Latest news with #MoveIt
Metro
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
Music legend, 84, admits 'I might be dead next year' ahead of new tour
84-year-old Sir Cliff Richard has admitted that his upcoming tour could be his last, amid fears that he could be 'dead' by next year. The legendary crooner and controversial gravy-maker is set to embark upon a series of live shows in Australia and New Zealand. The octogenarian rock n' roll star has been a fixture of the music industry for almost 70 years, having rose to fame with the hit single Move It in 1958. He went on to release such hits as Living Doll (1960), We Don't Talk Anymore (1979) and Summer Holiday (1963), from his musical film of the same name. His global Can't Stop Me Now tour will get underway in Cardiff on November 30, before touring venues in Australia and New Zealand. However, Cliff, who turns 85 in October, has admitted that this could turn out to be his 'farewell tour,' should the worst come to pass. During an interview with the New Zealand radio station Coast, Sir Cliff – who was knighted in 1995 – admitted that he doesn't think too far into the future. After all, he might be 'dead next year.' 'The thing I would have to give up probably at some time is touring. It's very wearing, and you never know when you wake up in the morning whether your voice is still there,' he shared. Pressed on whether this would be his final ever tour, Sir Cliff said: 'I might be dead the next year!' 'So I don't even think about it anymore. It's one of those things. As I get older maybe I'll become less able to perform, so I can't say'. Elsewhere in the interview, he admitted that he wouldn't be breaking out his old dance moves. 'I don't want to be an 85-year-old guy trying to be 18,' the Mistletoe and Wine singer told hosts Toni, Jase and Sam. He may have once been credited as Britain's answer to Elvis Presley, but these days, Sir Cliff is best known for his colourful picture calendars, released every year to the delight of grandmas and ironic fans everywhere. The 2024 edition saw Sir Cliff posing aboard a luxurious cruise ship, showing off his collection of sunglasses and colourful shirts. Of the calendar, Sir Cliff said: 'I have grown to love cruising, it allows me to relax and regroup, sometimes prep for new projects, and above all, to socialise with friends who join me on ship. 'This calendar was fun to produce and allowed me to be creative in terms of where and how to take the images. 'I am pleased with the result, it's not me on stage or in a studio, and I hope you enjoy it too!' The release of Sir Cliff's cruising calendar came in the wake of his 'fat shaming' controversy which ensued during an ill-fated appearance on This Morning. Explaining his regret at not meeting Elvis, Sir Cliff told Alison Hammond: I had one chance, through a journalist when I was promoting Devil Woman in the States. More Trending 'At the end of the interview though, I said, 'Can we put it off?' because he'd put on a lot of weight, and I thought, if I'm having a photograph taken with him and it's going to be hanging on my refrigerator, it's got to look good.' To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video 'You should never have put it off, just because they're a little bit heavier,' Alison joked back. He went on: 'If you're a fan of somebody's, if you get the chance to meet them, meet them, even if they've put on weight!' Alison retorted: 'Is that why you don't want me over at your house?' Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Robbie Williams releasing the album he actually wanted to after quitting Take That MORE: Astronomer launches investigation into Andy Byron and Coldplay kiss cam drama MORE: Chris Martin mortified after exposing couple's 'affair' during concert
Daily Mirror
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Cliff Richard says 'I might be dead next year' as he shares sad tour update with fans
Iconic singer Cliff Richard says he may have to quit touring after being on the road in 2025 as he tells fans 'I might be dead the next year' Sir Cliff Richard says he will probably have to quit touring - and the rock 'n' roll singer famous for his hip thrusts may only perform a few dance steps on stage at his upcoming shows. 'I don't want to be an 85-year-old guy trying to be 18,' he said, admitting that he has started to think about his own mortality. Cliff is performing in Australia and New Zealand before returning to the UK in November, a month after he turns 85. The singer, known affectionately as the Peter Pan of Pop due to his eternal youth, admits that touring can be exhausting and has started to take its toll. He said: 'The thing I would have to give up probably at some time is touring. It's very wearing, and you never know when you wake up in the morning whether your voice is still there.' Asked if his upcoming Can't Stop Me Now tour could be a farewell tour or if he could return, he was undecided. 'I don't know," he admitted. "I might be dead the next year! So I don't even think about it anymore. It's one of those things. As I get older maybe I'll become less able to perform, so I can't say…' However, he does hope to perform some of his trademark dance moves that first endeared him to fans back in the 1950s, when his performances of debut single Move It were deemed 'too sexy' for TV. He is hoping to perform a routine with two backing singers and dancers to his 1962 hit with his former band Cliff Richard and The Shadows, Do You Want To Dance? But acknowledges he is still yet to determine if it will be possible, and hopes to be able to when he starts rehearsals. He tells New Zealand radio station Coast: 'I used to move around a heck of a lot and there was a period when I would get four girl dancers, four guy dancers and I used to dance with them. 'What I don't want to be is an 85-year-old guy trying to be 18. So, I can still move on stage. And that's what I do. I've got two backing singers, two guys, and they can dance, they can act, they can sing, they can play instruments. 'And I'm going to see, when I get to rehearsals, to just say, 'let's talk about maybe doing two songs where you come and join me out front. And while we're singing something like Do You Want To Dance we do a few steps like that?' 'I don't want to try and be 18 anymore. I like singing now, I'm as excited now as I was when I came [to New Zealand] last time. And I'm sure the audience will see that we - the big band and I - are friends and almost a family when we're on tour. So we'll try and do something that will make it look as though I'm 18! But I'm not.' Cliff, who has sold more than 260 million records worldwide, has previously said he has no plans to retire, and spoke of his hopes to still be on stage in his 90s. Cliff's upcoming Can't Stop Me Now tour will include two dates at the Royal Albert Hall, where he holds a record for performing 32 dates in two batches. He is also the only artist to have a top 5 album in eight different decades.
Irish Independent
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
‘I said, Geldof, this is gonna hurt but it'll help, and scratched his back like a maniac. It gave him a sexual identity with the girls'– BP Fallon's life and times
Now, thanks to Speed of Life Films, the same crew who gave us the award-winning Heyday: The Mic Christopher Story back in 2019, there finally is one. The rollicking BP Fallon: Rock'n'Roll Wizard premieres at the Galway Film Fleadh on July 12 and the cast of contributors is, frankly, ridiculous. U2's Adam Clayton, Imelda May, Geldof, Led Zeppelin's Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, R.E.M.'s Mike Mills, Def Leppard's Joe Elliott, Debbie Harry and many others, including Michael D Higgins, all line up to give Beep his dues. And there could have been even more according to producer Niall Carver. 'As fans of rock and roll, you and I can look at BP and go, 'that's the greatest story people never heard', but turning that into a feature film is a tricky thing. If you had a commission for a multi-part series, you'd get to put all the people in there. Our director Alan Leonard made the film work.' That he certainly did, delivering an affectionate portrait of this PR guru, DJ, writer, photographer, musician, vibe master, and inspiration to anyone who fancies a life less ordinary. The documentary is made even more remarkable by the fact that it's all true. 'BP is rock and roll,' says old friend Dave Fanning. 'He was there when you and I were still in school.' 'I heard Move It by Cliff Richard when I was in Avisford prep school,' Fallon kicks off down the phone from his south Dublin home, locating his year zero as 1958 when he was about 12. 'People might say, 'Oh God, Cliff Richard?' but Cliff then was raunchy. I heard this incredible guitar and I wanted to be part of this noise. I had no idea how to do it but it sort of panned out. Most of my life is like the unrolling of a magic carpet.' The first step on the ladder, or carpet as the case may be, was auditions in Teilifís Éireann while he was still in his final year at St Conleth's College. 'It was for this kind of Juke Box Jury pop show,' he remembers of his entry to Pickin' the Pops in 1964. 'I got hired to be on the panel, hit or miss kind of thing. I then had a profile that made it easy-peasy to meet anyone you wanted.' He was instantly famous in Ireland but London was where the action was and Fallon made his first assault on the place in 1966. He drove a bread van out of a depot just off Wardour Street which meant he could nip into The Marquee to see Jimi Hendrix. He returned home when the money ran out but London kept calling. All these Fleet Street journalists were very disappointed they weren't having huge sex on the bed Upon his return, a brass neck lifted him up another rung. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were staging their 'bed-in' peace protest in the Amsterdam Hilton at the time and BP took a chance. ADVERTISEMENT 'I hitched to Amsterdam, got on the house phone. John Lennon, please. Hello, I've come over from Ireland to interview you.' ''Can you come up now?' And that was that. I went back to the people I was staying with and said: 'Listen to this. John Lennon. Fantastic…' Weurghuuggg. The battery on the recorder had been [broken] so you either jump out the window or do what I did which is ring John and say: 'You know that stuff we did today?' 'It was really good,' he said. 'Yeah but it didn't come out.' 'Come around again tomorrow.'' 'I think I was probably light relief for them,' Fallon continues, casually recounting an episode that would have most music fans falling on the floor. 'All these Fleet Street journalists were very disappointed they weren't having huge sex on the bed. They threw all of them out and we talked about this and that and had a joint. It was a good trip, as they say. ' Fallon sold the story to Melody Maker with the proviso that they include a headshot in the byline. 'That was more important than the money because it gave me some profile in the British music scene.' Legendary Beatles press agent Derek Taylor threw work his way, including a brief job as Paul McCartney's weed taster. 'I've often wondered if Derek made that up in order to give me money. That is a job I took very seriously although after about the third jazz woodbine, it didn't make any odds really.' Lennon turns up again when Fallon was hustling around the BBC TV studios in 1970. The Beatle was there to preform solo single Instant Karma!. 'Lennon lent over and said: 'Are you getting up?' Never heard the song before but I enthusiastically banged a tambourine in his left ear and him trying to sing live. I thought I better be silent for the next take so I borrowed a bass guitar and did my thingy there. We'd worked out some Shadows steps but as soon as the music started, I forgot all about that.' There he is, enshrined for all eternity, giving it some welly beside a Beatle on Top of the Pops. If Fallon had retired there and then we'd still be talking about a great movie but he was only getting going. He'd met Marc Bolan at a party, although he mistook him for Cat Stevens because he'd taken a pill a roadie called Noddy gave him. My job was to make people famous Bolan was preforming with an acoustic guitar as Tyrannosaurus Rex and Fallon played him on his Irish radio show. 'I used to record it in the BBC, on the QT of course, and I'd leave the tape in reception for Terry Wogan to bring over. He was sitting on people's desks trying to get a gig but his dosh was still in Dublin so he had to go back every week and would kindly bring the tape for me.' Fallon was instrumental in getting Bolan up off the floor. 'It was obvious Marc wanted to be a rock' n' roller because that's what we were listening to.' Plugging in as T. Rex, Bolan 'became this extraordinary thing bigger than The Beatles'. Fallon, coining the term 'T. Rextasy' to get the job done in the press – 'it came to me on a train as a newspaper headline on fire' – was the PR man who made it happen. 'My job was to make people famous.' Mission accomplished, he was ready to move on. 'I'd done what I wanted to do.' A phone call from notorious manager Peter Grant provided the next step. 'I thought he was talking about Maggie Bell, a good singer but I'm looking for people on top of Nelson's Pillar. Then he said Led Zeppelin and I said: 'I think we should have a meeting.' One of the reasons I was brought in was because people put them in the same bracket as other bands who didn't have the magic of Zeppelin. Something happened when those four people played – alchemy basically.' Jimmy Page and Robert Plant attest to Fallon's importance within the organisation in the documentary. The stories of Zeppelin on the road are legion but it was even wilder than reported according to Fallon, who recalls one particular incident with drummer John Bonham. 'We all got on the plane and the next thing the pilot comes down to where we are with his little bottle and spoon. Bonzo waddled up to the cockpit to drive the plane and went loop the f**king loop. It was the most terrifying and exhilarating thing I've ever had happen to me. Thank God we all survived.' When Punk exploded in 1976 to knock things back into shape, Fallon – a Stooges and New York Dolls fan – loved it. 'Stuff like Tales from Topographic Oceans was just waffle to me. I actually brought Zeppelin down to see The Damned, good publicity for both of them. Then this Geldof fellow came along and what attracted me was that he wanted it so badly, he had an incredible knowledge of music, and was incredibly bright.' One can only imagine the difficulty other humans present had securing sufficient oxygen when Bob and BP were in a room together. Calling in a favour, Fallon got The Boomtown Rats their first serious British exposure on Marc Bolan's TV show. I previously interviewed Geldof, who grinned as he told the story of Fallon scraping his back before an encore so it would look like he'd just had sex. 'It's completely true,' Fallon confirms. 'I said, 'Geldof, this is gonna hurt but it'll help' and scratched his back like a maniac. It gave him a sexual identity with the girls.' In the documentary, Rats bass player Pete Briquette recalls Fallon's plan to drop actual rats on audience members. 'Under the guise of Blackhill Medical School, I ordered a couple of hundred rats in formaldehyde,' BP recounts matter-of-factly. 'The plan was to drop them off the Phonogram balloon on to punters. Thank God I was foiled. I drove around for weeks with a boot full of dead rats. It wasn't the most tasteful idea I've ever had.' Sinéad O'Connor was a complete and utter one-off with more b*****ks than a herd of bulls The 1980s saw Fallon back in Ireland, presenting the fondly-remembered and award-winning BP Fallon Orchestra radio show where both The Pogues and Sinéad O'Connor received early spins. 'I played a demo of Sinéad's, I've got it here. Frank Murray, The Pogues' wonderful manager, told me about them and said Elvis Costello might produce their record so I went down to Carlow to see. Everyone was leaping about but it's only when I sat down to listen to the records that I heard these extraordinary lyrics by this fellow who I remembered as Shane O'Hooligan back in the punk days. 'The angels sang through her,' Fallon says of close friend O'Connor. 'She was a complete and utter one-off with more b*****ks than a herd of bulls. There was something in Sinéad that reached people. It took her death for them to realise it fully.' In the early 1990s, Fallon was the resident DJ, in the back of a Trabant, and vibe master on U2's ground-breaking Zoo TV tour. Dave Fanning calls it 'a huge inveigle' in a career full of them. Adam Clayton reckoned it would be fun to have BP on the road. 'U2 invited me to write their programme, so I did and they said: 'If we asked you to come on the road with us, would you come?' They never asked but I ended up on the road somehow. A fantastic time and they treated me really well. 'I think that tour was quite possibly the apex of their career. Starting off with eight songs from the new album Achtung Baby and it worked because it wasn't 'sword and dove' music any more, it was 'those are cool trousers' music.' In the years that followed Fallon hosted rock and roll party/club nights under the Death Disco banner alongside the man-who-discovered-Oasis Alan McGee in London, New York, Dublin, Tokyo and beyond. Guest DJs included MacGowan, Gavin Friday, Kate Moss, and even Ronnie Drew among other members of BP's golden circle. Out of that came a meeting with Jack White. 'He came up to me in a club in New York and said: 'Would you like to come to Nashville and make a record for my label, Third Man Records?' Unlike with a lot of rock and roll talk, the ticket to Nashville arrived.' Fallon's first single was released by White, an admirable chap who consistently puts his money where his mouth is, in 2010, completing his unexpected crossover from poacher to gamekeeper. A band was the next logical step and BP's enviable phone book allowed him rope in such wiling luminaries as Nigel Harrison and Clem Burke from Blondie. BP Fallon & The Bandits released the debut album Still Legal in 2013 and he's still making music. 'A performer like him that brings the wisdom of the road into a performance, that's a great gift to the people who are present,' President Higgins offers. 'I ran into him after the Shane Concert [Shane MacGowan's 60th celebration in 2018],' says BP. 'We've been friends for ages and he was saying all these things so I asked would he say them on camera. I knew he wasn't one of these people who the next day would say no. He's the only president I know of who has a picture of Rory Gallagher and Phil Lynott on his office wall.' There's a line in BP's song Increasingly Often, 'each and every moment is a special one, not just some of them', which sums up his incredible life story and he has no regrets. 'No, I don't,' Fallon confirms. 'That's not to say there wasn't the odd wobble on the way. That's on the menu of the four-letter word called life. By and large, I've had an incredible time. I've lived my dream. And I still am.' 'BP Fallon Rock'n'roll Wizard' is at the Pálás Cinema, Cork on July 12.
GMA Network
22-05-2025
- Business
- GMA Network
Move It calls for immediate reversal of order slashing its fleet
Motorcycle taxi-hailing firm Move It on Thursday urged the Motorcycle Taxi Technical Working Group (MCT-TWG) to immediately overturn a recent order that slashed its fleet of rider-partners. In a statement, Move It said it filed a supplemental appeal on May 22 regarding its motion for reconsideration. Filed last month, the motion asks the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB)-led MCT-TWG to stay the implementation of its April 2025 order to reduce the Move It fleet by 7,826 units. According to the LTFRB order, Move It has 14,662 riders, which is beyond its 6,836 allocation. The LTFRB also suspended the motorcycle taxi service's operations in Cebu and Cagayan de Oro. In its appeal, Move It wants the agency to "formally declare that the motorcycle taxi company has a right to operate with 14,000 riders, including in Cebu and Cagayan de Oro." The ride-hailing company warned that continued "inaction" on its appeal "could result in the layoff of more than 14,000 riders and could be detrimental to thousands of commuters, particularly in the face of the scheduled rehabilitation of EDSA next month." "It is both arbitrary and unjust for the Honorable MCT-TWG to base a decision—one that effectively obliterates up to 14,000 jobs—on a single 'hearing' conducted solely by the Secretariat, without the presence of the Chairman, Vice Chairperson, the five other members of the Honorable MCT-TWG, and, most critically, without the participation of the directly affected parties, Move It and the riders," it said. GMA News Online reached out to LTFRB Teofilo Guadiz III, no response yet has been received as of posting. Transportation Secretary Vince Dizon earlier said the order slashing the Move It fleet will not be implemented for now as the company has already filed a motion for reconsideration with the LTFRB. Move It said the order "also equates to more than 14,000 families which are in danger of losing a source of income and users who stand to lose another option for cost-efficient, safe and convenient transportation." The ride-hailing firm clarified that it does not question the MCT-TWG's authority to regulate the motorcycle taxi sector, but stressed that "the power of regulation should be exercised in accordance with the tenets of due process as mandated by the 1987 Philippine Constitution, wherein '[n]o person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law...'" "The enforcement of the order–which was issued in flagrant violation of the right to due process–will displace almost 7,000 riders in Metro Manila, 3,000 in Cebu, and 3,000 in CDO who depend on Move It for their livelihood," said Move It. "Any further delay in the resolution of the motion will not just affect 14,000 riders and their families, but also the riding public, for whom the MCT pilot study was contemplated and envisioned," it said. — VDV, GMA Integrated News
