the political and the poetic ran in parallel,' she said. 'It wasn't an artistic movement or a formalism, but a collective adventure and a philosophy.' Contrary to other avant garde movements which embraced the notion of progress, it questioned everything. The surrealists were among the first anticolonialists, the staunchest anti-fascists, proponents of social revolution and proto-eco warriors. 'They asked the questions artists today are asking,' said Sarré. To wit, Malaysian-born artist Heman Chong, whose work is currently on show at the Singapore Art Museum. This survey exhibition is organised into nine categories: words, whispers, ghosts, journeys, futures, findings, infrastructures, surfaces and endings. One piece, 'This pavilion is strictly for community bonding activities only', reproduces a sign Chong found in a communal space within one of Singapore's Housing and Development Board block of flats. 'The sentence itself is nuts, right?' he says. 'That you would insist on community bonding activities, which means, literally, you cannot be there alone, right? Because you can't bond with anyone alone.' By contrast, he often makes installations with things people could secrete away – stacks of postcards; mountains of sentences from spy novels shredded on to the floor; a library of unread books. 'I would love it if people just take things out of their own accord,' says Chong. 'Coming from Singapore, which is an extremely paternalistic, authoritarian state, a lot of my work is not about telling people what they cannot do.' In November 2024, South Africa-based Nhlanhla Mahlangu, who is a long-term collaborator of William Kentridge, gave a performance lecture titled Chant for Disinheriting Apartheid. It collates several spoken word compositions and improvised works, which delve into the brutal flattening of colonial oppression: language stolen, names mangled, bodies which have learned to recognise different guns by the sounds they make. In one section, he performs, one by one, various unrelated sentences in the languages of isiZulu, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Venda, Xhosa. And then, 'the language of apartheid'. He stands stock still, in total silence, for two whole minutes. He recounts doing a workshop with children from Hillbrow, a part of inner Johannesburg beset by high crime and intense poverty. They were working on a performance of Aimé Césaire's 1939 masterwork, Return to My Native Land – a gut punch of a poem against colonialism, which Breton called 'the greatest lyrical monument of this time'. Mahlangu's students, who were witnessing crime and death and abandonment on the way to class, said: 'We experience surrealisms every day. We don't understand why people go to universities and study it. Our lives are surreal.' 'Surrealism offers ways to look awry at things,' says Patricia Allmer, an art historian at the Edinburgh College of Art. She recently co-curated The Traumatic Surreal at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. 'Because you can't encounter trauma head on, you have to find ways of seeing it, either as a distortion, through a distorting lens or from the side.' For Mahlangu, it is about 'bringing fluidity to what seems stable, and understanding that stability can be a weakness. It's constantly not answering the question, but questioning the answers, asking more questions.' In the 21st century, we may have grown wary of 'isms' in art. In a climate of constant technological and economic interruption, the promise of a transformative cultural revolution can feel suspicious; the most powerful movement in modern art, contended a recent article in the Art Newspaper, may be the art market itself. But it's worth remembering that when Breton first wrote about his ideas in 1924, he didn't think of it as a manifesto, just a preface to a book of poems he wanted to publish. And that's why Exquisite Corpse sums up surrealism's most lasting legacy to modern art today: a tool that taps you into something unexplored, a game for 'pure young people who refuse to knuckle down'.
The Sun
17 minutes ago
- The Sun
Eamonn Holmes, 63, struggles to walk as he arrives at party with girlfriend Katie Alexander, 43
EAMONN Holmes was seen struggling to walk as he arrived at glitzy bash with his new girlfriend Katie Alexander. The TV presenter looked frail but determined as he arrived at a star-studded party hand-in-hand with new flame - bravely pushing through his ongoing health battles. 5 5 GB News star Nana Akua celebrated her upcoming wedding in style as she threw a glam engagement party with fiancé Stephen at Shoreditch's swanky Blue Marlin Club. The loved-up pair were joined by a string of celeb pals, family and friends for the star-studded do - with Eamonn, 63, making a surprise appearance alongside new girlfriend Katie, 43, who stayed close by his side throughout the night. Eamonn, who has been battling ongoing mobility issues, was seen leaning on a walking aid as Katie supported him into the venue - the pair marking one of their first public outings together. After suffering from chronic back issues following spinal surgery and a fall, Eamonn appeared in good spirits despite his visible discomfort, managing a smile for waiting photographers. The pair, who recently went public with their relationship, looked loved up as they stepped out for the glitzy evening do. Katie turned heads in a figure-hugging chocolate brown bodycon dress, oozing glamour as she arrived on Eamonn's arm. She completed the look with matching sunglasses, a gold chain and a waist-cinching belt that showed off her hourglass figure - stealing the spotlight as the pair made their entrance. Meanwhile, a frail but dapper Eamonn cut a smart figure in a navy two-piece suit, crisp white shirt, and matching shoes - proving he hasn't lost his sharp sense of style. This comes after Katie opened up on the reason she swerved her red carpet debut with him at this year's TRIC Awards two weeks ago. Taking to Instagram, Katie shared a photograph of herself sat barefoot inside a wooden cabin. Eamonn Holmes hits out at 'horrible' celebrities on TV and admits 'there are so many false' stars She used stickers saying "be mindful" and "peace and quiet" to illustrate the snap. Writing alongside it, Katie admitted that she deliberately avoided the high profile event in London because of hurtful trolls. She said: "Was going to The Tric Awards, but I'd rather protect my Mental Health and Inner Peace than be subjected to more online hate from people who don't know me." This year's TRIC Awards was held at Grosvenor House in London. Ruth and Eamonn's relationship timeline Before the shock split announcement, Ruth and Eamonn seemed like one of the strongest couples on UK TV – even with their signature bickering style. Here's how their romance played out... 1997 - The couple first meet after being introduced by mutual friends, two years after Eamonn splits from his first wife, Gabrielle, with whom he has three children. 1997-2002 - To be respectful to Gabrielle, the couple kept their relationship out of the limelight. Ruth told Daily Mail: "I thought it spoke volumes about the sort of man he was, the sort of father he was and the integrity he had. It made me love him more, not less." 2002 - Ruth and Eamonn welcome their son, Jack, to the family. 2005 - Eamonn finalises his divorce with Gabrielle. 2006 - The pair begin to host Friday episodes of This Morning together. 2010 - Eamonn proposes to Ruth while at the Cheltenham Races, after asking Ruth's mother for her hand. June 2010 - Eamonn and Ruth marry at Elvetham Hall, Hampshire. 2016 - Eamonn undergoes a double hip replacement in the first of many health battles. June 2019 - On This Morning, Ruth and Eamonn say the secret to their happy marriage. Eamonn credits "compromise, consideration and lots of conjugal," while Ruth said it was "laughter and an equal marriage". November 2020 - Ruth and Eamonn are replaced on their regular Friday slot by Alison Hammond and Dermot O'Leary in a 'show shake-up'. December 202 1 - After a year of being moved to the bank holiday presenting slot, both Eamonn and Ruth left This Morning. January 2022 - Eamonn debuted on GB News, while Ruth stayed with ITV in her long-standing role on Loose Women. September 2022 - Eamonn undergoes spinal surgery after years of back issues including a trapped sciatic nerve. November 2022 - Eamonn falls down the stairs of his Surrey home with Ruth and breaks his shoulder, requiring a new operation. September 2023 - Eamonn has a spine and neck stretching procedure as part of his year-long recovery. May 2024 - Ruth and Eamonn announce they have split after 14 years of marriage and a 27-year relationship. September 2024 - Eamonn was spotted on a luxury holiday in Barcelona with his new girlfriend Katie Alexander. Ruth calls in a 'fierce' divorce lawyer. It would have been Eamonn and Katie's first red carpet event together. Eamonn joined his GB News Breakfast Show co-stars on stage in his wheelchair as they collected the award for Best News Programme. Katie has since shared a photo of the team to congratulate them, writing: "Winner winner chicken dinner!" Katie is a relationship counsellor and family support worker from Yorkshire. The pair reportedly grew close earlier this year, with sources saying she has been a 'pillar of strength' during Eamonn's ongoing health battles and split from wife Ruth Langsford. Eamonn and Ruth called it quits after 14 years of marriage. The former couple, who share son Jack, are now in the midst of divorce and a battle over their £3.6million home. Following his split, Eamonn and Katie began dating in mid-2024. 5 5 5
