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Colin Burgess, the original drummer for AC/DC, has died. He was 77. The legendary rock band announced Burgess’ death through social media on Saturday (Dec. 16). A cause of death was not given. “Very sad to hear of the passing of Colin Burgess,” AC/DC captioned a photo of the drummer on Instagram. “He was our […]
Brittany Howard reaches No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart as a solo artist for the second time with “What Now,” which rises to the top of the Dec. 23-dated tally. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The song rules in its ninth week on the […]
If you booked a concert lineup featuring The Go-Go’s’ Gina Schock, L7’s Donita Sparks, Suzanne Vega, Amanda Palmer and Heart’s Ann Wilson, the show would offer a pretty wide range of musical styles. The same holds true for the experiences and opinions those artists and 15 others share in Katherine Yeske Taylor’s She’s a Badass: Women in Rock Shaping Feminism, which Backbeat Books will publish Jan. 16, 2024.
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She’s a Badass is the first book for Taylor, a veteran rock journalist who also contributes to Billboard. (She’s currently collaborating with Gogol Bordello frontman Eugene Hütz on his memoir that’s expected to be published in 2025.) The interview collection documents the gender-based challenges each woman has faced in their career, as well as their determination and perseverance.
Their stories run the gamut from shocking to humorous to enlightening. (The author of this article also contributed a quote.) Joan Osborne, a longtime Planned Parenthood advocate, recalls being banned from Texas’ Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion after expressing support for the organization from the stage during a 1997 Lilith Fair tour stop. Cherie Currie — whose former group The Runaways gets cited as a cautionary tale about how the industry has exploited females — tells an unexpected story of forgiveness in her relationship with late band founder-manager Kim Fowley; his complicated legacy includes Runaways member Jackie Fox claiming that he sexually assaulted her. Indigo Girls’ Amy Ray, who grappled with self-acceptance as a lesbian during the act’s ’90s heyday, faced sexism and homophobia on the level of being underpaid for her performances, and getting punched by a drunk man who called her a “d–e.”
She’s a Badass began taking shape when a literary agent familiar with Taylor’s work approached her about doing a book. “We agreed that feminism and women in rock was a topic that really hadn’t been addressed in a book before,” she observes. “There are a lot of books about women in rock and a lot of books about feminism. But when I went to do the proposal for this, I couldn’t find another one that was about this topic.”
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Sourcing artists for the project wasn’t difficult; Taylor had previously interviewed some of them and put out asks for others. However, along the way, she revised the book’s thesis because she wasn’t expecting there would be “a certain number of women in this book who do not identify as feminists and have a real problem with some of the things that the feminism movements have done,” Taylor explains. “And it’s not because they don’t agree that women should be equal. It’s just that they disagree with the approach or what that label ‘feminist’ signifies now.”
She adds, “But I think that’s healthy. I think it shows more of the full spectrum of opinions that are out there about it. And I think the really important thing to note is that everybody was on the same page in terms of wanting to move women’s equality forward.”
Taylor also emphasizes that She’s a Badass isn’t “a male-bashing book,” for all the interviewees made sure to point out when men lent their assistance: “Everyone went out of their way to at least tell me one story where there was something where a man helped them.” Currie, for instance, cites touring mates Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Cheap Trick as being supportive; in high school, Palmer’s drama teacher let her protest a song in her senior year musical, Carousel, that normalized domestic violence by letting her perform her own tune during intermission. “So the message is pretty clear that these women don’t hate men. They hate that certain men treated them this way.”
She concludes, “I feel like with their honesty, they really captured the pretty full spectrum of women’s experience in rock. There’s no way to capture absolutely every single viewpoint, but I think that this group of women really did a good job of illustrating all the different kinds of good and bad things that can be encountered in this business.”
In the following excerpt from She’s a Badass, Ann Wilson recounts how her anger about sexism fueled Heart’s hit song “Barracuda,” and how an unsavory publicity stunt made her and her sister-bandmate, Nancy Wilson, break from a record label. (To preorder a copy, go here.)
Wilson certainly wasn’t submissive and quiet — but even so, she was taken aback by the misogynistic culture that permeated the music business at that time. Ironically, one of her encounters with this type of bad treatment also sparked one of Heart’s biggest hits, “Barracuda,” which was released as a single in 1977. Scathing and soaring, it has become one of the band’s signature songs.
“It was probably late ’76 or something, ’77, maybe,” Wilson recalls. “A guy who came up to me in the dressing room after our set said to me, ‘Hey, how’s your lover doing?’ I said, ‘He’s fine; he’s right over there,’” and she motioned to Mike Fisher. “And then the guy went, ‘No, no, no—I meant you and your sister. You and your sister are lovers, right?’
“I had this strange bunch of emotions that hit me right after he said that. At first it was like, ‘Wow, huh.’ And then it was like, ‘God damn it, this is a sleazy business after all. What was I thinking?’ Because Nancy and I really had this idea that we were songwriters carrying cool messages to the people. We had no idea that we would be perceived, even by a sleazeball, as two porno chicks together in a band. It made me really mad, not only at him but at the industry and at my decision to be so naive and consider myself some kind of spiritual pilgrim with these songs. I got so mad and confused, I wrote the words to ‘Barracuda.’ It was mostly just venom that I felt.”
Soon after, Wilson encountered another notorious example of how badly women could be treated in the music business. Forty-five years later, she still sounds irritated as she recalls this incident.
“Our record company was really good. They believed in us. But they had this publicist at the time; his idea was to put a full-page ad in Rolling Stone that looked like a tabloid cover, and for it they used an outtake from the Dreamboat Annie cover session where [Nancy and I] had circles under our eyes and we looked really kind of bad. And the caption was, ‘It was only our first time.’ So the way it looked was, we just got out of bed from having fucked each other. My parents were offended. We were offended. Everyone was offended—except for the record company, because they sold a lot of records because of it.
“All of it became so distasteful to me that I just thought, ‘No, this is going in the wrong direction for our dignity and for our souls. This is not how we want to be perceived. I don’t care if it sells records or not. This is just ugly. It’s the lowest common denominator, and I’m not going to go there.’ So we decided to change labels. Our producer, Mike Flicker, also left over it. We just went, ‘We’ll take our chances someplace else.’”
Breaking that contract prompted Mushroom Records to sue the band. The lawsuit was filed in Seattle, where the members of Heart had relocated. “That’s probably where we lucked out, because if it had gone in front of a judge that was more familiar with the music industry, like in L.A. or something, we might not have prevailed. But we did,” Wilson says. “This judge in Seattle went, ‘You can’t stop these local girls from doing their craft. So back off.’”
Despite winning the case, the Wilson sisters didn’t feel entirely victorious, as they were worried that standing up for themselves would get them labeled as “difficult” or otherwise hurt their long-term career prospects. “We felt that no one else was going to want to touch us because we were such divas,” she says.
Fortunately, that fear turned out to be unfounded, as Heart went on to ubiquitous radio play through the rest of the 1970s and on into the 1980s, when they became popular on the then brand-new MTV network. Though relieved that they had adapted to the times and remained successful, Wilson recalls that it was difficult for her and her sister to suddenly have so much attention paid to their looks, not just their music.
“It was sort of like you were put on a movie set with trained dancers and people who were actors and actresses, and expected to be one of them,” Wilson says of making music videos in the 1980s. “I know in my case, I’d just always been a musician. I’d never been a dancer or an actress or anything like that, so it was really uncomfortable at first to try and measure up to that. And,” she says with a laugh, “you can see it in some of the old Heart videos, the styling and the bad acting that both Nancy and myself did!”
MTV provided a new visual-based promotional medium for bands—but in truth, Wilson says, the focus on women’s appearance has been the case forever. “I think there’s always been an image thing, for all women. That’s always been an obstacle. There’s a very small window of acceptability that’s put on women, image-wise. Or if it’s not image, then it’s ageism, or it’s something else.” She says this is particularly true for women in music. “There’s always some reason why you shouldn’t be doing this if you are a woman.”
She worries when she sees how many young female artists these days seem to focus on appearance over talent in order to get noticed. “If you’re good-looking and you wear tiny hot pants and all this kind of stuff that is commonplace now for women in the music industry, you can only do it for so long before your body changes. The inevitable decline. So you’d better have a lot more than just your body.”
Five decades after Heart began their rise to fame, Wilson sees how women are still treated differently than their male peers — it happens “constantly. All the time,” she says. “Sometimes it’s disappointing because you’re sending the music from your soul, and why does it have to get hung up in the gender issue? It’s a human broadcast, not a gender one.”
Reprinted with permission of Backbeat Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield.
Patti Smith told fans on Thursday morning (Dec. 14) that she is “resting, as the doctor ordered,” following a brief stay in an Italian hospital to deal with what’s been described as a sudden, unnamed illness.
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“This is thanking all at the hospital for their help and guidance,” Smith wrote in an Instagram post in which she is pictured standing in the middle of a group of eight hospital workers in scrubs. “I am so sorry that we had to cancel concerts in Bologna and Venice. I will return to fulfill my happy obligations. This is also to thank all the medical teams globally, who attend to the people’s needs, especially those altruistically serving under fire, all healers, physicians, nurses, attendants,” she continued.
Italian media reported that Smith was taken to the Maggiore Hospital on Tuesday due to a “sudden illness” that resulted in the cancellation of her planned show at the Teatro Duse in Bologna that night; she was reportedly released after the short visit to the ER. “With great regret, we inform the kind audience that the [Patti Smith] concert scheduled for today 12 December 2023 at 9 pm will not be able to go on stage due to a sudden illness that struck the artist,” the venue wrote in an Instagram post.
The artist/poet’s planned show tonight at the Teatro Malibran in Venice has also been cancelled.
Hospital press officer Illaria Maria Di Battista told People that the head of the emergency unit, Dr. Alesso Bertini, told her that, “Mrs. Smith was very polite and collaborative with us which made it easier for us to do our job t the bet of our capabilities.” Battista added that Bertini also said, “She [Smith] is such a person of reference for us and for so many generations. We even had the opportunity to speak about music and our favorite songs.” Another hospital source said that Smith hugged and thanked the medical staff before leaving.
A spokesperson for Smith had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment at press time.
The “People Have the Power” singer shouted out her fans in the Insta post, writing, “Also I want to thank everyone for sending messages of love and concern. I am resting, as the doctor ordered, grateful to have had such care, though being painfully aware that many are not so fortunate.”
The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer is slated to perform in Chicago at the Salt Shed on Dec. 27
See Smith’s post below.
Releasing a groundbreaking debut album, touring the world and racking up a whopping six Grammy nominations are just a few of the accomplishments achieved by indie rock group Boygenius in 2023. But as band member Phoebe Bridgers tells it, there was nearly one other crowning achievement for the trio that didn’t quite pan out. In […]
Pete Townshend chased his white whale for more than half a century. The legendary Who guitarist and songwriter has been trying to bring his sprawling, dystopian sci-fi epic Lifehouse to life since he first wrote the follow-up to the band’s iconic rock opera Tommy in 1970. Through several re-writes, false starts and re-imaginings, Townshend has struggled to bring his epic vision of a future world in which music is outlawed by the tyrannical despot Jumbo 7 — and saved by a group of idealistic underground rock rebels via a massive, mind- and spirit-melding concert — to the masses.
“I’d gone back to it a few times and tried to get it to make sense and several times I’ve worked with other creative people, producers and writers who, in a sense, tried to ‘fix’ what they thought was wrong with it,” Townshend tells Billboard in a Zoom call from his London study. “But in the case of this graphic novel what happened is people who trusted the original idea and used those [original scripts I wrote in 1971 and a 1978 revision] to create the bulk of the story.”
Those people include the graphic novel’s authors, James Harvey (Doom Patrol) and David Hine (Spider-Man Noir), as well as illustrator Max Prentis, with lettering by Micah Myers and ink by Mick Gray. A limited-edition run of 1,000 copies of the project — which is being released in a square, vinyl-sized box — signed by Townshend and Who singer Roger Daltrey, will be released by Tower Records on Jan. 20 and Rockbox Studios (pre-order here), with standard and deluxe versions coming from Rockbox and Image Comics on Dec. 19.
The bulk of the original songs Townshend wrote for Lifehouse ended up on The Who’s 1971 album, Who’s Next, including such iconic tracks as “Behind Blue Eyes,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and the song that provides the beating human heart of the graphic novel, “Baba O’Riley.”
Though the story appears to predict such future technology as AI, music streaming and attempts by despotic dictators to control what we see and hear, Townshend says he doesn’t see it that way. “The writers took the original script at face value and where it was a bit weak — or fantastic or beyond sci-fi — [and] they’ve made it mischievous and amusing and colorful and crazy,” he says of the brisk pacing and jump-off-the-page illustrations. Indeed, the creative team bring the story to vivid life with anime-style explosions, gripping drama and a story that Townshend believes is much easier to follow than his original take, which he says was “overloaded” and “overcooked” with too many ideas in an attempt to catch the Tommy fire one more time.
That original kernel of a story was inspired by the two north stars Townshend says have always stoked his creative machinery: the time he spent with his abusive grandmother as a child following his parent’s split — which made him retreat into a world of fantasy and imagination — and the inspiration he took from attending art school in his early teens.
It was there that he learned about the functions of early computers from IBM, as well as the first wave or analog synthesizers. “I got myself a couple of big synths and realized one of my missions I wanted to achieve with Lifehouse was to get some of the audience to be part of a real experiment with music in which they provided data through feelings, emotions, case studies and counseling sessions,” he says of the ambitious first iteration of the project, from which he planned to produce musical scores based on each person’s feedback.
The Who gave it a shot, setting up at the Young Vic Theatre in London — only to draw such a poor turnout (despite Tommy‘s recent success) that they ended up playing a fairly standard Who show featuring some of the new songs to a thin crowd. “It was a story on the one hand and an experiment on the other, so I very cheekily said, ‘Well, we ain’t got a computer, so I’m going to be the computer!’,” Townshend recalls thinking. The idea at the time was that Townshend would “process” all the music — and when a serviceable, affordable computer came long he would feed the data into it.
Despite how complicated that all sounds, Townshend is overjoyed at how uncomplicated the story in the graphic novel turned out. “The book has brought Lifehouse into the modern world, and when it arrives, the modern world it has caught up with some of it,” he says of the seemingly prescient technological bits he dreamed up half a century ago. “Now it feels understandable and easy to access and enjoyable and it really does add some essence to the songs.”
There is, indeed, plenty to love for diehard fans of the band’s music, including the masked Slip Kids rebel brigade and a mid-book concert by the “cryogenically frozen” band after a 200-year deep freeze. In a nod to the ravages of time, in the book Townshend’s joints and fingers have been replaced with the “best, most flexible materials,” allowing him to play faster than ever, as well as newly perfectly tuned ears; in real life the guitarist suffers from tinnitus and partial deafness due to the Who’s legendarily loud concerts. Singer Daltrey’s vocal cords — on which he has had surgery to help alleviate cancerous growths — are also spruced up, along with a fresh circulatory system for late bassist John Entwhistle and unnamed body part replacements for hard-hitting late dummer Keith Moon.
While readers might spot modern parallels to a few of the more outrageous characters, Townshend says they are all fabrications — with the exception of the nefarious person who controls The Grid, Jumbo 7. He says in the original script, Jumbo was a sound tech/roadie loosely based on Thunderclap Newman. “He first introduced me to recording from tape-machine-to-tape-machine and he was a great model of a crazy guy who invents ways to subvert the technological grid and take it over for a concert,” he says of the keyboardist of the eponymous group best known for the 1969 hit “Something in the Air.”
For Townshend, the central conceit of a strong-arm ruler outlawing music feels as fresh today as it did in the 1970s. “That was a testament to the force of modern music as an irritant against organized political factions who wish to use it for their f–king rallies or censor it for their purposes,” he says. “Bringing people together to listen to music can appear to the closed minds of autocratic and theocratic governments to be dangerous.”
Well acquainted with such pushback from the powers-that-be to songs of youthful rebellion (see “My Generation”), Townshend says the graphic novel is really the “ultimate reflection of the individual and their individual loving soul.” As for the idea in the book of creating a “One Note” that serves as a musical lifeline composed of the heartbeats and brainwaves of citizens — a noble, but perhaps also slightly ominous goal — Townshend says he sees it as a kind of “poetic meme.”
“The idea is that we all like different stuff, we all live different lives, but we are all human and we come from somewhere, which, when we boil it down to quantum physics, we’re all made of the same stuff that produces our consciousness and that’s what the Lifehouse story is about,” he says. “It’s about losing the individual ego trapped in our consciousness in return for finding a universal consciousness.”
And while Lifehouse ropes in mind control, artificial universes and the ultimate technological search for the music of the soul, when you boil it down, Townshend says it’s really the most basic, elemental story ever told. “If you grasp the idea of incarnation, karma and consciousness as being a big ocean in which we are all little drops,” he says. “When we try to get together you lose yourself in the ocean at the expense of for a bigger, grander, more universal [notion].”
When asked if he can finally put Lifehouse to rest now that the graphic novel has presented his knotty tale in a fashion that seems to elate him, Townshend is predictably restless. “The story is complete,” he says confidently, before adding a tease that the modern streaming age might provide yet another chapter to the story they said couldn’t be told. “But there are film people already interested in it as a series, or an animated movie.”
Check out an image from Lifehouse below.
Courtesy of Rockbox Studios/Tower Records
The Masked Singer season 10 is heating up, and the judges are trying to narrow down on their guesses for the celebrities behind the mask.
The Group C finals are taking place on Wednesday night (Dec. 13), and in an exclusive clip shared to Billboard, the judges panel tries to figure out who the Anteater is. In the one-minute clip, both Robin Thicke and Jenny McCarthy-Wahlberg agree that the Anteater is a rock legend, but they varied on who exactly he might be.
While Thicke opted to guess Jackson Browne, McCarthy-Wahlberg suggested that maybe the singer behind the mask is Steven Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.
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During the Group C finals, the finalists are set to perform songs representing key moment in their life, including “Georgia on my Mind,” “I’m Going Down” and “Johnny B Goode.” Two celebrities will be unmasked leaving only one to move on to the season finale.
So far, the stars eliminated from this season’s competition include Sebastian Bach, Ginuwine, Ashley Parker Angel, Metta Sandiford-Artest, Luann de Lesseps, Tyler Posey, Billie Jean King, Michael Rapaport, Tom Sandoval, Anthony Anderson and Demi Lovato.
In addition to Anteater, the contestants still in the competition include Candelabra, Cow, Donut, Gazelle and Sea Queen.
Catch the full “Soundtrack to My Life” episode of The Masked Singer on Wednesday (Dec. 13) at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. Watch the clip of McCarthy-Wahlberg and Thicke putting in their guesses for the Anteater below.
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Def Leppard won’t be “Bringin’ on the Heartbreak” this summer. Instead, they’ve announced another tour with the legendary Journey. The two bands will be putting on a joint tour starting July 6 that will travel across North America — and you won’t want to miss out on scoring cheap tickets.
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The “Love Bites” band may have just wrapped up their joint tour with Motley Crue, but they’re ready to hit the road again with a 23-city trek that’ll have ’80s rock fans excited to sing top hits by them and Journey as well as songs from their 12th studio album, Diamond Star Halos. The tour will begin in St. Louis, Mo., and hit cities including Orlando, Atlanta, Chicago, Toronto, Boston, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles and more before wrapping in Denver on Sept. 8.
Def Leppard announced the joint tour on Instagram on Thursday (Dec. 7) with a video montage revealing official openers that include Steve Miller Band, Heart and Cheap Trick, which will vary by city.
“JUST ANNOUNCED!!! Def Leppard and @journeyofficial are teaming up to rock 2024 with @stevemillerband, @heartofficial, and @cheaptrick!” the captions read.
The official fan presale happens on Tuesday (Dec. 12), but Citi cardholders have the opportunity to participate in a member-exclusive presale beginning Dec. 13 at 10 a.m. local time. General tickets will go on sale on Friday (Dec. 15) at 10 a.m. local time through Ticketmaster. Prices for tickets will range from $49 to $549.
If you miss the presale and general onsale, you may be able to score ticket through resale retailers including Vivid Seats, StubHub and Seat Geek. Plus, you can score $10 off a purchase of $250+ on Seat Geek when you use the code BILLBOARD10 (valid on first purchases only).
Google released its list of the biggest trending searches of 2023 and when it comes to music, Jason Aldean‘s controversial “Try That in a Small Town” led the list of search inquiries for songs, with Aldean also hitting No. 1 as the top trending musician.
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In a year when Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were perpetually in the news thanks to their massive tours and the live concert films, the high placement for Aldean was not totally surprising given the weeks of attention he got for “Small Town,” which was pulled from CMT and labeled by some detractors as being pro-gun, pro-violence and akin to a “modern lynching song” after the release of the track’s video.
The visual found Aldean performing the song in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, TN, the site of the 1927 lynching and hanging of 18-year-old Henry Choate over allegations that he sexually assaulted a white girl, as well as the spot of a 1946 race riot in which two Black men were killed. Aldean rejected detractors’ claims about the song whose video featured images of an American flag burning, protesters clashing with police, looters breaking a display case and thieves robbing a convenience store; the video was later seemingly edited to remove images of a Black Lives Matter protest following the backlash.
Right behind Aldean was buzzy rapper Ice Spice, followed by “Rich Men North of Richmond” country singer Oliver Anthony, Peso Pluma, Joe Jonas, Sam Smith, The 1975’s Matty Healy, Kellie Pickler, Kim Petras and Sexxy Red.
Google’s data shows the top trending searches in the U.S., referring to trending queries as searches that had a major spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2023 versus 2022, which is why despite being a near-ubiquitous search term who has a consistently high search interest, TIME‘s Person of the Year Swift (and Beyoncé) didn’t top the ranking for musicians; click here for Gizmodo‘s explanation.
The year’s most buzzed-about movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer (combined as Barbenheimer by fans) came out on top, followed by the controversial anti-trafficking movie Sound of Freedom and Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, as well as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Creed III, John Wick: Chapter 4, Five Nights at Freddy’s and Cocaine Bear. The No. 1 trending actor was Jeremy Renner, who suffered serious injuries in a snowplow incident in January.
Jamie Foxx, who was sidelined most of this year after an unexplained “medical complication” in April, was just behind Renner, followed by disgraced That 70’s Show actor Danny Masterson, comedian Matt Rife, Pedro Pascal, Jonathan Majors, Sophie Turner, Russell Brand, Ke Huy Quan and Josh Hutcherson.
The trending people list had Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin at No. 1 following his scary on-field cardiac incident during a Cincinnati Bengals game in January, followed by Renner and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, likely due to his romance with Taylor Swift; Kelce was also among the top five most-searched athletes.
The TV tally featured mostly Netflix projects, including its originals Ginny & Georgia, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, Wednesday, That 90’s Show, Kaleidoscope, Beef and The Fall of the House of Usher. Other shows that got in the mix included Daisy Jones & the Six (No. 4) and The Weeknd’s one-and-done HBO series The Idol (No. 9).
Late Friends star Matthew Perry was No. 1 on searches for celebrity deaths, followed by Tina Turner, Jerry Springer, Jimmy Buffett and Sinead O’Connor, with Lisa Marie Presley coming in at No. 8. The news headlines that we searched the most were those related to the war between Israel and Hamas, followed by the sinking of the Titanic tourist submarine, Hurricanes Hilary, Idalia and Lee, as well as a mass shootings in Maine and Nashville, the Maui wildfire, the Idaho college campus murder trail and the Canadian wildfires.
Seeing the list of stars we’ve lost in the calendar year is always a shock. But there’s something comforting about British artist Chris Barker’s annual visual homage to stars who’ve left this mortal coil, which this year includes yet another unfathomable tally of beloved singers, actors, public figures and personalities.
As always, Barker organizes the faces using the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover as the template, with this year’s model featuring Pogues singer Shane MacGowan front-and-center above the bass drum, flanked by Tina Turner and Sinead O’Connor. Just a few spots down, Tony Bennett smiles next to British guitar great Jeff Beck, with beloved comedian/actor Pee Wee Herman copping a squat in the foreground.
In a statement to Billboard about his eighth go-round, Barker — who has frequently pledged to make each year his last — says that after cramming all his work into November in the past, this year he began compiling his list in September because he knew this year would be jam-packed with subjects.
“This is the most overwhelming number of huge significant losses I remember in the eight years doing this since 2016. The front two or three rows are all really recognizable legends. It’s a bit much to be honest,” Barker says of the list that includes the above mentioned, as well as beloved British actor Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries, Raquel Welch, Friends star Matthew Perry, CSNY singer David Crosby, composer Burt Bacharach, De La Soul’s Trugoy the Dove and Calypso singer/civil rights activist Harry Belafonte.
Barker said he was glad that Pogues and Smiths fans were sharing the image of MacGowan and Smiths bassist Andy Rourke. He pointed out some other small touches he was happy to include were late artist Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols flag under Herman’s feet, replacing the flag more earnestly commemorating Queen Elizabeth II in last year’s montage. “I also quite like the way I’ve used Steve Mackey from Pulp’s actual cardboard cutout from the Different Class album cover,” he says.
“I know it’s a very sad topic, it’s a very strange hobby and I really don’t know how I’ve ended up as this weird custodian of international grief, but people do really seem to like it so I’m kind of stuck with it now!” Barker says.
Among the other faces in the crowd are: actors Richard Roundtree (Shaft), Michael Gambon (Harry Potter), Alan Arkin (Little Miss Sunshine), Lance Reddick (The Wire), Angus Cloud (Euphoria), Suzanne Somers, Richard Belzer, Gina Lollarigida, Jerry Springer and game show host Bob Barker, singers/musicians Sixto Rodriguez, Gary Rossington (Lynyrd Skynyrd), Jimmy Buffett, Yukihiro Takahashi (Yellow Magic Orchestra), Tom Verlaine (Television), Robbie Robertson (The Band), Steve Mackey (Pulp), Tim Bachman (BTO), John Gosling (The Kinks), Fred White (EW&F), Lisa Marie Presley, Randy Meisner (Eagles), Anita Pointer (Pointer Sisters), Astrud Gilberto, Dwight Twilley, Van Conner (Screaming Trees), Jane Birkin, The 45 King, Gary Wright, Paul Cattermole (S-Club 7), Gary Young (Pavement), Denny Laine (Wings) and Smash Mouth’s Steve Harwell.
In keeping with Barker’s comprehensive determination to keep the image as up-to-date as possible, the most recent iteration features two images of Hollywood icons we lost just last week, Love Story star Ryan O’Neal and legendary sitcom producer/writer Norman Lear (Good Times).
Check out the image and the key for the 2023 edition below.