Rock
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Former Sex Pistols singer John Lydon is mourning the death of his wife Nora Forster at age 80 following her long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. The news of Forster’s passing was shared on the Instagram feed of Lydon’s band Public Image Limited in a post that read, “Rest in Peace Nora Forster. It is with a heavy heart that we share the sad news that Nora Forster – John Lydon’s wife of nearly 5 decades – has passed away. Nora had been living with Alzheimer’s for several years. In which time John had become her full time carer.”
The punk icon and Forster were married for 44 years and Lydon had spent the past few years dedicating his public efforts to honoring his longtime love. Lydon, 66 — who was known as Johnny Rotten during his Pistols days — entered the Eurovision Song Contest earlier this year with a touching ballad, “Hawaii,” dedicated to his beloved.
“All journeys end/ Some begin again/ We’re here, you and me/ Hawaii/ Remember me,” Lydon sang over gently thrumming drums and a swaying arrangement in the song that failed to advance in the contest.
The notoriously irascible singer also dedicated his emotional run on The Masked Singer last year to the love of his life and told Billboard at the time that he agreed to slip into the Jester costume to make Nora smile.
“I thought it would be really good because it meant my lovely wife, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, might get a great sense of fun out of it if she managed to guess who it was,” he said. “We’ve lived together for 47 years, Nora and I, so she must have some clues as to who I am and what I can get up to.”
As for why he agreed to do the show after a lifetime of kicking against the mainstream, Lydon said it was love, after all. “This is a giggle, which I don’t mind sharing with the general public, but mostly because I want to see my wife happy,” he said. “Alzheimer’s is a very, very challenging illness. Any connection I can have to bring joy into her life I’m more than happy to do that. Those are my motives.”
According to the BBC Lydon met Forster — who came from a wealthy publishing family — at Vivienne Westwood and Pistol manager Malcolm McLaren’s punk shop Sex in London in 1975, just before the Pistols blew up. Their family ties to punk went deep, as Forster’s daughter from her first marriage to singer Frank Forster, Ariana, became better known as The Slits singer Ari Up; Ariana died from breast cancer in 2010 at age 48.
Earlier this year, Lydon told the Sunday Times that caring for his wife had elicited profound changes in him. “It’s hideous. So pernicious and vile to watch someone you love just slowly disappear,” he said, adding that their life together had been “worth every moment… No joy comes without pain, and boy do I know that now.”
Frances Bean Cobain and Courtney Love paid tribute to Kurt Cobain on the 29th anniversary of the Nirvana singer’s death this week. Cobain’s only child, Frances, 30, posted a loving message about the impermanence of existence in a since-expired Instagram Story (per Rolling Stone) in what appeared to be a meditation on her late father.
“Life is like a wave crashing upon the shore & death is like the wave returning back to the ocean, back to its most natural state,’” she wrote on the anniversary on Wednesday. “I forget exactly where I heard this quote but hearing it makes loss seem less scary and more like a return to the collective consciousness of loving awareness,” the visual artist and singer continued. “Free from pain or human worry. Death serves a purpose. It is what makes life so precious, in the same way pain is purposeful because we wouldn’t know joy without it.”
The message ended with a lesson about being thankful and sharing your love. “Everyday I aim to have gratitude for everything that surrounds this life including loss,” Frances Bean concluded. “It’s the ultimate teacher. Hold the people you love a little more tightly and a little bit closer for me today.”
Cobain’s widow, Hole singer Love, honored the April 5th anniversary by posting an image of Kurt’s hands taken by R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe. “I love beautiful hands, it’s the first thing I look at in another. I love that the only photograph of Kurt that @michaelstipe took despite being a lover of all sorts of beauty, kudzu, @helenachristensen, river pheonix; dozens if not 100s of gorgeous photos of people he finds and sees their ‘Shen’ (a Chinese word of what’s in the eyes – loosely translated as ‘mojo’ but more about the ‘twinkle’),” she wrote alongside the black and white image of the singer/guitarists hands folded over each other across his stomach.
“But Micheal saw these hands. These left handed beautiful hands like a votive/ a mudra, a shot this singular, powerful photograph of my twin flame,” added the singer who is a longtime practicing Buddhist. “It is one of the only images (or sounds/ tastes etc) that makes me miss him deeply. But he chanted with me & often, & truly was moved by our Buddhist practice. I know he’s in an enlightened place, more so, than we here in mappo are. “The arms of a 1000 Buddhas outstretched to greet you” the gosho says. Nam myoho renge kyo dear Kurt D. C. 🙏🪷 i & we love & miss you.”
Cobain, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on April 8, three days after police determined that he had taken his own life.
See Love’s post here.
If you’re thinking about suicide, or are worried about a friend or loved one, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
Just under the surface of Ed Sheeran’s chart-topping Oceania shows, the Red Hot Chili Peppers breaks new ground on Billboard’s monthly Boxscore charts. The band is No. 2 on February’s Top Tours ranking, and followed closely again at No. 6, becoming the first act to appear twice on the same chart since the list launched in February 2019.
The Chili Peppers played eight shows in Australia and New Zealand from Jan. 21 through Feb. 12. For those stadium gigs, the group paired with Post Malone for a co-headline run of $48.2 million, splitting by $15.2 million in January and another $33 million in February. That was enough to land them at No. 2 for both months, first behind Elton John and then Sheeran.
Without missing a beat, the Chili Peppers followed with three shows in Asia on Feb. 16, 19 and 21, sans Post Malone. Those earned $12.1 million, putting the unaccompanied band at No. 6 on February’s overall ranking. In the four years since the monthly charts premiered, no act had previously doubled up on the 30-position ranking, much less in the top 10.
While it’s the first time that an artist has scored two positions on a monthly chart, it’s not unprecedented among all Boxscore rankings. On the 2018 year-end charts, Jay-Z was No. 3 alongside Beyonce for the On the Run II Tour, and at No. 25 for his solo headline dates.
The Chili Peppers also blanket the Top Boxscore chart, both on its own and alongside Post Malone. The co-headline shows appear at Nos. 5-6 and 9, topped by two shows on Feb. 2 and 4 at Sydney’s Accor Stadium ($13.5 million; 107,000 tickets).
Unaccompanied, the band hits Nos. 9 and 24, spotlighting the Feb. 19 performance at Tokyo Dome which earned $7.2 million and sold 45,000 tickets.
In addition to two shows from Sheeran, the Chili Peppers’ Sydney dates helped make Accor Stadium the month’s top-grossing venue with a $32.4 million gross and 279,000 tickets sold.
Since launching in June in Europe, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Global Stadium Tour has earned $237.4 million and sold 1.9 million tickets. Beyond the Oceania and Asia legs, the band continues with a swing of North American shows that extend through mid-April, before returning to Europe and continuing on to Latin America later this year.
At $491.9 million, the soon-to-be-reported Western shows will push the band’s career Boxscore gross past the half-billion mark.
Forget “I’ll be watching you,” it’s “I’ll be paying you” when it comes to Diddy and Sting. The rapper shared in a tweet on Wednesday (April 5) that he pays the mighty hefty sum of $5,000 a day to the legendary singer for using a sample of The Police’s classic hit “Every Breath You Take.”
For those doing the math (or are math averse), that comes to an astounding total of $1.825 million per year.
Diddy’s revelatory tweet was in response to a resurfaced clip of Sting’s March 2018 interview on The Breakfast Club in which the singer-songwriter — who penned the lyrics to the song — confirms that the “It’s All about the Benjamins” artist pays him daily for reportedly not getting permission before sampling the hit in Diddy’s on “I’ll Be Missing You.”
“Is it true that Diddy had to pay you two grand a day because he didn’t have permission to sample ‘Every Breath You Take’?” host Charlamagne Tha God asks in the clip. Sting replies with a quick, “Yeah,” but also emphasized, “for the rest of his life.” The 12-time Grammy winner did go on to also confirm that Diddy did finally get clearance for the sample, though after the fact.
In the hip-hop star’s retweet of the resurfaced clip, he corrected to note that it’s $3,000 more than what Sting noted. But no hard feelings between the two music heavy-weights, though. “Love to my brother @OfficialSting!” Diddy noted in his tweet, including a smily, sunglass-wearing face emoji and heart hands.
The feeling appears to be mutual. In the 2018 interview, Sting adds of Diddy, “We’re very good friends now.”
The rapper’s hit “I’ll Be Missing You” was written to honor friend and collaborator Notorious B.I.G after the rapper was fatally shot in March 1997. The song — a collab with Faith Evans and featuring 112 — debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 14, 1997, and stayed atop the chart for 11 weeks. It remained on the all-genre tally for a total of 33 weeks.
“Every Breath You Take,” which debuted on the chart in June 1983, peaked at No. 1 in July that year, and remained at the top for eight weeks.
See Diddy’s tweet and the clip of Sting’s The Breakfast Club interview below.
A 60-year-old recording of the Beatles, said to be the earliest full taping of the Fab Four on home soil, has come to light.
The gig took place on April 4, 1963 when the-then rising band performed at the school’s theater.
Teenager John Bloomfield, a boarder at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, tested out his new reel-to-reel tape recorder at the show. The result, revealed on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, opens with “I Saw Her Standing There,” then segues into Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”
The recording “captures the appeal of The Beatles’ tightly-honed live act,” according to the Corporation, “with a mixture of their club repertoire of R&B covers and the start of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting partnership, with tracks off their debut album Please Please Me, which had been released barely two weeks earlier, on 22 March.”
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Speaking about the find, Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn comments, “The opportunity that this tape presents, which is completely out of the blue, is fantastic because we hear them just on the cusp of the breakthrough into complete world fame. And at that point, all audience recordings become blanketed in screams.”
He adds, “So here is an opportunity to hear them in the U.K., in an environment where they could be heard and where the tape actually does capture them properly, at a time when they can have banter with the audience as well.”
The mic picks up the mostly-male audience shouting out requests and, crucially, the BBC adds, the recording isn’t drowned out by screaming, a hallmark of “Beatlemania.”
Bloomfield, who kept the recording safe through the years, but hadn’t revealed its existence until now, is now 70.
“I think it’s an incredibly important recording,” adds Lewisohn, “and I hope something good and constructive and creative eventually happens to it.”
Though the Beatles officially split in 1970, the year of the release of Let It Be, their twelfth and final studio album, the legend, and the myth continues to grow.
A Danny Boyle-helmed film based on the band’s music, Yesterday, was released in June 2019; recent reissues of the Beatles’ catalog have topped sales charts around the globe; and Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson invited fans inside for previously-unseen final recording sessions, and the band’s legendary performance atop the Apple Corps headquarters in London, for an exhaustive three-part documentary series, Get Back, which dropped in late 2021 on Disney+.
Read more on “The Beatles at Stowe School” here.
Lana Del Rey lands her seventh No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Alternative Albums chart, and sixth in a row, while Fall Out Boy claims its fifth Top Rock Albums ruler, both on the April 8-dated tallies.
Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd crowns both the Top Rock & Alternative Albums and Top Alternative Albums surveys with 115,000 equivalent album units earned in its first week (March 24-30), according to Luminate. Of that sum, 87,000 units are via album sales and 28,000 from streaming units.
Tunnel is Del Rey’s second No. 1 on Top Rock & Alternative Albums and first since it shifted to a model inclusionary of alternative-leaning albums not necessarily within the rock genre, following Born to Die in 2012.
As for Top Alternative Albums, her domination dates back to Die, followed by six straight leaders beginning with 2015’s Honeymoon. Del Rey extends her lead for the most Top Alternative Albums No. 1s in the chart’s 16-year history, with the next-closest acts all boasting five rulers apiece.
Most No. 1s, Top Alternative Albums:7, Lana Del Rey5, Coldplay5, Disturbed5, Foo Fighters5, Imagine Dragons5, Jack White5, Pearl Jam
Concurrently, Tunnel tops Vinyl Albums (58,000 vinyl copies sold). On the all-genre Billboard 200, it opens at No. 3, marking Del Rey’s ninth top 10.
The latest Hot Rock & Alternative Songs tally features 14 Del Rey songs from the album. Leading the way is “A&W,” which jumps 43-18 in its seventh week on the survey with 3.3 million official U.S. streams. The Jon Batiste-featuring “Candy Necklace” follows at No. 22 (3.1 million streams).
Meanwhile, Fall Out Boy’s So Much (for) Stardust bows at No. 1 on Top Rock Albums on the strength of 64,000 units, 49,000 of which are from album sales.
Each of Fall Out Boy’s last four studio albums has led Top Rock Albums, dating to 2007’s Infinity on High. The band last reigned with 2018’s M A N I A prior to Stardust.
Stardust also starts at No. 2 on both Top Rock & Alternative Albums and Top Alternative Albums. On the Billboard 200, it begins at No. 6, becoming the band’s seventh top 10.
Three songs from Stardust place on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs, paced by lead single “Love From the Other Side,” which jumps 29-15. It earned 7.1 million radio audience impressions, 2.4 million streams and 1,000 downloads March 24-30.
“Side” became Fall Out Boy’s first-ever Alternative Airplay No. 1 in March and also boasts new highs of No. 24 on Mainstream Rock Airplay and No. 40 on Pop Airplay.
Pretty soon, Kid Rock might be a devil without a case… of beer. After the conservative rapper-turned-country crooner posted a video earlier this week in which he blasted three cases of Bud Light using a semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle while intoning, “f– Bud Light and f–k Anheuser-Busch,” Jason Isbell had some bad news for the MAGA hat-wearing Bullgod.
“This is finally how we get him,” Isbell wrote. “Leave no bigoted beers to drink.” The comment came above a re-tweet of a post in which a user noted that Robert Ritchie’s beer of choice — Coors Light — is “guilty too!” The post featured an infographic noting that Coors “has had an anti-discrimination policy including sexual orientation since 1978, one of the first American corporations to do so.”
The image also said that the company “has financially supported its GLBT employees group since 1993,” while listing a number of LGBTQ-friendly bars where you can enjoy the brew that Rock promoted in a 2003 Super Bowl ad.
Rock’s rifle video came shortly after trans activist Dylan Mulvaney teamed up with Anheuser-Busch to promote the brand’s Easy Carry Contest, posting a video of herself talking about the campaign and even receiving “possibly the best gift ever” — a commemorative can of Bud Light with her face on it.
Mulvaney’s video immediately sparked outrage from right-wing commentators, who lambasted the brand for working with a transgender influencer. Anheuser-Busch responded to the backlash first in a statement to Fox News, which they reiterated to Billboard, saying the company works with “hundreds of influencers across our brands as one of many ways to authentically connect with audiences across various demographics and passion points,” and adding that Mulvaney’s commemorative can “was a gift to celebrate a personal milestone and is not for sale to the general public.”
The clip also came just weeks after a mass shooting at a private Nashville elementary school in which an assailant using a semi-automatic military-style rifle murdered three nine-year-old children and three adult staffers. Rock’s beer rant raised the ire of Fred Guttenberg, the father of a child who was killed during the Parkland shooting in Florida in 2018.
Guttenberg — who has turned into an outspoken gun control advocate in the wake of the massacre in which 14 teenagers and three staffers were killed — lambasted Rock for glorifying the kinds of war weapons often employed in mass shootings.
“Hey @kidrock, this dad is ‘feeling a little frisky today,” Guttenberg tweeted, mimicking Rock’s playful tone in a post that showed his late daughter trying to evade the murderous school shooter. “Let me be ‘as clear and concise’ as I can with you. This is my daughter Jaime (under the black oval) and these are the students running over her for safety to avoid getting shot by the AR 15 that killed her. F–K YOU!!!
Billboard has reached out to Kid Rock and Dylan Mulvaney for comment.
Rock’s video — which did not specifically mention Mulvaney or the LGBTQ-friendly Bud campaign — came amid amid a nationwide targeting of transgender people by conservative state legislatures around the U.S. Kentucky became the latest state to pass anti-trans legislation into law last week when lawmakers overrode Gov. Andy Beshear‘s veto of a bill banning gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 18, while also compelling physicians to cease any ongoing gender-transition care for minors.
See Isbell and Guttenberg’s tweets below.
Hey @KidRock, this dad is “feeling a little frisky today.” Let me be “as clear and concise” as I can with you. This is my daughter Jaime (under the black oval) and these are the students running over her for safety to avoid getting shot by the AR 15 that killed her. FUCK YOU!!! https://t.co/Viv1Jzkuzu pic.twitter.com/OW9PDjETjW— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) April 4, 2023
Mod Sun got vulnerable about his breakup with Avril Lavigne at his Los Angeles tour stop on Sunday night.
“Ya’ll f—ing saved my goddamn life for the last six weeks,” he told his fans from the stage of the Fonda Theater in a video captured by TMZ.
“If any of y’all are going through some sh– right now, whether it be heartbreak, depression, addiction, anxiety, maybe you just have a negative voice in your head right now, I want you to know the one thing I have learned in the last almost four years: Do not be afraid to ask for help,” the pop-punk rocker continued. “So, thank you for helping me. It’s time for a new chapter.”
Mod Sun and the Love Sux songstress officially called off their engagement back in February after nearly two years together.
Since then, Lavigne has been spotted out and about with Tyga on multiple occasions, and while neither has publicly commented on their relationship, the rapper did seemingly make things Instagram official by posting a photo from their trip to Paris for Paris Fashion Week. For her part, the pop-punk princess left a cryptic comment on the post in the form of three black heart emojis.
Watch Mod Sun thank his fans for their post-breakup support here.
Kid Rock is taking out his frustration on a few dozen cans of Bud Light.
Late Monday night (April 3), the “Bad Reputation” singer posted a video of himself across his social media accounts, speaking directly to the camera. Wearing a white MAGA hat, the rock-rapper said that “Grandpa’s feeling a bit frisky today,” and promised to be as “clear and concise as possible” with his statement.
The “Devil Without a Cause” singer then lifted up a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire on three cases of Bud Light propped up on a wooden table. Ceasing his fire on the beer cans, Rock looked back into the camera to make his point clear: “F–k Bud Light, and f–k Anheuser-Busch.”
The video came shortly after trans activist Dylan Mulvaney teamed up with Anheuser-Busch to promote the brand’s Easy Carry Contest, posting a video of herself talking about the campaign and even receiving “possibly the best gift ever” — a commemorative can of Bud Light with her face on it.
Mulvaney’s video immediately sparked outrage from right-wing commentators, who lambasted the brand for working with a transgender influencer. Anheuser-Busch responded to the backlash in a statement to Fox News, saying the company works with “hundreds of influencers across our brands as one of many ways to authentically connect with audiences across various demographics and passion points,” and adding that Mulvaney’s commemorative can “was a gift to celebrate a personal milestone and is not for sale to the general public.”
The ongoing backlash comes at a time when transgender people are being targeted at a steady cadence by state legislatures around the U.S. Kentucky became the latest state to pass anti-trans legislation into law last week when lawmakers overrode Gov. Andy Beshear‘s veto of a bill banning gender-affirming care for anyone under the age of 18, while also compelling physicians to cease any ongoing gender-transition care for minors.
Billboard has reached out to Kid Rock, Dylan Mulvaney and Anheuser-Busch for comment.
Watch the Instagram videos below:
The second-annual FORMAT Festival will return to Bentonville, Arkansas on Sept. 22-24 with headliners Alanis Morissette, LCD Soundsystem and Leon Bridges. The event — whose name stands for “music art and technology” — will also feature sets from Modest Mouse, Jamie XX, Tash Sultana, Big Wild, Little Simz, Bob Moses, Poolside, Channel Tres, Paul Cauthen and more.
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Situated on the private Sugar Creek Airstrip, the fest in the heart of the Ozarks will once again incorporate unique performances, installations and art experiences from artists including Guerrilla Girls, JR’s Inside Out Project, Jeremy Deller, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed.
Ticket presale will begin Thursday (April 6) at 11 a.m. ET; fans can sign up for a presale code to get first access to three-day and one-day tickets and find out more about the art installations here.
Among the other acts on this year’s lineup are: Digable Planets, Madeline Edwards, Kari Faux, Theon Cross, Green Velvet, The Pharcyde, Nikki Lane, Sudan Archives, Franc Moody, Serpentwithfeet, Digitalism, Clasixx, Pedrito Martinez and Francois K, among others.
FORMAT takes place on a 250-acre of green space just minutes from downtown Bentonville, with two conventional music stages, as well as a number of unusual settings for performances with names including The Cube, Drag Me to the Disco, Next Door/Nova Heat and Smokey’s. There will also be underground discos and stages in the surrounding forest amid the art installations, as well as a Bizarre Bazaar with curated food, vendors, retail and experience booths, experimental light shows and therapeutic workshops according to a release.
Check out the full lineup below.