Ed Sheeran’s ‘prissy’ tweet doesn’t go down well


Ed Sheeran has deleted a tweet asking his fans to stop meeting him at the airport and replaced it with the word “whatever” after a torrent of abuse on social media.

“Please stop coming to airports to meet me, I really appreciate the love but getting off of long haul flights I’m not in the best of states,” Sheeran tweeted on Tuesday morning.

“No disrespect whatsoever intended, I always take time with fans where I can, just airports are awkward.”

The tweets didn’t go down well with fans.

“edsheeran it’s because of the fans you’re getting these long haul flights. Don’t be so naive, this comes with the territory,” Fiona wrote.

“Ed Sheeran is lucky he has the fanbase that would even come see him at the airport,” Mikayla wrote.

“You can’t really tell people not to go to the airport…” Livia Than wrote.

Deleting the tweets did not stop the discussion.

“For the record edsheeran sent out a moderately prissy tweet about not meeting him at airports and then deleted it” Margaret Omencene wrote.

But there were some fans who came to his aid.

“Ed sheeran doesn’t deserve to get hate just because he asked for fans to stop coming to airports to meet him he does so much to make us happy,” one fan with the Twitter name Ed Sheeran naked wrote.

“edsheeran the airport staff are lucky to get a grunt after I get off a long haul flight, I feel you,” Gabby wrote.

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– AAP

Top 5 feuding musicians


She’s reached records set by The Beatles, held on to the No.1 and No.2 spots in the US Billboard charts two weeks in a row, yet Iggy Azalea is creating news for a different reason.

The Australian rapper waded into new territory when she criticised the actions of fellow Antipodean music star, Lorde.

Azalea spoke out in a recent Billboard magazine article about Lorde’s recent performance with the surviving members of Nirvana at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony in Brooklyn.

“Nothing against her, but I think when you’re doing a tribute to someone that’s dead, generally it should be the person’s peer,” Azalea told the US magazine.

“Lorde is not Kurt Cobain’s peer. No matter if she killed the performance or not, I just don’t think it’s appropriate.”

Azalea’s comments in the article caused a bit of a stir. British music bible, NME, also ran a similar article saying Azalea had criticised Lorde’s performance.

However, in the midst of the media commentary, Azalea posted a Tweet disputing she was starting a fight with her peer.

“Lol I have a feud with lorde now I Don’t think so she’s my southern hemispheric soul sister. Keep reaching world,” Azalea tweeted.

Lorde has yet to wade in with her own comments, so a war of words has been avoided.

However, many before Azalea have not been so lucky:

MILEY CYRUS VS SINEAD O’CONNOR:

After over 20 years years in the music industry, O’Connor felt she was imparting some words of wisdom to the young Cyrus.

“You have enough talent that you don’t need to let the music business make a prostitute of you,” she said, in an open letter to the US pop star.

However, Cyrus proved she wasn’t about to take advice from the Irish singer. Instead, Cyrus posted a screenshot of O’Connor’s tweets from 2012 when the singer, who has bi-polar disorder, was asking for psychiatrist recommendations.

Needless to say, O’Connor wasn’t happy with this lack of respect from the young singer, prompting more letters urging Cyrus to take down her tweets.

One thing’s for sure, Nothing Compares to a social media spat.

TAYLOR SWIFT AND KANYE WEST:

Before West married Kim Kardashian, he was fighting the good fight in favour of his best friend, Jay-Z’s wife, Beyonce.

Queen B doesn’t normally need somebody in her corner, the singer is On Top and she got there without West’s help. Yet, at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, West took it upon himself to storm the stage when Swift was awarded Best Female Video.

“I’m really happy for you. I’ma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time,” he said while a gobsmacked Swift looked on.

However, the young singer took some time to gather herself and respond as only she knows how, through song.

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A year later, at the 2010 awards show, she performed her new song You’re Still an Innocent, with some very pointed lyrics: “Thirty-two and still growing up now/ who you are is not what you did/ you’re still an innocent.”

JUSTIN BIEBER VS THE BLACK KEYS’ PATRICK CARNEY:

The Black Keys drummer, Patrick Carney, formed some formidable foes in the shape of an army of Beliebers when he landed himself in a feud with the mighty Biebs.

Caught on a video by TMZ, the drummer is heard responding to a question asking if Bieber should feel snubbed for not scoring a Grammy nomination in 2013.

“Grammys are for music, not for the money, and he’s making a lot of money. He should be happy.”

But Bieber responded with a tweet: “The Black Keys drummer should be slapped around haha” and that was enough to unleash the fury of the Beliebers.

After an onslaught of Bieber’s defensive fans took swipes at him, Carney responded in an article with Rolling Stone.

“Justin Bieber, like a f*****g irresponsible asshole, sicced 40 million Twitter followers on me because I paid him a compliment he didn’t understand.”

Carney is probably still sorting through the hate mail.

RIHANNA VS CIARA:

R&B star Ciara appeared on US TV show, Fashion Police, hosted by comedian Joan Rivers. She dared to diss RiRi on the show, saying she ran into the singer at a party and “she wasn’t the nicest”.

“It wasn’t the most pleasant run-in,” she continued.

It didn’t take Rihanna long to respond, and the singers ended up in a tit-for-tat Twitter war.

After Rihanna took a swipe at Ciara’s music sales, the Barbadian singer realised she probably went a bit too far and apologised via Twitter.

Ciara took the high road, suggesting the girls work it out in person. Wise words.

BLUR vs OASIS:

A vintage musical spat, that really seems so harmless in this day of Twitter trolls and social media bullies, but once upon a time Blur vs Oasis was all any one ever talked about.

It was a proper musical feud. These guys weren’t fighting over who said what, it was down to fundamentals: who was going to take out the No.1 spot.

It was the year 1995, the height of Britpop, and after some swiping at each other through the British media the bands decided to put their music where their mouths were.

A head-to-head musical fight ensued and Blur’s Country House battled Oasis’ Roll With It for chart supremacy.

Blur beat them to it but, musicians take note, these days Noel Gallagher (Oasis) and Damon Albarn (Blur) are surrounded by rumours of a possible musical collaboration.

Aww, isn’t it sweet how things work out

– AAP

Performers head to games


Young performers from South Auckland will help bring the streets of Glasgow alive during next month’s Commonwealth Games.

Three members of Auckland’s Massive Company theatre group have been selected to represent New Zealand for performances at the huge sporting event which kicks off in Scotland on July 23.

Two of them are from South Auckland.

The Kiwis are among 90 young artists from across the Commonwealth tasked with creating “pop-up theatre” next to riverside landmarks.

Manurewa’s Liam Jacobson is not too sure what to expect but he’s looking forward to the different styles and cultures of theatre he’s hoping to encounter at the event.

Theatre has been a creative outlet for the 16-year-old ever since he attended his first classes at Massive Company.

“I started when I was 14 doing one of the free workshops during the school holidays and from there I moved on to the next level.

“When I was younger I was that kid who couldn’t shut up and was always wanting to be the centre of attention so I just took to it from there.”

Papatoetoe performer Dominic Ona-Ariki is “super stoked” to have the opportunity to travel to the event and can’t wait to collaborate with performers from around the world.

The 24-year-old started performing at the theatre company when he was 16 and calls it his “stomping ground” and the place where he has honed the craft of live theatre.

“I’m really looking forward to going over with our team . . . it’s going to be a great opportunity to learn and grow,” he says.

The project is being run by the National Theatre of Scotland and participants will help tell stories of Glasgow’s industrial past through a series of drama, craft, design, music production, dance, storytelling and urban art.

Performances will be inspired by the bestselling book The Tin Forest by Helen Ward and Wayne Anderson.

Artistic director Sam Scott says Massive Company was asked to take part in the event because of the strong networks it has in the United Kingdom. It is the only New Zealand theatre group to have performed at the London’s Royal Court.

Scott is excited for the performers chosen to represent their country, including 21-year-old Central Auckland resident Denyce Su’a.

“It will be a fantastic opportunity for the three that are going . . . they are all very good performers and devisers and they will bring a lot to whatever they end up making.”

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– Manukau Courier

Rik Mayall remembered


I was nine years old when I fell in love with Rik Mayall.

To begin with, I didn’t know who he was, only that he played the brilliantly arrogant blond-haired, moustachioed pilot Lord Flashheart on Blackadder Goes Forth.

Vain and promiscuous but undeniably talented and really damn cool, Lord Flash had the kind of “F— you” chutzpah that the younger me (hell, me now) desperately wanted. He was the kind of person who melted hearts, dropped jaws and punched Germans, all before breakfast.

Later, in my teenage years, I would realise he only appeared on one out of six episodes in that season; to my younger mind he had been so big, so bright, so loud, so fun, so captivating that he defined the whole final series for me.

Mayall was the King of Crude, the Rumpelstiltskin of Rude. No one – except perhaps his longtime writing and acting partner Adrian Edmondson – could spin smut, filth, grubbiness, indecency and the downright wrong into more delightful comedic gold.

Children begin life obsessed with their bodily fluids and emissions, and delight in the simplicity of slapstick, but most grow out of it, or at least pretend to be more sophisticated.

Mayall never lost the sense of how that stuff could shock adults, and shock them even more when they believed he should know better. He did of course; that’s why it worked.

Smut flowed smoothly from Mayall’s mouth, whether in a bravura character like Lord Flash, or a more put upon one like Rick, his acne-ridden, lisping anarchist with a penchant for bad pop music, from the seminal early ’80s student share house sitcom The Young Ones.

The dialogue for both of course came from the pen of Ben Elton, another master of the toilet humour turn of phrase.

Mayall’s rants, terrible poetry and general annoyingness made him lovable; indeed the first tweets to start circulating after news of his death broke were the immortal lines “He’s dead! The People’s Poet is dead!”

It remains the role he is best known for in Australia; but I only reached it in the early ’90s, by which time I had already become obsessed with Bottom, the sitcom he and Edmondson wrote and starred in together.

As Hammersmith flatmates Richie and Eddie, they were Rick and Vyvyan grown-up, their loser young adulthood blossoming into nothing more than loser middle-age: unemployable, drunk, lacking romance or basic human empathy, their lives a spiral of cartoonish violence.

They were stupid, offensive and on occasion creepy, but they always got their comeuppance and damn, they were just funny.

Who else would think of ideas like having a “See How Much Custard You Can Fit in Your Underpants” competition, devote 10 minutes of one episode to commentating a local riot, or set one entire episode on a dodgy ferris wheel

Eddie would get drunk on Old Spice and need to be resuscitated with an iron, Richie would fall down the stairs and get his head stuck in the toilet, Richie would recruit Eddie to be his butler to impress a date, then serve caviar from a bin. All of this would be accompanied by punch-ups, dust-ups, wind-ups, fall downs and knob gags.

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I loved Richie’s pathetic neediness and bitterness as much as I had loved Lord Flashheart’s superiority complex.

Those characters made me, as a pre-teen, start to really look at humour, to examine jokes, to work out how a funny sequence was constructed, how to create good characters, and comedic principles like the “rule of threes” and the fact that the word “knob” is always funny.

A friend and I would recite dialogue at each other in class; my mum used to tell me off for saying “bollocks”, “bugger” and “bastard” too much (I loved hearing her ask if I knew what those words meant).

Bottom toured the UK regularly through the ’90s and early ’00s; I used to order the shows on VHS then watch and rewatch. They could swear in the live shows, and Mayall had a glorious talent for swearing. He was Shakespeare’s clown and Beckett’s buffoon but he was the James Joyce of modern comedic cursing.

In those same years he was also playing impoverished Richie’s polar opposite as greedy Conservative MP Alan B’Stard in the parody The New Statesman; he also starred as the titular imaginary friend in 1991’s Drop Dead Fred, probably his best-known film. In more recent years he had a recurring role on detective series Jonathan Creek as a policeman whose intellect and powers of observation almost matched the hero.

A couple of gems to grab are the 1998 BBC drama-thriller In the Red, in which Mayall showed off his remarkable dramatic capabilities as a fantastically immoral economist; and the sitcom Believe Nothing, in which he played the smartest man in Britain, Professor Adonis Cnut (the wordplay by no means an accident), who solves problems and mysteries with the help of a faithful manservant.

Every Mayall fan knows that nose of his; the way he would push it forward like a pig’s snout to look slimy or grovelly, tilt it up to look haughty, or pair it with a raised lip and maniacal grin to look scheming or clever. No other performer, serious or comedic, has ever acted so well with their nose.

Mayall had cheated death once before. In 1998, he crashed a quad bike Edmondson had given him as a present.

It happened the day before Good Friday, and he christened it “Crap Thursday”. There was some contention that the head wound he suffered changed him in some way forever; whether this was so is not really to speculate, save to say that any experience like that would have some effect.

What’s for certain is that while 56 is far too young to go, we did get those extra 16 years of his glorious presence, time in which he worked, and still made us laugh.

The Young Ones were always huge supporters of Britain’s famous Comic Relief charity events, and in 1986 joined Sir Cliff Richard to rerecord Living Doll. That version hit number 1 on the UK charts, and you can’t sing it now without having someone yell The Young Ones’ additional lyrics out at you (“What does this button do”)

It seems strange that one of The Young Ones should die before the seemingly immortal Sir Cliff – but then that kind of dark twist would probably be right up Mayall’s alley, the utter, utter, utter, utter, utter, utter… oh, just pass me the mallet.

Rik Mayall, Young Ones and Blackadder star, dies


Rik Mayall, one of a generation of performers that injected post-punk energy into British comedy, has died. He was 56.

Mayall’s management firm Brunskill Management said the comedian died at his London home on Monday (local time).

In the 1980s Mayall was part of the Comic Strip, a hugely influential group of alternative young comics that included Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Mayall’s writing and performing partner, Adrian Edmondson.

He was best known for co-writing and performing in The Young Ones, a sitcom about slovenly students that was much loved by those it satirised.

On television he memorably played Conservative politician Alan B’stard in the sitcom The New Statesman and lecherous Lord Flashheart in comedy classic Blackadder.

He and Edmondson also created and starred in Bottom, a surreally violent slapstick series about two unemployed slobs.

Film appearances included the title role in 1991 fantasy Drop Dead Fred – which gained him a US cult following – and 1999 British comedy Guest House Paradiso.

“There were times when Rik and I were writing together when we almost died laughing,” Edmondson said. “They were some of the most carefree, stupid days I ever had, and I feel privileged to have shared them with him. And now he’s died for real. Without me. Selfish bastard.”

Mayall’s manager, Geoff Stanton from Brunskill management, said: ”We are devastated and he will be missed by all who knew and loved him.”

The cause of death was not immediately disclosed. London’s Metropolitan Police force said officers had been called to the house by the ambulance service on Monday, but that the death was not believed to be suspicious.

In 1998 Mayall was on life support and in a coma for several days after an all-terrain vehicle accident.

“The main difference between now and before my accident is I’m just very glad to be alive,” Mayall said last year.

“Other people get moody in their 40s and 50s – men get the male menopause. I missed the whole thing. I was just really happy.”

TRIBUTES TO MAYALL