Picasso toy guitar found in Italy

Italian police have found a toy guitar sculpture created by Pablo Picasso for his daughter Paloma, which had been kept in a shoe box by a businessman.

Rome police tracked the sculpture down to the businessman's apartment in Pomezia, a town south of the capital.

The businessman, who was not named, was charged with fraud and is now on bail.

Picasso gave the piece to an Italian artist, Giuseppe Vittorio Parisi. He then lent it to the businessman, who was to make a glass showcase for it.

The plan was for the priceless piece to go on display at the civic museum in Maccagno, a small town on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy where Parisi was born.

But the piece disappeared after Parisi handed it over two years ago. When Parisi died in January this year his widow told police that it was still in the businessman's hands.

The Little Guitar will now go on display at the museum in Maccagno, Italy's Ansa news agency reports.

An expert is reported to have authenticated the work, which bears the inscription "Paloma".

Celebrated as a pioneer of Cubism, Picasso is widely regarded as one of the 20th Century's greatest artists.

@'BBC'

Rowland S. Howard - Interview (October 2009)

Audio interview originally broadcasted October 23rd 2009 on 95bFM.

HERE

Rowland S. Howard - Shut Me Down (Live ATP Mt. Buller 10/01/09)

The Young Charlatans - Shivers

 By the end of 1977, the "supergroup" Young Charlatans had formed in Melbourne out of the ashes of earlier bands. Ollie Olsen, Rowland S. Howard (guitar, later in The Birthday Party), Jeff Wegener (drums, former member of The Saints, later in the Laughing Clowns) and Janine Hall (later in The Saints). The band recorded the first version of the Howard song "Shivers" (made famous by the Boys Next Door).

Music to the (ringing) ears: New therapy targets tinnitus

Loud, persistent ringing in the ears, known as tinnitus, can be vexing for its millions of sufferers. This perceived noise can be symptomatic of many different ills—from earwax to aging—but the most common cause is from noise-induced hearing loss, such as extended exposure to construction or loud music, and treating many of its underlying neural causes has proven difficult.
But many people with tinnitus might soon be able to find refuge in the very indulgence that often started the ringing in the first place: music.

A new music-based therapy has shown promise in helping reduce the ringing's volume in tinnitus sufferers within a year, according to a study published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment," wrote the researchers, who were led in part by Christo Pantev at the Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosign Alanalysis at Westfalian Wilhelms-University in Munster, Germany. 
The treatment is based on behavioral training theories that posit that the auditory cortex, which is responsible for perceiving the sound and has been shown to be distorted in the areas where a specific frequency is "heard," might gradually be trained to reorganize, correcting for its maladaptive distortion.
In the small study, eight subjects with tinnitus listened to their music of choice that had been specially edited—or "notched"—to remove the frequency that corresponded to their tinnitus level. Another eight subjects with tinnitus listened to their preferred music that had random "placebo" frequencies removed, and another seven individuals with tinnitus received no treatment.
Those in the two music groups listened for an average of about 12.4 hours per week, and the individuals in the tinnitus-tuned section found that "tinnitus loudness was significantly reduced," the authors reported. The other two groups showed no change.
The researchers propose that the therapy might work by re-wiring parts of the auditory cortex that have become over-active to instead tune into surrounding—but different—tones. Another possibility is that with deprivation, these specially tuned auditory neurons would undergo "long-term depression," causing them to become less active overall.
The therapy might also get a boost from the simple pleasure of listening to good music. "Joyful listening to music activates the reward system of the brain and leads to release of dopamine, which plays an important role in cortical reorganization," noted the authors. Just so long as that music is at a reasonable volume, of course."

@'Scientific American'

Surprisingly as someone who loves standing right in front of the speakers at gigs and likes my music loud, this is something that I don't suffer from...

The Phantom's Revenge - When Mr Hyde Killed Dr Jekyll (Barletta / Markus Lange / ...rmx)

This is the preview of the new PHANTOM'S REVENGE track called "when mr hyde killed dr jekyll" that will be out on G POINT MUZIK in january 2010.
With remixes from THEM JEANS, DJ BARLETTA, Q.G., FUTUREFLASHS + DAREDISCO, MARKUS LANGE + STEREOFUNK, MODEK, METALZONE, ...
check the forums to download the promos.

info: thegpoint@live.be

Interview w/ Robert Hood

Tim Hart (Steeleye Span) RIP

Tim Hart, a founding member of the British folk-rock group Steeleye Span, has died of lung cancer, his daughter said Wednesday.

Hart, 61, died Dec. 24 in La Gomera in Spain's Canary Islands, where the Briton had lived since retiring from the music scene, Sally Hart told The Associated Press.

He had returned to La Gomera three weeks ago after spending a year in Britain receiving treatment, she said.

"In the last few days he became very weak, and had chest pains. His body had suffered greatly from the cancer treatment," she said.

Hart was a star of the 1960s folk scene in Britain, first gaining fame in a musical partnership with singer Maddy Prior in 1966. The duo recorded two albums of "Folk Songs of Olde England," with the versatile Hart backing their singing on guitar, mandolin, dulcimer, banjo and violin.

In 1971, Hart and Prior joined with Ashley Hutchings, who had left the Fairport Convention to form a new band. The new project, at Hart's suggestion, was named Steeleye Span after a character in a Lincolnshire folk song, "Horkstow Grange."

Hart left Steeleye Span in 1983, but appeared at a charity concert with the group in 1995. Last year, he appeared with Prior at a BBC concert in London.

Living on La Gomera, Hart developed his interest in photography. He called the island "my inexhaustible subject" and did his own pictures for his English language guide to the island, published in 2004.

"In what now feels like a previous life, I once spent 16 years as a member of the English folk-rock band Steeleye Span," Hart wrote on his Web site.

"As the Everly Brothers so rightly sang we did it for the stories we could tell. But after a few years of traveling too fast around the world I got myself a camera, a Pentax Spotmatic, in order to provide a more substantial, and accurate, archive of memories," he wrote.

Hart is survived by his wife Connie, and a daughter and son from a previous marriage. Funeral arrangements were not announced.

@'HuffPo'

Nite Jewel - What Did He Say?

Nite Jewel

An ill informed wanker rant!

Rowland S. Howard - one of the last interviews

Walking into a South Melbourne record company office to meet Rowland S(tuart) Howard is an odd experience, made even stranger by a sign on the upstairs boardroom reading, “Please be quite (sic)”, in big capital letters. It’s an intern’s boo-boo apparently, but makes the sight of Howard sitting at the end of a long polished wood table surrounded by industry memorabilia less jarring.

Framed against the fluorescent colours of a signed poster for the Sound Relief benefit concert, Howard looks as calm and dapper as ever in his usual dark suit jacket. There are magazines and books stacked neatly within easy reach, to see him through any dead patches in a long day of press interviews. Coffee is brought and the doors swing shut with a muted thud.

We start by talking about his involvement in the recent We’re Livin’ On Dog Food documentary, a companion to the DVD release of Richard Lowenstein’s 1986 classic Dogs In Space, where Howard is a striking and articulate presence, in both past and present.

“I don’t actually know where Richard (Lowenstein) got that old footage of Ollie [Olsen] and I from,” he admits, “but I guess the reason there seems to be a lot of me in there is that he thought I said pertinent things, or possibly amusing things. I was really surprised by the amount of backstabbing that went on in the documentary when I saw the finished product.”

I thought some of it was kind of subtle.

Really? Well, the Primitive Calculators weren’t terribly subtle, and I wasn’t terribly subtle about them. If I’d known the final version of the film was going to be like that, I would have let loose a bit more, put the boot in.

You didn’t have a great deal to do with Dogs In Space, apart from one of your songs being sung in it. Does it feel odd to have become associated with it now?

No, not really. The documentary is a film about a thing that I was a part of, no matter how peripherally. Or maybe those people were on the periphery of a scene that I was part of? I think that it became weaker when it concentrated more on The Ears, rather than being about the scene in general. And there were some people in there, like Alannah Hill, who I don’t think had any business being included. She didn’t even arrive in Melbourne until 1980 or so.

There has been some talk, on the back of Dog Food, and The Ears reunion show, that Wirlywirld should come out of retirement.

That’s not going to happen, there’s no way. Ollie’s exceedingly entrenched in his world of techno these days.

Fair enough. Looking at Pop Crimes now, after a big introductory background spiel, the press release goes on to say, “It’s a history Rowland would gleefully put a match to.” Is that really the case?
Hmm, yeah. I wasn’t quite sure about that either. I mean, some of the stuff – most of the stuff – that I’ve done, I’m really proud of. But I don’t like the fact that so many of the interviews I do dwell so much on the past. It’s frustrating, I get interviewed all the time by people who haven’t heard anything that I’ve done since the Birthday Party or whatever.

“No longer do I look out from the stage and just see a bunch of ageing ex-junkies.”

How did you go about assembling the band for the album? I’m guessing you knew JP Shilo through producing his band The Hungry Ghosts.

Yes, I’ve known John for a while. Originally I was going to get Brian Hooper to play bass again, but he was over in Europe, doing a tour of his own. I’d always intended to have John on the album, just as somebody who always has something interesting to contribute. He approaches things from a less than obvious point of view. He suggested that he could play bass, and it seemed like an interesting idea, so we went with that. And Mick, I just think he’s a great drummer. He’s one of the few drummers I can think of who plays his drums like they’re a musical instrument, and really thinks about what’s the best thing for the song, rather than how he can just make his part encroach in it more.

And it was just the three of you during recording?

Yes, it was just us, just guitar bass and drums, with John also adding some organ and violin.

The sound and feel of the album is very distilled, very concentrated. And the first few lines of ‘Pop Crimes’ and ‘Golden Age Of Bloodshed’ are very dense lyrically as well.

Well, with those two songs in particular, I was trying to write a different kind of song than I normally would. As opposed to just writing about things that I’ve directly experienced, I was writing from a more global point of view, about the world that we live in now and that apocalyptic kind of feel to things that are around. I tried to get that across in those songs, and I was really happy with both of them.

Everything on the album is written in the first person, which makes them very direct.

Yes, I’m not somebody who writes about characters, or who tries to distance myself from the topic of the song by interjecting somebody between myself and the song’s lyrics or message.

Is it a bit of a balancing act, between those ideas and the pop feel of something like ‘(I Know A Girl Called) Jonny’, which has an almost girl-group feel to parts of it?

Yeah, it’s really just … I mean, I always try and have a element of pop to things, running through things, because I think that great pop music can be really fantastic. And for ‘Girl Called Jonny’ especially, I thought it would be great to do a song with Jonnine [Standish, from HTRK], because she’s got a very similar aesthetic to mine, and a similar sense of mischief. We both like to subvert the form of the music.

I’ve seen people at live shows be puzzled by you doing Talk Talk’s ‘Life’s What You Make It’. It doesn’t seem an obvious choice for you, the way that perhaps the other cover on the album [‘Nothin’, by Townes van Zandt] does.
Well, again, something that I like to try and do is take songs that are thought of in one particular way, or in one context, and show that there can be a lot more to them. And you know, ever since I first heard that song, I’d thought you could do it like it was something off ‘Funhouse’, it’s got that huge bassline and it’s just this big sort of grinding thing.

 

And, of course, at those same live shows I’ve been noticing the make up of the crowd has been changing. They seem to be getting younger.

It’s very gratifying. I get lots of messages on MySpace from young people, from 16 years olds. And when I play live, nobody calls out for ‘Shivers’ any more, because they are too young to have any kind of historical attachment to it. It doesn’t mean anything to them. It’s peculiar in a way, it just seemed to happen of it’s own accord. And it’s great, because no longer do I look out from the stage and just see a bunch of ageing ex-junkies, or whatever.

Yes, I can imagine that would get depressing.

Well, yes, but I think that kind of thing – calling out for old songs – is more of a problem for the audience than for the performer. But then it becomes a problem for the performer, when you have people coming to see you, and they just want you to remain the same forever.

But then you can’t have been “rediscovered”, because you’ve never really been away.

There is definitely a lot more interest in me, and what I’m doing at the moment, much more than there has been for a long time. And considering that I haven’t really done anything major for quite a while, it’s pretty strange.

Given that you are firmly in the present, then, do you listen to much current music, or go out to see much played live?

No. I never go and see new bands these days. The only recent Australian band that I’ve liked are HTRK, I think they’re a fantastic band. If they stick around for long enough they could achieve something really amazing.

Do you listen to CDs?

I listen to very few CDs, very few recent CDs. Most of my inspiration for writing tends to come from literature or film, rather than music. Although having said that, I must admit that I am really slack about listening to new things, it’s something that seems to happen to a lot of people, especially musicians, that when they reach a certain age, they become less and less interested in what other people are doing musically.

I guess what I’m reaching for – without wanting to put you on the spot at all – is your take on the way things stand today, based on the perspective of your 30 or so years of being involved in music.

Well … I think that it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been. Unfortunately music is still dominated by people who have no interest in really doing anything but rocking. When I went to Japan back in July [for Fuji Rock], I was introduced to Fall Out Boy, who are a particular bugbear of mine, and of course they didn’t have the faintest idea who I was, which naturally I was quite pleased about. But I’d have to say that I see them as being typical of a lot of bands, in the sense that the only purpose of their lyrics is to be there as something to hang a melody on. And they’re all very collegiate at heart too.

And this is the world you are about launch a new album into. At least you’ve got some quality acts [DZ in Sydney, Kes Band and The Dacios in Melbourne] as supports.

Yes, they were recommended to me by other people. As I said earlier, I don’t really keep up with what’s going on. John [Shilo] does, though, he knows a lot, so he came up with some suggestions. The live band for these shows is going to include Brian [Hooper], by the way, so it’ll be me, Mick, John and Brian.

And on that note – disregarding a bit of stray chatter that doesn’t bear repeating — it feels like we are done.

@'Mess+Noise' 

Rowland S. Howard RIP

MELBOURNE musician Rowland S. Howard has lost his battle with liver cancer.

He passed away this morning, aged 50.

Howard was waiting for a liver transplant and had cancelled recent shows due to illness.

The influential guitarist came to prominence as a member of Melbourne punk band the Boys Next Door who became The Birthday Party, fronted by Nick Cave.

Howard wrote their iconic hit Shivers, and his guitar skills would inspire a generation to come.

The guitarist was also a member of bands including Crime and the City Solution and These Immortal Souls.

His second solo album, Pop Crimes, was released in October to critical acclaim.

His final gig was at the Prince of Wales in October to launch the album.

In an interview with Rolling Stone to promote the album Howard spoke of his years of poor health.

“Being told that you've only got a couple of years to live without a transplant is a pretty frightening experience and certainly changes the way you feel about your life, [it] makes things so much closer."

Howland appeared in this year’s Melbourne punk scene documentary We’re Living on Dog Food, released with the DVD of Australian film Dogs in Space.

@'Herald-Sun' 

+

@'Mess + Noise' 
REVIEW OF HIS FINAL GIG  MELBOURNE 29/10/09
Recording of  first 4 songs
HERE
RECORDING OF HIS LAST SYDNEY SHOW 22/10/09

To HerrB (Tscha Bum)

Passen Sie auf sich selbst mein Freund auf...

Andy Serkis brings Ian Dury back to life

Spending time with Andy Serkis can be unnerving. The 45-year-old screen and theatre actor himself is the epitome of kindly decorum. And yet his wide, expressive eyes — round, rheumy and limpid blue — are forever at the mercy of his big screen alter ego, Gollum from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Flickers of that ancient balding hobbit repeatedly pass across the features of the London-born Serkis (the latter was digitally morphed into the former for the movies). Thus conversations about his career, his relationship with his Iraqi father or his anti-war protest at the 2003 Oscars reverberate with eerie visual echoes. “We wants it!” whispers the ghost of Gollum, somewhere in the ether. “We needs it! Must have the precious!”

Similarly, a grimace here and curious furrow there, and you spot the formidable primate star of the 2005 blockbuster King Kong living too in that same expansive facial range — the digital Kong was also a bespoke Serkis creation.

Later he will rail against the Luddites who dismiss these computer-enhanced turns, crying: “Wake up! These are acted performances, all driven by my facial muscles!” But for now Serkis, who was once in danger of becoming a pixelated punchline, is relishing the fact that he’s finally taking flesh-and-blood centre stage. Thanks to an incendiary career-defining role in the red-raw musical biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Serkis will soon be recognised, without resorting to hyperbole, as one of the greatest actors of his generation. It has already scooped him a Best Actor nomination at this Sunday’s British Independent Film Awards.

“I think that a lot of things have come together with this role," he says, black-clad and bestubbled, sipping spring water in a discreet London hotel and contemplating the break of a lifetime. “There’s a lot that floats my boat in terms of Ian’s style, Ian’s persona and Ian’s artistic endeavour

“Ian” is the rocker Ian Dury, the complicated, vicious and vulnerable subject of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Dury, who was the so-called “pop laureate” of the late 1970s London music scene and was paralysed down his left side (courtesy of a childhood bout with polio), is also the fulminating soul of a movie that swings breathlessly from ecstatic concert scenes to childhood flashbacks to domestic traumas and back again, often all in the short space of a single thumping anthem — Billericay Dickie, Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick or the deadpan title track.

And yet the movie never once abandons its emotional heart. At times it is dangerously moving. The wayward Dury, for instance, sits at the bedside of his heartbroken son Baxter (Bill Milner), and attempts a tough-love life lecture. “Don’t be like me, son. Be like you. Remember, we’re all on our own in this life!”

To which the son stares open-eyed at the father and replies the sweetest, softest: “No, Dad. I’m here.”

It is impossible to overstate just how fully Serkis inhabits the role. A self-confessed research nut, he spent three years of pre-production slowly and wholly becoming Dury. He perfected the singer’s baritone stage growl so precisely that he re-recorded a slew of Dury’s hits with the latter’s backing band, the Blockheads. “It’s quite scary,” says Blockhead Chaz Jankel. “He can now mimic Ian with 100 per cent accuracy.”

Physically, too, to capture the extreme gait of the severely disabled Dury, Serkis began walking with a heavy Seventies-era calliper attached to his leg. And he spent six insane months in the gym working out only on the right side of his body, to leave his left side fragile and weak. He admits that though the results onscreen are convincing, the methods have left him in pain. “I’ve got a dodgy back at the best of times, but the weight of that calliper, throwing it about every day, it shoves your body off-centre. And it made this massive weird muscle develop in my groin. I’m still recovering from it all.”

The emotional work was also intense. Dury confidantes far and wide, including his widow Sophie, son Baxter and daughter Jemima were closely consulted on a script that initially seemed, to Serkis and the screenwriter Paul Viragh at least, indecently unforgiving. “We had this early meeting with Jemima and Baxter where we showed them a first draft of the script,” Serkis says. “They both just sighed, shook their heads and eventually said: ‘He was much more of a c*** than that!’ ”

Furthermore, there are subtle biographical bonds between Dury and Serkis that feed the symbiosis of man and myth on-screen. Both men, for example, were art school students who fancied themselves as painters before settling on successful secondary careers — Dury as a singer, Serkis as an actor. Both were outsiders by virtue of their childhoods, Dury because of his disability and Serkis because of his Iraqi background (he suffered schoolyard racism). And both, most tellingly, were profoundly troubled by the painful reality of absentee fathers.

“I always mourn the fact that I never got to know my father, or spent more time with him,” says Serkis, who freely admits that he is “obsessed” by this one defining relationship in his life. He says that his childhood in Ruislip, in Surrey, growing up with his mother and four siblings, was happy but nonetheless marked by the absence of his father, a doctor who had chosen to live and work permanently in Baghdad while remaining married. His father eventually returned to the family home in 1990, on the eve of the first Gulf War, and is now 90. The time for reconciliation, Serkis says, has simply passed. “He’s 90,” he says, haltingly and with a defeated look. “It’s hard, it’s really hard. It’s unfathomable now. It's like, where do you begin? So much has gone on. So much.”

Never a stage brat or a childhood show-off, he found solace in hill-walking and the “isolation of the wilderness”, and chose to study painting at Lancaster University because it was close to the climbable peaks of the Lake District. Acting, he says, was an accident. Forced to chose a subsidiary course during his first year he opted for drama studies but, after playing a wildcard hostage-taker in Barrie Keefe’s play Gotcha, he found himself “addicted to the immersion in character, the psychology, the ability to express what I wanted to express”.

Tutored in the strong tradition of socialist theatre in the Northwest he became a regular fixture at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, where he met his future wife, the actress Lorraine Ashbourne, during a production of She Stoops to Conquer. The pair were married in 1991 and have three children: Ruby, 11, Sonny, 9, and Louis, 5. The socialist grooming, he says, was key to his life, his politics and his understanding of acting as a “service” to society. “I’m not just there to be gawped at,” he says. “I’m trying to change things.”

He talks about his desire to “needle” the audience, to provoke it. And certainly, in his best screen roles — from the excitable Potts in Mojo to Ian Brady in Longford to Gollum to Dury — he has an arresting ability to subvert expectations and somehow extract sympathy for the devil. “It’s something in me,” he says. “It might be fighting for the underdog, but I need to challenge an audience’s preconceptions.”

This fighting talk has spread beyond movie sets, too. He famously, on the Oscar night red carpet, three days after the start of the second Gulf War and in front of 33 million US viewers, unfurled a bright red and yellow banner that read: “No War for Oil.”

“It was nerve-wracking,” he says, remembering a night when Hollywood, aside from the lone protesting voice of Michael Moore (“Shame on you, Mr President!”) put its self-preservation ahead of its politics. “It was risky, there was a lot of security around, but America had just invaded Iraq — somebody had to do something. It was my first and possibly my last experience of going to the Oscars.”

On reflection, the London-based Serkis says that his subsequent fears of being ostracised by the Hollywood mainstream were ill-founded. On the contrary, he is currently the darling of the industry’s power elite and will soon be starring as, “the rambunctious, blustery, dipsomaniac Captain Haddock” in Steven Spielberg’s Tintin adaptation, as well as reprising the role of Gollum in the long-awaited two-part adaptation of The Hobbit. Of the latter role, he says that he’s excited to “get back into Gollum mode and revisit him. There’s still so much more to mine.”

For now, though, he is a man still functioning in the shadow of Ian Dury and the Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll experience. He speaks of the project with the punch-drunk love of someone who’s gone deep down for the sake of his art. Widespread recognition is on the way. A Bafta is a dead cert. An Oscar nomination at a push (don’t mention the war!). But none of that matters. What’s important, Serkis says, increasingly impassioned, is being the best father he can be, is planning hill walks with his family and is “finding out who I am through these f***ing characters that I play”.

And right there, in the gritted teeth of frustration, he could be Dury. And probably is. Still flipping back and forth from an impossibly potent character who screams, at the height of his powers: “I’m not here to be remembered! I’m here to be alive!” Either way, Andy Serkis, former big screen special effect, has truly arrived.

@'The Times'

'Sex, Drugs, Rock'n'Roll' opens on Jan 8th in the UK