News

Bob Dylan has been relatively tight-lipped about the people he has dated. He has had multiple romantic relationships, though.

Bob Dylan | Kevin Winter/Getty Images for AFI Barbara Ann Hewitt

Long before he was famous, Dylan was a high school student in Minnesota who had fallen in love with his classmate. He wrote many love letters to his then-girlfriend, Barbara Ann Hewitt.

Collection of love letters written by Bob Dylan sold for $670K https://t.co/EZt93oqhcT pic.twitter.com/Rpon6ksvBY

— New York Post (@nypost) November 20, 2022

The letters, in which Dylan invites Hewitt to events and writes about the songs he likes, sold for nearly $670,000 at an auction in 2022.

Mavis Staples

Dylan and Mavis Staples played overlapping shows, and Dylan quickly developed a case of what Staples described as “puppy love.” He spoke to her father about proposing, but never did.

“I still have letters that we would write to each other,...

Five years after the release of David Bowie’s first masterpiece, Hunky Dory — which replaced the perception of Bowie as a one-hit space oddity with the idea Bowie as an ever-ch-ch-changing moon-age messiah — he offered up some characteristic mythmaking. In a 1976 Melody Maker interview, Bowie claimed Hunky Dory‘s “Song for Bob Dylan,” a piss-take extraordinaire that Bowie had shrugged off by saying it was how “some” people saw Dylan, in fact, “laid out what I wanted to do in rock.” “It was at that period that I said, ‘Ok,...

Exclusive: Filipina actress and singer Lovi Poe (Malaya) is joining Alex Pettyfer (Magic Mike) and Poppy Delevingne (Riviera) in director Ben Cookson’s The Chelsea Cowboy, based on the life of actor, gangster and lothario John Bindon.

In her biggest English-language movie role to date, Poe will play British blues singer Dana Gillespie who employed Bindon as security and also provided him with access to the high life, most notably the island of Mustique where he met Princess Margaret. The charismatic Gillespie was well known for her close personal ties to leading singers and actors. A recent biography notes that her lovers included David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Michael Caine, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon and Sean Connery.

The Chelsea Cowboy charts the rise and fall of underworld hard-man turned actor Bindon, who despite a successful acting career and passionate romantic liaisons with members of high society, was unable to leave his criminal past behind.

She tamed Keith Moon, got laughed into bed by Bob Dylan and went to a young David Bowie’s house for tuna sandwiches – but the blues singer’s 72 albums are what really define her

“No one has understood how deeply rooted in music I am because they got distracted by my tits,” Dana Gillespie complains.

Now 72, the singer and songwriter’s curvaceous figure ensured she regularly appeared in both tabloids and films from the 1960s to 80s but, she says, this was a mere sideline: music was always her mission in life, it’s just that the British refuse to take her seriously. In Austria and Germany – where she has enjoyed hit singles and hosted a long-running radio show – they do. Ditto in India, where she records devotional music with leading Indian musicians. But in Britain she is too often been relegated to “lover of” status for her string of...

David Bowie examines his psyche in his formative years in a new teaser trailer for Showtime’s upcoming documentary on the artist, Finding Fame. “I’ve always been a very curious and enthusiastic person,” he says, as imagery of him in mime makeup from 1967’s The Mask and walking through the woods plays. “I’ve just had to accept that I was a person that had a very short attention span and would move from one thing to another quite rapidly and then I got bored with the other.”

Footage...

Francis Whatley said making “David Bowie: Finding Fame” – his third film about the rock star – has given him a chance to tell the story of the singer’s earlier years, which was previously denied him. But the race is on to restore what is believed to be the first TV footage of Bowie as Ziggy Stardust and get it into Whatley’s film before it airs Feb. 9 on the BBC.

Spiders From Mars band member Mick “Woody” Woodmansey, Bowie’s cousin and friend Kristina Amadeus, and former girlfriends Dana Gillespie and Hermione Farthingale, all of whom feature in the film, were among those at an emotionally charged London screening of “David Bowie: Finding Fame,” which chronicles the iconic rock star’s early years and music and attempts to find stardom.

Whatley had wanted to cover Bowie’s efforts to break through when he was making an earlier documentary series,...

The first five years of David Bowie’s career is to be the focus of a new documentary for the BBC – the third in a trilogy of docs about the Star Man singer.

David Bowie: The First Five Years will launch on the British public broadcaster’s BBC Two channel in 2019. It follows David Bowie: The Last Five Years, which was acquired by HBO, and David Bowie: Five Years in 2013. All three are produced and directed by Francis Whately.

Coming 50 years after the release of Space Oddity, the 90-minute film explores the Bowie before Ziggy Stardust, following the period from 1966 when he changed his name from David Jones to Bowie.

It includes footage from the BBC Archives including footage of a BBC audition in 1965 of David Bowie and the Lower Third, which included a performance of Chim-Chim-Cheree and Baby That’s A Promise.

David Bowie: The First Five Years will also feature unheard audio recordings,...

David Bowie displayed the makings of Starman from an early age. Before changing the face of pop culture, music and fashion with a slew of ostentatious alter egos (from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Man), Bowie - who died of cancer Sunday, just two days after his 69th birthday and the release of his album Blackstar - was just a precocious kid in a middle-class family. Born David Robert Jones to John, a charity worker, and Peggy, a waitress, Bowie grew up in the south London neighborhood of Brixton, where a boring home life motivated him to want more.

Feature James Clayton 22 Mar 2013 - 06:22

As The Croods arrives in UK cinemas, James recommends leaving civilised society behind and reveling in the freedom of being a Neanderthal...

Remember the advert where a caveman wakes up in a modern suburban setting and only becomes a fully upstanding civilised human being once he’s eaten a bowl of Corn Flakes with milk? Watching those commercials makes me never want to eat breakfast cereal ever again. Quite frankly, Kellogg’s, I’d rather be a caveman.

I’m not talking about a caveman in the Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble vein either. They aren’t cavemen. They are identifiable contemporary types drawn into a retrofitted animated version of 1960s mainstream America. As the theme tune cheerily proclaims, The Flintstones are “the modern stone age family” and the emphasis is definitely on the ‘modern family’ part.

What I’m talking about is real, authentic prehistoric man.

Titan Books has published Marcus Hearn’s third impressive hardback coffee table book on Hammer Horror and it’s a real dream not just for fans of the great British studio but for connoisseurs of the art of the movie poster. The team which produced “The Hammer Story” and “Hammer Glamor” has now come out with “The Art of Hammer“, a fantastic illustrated collection and history of Hammer film posters. Raquel Welch in her fur bikini against a backdrop of dinosaurs may be the most famous Hammer film poster (at least in the U.S.) but this book showcases over 300 posters from all over the world, all in color, pulled from private collections and the studio’s archives. Hearn has done a fantastic job assembling these sumptuous images. Some get the full-page treatment and some are accompanied by informative notes and trivia (the Danish Brides Of Dracula poster is the...