#william johns (pitch black)

[artemiseamoon]

Stay in the Light

A Pitch Black Au

Status: complete

Gif credit: to owners | Moodboards by me

Summary: Five months after the disappearance of her mysterious broody lover, Kiara Mora books a ride on the long-haul transporter, Hunter-Gratzner, to start a new life. What she finds on board takes her by surprise.

Warnings: addiction, pain med use, sex, death and killing, chronic pain, killer alien species.

Elements: sci-fi, space creatures, human/shifter hybrid, alternative ending, second chances.

Chapters

Read directly on A03

One: Respite

Two: bound

Three: More like him than you

Four: Stay together

Five: Taking chances

Six: Making a choice

Canon vs non canon: *some* canon mixed with my vision.

An: He’s an asshole okay but also - this is mainly the ofcs POV with some switches to Johns.

Characters:

Oc - Kiara Mora

William J. Johns

Minor: everyone else

[artemiseamoon-ficart]

Stay in the light

A pitch black au

William Johns x ofc

Story info

[zablife]

John + Solomons!sister thoughts:

This chaotic woman babysitting his kids. At this point all of them call her "Aunt y/n" ❤️. The thing is she can't control herself so, she's telling them a story but in the same way Alfie did with her (can you imagine Alfie telling bed stories to his little sister? 🫠) Well, so, she's telling them something like: "then the princess, who was in the fucking castle, was forced to marry this man . He was a cunt! A fucking cunt..."

And in that moment John returns, and he's wtf! ��‍♀️. That's not the kind of language to use in front of his kids! But they're so happy listening to her that in the end he let her finish the story 😂. Probably he joins his kids, too.

The Runaway (Partners in Crime AU)

John Shelby x Y/n Solomons 

GIF credit @alicent-targaryen

Read previous part Shots Fired

John sat in pensive silence, hands clasped in his lap as his older brother’s shadow passed over him threateningly. He felt like a child waiting for punishment, but no one could make him feel worse than the condemnation that came from within. His mind had been on your disappearance all day.

“What the fuck were you thinking, John?” Tommy said pacing the floor as he pinched the bridge of his nose harshly.

“I swear it wasn’t my idea, Tom. You know what she’s like,” John protested.

Tommy stopped in front of a chair, fingers curled around the back tightly as he glared at his brother, “Is that what I’m supposed to tell Alfie?”

John looked away in defeat, shoulders hunched. Why did you have to be so bloody stubborn, he wondered, anger bubbling up inside of him. When he’d gone to check on you yesterday, the nurse told him you’d discharged yourself hours earlier. He’d flown into a rage, overturning the bed and table until she handed him a letter between shaking fingertips, begging him to leave.

“Tell me once more,” Tommy insisted.

“Here, read it for yourself,” John answered with a huff. He fished the note from his coat pocket and tossed it across the kitchen table. It was creased and torn at the edges from where he’d already read it many times over, trying to discern meaning from your cryptic words. 

Tommy snatched it up, scanning the hastily scribbled writing and squinting in the dim light at your poor penmanship.

I couldn’t stay here. I have a personal matter to settle, but I’ll see you again in a familiar place when I'm done. I owe you a black eye and two kisses xx

“The fuck’s she on about, eh?” Tommy said, hurling the paper back at his brother. “What place?”

John simply shrugged, too exhausted to speculate.

Tommy narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “Were you two fucking? If so, you need to tell me now.”

John’s body pitched forward with a burst of laughter. “Oh, fuck off, Tommy!”

Growing irritated Tommy stormed out, calling over his shoulder, “Find Y/n, NOW! Before Alfie finds out about this!”

———————————————

Three weeks later…

“You won’t believe what happens next!” you tease out slowly, watching the little faces gathered around you.

“Does he find the princess?” Clara asked, clutching her teddy bear.

“Yes! But that’s not all! Cheeky bastard leans over for some heavenly bliss,” you said, kissing your hand to demonstrate dramatically.

The children shrieked and squealed before Katie piped up excitedly, “He kissed her?”

You nodded, “I mean…not a proper snog cause she weren’t awake. And, more importantly, girls, he didn’t ask! A lad’s gotta treat you with respect,” you reminded them with a wag of your finger.

“Can we please have another story after this one?” William interrupted, chubby hands pushed together pleadingly.

“You tell stories better than daddy,” Katie proclaimed with a giggle.

Following the sound of his children's laughter, John climbed the stairs quietly. His heart thundered in his chest as he strained to listen for the female voice he knew well. A thousand questions crossed his mind, but the relief he felt quieted them all as he caught a glimpse of you from the hall.

You shifted in the small bed to make yourself more comfortable, adjusting the sling that held your bad arm. “No, this is the last one. I’m cream crackered!” you said, stifling a yawn.

“Why do you talk funny?” Katie asked, her lisp adorably more pronounced.

“Why do you?” you countered defensively.

“I can’t help it, I’m missing my front teeth,” she replied sweetly, opening her mouth wide to reveal a wide gap.

You leaned forward to examine her, pinching her chin between your thumb and forefinger. Nodding thoughtfully you exclaimed, “Oh, right. Got a man down at the bakery who looks like you. He’s called Walter.”

“Is Walter getting new teeth like me?” Katie asked hopefully.

You furrowed your brow and shook your head, “No, I don’t think so.”

John leaned against the door frame watching you with his children. He was somewhat surprised to see this softer side of you, though he always knew you must have one. He watched the corners of your eyes crinkle into a smile as you continued joking with the children and he found himself smiling as well.

“I feel sorry for Walter then,” Katie said, big blue eyes looking up at you sorrowfully.

“No, don’t trouble yourself, love. He’s a right cunt,” you said matter-of-factly. "And a dirty little snitch as it turns out. Do you know what we do to them?"

John leaped forward. “Alright, bedtime!” he announced. “Y/n, can I speak with you?”

You looked up, realizing he was home. “So you finally found me,” you said with a grin. “Did you come for those kisses?” you teased as you rose to greet him, batting your lashes at him playfully. The children whooped in delight, jumping up and down as they watched both of you carefully.

“Bed!” John instructed, pointing for them to lie down. Guiding you out into the hall, he closed the door to their room and when you attempted to walk away from him, he pulled you back to him demanding, “Where the bloody hell have you been?”

“You speak to me like that again and it’ll be a black eye for you, understand?” you warned him.

“Alright, calm down,” he said, relinquishing his grip on your wrist. “I was worried,” he admitted in a quiet voice.

Crossing your arms over your chest, you looked down at your feet and nodded in understanding. “M sorry. Sabini’s men came looking for me at the hospital. I had to leave.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve taken care of it,” John said lowly.

Your eyes flicked up to his, a sudden spark lighting within you as you shook your head at him. “I don’t need you to fight my battles for me.”

John ran a hand through his hair in exasperation. “Fine, you don’t need me,” he said, pushing past you to take the stairs two at a time.

You followed after him into the kitchen where he was noisily opening cupboards to distract himself from your rejection.

“That’s not what I meant. I’m good at what I do so I don’t need my man to rescue me every time I’m in trouble, John."

“Oh, fuck off, Y/n!” he shouted, spinning around to look at you. "I may not be your man, but I'm still your partner. Why can't you trust me?” he asked, chest rising and falling quickly with his rapid heartbeat. You meant more to him than any woman had since Martha and he couldn’t understand why you insisted on shutting him out.

You stood staring at him, a lump in your throat in place of an explanation. Why were you like this? Was it years of working for Alfie or the fear of admitting you cared about someone? You couldn’t say. You’d never been good with words, but you had to try or this might be the end of your friendship.

“Look, I’m shit at telling people how I feel about them, alright? I learned everything I know about family from Alfie and you know what a numpty he is,” you let out a desperate laugh that fell flat when you saw John’s wide eyes staring back at you. “I couldn’t risk Sabini hurting you too. You’ve got kids to think of!” you said, eyes welling with tears. “I don't have anyone so it wasn't as much of a risk for me. You think I don’t trust you, but I’d fucking die for you, you arsehole.”

John exhaled the breath he’d been holding listening to you and rushed to embrace you, letting you cry into his shoulder. “Hey, you’ve got me. You’ve got all of us," he assured you as he stroked your hair gently. "Promise me you won’t do that again. I couldn’t lose you.”

You nodded against his shoulder, wiping your tears away with the back of your hand as embarrassment washed over you. John loosened his grasp on your shoulders and stepped back to give you space. Digging into his pocket, he bit his lip before offering a handkerchief. Looking up at you with a mischievous glint in his eye, he attempted to lighten the mood. “If you’re going to come round more often to see the kids, stick to bedtime stories, yeah?”

You hiccuped out a little laugh asking, “No small talk?”

“Not if it’s about Walter,” he joked, looking away with a chuckle. 

You blew your nose into the hanky as you mumbled, “Sleeping Beauty again, I reckon.”

John winced, “I hate that one.”

“Says the man who grabbed the tit of an unconscious woman,” you retorted playfully.

“How many times do I have to apologize for that? I did save your life that night you know!” John said, voice tinged with mild irritation.

A smile slowly began to creep over your face as you brought your hand up to caress his cheek softly, “Thank you, Barney.”

His bright blue eyes searched yours and found a sincerity he'd never seen before. “You’re welcome, alley cat," he whispered into the stillness of the night. His term of affection made you feel warm and comforted and for once you didn't feel like dismissing it with a joke or running away.

Read part 5 Plus One

[poppitron360]

Wait. I wanna hear you Will Solace headcanons

Okay so be prepared for these to be wildly inaccurate because all I know about this guy is from fannon. Most of this is also me projecting.

1. Bass player. Yes that is 100% biased, as I am also a bass player (and I hc myself as a legacy of Apollo). No I have no basis on this claim other than Basses Are Just Cooler Than Guitars.

2. OR he’s the guitarist, Nico is the Bassist.

3. If there is a piano in the house, he WILL play it. For hours. Gods forbid you take him anywhere with a public piano.

4. Hates learning Music Theory, learns by ear and by feel. As an Apollo kid, he can instantly read both tab and sheet music, but uses neither.

5. Also has perfect pitch (can name any chord just by hearing it).

6. He’s a Star Wars fan, right? Can talk for hours about John William’s use of Lydian Mode in the score to convey a sense of majesty, and don’t get him started on the expert use of Vagnarian methods of leitmotif-

7. Okay, so maybe he knows a little music theory.

8. Writes terrible poetry that’s low-key kinda good.

9. Founder of the chb LGBTQ+ club.

10. Bisexual flags everywhere. He always at least one pink, purple, and blue pen on hand, doodles exclusively in those colours. His doctors notes are colour-coded pink, purple, blue.

11. BIG supporter of Trans rights- is qualified to help with Gender Affirming Healthcare for anyone at Camp.

12. Apollo is also god of prophecies. Will has the power of foresight ONLY for TV show/Film/Book endings. He is able to predict how a character would die with incredible accuracy after one episode. Morbid as fuck, so naturally Nico thinks it’s the hottest thing ever.

13. SWIFTIE!!!!!

14. Friendship bracelets. VERY swiftie-coded, he has a million of them on both arms, cutting off his circulation.

15. Paints Nico’s nails. Nico insists on all black, but gave in and let Will paint ONE nail fun colours, bedazzled with charms and shit. As long as it’s the middle finger.

Now, specifically my Will x Leo (Platonic) headcannons:

16. Will and Leo become very close at camp simply because Leo has absolutely zero sense of self-preservation. Like that kid does not value his life in any way at all, and so always ends up doing the most reckless shit ever, and, naturally, ends up spending a lot of time in the infirmary, usually only after being dragged there by Jason (“What’s the big deal? It’s just a broken arm. I’m ambidextrous! Besides, I’ve survived worse.”)

17. Will loves him because he’s never there longer than he has to be.

18. Except sometimes he does have to force Leo back into bed while Leo’s yelling loudly about how he needs to get back to his work, the Argo II won’t build itself, and to let go of him or he’ll burn you.

19. Will makes him wear enchanted plasters (band aids) that he can’t take off without doctor’s permission, to stop him absent-mindedly picking at old scabs and bits of skin. He also keeps fidget toys and stress balls to give to his patients. Leo has stolen ALL of them.

20. Like seriously, it is a problem. Leo has had to make them a whole bunch more fidgets because he’s taken and then overworked them until they all broke.

21. Both their southern accents come out more when they talk to each other. If a conversation goes on too long, they evolve into using so much fast-paced Texan slang that no-one else can understand them- it’s practically its own language.

22. BOTH SWIFTIES!!!!!

23. Leo helps out in the infirmary a lot- he’s useful if you need to sterilise equipment or cauterise any wounds.

24. It works sort of like an exchange of favours, where Leo also calls on Will anytime he needs a human flashlight to work on a project.

25. Leo has a lot of scars from his rough childhood. Will is one of the few people (aside from Jason) who’s actually seen them all. They never talk about it, and, as his doctor, he’s sworn to secrecy, but some of them are really disturbing. It will never not shock him that demigods can get hurt by things in the mortal world.

26. Leo makes sure Will uses accurate engineering jargon when writing Star Wars fanfiction.

27. Aside from Leo, Nico is the only one who reads his fanfiction

[dustedmagazine]

Horse Jumper of Love — Disaster Trick (Run for Cover)

Photo by Pond Creative

Horse Jumper of Love’s second album blows out introspective songs into wailing crescendos. Guitars bristle, flare and dissolve into fuzz, while quiet, contemplative lyrics unfold in the hurricane’s unblinking eye. “Wink,” the first single, spools out in chilled post-rocking chords, drums kicking up dust in the long sustained intervals. The singer, Dmitri Giannopoulos, sings in a shrugging, self-effacing tenor, navigating twisty melodies with an unhurried, unbothered nonchalance. The song is a battering ram and a weighted blanket, equal parts brute force and solace.

The music has undergone a shift since Heartbreak Rules, from 2023, an album I liked a lot. That record was a mostly solo endeavor, just Giannopoulos singing songs he’d knocked out during COVID quarantine and John Margaris coming in late to play a few piano parts. This one is much more of a band effort. Margaris plays bass throughout, and James Doran drums. There are guest appearances from of-the-moment indie rockers including Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman, MJ Lenderman and Ella Williams of Squirrel Flower. Though still morose and inward-looking, the songs bloom into sprawling, distorted, nocturnal flower. They are larger but very personal.

“Snow Angel,” for instance, establishes a slow acoustic strum, then blows it to bits with fuzz. The sound coils and uncoils, storming ahead with inexorable anthemic vigor, then turning inward on itself in wounded dissonance. “Curtain” strips back the Horse Jumper experience to flared electric chords and vocals. The song digs into the bleakest existential questions—the self, its relation with others, mortality — in clean, echoing isolation. Giannopoulos croons, “Do you think yours is the only point of view? Do you that think others haven’t done it, too? Did you follow that nasty rule? You wave that goodbye and they close the black curtain on you.”

The sound is mesmerizing, pitched somewhere between Polvo’s guitar-wrenching abstractions and David Grubbs’ surreal sung poetry and Bedhead but with more explosions. Ovlov comes to mind, too, in the tactile onslaught of distorted guitar sound. Yet the words are good, too, if hard to catch, as they bob up to the surface of guitar skree, then sink under again. “Lip Reader” has one of the disc’s most arresting images, in a verse that goes, “You were singing your song in the doorway/I could see you in the other room/like a lip reader from the other side/you’re from another side.”  The line between the living and the dead, the real and the imagined, is wavery and blurred.

At times, Giannopoulos recalls other, far more acoustically centered artists. The spare, stark “Word,” for instance, sounds a good bit like whispery, gothic Boduf songs. The trick he’s mastered, however, is hitching vulnerability to blaring, swelling, overwhelming guitar sounds. It’s not often that music this loud and distorted can break your heart.

Jennifer Kelly

[pollywiltse]

There was an Entertainment Weekly interview with JJ Feild back in 2016 where I really thought he said that Turn had decided that Clinton and André were in a relationship, but frankly given the expression on André's face after he hands him the glass, it looks more like André is reluctantly putting up with Clinton grabbing his ass for the sake of his career. (I guess this is actually "the Clinton pod person" and "the André pod person" since neither of them seem to have that much to do with their historical counterparts. Also almost all of the historical claims JJ makes in that interview are somewhere between "uh, not quite" and completely wrong.)

This would make me sad and uncomfortable if it was the real André, especially because he was really not in a position where he could piss Clinton off. He was a brevet major, not a real major, so if he ever left Clinton's family, he would get booted back down to especially junior captain (because he had gone down in seniority when he was playing musical commissions so he could stay in America and his brother could go back to England), possibly with a black mark against his name for the next time he tried for a promotion to major because London was still pissed he tried to jump the line the first time. (Clinton tried to promote André to actual major around the time he also was appointed deputy adjutant general, but Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who had to approve it, pitched a fit and said neither of the Andrés he could find - John and his brother - had been a captain long enough and Captain André wasn't getting promoted, whoever the fuck he was, so screw you.) There's a bit in Hatch where he quotes from one of André's letters to a family member (Hatch thinks his uncle John-Lewis) where he's explaining how the commission swap is good for William's career, but uh, oh yeah, it's kind of not so great for him: Should he fall from favor, or should Clinton be replaced, he could "stagnate", as he puts it, at "the bottom of the captains, with the retrospect of my disappointment for the amusement of my leisure hours." This is probably not unrelated to his poor life decision to go meet Arnold himself. (The bit where Clinton periodically tried to ragequit was presumably not doing great things for André's stress levels either, especially because it took months to find out either way. I'm semi-convinced that the reason André spent a significant part of the last year or so of his life being sick was caused by having to deal with Clinton. That or malaria.)

Fortunately the real André got promoted because he was intelligent, hardworking, freakishly good at getting people to like him, and if we're going to be completely honest probably a little bit of a brownnoser, not because he was having a sexual relationship of dubious consent with his boss. Also his career seems to have been on a basically vertical trajectory even before he met Clinton, and Grey was actively shoving him under Clinton's nose so he would be able to stay a staff officer when Grey went back to England.

But as for Turn!dré, the idea of that particular cliche being especially long-suffering while his boss sexually harasses him is hilarious, because André looking like he's about five seconds away from putting either his own or someone else's head through the nearest wall is one of the funniest things about the show.

("It's almost eight. At eight o'clock, he's going to walk in, and come up behind me, and smell my hair. I don't know why he wants to smell my hair. It's the eighteenth century and none of us have washed out hair in months and scented pomades can only do so much, especially when their base ingredient is lard. But he's going to smell my hair anyway. I hope he enjoys it. And then he's going to go sit down at his own desk and I'm going to open the bottom drawer, take out that bottle of wine, and have my fifth drink of the day. From the bottle. In plain sight. Because I don't care. There are his footsteps. Here he comes. Five, four, three...")

[r0b0tb0y]

do you have any sci-fi book or movie recommendations? (or any other media really)

boy do I!!!! These are some that have influenced my style:

Books (some are fantasy-leaning scifi but I don't differentiate):

The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin. This book starts with the world ending, and it gets worse from there. Parts of the series get really cosmically unhinged but the colossal scope is phenomenal and the flagrant lies-by-omission from the narrators blew me away.

Murderbot series by Martha Wells. Everyone reads murderbot, it's good.

Discworld by Terry Pratchett, because if you haven't read any yet you most certainly will. Everyone deserves a personalised recommendation for their entrypoint, but the one I'm feeling today is The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Hard scifi space opera, royal succession drama, cultural imperialism through linguistics.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow. This is a novel-length beat poem about werewolf gangs in Los Angeles. I'm convinced there's a curse attached to it so beware. I have three copies because I'm obsessed with it.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I have a whole zine about why I'm obsessed with it.

Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. You don't think you'll end up in love with Saga but you will be wrong.

Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. These books are super funny share my fascination with architecture-as-magic.

The City and the City by China Miéville. Takes about 100 pages to get invested in the world/plot/character but you actually feel your brain crackle when it happens. One of the most captivating what-if concepts I've ever read.

Burning Chrome by William Gibson. This is a collection of short stories, some set in the Sprawl and some standalone. The titular Burning Chrome and Hinterlands are my favourites.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey. hippo cowboys.

Movies, which I will not write blurbs for or we'll be here all day, in approximate release order or we will also be here all night:

Nope

Prey

Neptune Frost

Space Sweepers

Prospect

Sputnik

Zygote

Shin Godzilla

Jupiter Ascending

Mad Max: Fury Road

Ex Machina

Snowpiercer

Prometheus

John Carter

Attack the Block

Push

Pitch Black

The Matrix

The Fifth Element

Alien

The Thing

Westworld

Metropolis

I will ruminate on other media and get back to you - this should keep you busy for about a year. Start with Space Sweepers!

[jules-has-notes]

Will.of.Oz (Unexpected Musical) — PattyCake Productions music video

For the third offering in their Unexpected Musicals series, the PattyCake guys got even more ambitious. Combining the club jams of the Black Eyed Peas with the spectacle of The Wizard of Oz required a bigger cast and more locations than their first two videos. Not to mention all the costumes, props, set pieces, and visual effects. But they pulled all of it off with their own unique flair.

Details:

title: Unexpected Musicals – Will.of.Oz

performers: Rachel Copeland (Dorothy); Alexander Browne (Scarecrow / coronor / Winkie guard); E. Michael Evans (Tin Man); Earl Elkins, Jr. (Cowardly Lion); Olivia Adkins (Glinda); Kathy Castellucci (Wicked Witch); Fletcher Wakim (Toto); Eli Jacobson (Lollipop Guild); Annesley Kolb, Kelsey Kolb, & Lilly Kolb (Lullaby League); Charlie Crook, Blanca Rosero, Savannah Simerly, Annabel Rosario, Danielle Peronto, Fred Ramos, Nick Perez, Britt Nicole, Richard Bianco, Polly Pocket, & Jonathan Shane Ferrell (munchkins)

original songs / performers: [0:20] "Let's Get It Started" by the Black Eyed Peas; [1:46] "Don't Phunk with My Heart" by the Black Eyed Peas; [2:10] "Don't Lie" by the Black Eyed Peas; [2:40] "I Gotta Feeling" by the Black Eyed Peas; [3:10] "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas; [3:28] "Scream and Shout" by will.i.am, featuring Britney Spears; [3:54] "The Time (I've Had the Time of My Life)" by the Black Eyed Peas

written by: all songs by William "will.i.am" Adams in collaboration — "Let's Get It Started" with Allan "apl.de.ap" Pineda, Jaime "Taboo" Gomez, Terence Yoshiaki, Michael Fratantuno, & George Pajon, Jr.; "Don't Phunk with My Heart" with Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson, Priese "Printz" Board, George Pajon, Jr., Full Force, Kalyanji–Anandji, & Shyamalal Babu "Indeevar" Rai; "Don't Lie" with Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson, Jaime "Taboo" Gomez, Allan "apl.de.ap" Pineda, Chris Peters, Drew Peters, & Richard "Slick Rick" Walters; "I Gotta Feeling" with Allan "apl.de.ap" Pineda, Jaime "Taboo" Gomez, & Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson, David Guetta, & Frédéric Riesterer; "Boom Boom Pow" with Allan "apl.de.ap" Pineda, Jaime "Taboo" Gomez, & Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson; "Scream and Shout" with Jean Baptiste Kouame, Tula "Tulisa" Contostavlos, & Jef Martens; "The Time (I've Had the Time of My Life)" by John DeNicola, Donald Markowitz, & Franke Previte

arranged by: Tony Wakim & Layne Stein

release date: 5 December 2016

My favorite bits:

the munchkins' various entertaining entrances

Eli recreating the Lollipop Guild's expressions and herky-jerky dance moves

the Scarecrow saying ♫ "lose control of body and soul" ♫ as he's gangling about

the "Ding Dong" instrumental melody playing underneath Dorothy and the Scarecrow's exit

and "If I Only Had…" under the Tin Man's introduction

including the iconic "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!" as a counterpoint to "Don't Phunk With My Heart"

Earl's fantastic lion growl and melodramatic wailing (and poor little Fletcher getting confused by it)

the lovely harmonized ♫ "no no no no" ♫ section in "Don't Lie"

the bombast of "Boom Boom Pow" being delivered by the illusory visage of Oz the Great and Powerful

Kathy's pitch-perfect Margaret Hamilton witch cackle

the layered melodies in the coda section

all those incredible costumes (Tony was busy!)

Trivia:

According to PattyCake's Instagram teasers, it took 68 yards of fabric to make Glinda's voluminous gown, 2500 hand-stiched sequins to cover each pair of ruby slippers, and 57 pounds of actual tin to make the Tin Man's armor.

The Lullabye League is portrayed by Layne's step-daughters.

Jonathan Shane Ferrell isn't just one of the munchins. He's also one of the artists from Makeup & Creative Arts who provided the incredible character prosthetics.

PattyCake released their first public blooper reel for this project, and it is very fun.

The team at Makeup & Creative Arts released a time lapse prosthetics demo video for their Oz collection a couple years later with Dan Varnum donning the Lion's mane, Kathy Castellucci reprising her Wicked Witch role, Geoff Castellucci going gray silver as the Tin Man, & Paul Kaleka getting stuffed into the Scarecrow's burlap.

Rachel slipped back into Dorothy's gingham dress the following year to play Judy Garland in PattyCake's "La La Land" video.

Tony had performed "Let's Get It Started" many, many times during his decade as Dracula in the "Beetlejuice Graveyard Revue" at Universal Studios.

"Let's Get It Started" was also part of the opening medley for VoicePlay's second episode of The Sing-Off, though not the section the guys were featured in.

Layne had previously created a remix of "I Gotta Feeling" back in 2010 through his studio, Rayne's Room.

[artemiseamoon]

Stay in the Light 1

William Johns x Ofc | fic info here

Words: 3,060

Warnings: drinking, sex, chronic pain, addiction

😂 I know, this is purely for me and the maybe one other person in the world who might read it. Gotta find joy in life right? Writing random characters gives me joy atm. Pitch Black adjacent stuff doesn’t happen til chapter 2. This is planned to be 3 chapters.

Gif credits to the owner

This is a preview * read in full on A03

BEFORE

This planet doesn't offer much; it was a shit hole, like most places. Anyone still going got used to this kind of thing, few had the luxury of stepping foot on a nice planet. One needs rich friends and important high-level connections for that kind of thing, or they're born into it.

When you make your living catching escapees, you make enemies, not friends, especially not friends in high places even if they’re the ones who hired you in the first place. Sure, they'll be appreciative, especially if you caught some asshole they’ve been tracking for years. But what you won’t get is an invitation to dinner or private island trips.

This place was just a pit stop before heading to Central and getting her newest job. Until then, Kiara didn’t plan on doing much. She got a decent room in a better part of town, north of the red-light district and east of the canal where all sorts of shady shit went down. She would hold up in the sweet spot, far away from all the drama yet close to the transit terminal.

She would sleep, take a long soaking bath maybe - do all the things she couldn't while on mission. Maybe if the right kind of person comes along, she'd get laid too, it has been a while. Lots of people hooked up on the mission, the men, women, and everyone in between. It happened often whether it was in the dark or behind closed doors yet barely hidden.

The job was dangerous enough, no need to add a mess of human emotions into the whole thing. Most of the men Kiara was posted with were pieces of shit, so it made it easy to adhere to this rule. Then, there were the few times she’d considered, but would never follow through with it. Besides, she liked to focus just on the task at hand and take care of her personal needs once the job was done, even if it meant waiting for a while.

.

Reaching her two-drink limit for the night, Kiara kicked back in the booth with her legs extended across the open seat, so no one got any ideas. If anyone was going to keep company with her, she’d extend the invite herself.

There was one-sided interest coming from a few onlookers, but no one caught her eye until a new guy walked through the doors and headed to the bar. There was a serious look on his face, and he carried himself like a marine officer, even with his plain clothes on.

Once at the bar, he scanned the room, his blue eyes cold and observant - then his eyes met hers. He seemed clean cut, with no facial hair, the hair on his head was dark blonde and a slight reddish undertone and cut short. There was something intense and broody about him, but it didn’t take away from his handsomeness.

His blue eyes stayed fixed on her until the bartender came to him. He turned slightly, his back to Kiara as he made his order. She took another sip, this time eyeing up his form and the way the long-sleeved black top fit perfectly, highlighting how fit he was - but not overly so. There were no bulging muscles or mass- she wasn’t into that kind of thing anyway.

The blue-eyed man turned in his seat, looking back at her again, this time with a beer in his hand. Kiara sat up from her slouching position and slowly lifted one leg off the seat, then the other.

A slight grin ticked on his lips. He stood and made his way over to her, not in a rush, nor a hurry. As he reached the table, Kiara relaxed against the padding and took him in.

He slid into the booth, and leaned back as his eyes raked over her,

“Johns.” he said when they made eye contact again.

“Mora.” she raised her glass, eyes still locked on his as he clicked his beer to it.

Not breaking eye contact, they both brought their drinks to their lips.

Read in full on A03

@artemiseamoon-updates | A03: artemiseamoon

[the-last-dillpickle]

DS9 trivia from IMDB - Part 7

- After Avery Brooks was cast as Commander Sisko, producers maintained a color blind approach to casting Jake.

- Buck Bokai, Sisko's favorite baseball player of the twenty-first century, who broke Joe DiMaggio's record for consecutive hits in 2026, comes from Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Big Goodbye (1988).

- This is the only "Star Trek" television series not to receive any competitive Saturn Awards.

- Producers toyed with casting a woman as Sisko. The idea of a female lead and commanding officer was successfully revisited for Star Trek: Voyager (1995).

- DS9 fans initially believed the characters Furel (a member of Major Kira's resistance cell) and Enabran Tain (retired head of the Cardassian's Obsidian Order) were played by the same actor due to their nearly identical voices and frame. However, they're played by two different actors, William Lucking and Paul Dooley respectively.

- Throughout the show, Quark has a total of 14 different outfits (seven main suits; two vacation outfits featured in "The Jem'Hadar" in Season 2 and "Let He Who is Without Sin" in Season 5; one pair of pajamas; two Klingon outfits featured in "Looking for Par'Mach in all the Wrong Places" in Season 5; a black "Mirror Universe" suit in "Cross Over" in Season 2; his Lumba disguise featured in "Profit and Lace" in Season 6; and his baseball uniform featured in "Take Me Out to the Holosuite" in Season 7. He also wears three different sleeveless overcoats; the first being his purple Nagus cloak in "The Nagus" (Season 1) and the other two being his furred Klingon marriage overcoat and his grey Klingon House shawl in "House of Quark" (Season 3).

- One subtle detail that Trek fans might notice is that Worf is more formal when it comes to interacting with Sisko. He uses the phrase "Aye sir" when responding to orders, which is what the crew of the Enterprise-D said on 'The Next Generation', where Worf first served. None of the other characters on 'Deep Space Nine' use this more militaristic phrase.

- When Max Grodénchik  auditioned for the part of a Ferengi, he thought that he blew it, and didn't think he would get the part. Afterwards, he walked into Armin Shimerman, who felt the same; however, Shimerman told him that they probably didn't have to worry, as they were the only two short actors who had turned up, and the Ferengi are traditionally of short stature. He turned out to be right.

- Several paintings adorn the quarters of Sisko, Bashir, Dax and Kira. These were painted by Mark Allen Shepherd, who plays Morn, Quark's silent bar patron.

- In a February 2021 interview with ScreenRant, Rick Berman stated that "Brandon Tartikoff, an executive at Paramount studios, originally pitched the idea of doing "The Rifleman in space" as a good premise for the new show." While the producers didn't pursue that concept very far, there are similarities in the characters of Rifleman's Lucas and Mark McCain and their counterparts on DS9, Designer John Eaves created the Breen ships with lots of T-shapes in the hull and engines, in honor of his fiancee and later wife Tara.

[worstqueerbaittournament]

Submission list

organised by @kindalikerackham (THANK YOU)

This is a list of all of the submissions. It will be updated continuously. Italics are still being decided in the polls, crossed out have been decided on “no”, bold have been decided on “yes”

By character name (or ship name if given)

Akira Kurusu and Goro Akechi from Persona 5 Royal

Alix from Miraculous Ladybug

Allison and Patti from Kevin Can F**k himself

Anna and Marnie from When Marnie was There

baron draxum and master splinter   rise of the tmnt 2018

Batman and Joker/ Bruce and John Doe from Batman Telltale

Beca and Chloe from Pitch Perfect

Beca from Pitch Perfect

Betty and Veronica from Riverdale

Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiaolong, aka Bumbleby from RWBY

Blitzen and Hearthstone from Magnus Chase

Buck and Eddie from 9-1-1

Chad/Ryan from High School Musical

Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr (aka Professor X and Magneto) from anything X-Men

Cory and Naveed from Ackley Bridge

Dani Ramos and Grace from Terminator Dark Fate

Darling Charming and Apple White from Ever After High

Dean Winchester

Destiel

Drs House & Wilson from House MD

emma woods/emily dyer from identity v

Faberry from glee!(Rachel Berry + Quinn Fabray)

Fuffy, faith and buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Finn and Poe from Star Wars

Firestar and Greystripe from Warriors

foot clan lieutenant and brute  rise of the tmnt 2018 

Ginji Amano & Ban Midou from GetBackers

goro majima and kazuma kiryu -  Yakuza/Ryu Ga Gotoku

Grif and Simmons from Red vs. Blue

Hannibal and will from Hannibal tv show

H.G. Wells and Myka Bering from Warehouse 13

Hikaru Sulu from Star Trek Beyond

hypnopotamus and warren stone  rise of the tmnt 2018  

Ineffable Husbands from Good Omens

Jade and Bella from Rainbow High

Jade and Tori (Victorious)

Jake Peralta (Brooklyn 99)

Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles from Rizzoli&Isles TV series

Janis from Mean Girls

Jeremy and Michael from Be More Chill

Jess/Jules from Bend It Like Beckham

Johnathan Harker and Dracula from Dracula (Netflix)

Johnathan Harker and Dracula from Dracula (1897)

Juleka and Rose from Miraculous Ladybug

Julian Bashir and Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Jun and Tatsuya from Persona 2

Kaoru Nishimi and Sentarou Kawabuchi from Kids on the Slope (Sakamichi no Apollon)

kanji/naoto from persona 4

keith and lance from voltron

Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk from Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint

klavier and apollo from ace attorney

L and Light from Death Note

legolas and gimli from lotr

Legoshi and Louis from Beastars

leo and adam from tatort saarbrücken

lightcannon, Jinx and Lux from league of legends

Loki from The Loki show

Luca & Alberto from Luca

Luigi and Bowser from the Mario movie

marc and nathaniel from miraculous

Masumi Itachi from blue flag

Matsuoka rin and haru from Free!

Max from Miraculous Ladybug

Mel and Naomi from Vermonia

merthur (merlin and Arthur from the BBC show merlin

Milo and Bisco from Sabikui Bisco

Mobius and Loki from the Loki show

nana komatsu/nana osaki from nana

narumitsu - Ace Attorney

Naruto and Sasuke

Newt and Hermann from Pacific Rim

Nina and Lily from the movie Black Swan

Peggy Carter & Angie Martinelli from Agent Carter

Quentin and Eliot - The Magicians

Ravenpaw and Barely from warrior cats

Raya & Namaari from Raya and the Last Dragon

rei and nagisa   from Free!

Sam and Max

Sam and Bucky from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Sherlock and John Watson from BBC Sherlock

Sherlock and Moriarty from BBC Sherlock

Shiro and Adam from voltron

shiro and keith from voltron

sophie and agatha from The School of Good and Evil

Spirk (Spock and Kirk) from Star Trek  The Original Series

Spirk (Spock and Kirk) from Star Trek  the reboot movies

Sterek  (Stiles and Derek from Teen Wolf)

Steve and Bucky from Captain America

Steve McGarrett and Danny Williams from Hawaii 5-0 (the 2010 version)

stiles stilinski from teen wolf

Supercorp! Lena and Kara from Supergirl!

Superman and Batman from the DCEU

SwanQueen (Regina Mills/Emma Swan from Once Upon a Time)

Sylvie from Loki

Thiel and Boerne from Tatort Münster

Thomas & Newt from the maze runner

troy barnes and abed nadir from community

wednesday and enid from wednesday

Yumihisu (Ymir x Historia Reiss) from Attack on Titan

yu/yosuke from persona 4

Zari and Charlie from Legends of Tomorrow

Zoro and sanji - one piece

By Property:

9-1-1 - Buck and Eddie

ace attorney - klavier and apollo

Ace Attorney - narumitsu

Ackley Bridge - Cory and Naveed  

Agent Carter - Peggy Carter & Angie Martinelli

Attack on Titan - Yumihisu (Ymir x Historia Reiss)  

Batman Telltale - Batman and Joker/ Bruce and John Doe

Beastars - Legoshi and Louis

Be More Chill - Jeremy and Michael

Bend It Like Beckham - Jess/Jules

Black Swan - Nina and Lily

blue flag - Masumi Itachi

Brooklyn 99 - Jake Peralta

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Fuffy (faith and buffy)

Captain America - Steve and Bucky

community - troy barnes and abed nadir

DCEU - Superman and Batman

Dracula (1897) - Johnathan Harker and Dracula

Dracula (Netflix) - Johnathan Harker and Dracula

Ever After High - Darling Charming and Apple White  

Free! - Matsuoka rin and haru

Free!-  rei and nagisa 

GetBackers - Ginji Amano & Ban Midou

Glee - Faberry (Rachel Berry + Quinn Fabray)

Good Omens - Ineffable Husbands

Hannibal (tv) - Hannibal and will

Hawaii 5-0 (2010) - Steve McGarrett and Danny Williams

High School Musical - Chad/Ryan 

House MD - Drs House & Wilson

identity v - emma woods/emily dyer

Kevin Can F**k himself - Allison and Patti

Kids on the Slope (Sakamichi no Apollon) - Kaoru Nishimi and Sentarou Kawabuchi

league of legends - Jinx and Lux

Legends of Tomorrow - Zari and Charlie

Loki show - Mobius and Loki

Loki show - Loki

Loki show - Sylvie

lotr - legolas and gimli

Luca - Luca & Alberto

Magnus Chase  - Blitzen and Hearthstone

Mario Movie - Luigi and Bowser

Mean Girls  - Janis

Merlin (BBC) - merthur (merlin and Arthur)

Miraculous Ladybug - Alix

Miraculous Ladybug - Juleka and Rose

Miraculous ladybug - marc and nathaniel

Miraculous ladybug - Max

nana - nana komatsu/nana osaki from

Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint - Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk

Once Upon a Time - SwanQueen (Regina Mills/Emma Swan )

one piece - Zoro and sanji

Pacific Rim - Newt and Hermann

Persona 2 - Jun and Tatsuya

persona 4 - yu/yosuke

persona 4 - kanji/naoto

Persona 5 Royal - Akira Kurusu and Goro Akechi

Pitch Perfect - Beca

Pitch Perfect - Beca and Chloe

Quentin and Eliot - the Magicians

Rainbow High - Jade and Bella

Raya and the Last Dragon - Raya & Namaari

Red vs Blue - Grif and Simmons

Rise of the TMNT 2018 - baron draxum and master splinter

Rise of the TMNT 2018 - foot clan lieutenant and brute

Rise of the TMNT 2018 - hypnopotamus and warren stone

Riverdale - Betty and Veronica

Rizzoli&Isles TV series - Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles

RWBY - Blake Belladonna and Yang Xiaolong, aka Bumbleby

Sabikui Bisco - Milo and Bisco

Sam and Max - Sam and Max

Sherlock (BBC) - Sherlock and John Watson

Sherlock (BBC) - Sherlock and Moriarty

Star Trek AOS - Spirk (Spock and Kirk)

Star Trek Beyond - Hikaru Sulu

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Julian Bashir and Elim Garak

Star Trek TOS - Spirk (Spock and Kirk)

Star Wars - Finn and Poe

Supergirl - Supercorp! Lena and Kara

Supernatural - Dean Winchester

Supernatural - Destiel

Tatort Münster - Thiel and Boerne

tatort saarbrücken - leo and adam

Teen Wolf - Sterek  (Stiles and Derek)

teen wolf - stiles stilinski

Terminator Dark Fate - Dani Ramos and Grace

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier - Sam and Bucky

The Magicians -  Quentin and Eliot

the maze runner - Thomas & Newt

The School of Good and Evil -  sophie and agatha

Vermonia - Mel and Naomi

Victorious - Jade and Tori

Voltron - keith and lance

Voltron - Shiro and Adam

Voltron - shiro and keith

Warehouse 13 - H.G. Wells and Myka Bering

warrior cats -  Ravenpaw and Barely

Warriors - Firestar and Greystripe

wednesday - wednesday and enid

When Marnie Was There - Anna and Marnie

X-Men (any) - Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr (aka Professor X and Magneto)

Yakuza/Ryu Ga Gotoku - goro majima and kazuma kiryu

[folkimplosionmusic]

Tim Buckley

Martin Aston, MOJO, July 1995

IN 1965, THE LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE CHEETAH dubbed three emerging singer-songwriters – Jackson Browne, Steve Noonan, and Tim Buckley – 'The Orange County Three'.

Browne progressed towards a comfortably feted stardom which endures to this day Noonan vanished into the ether after one album. And somewhere between their two paths drifted the late Tim Buckley. Between rabid adulation and ignoble obscurity, between legendary status and the losers' list, his is a fixed position, like a star that shines fiercely in the night sky but in space was extinguished eons ago.

Twenty years after his death on June 29, 1975, diehard disciples complain of the mismanagement of Tim Buckley's legacy. Here was a man whose recordings remain extraordinary cross-pollinations of folk-rock, folk-jazz, the avant-garde and all points in between. They are, in the words of Lillian Roxon's famed 1969 Rock Encyclopaedia, "easily the most beautiful in the new music, beautifully produced and arranged, always managing to be wildly passionate and pure at the same time". A shame, then, that they are still to be posthumously rewarded with a decent CD reissue campaign.

"When an artist finally comes through all this mess, you hear a pure voice," said Tim Buckley three months before he died. "We're in the habit of emulating those voices when they're dead."

TIMOTHY CHARLES BUCKLEY III WAS BORN IN AMSTERDAM, New York on Valentine's Day, 1947, his family uprooting westwards a decade later to Anaheim, home of Disneyland and strip malls. He grew up with music. Grandma dug Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith, mom adored Sinatra and Garland. Timothy Charles III himself leaned towards the gnarled county of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, the lonesome sound of the singing cowboys. The kid even taught himself to play the banjo.

Larry Beckett, the Buena Vista high school friend who added erudite lyrics to Buckley melodies over the years, recalls how schoolboy Tim always wanted to sing. Buckley had learnt how to use his perfect pitch from crooners like Nat 'King' Cole and Johnny Mathis but chose to exercise his range by screaming at buses and imitating the sound of trumpets. His voice set sail for the edge early

Jim Fielder, Tim's other best buddy at school, recalls first hearing the Buckley voice. "One hesitates to get flowery but the words 'gift from God' sprung to mind," he says. "He had an incredible range of four octaves, always in tune, with a great vibrato he had complete control over. You don't normally hear that stuff from a 17-year-old."

Recruited by C&W combo Princess Ramona & The Cherokee Riders, Buckley played guitar in a yellow hummingbird shirt and turquoise hat. The Princess soon saw that Timmy's heart wasn't in country – his nascent love of Miles Davis and John Coltrane testified to that – so suggested he turn instead to the burgeoning folk scene. Despite an intuitive gift for its melodic nuances, 'folk-rock' was a tag that would later irk him. Buckley was always cynical about how the business worked. "You hear what they want you to play when you're breaking into the business," he told Sounds in 1972, "and you show 'em what you've got."

With Fielder on bass and lyricist Beckett on drums they formed two bands, the Top 40-oriented Bohemians and the more esoteric, acoustic Harlequin 3, who would mix in poetry and freely ad-lib from Ken Nordine's Word Jazz monologues.

Buckley quickly won great notices in LA, and the 'Orange County Three' accolade only heightened the interest of the music business. Mothers Of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black was impressed enough to suggest a meeting with Herb Cohen, a manager with a curiously dual reputation for unswerving breadheadedness and courageous work with mavericks from Lenny Bruce and the Mothers to Captain Beefheart and Wild Man Fischer. Instantly smitten – "there was no question that Tim had something unique" – Cohen sent a demo to Jac Holzman at Elektra, home of folk-rocking excellence.

"I must have listened to it twice a day for a week," said Holzman. "Whenever anything was getting me down, I'd run for Buckley. He was exactly the kind of artist with whom we wanted to grow – young and in the process of developing, extraordinarily gifted and so untyped that there existed no formula or pattern to which anyone would be committed."

Buckley in turn told Zigzag that he respected Holzman because he believed Jac only signed multi-talented acts who made each album an individual statement. Yet Buckley's self-titled debut album in 1966 was also his most generic. "I was only 19," Buckley later recalled in Changes magazine, "and going into the studio was like Disneyland. I'd do anything anybody said." The beat-guitar chime of Lee Underwood and the songs' baroque dressings were blood-related to The Byrds, par for the folk-rock course. "Naive, stiff, quaky and innocent, but a ticket into the marketplace," was Underwood's verdict. But you can discern what Cohen and Holzman had so clearly appraised: above all, that soaring counter-tenor voice and remarkable melodic gift.

The follow-up, Goodbye & Hello (1967), was tainted less by convention than by overambition. Producer Jerry Yester probably saw the chance to drape Buckley's ravishing voice in all the soft-rock flourishes at his disposal, while Beckett's convoluted wordplay was just the wrong side of pretentious. Buckley had radically outgrown the first album's high-school origins, his voice now adopting the languid resonances of his Greenwich Village folk idol Fred Neil on the aching ballads 'Once I Was' and 'Morning Glory'.

"Me and Tim hung around in Greenwich Village during the 1960s," recalls the reclusive songsmith of 'Everybody's Talkin'' and 'Dolphins'. "Tim was completely immersed in the music 24 hours a day He ate, drank and breathed music. I would not be at all surprised to learn that Tim worked on chord progressions and melody lines in his dreams, he was that committed to the art form."

In the Neil vein, Buckley's bristling 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain' is a six-minute epistle to his already estranged wife Mary Guibert and son Jeffrey Scott (better known now as Jeff Buckley).

"The marriage was a disaster," says Jim Fielder. "Mary was full of life and talent, a classical pianist and Tim's equal. But the pregnancy made it go sour, as neither of them was ready for it. To Tim it was draining his creative force, and Mary wasn't willing to take the chance on his career, putting it to him like, Settle down and raise a baby or we're through. That kind of showdown."

In the climax to 'I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain', Buckley yelped, pleaded, even shrieked "Baby, pleeeaEEESSE!"), the first evidence of the places his pain would take him. Honesty was the key. When Buckley and Beckett played it autobiographical – exquisitely vulnerable, naive yet insightful – the results were stunning. When they played to the gallery it sounded forced. Of the title track's anti-Vietnam tract, Buckley said, "I just hate the motherfucker. It's like, 'OK motherfuckers, you want a protest song, here it is'. They were bugging the hell out of me so I figured, just this once, and then I wouldn't have to do it again.

"Talking about war is futile," he reckoned. "What can you say about it? You want it to end but you know it won't. Fear is a limited subject but love isn't. I ain't talking about sunsets 'n' trees, I'm involved with America...but the people in America, not the politics. All I can see is the injustice."

Elektra's Jac Holzman, however, felt positive: a poster of Buckley loomed large over Sunset Strip. "As we got deeper into 1967 and Vietnam," Holzman observed, "the combined effect of his words, his music, his passion, his persona struck a particular resonance. To some extent he was the bright side of people's tortured souls, and maybe of his own tortured soul. He could express anguish that wasn't negative."

Goodbye & Hello reached 171 on the Billboard chart, but Buckley wasn't in the mood to consolidate. Instead, when Tonight Show guest host Alan King made fun of his hair, the singer retorted, "You know, it's really surprising, I always thought you were a piece of cardboard." On another outing he refused to lip-synch to 'Pleasant Street' and walked out.

WITH HINDSIGHT, UNDERWOOD TRACES Buckley's depressive tendencies to his father who "suffered a head injury in the Second World War and from then on his insecurities and rage made life miserable for Tim. He saw Tim's beauty, and called him a faggot and beat him up. He looked at Tim's talent and said he'd never make it. His mother didn't help: she'd tell him he'd die young because that's what poets always did. So he grew up deeply hurt and feeling inadequate, yet driven by this extraordinary musical talent that possessed him." The result, Underwood ventures, "gave Tim a deep-seated fear of success...he wanted people to love him but, as they did, he pushed them away".

"Long after his death," says Beckett, "I realised that there were very few songs he wrote that didn't have the word 'home' in them. It seemed like he felt homeless, and nothing would restore it. He seemed OK in high school, maybe a little wild, but he got increasingly neurotic. He'd almost welcome a negative comment that would reaffirm his feelings."

When, in 1970, Jerry Yester's wife Judy Henske poked fun at the line "I'm as puzzled as the oyster" in the majestic 'Song To The Siren', Buckley instantly dropped the song from the set. "He took the smallest criticism to heart," says Larry Beckett, "so that he couldn't even perform a song which he admitted was one of his all-time favourites!"

Another incident stands out from this period. Tim's choirboy looks and froth of curls had attracted a Love Generation-style teenybop following. At a show at New York's Philharmonic Hall, his most prestigious to date, various objects were thrown on stage, a red carnation among them. Buckley stooped down, picked it up and proceeded to chew the petals and spit them out.

"He was very vulnerable and emotional," says Beckett's ex-wife Manda. "It made him terribly attractive to everybody of both sexes. People just sort of swooned around him because he was so sweet. I think that frightened him. He was difficult to deal with because he was scared of his power over people. He almost seemed to reject his audiences for loving him so much. He wasn't mature enough to accept that kind of attention."

Tim would also embroider the truth. At school he'd lied about playing C&W bars, while Larry Beckett remembers dubious boasts of female conquests. Buckley also claimed to have played guitar on The Byrds' first album, which Roger McGuinn always denied. "Tim liked to feed the legend," Beckett recalls with a wry chuckle. "He was quite amoral – if a lie gave a laugh or strengthened his mystique, that was fine. But his music was always honest."

"If someone dared him to do something, he'd do it," recalls British bassist Danny Thompson, who accompanied Buckley on his 1968 UK visit. "This free spirit was what most people saw, but I also saw a bit of a loner. Unlike most people who get into drugs, he wasn't a sad junkie figure. He was more of a naughty boy who said, 'OK, I'll have a go, I'll drink that'."

If he admired Hendrix and Hardin and Havens, Buckley frequently railed against the rock establishment. "All people see is velvet pants and long, blond hair," he fumed. 'A perfect person with spangles and flowered shirts – that's vibrations to them."

"He viewed the blues-oriented rock of the day as white thievery and an emotional sham," says Underwood. "He criticised musicians who spent three weeks learning Clapton licks, when Mingus had spent his whole life living his music.

Retreating to his home base in Venice, LA, Buckley and Underwood took time out to immerse themselves in the music of the East Coast jazz titans. Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus and Ornette Coleman all provided inspiration as rehearsals slowly metamorphosed into jam sessions. The day before playing New York's prestigious Fillmore East theatre, Buckley asked vibraphonist David Friedman to rehearse for the show. Seven hours without sheet music later, a new sound was born.

With Happy/Sad (1969), Buckley began to arc away from the underground culture that had launched him. New York photographer Joe Stevens, a good friend of Buckley's at the time, recalls the singer's suspicious attitude towards the forthcoming Woodstock festival. "He said, Are you really going? Oh man, it's going to be awful.' Yet we used to hang out on a friend's farm which was like a scaled-down Woodstock, with hippy girls walking around, weird food, drugs, freedom and trees."

Although Jerry Yester was again involved, Happy/Sad was the polar opposite to Goodbye & Hello's crowded ambition: spacious, supple, a sea of possibilities. The line-up was just vibraphone, string bass, acoustic 12-string and gently rippling electric guitar. "The Modern Jazz Quartet Of Folk," enthused vibraphonist David Friedman. "Heart music," Buckley offered, and Elektra used his words in the ads like a manifesto. Happy/Sad's only real comparison is Astral Weeks, a similarly symmetrical, fluid work that revels in its lack of boundaries while possessing a unique tension.

"The trick of writing," Buckley felt, "is to make it sound like it's all happening for the first time. So you feel it's everybody's idea."

Van Morrison, Laura Nyro and John Martyn were also melting the walls between rock, blues, folk and jazz; at 22, Buckley was the youngest of the bunch. He'd also caught the jazz bug the hardest. Yester revealed that the band resisted second takes, while 'Strange Feeling' was bravely anchored to the bass line of Miles Davis's 'All Blues' before Buckley's voice set sail, caressing and cajoling.

"Being with Tim was like going out with an English professor," recalls Bob Duffy, Buckley's tour manager at the time. "He was very serious and almost stodgy, exactly the opposite of what you'd think a rock star would be. He wasn't in the music business to get laid. If one of the guys in the band came up and mentioned women, 13 of them would run out of the room, except for Tim who just sat there, guitar in hand, almost like he was teaching himself the songs again even though he'd played these songs 200 times, because he wanted the show to be as musically performed as possible. I saw incredible shows that he got depressed about, and wouldn't talk to anyone afterwards – he was very Zappa-like in that demanding way, but he was one of the sanest people on that level that I worked with."

As its very title acknowledged, despite Happy/Sad's sun-splashed backdrop, musical invention and lyrical joie de vivre, its mood was acutely introspective. Critic Simon Reynolds has described it as "a poignant premonition of loss, of an inevitable autumn..."

Lyrics had clearly shifted to a secondary, supportive role. Larry Beckett says he was politely informed that the singer would pen the lyrics alone. "He was moving toward a jazz sound, so to have wild poetry all over the map, you'd miss the jazz. But it was my feeling too that Tim felt his success was due to my lyrics rather than his music, so he wanted to see how well he'd do alone. He tended to believe the worst about himself..."

"It was very hard for me to write songs after Goodbye & Hello, because most of the bases were touched," Buckley admitted. "That was the end of my apprenticeship for writing songs. Whatever I wrote after that wasn't adolescent, which means it isn't easy because you can't repeat yourself. The way Jac [Holzman] had set it up you were supposed to move artistically, but the way the business is you're not. You're supposed to repeat what you do, so there's a dichotomy there. People like a certain type of thing at a certain time, and it's very hard to progress.

In another interview Tim said, "I can see where I'm heading, and it will probably be further and further from what people expected of me."

"He was very friendly and open to ideas, not a prima donna or a hypocrite," recalls John Balkin, who played bass with Buckley in 1969-70. "There was no drugs, sex and rock'n'roll in relation to him as an artist, not like Joplin and Hendrix, getting stoned before or during a gig. He felt stifled and frustrated by the boundaries that be, trying to stretch as an artist but making a living too. I remember Herbie Cohen saying, 'Go drive a truck then'..."

PROGRESSION WAS NOW BUCKLEY'S WATCH-word. Dream Letter, recorded in 1968 at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, was already more diffuse than Happy/ Sad, lacking the pulse of Carter CC Collins's congas. The budget couldn't afford him or bassist John Miller, so Pentangle's Danny Thompson was drafted in to play an intuitively supportive – and barely rehearsed – role.

"I got a call asking me to turn up and rehearse everything at once," recalls Thompson. "He refused to get into a routine of singing 'the song'. We did a TV show, and when it came to doing it live Tim said, 'Let's do another song', which we'd never rehearsed. It was two minutes longer than our time slot, and the producer was putting his finger across his throat, and Tim looked at him with a puzzled expression and carried on, like art and music was far more important than any of this rubbish that surrounds it. He was fearless."

Clive Selwood, who ran the UK branch of Elektra records, recalls the same episode: "Tim had got a slot on the Julie Felix Show on BBC. He turned up to rehearsals with Danny Thompson an hour late; he shuffled in, nodded when introduced to the producer, unsheathed his guitar, and they launched into an extemporisation of one of his songs that lasted over an hour. The producer and Felix watched open-mouthed, not daring to interrupt. The most exhaustingly magical performance I have ever witnessed – and all to an audience of three. When it was done, Tim slapped his guitar in the case, said 'OK?' to the producer, and departed."

A year later after a heady bout of touring, including the Fillmore East's opening night alongside BB King, Buckley's muse was flying high. In 1968 he'd sounded enraptured, a wayward choirboy testing the limits of a new-found sound, but the voice of 1969 scatted and scorched, twisting and ascending like a wreath of smoke. The music mixed blues, jazz and ballads, throwing in calypso, even cooking on the verge of funk. A key Buckley moment arrived at the climax of a simmering 14-minute 'Gypsy Woman' (from Happy/Sad), when he yelled, "Oh, cast a spell on Timmy!", like an exorcism in reverse. Few singers craved possession so hungrily.

A little-known artefact from this period is his soundtrack music for the film Changes, directed by Hall Bartlett who later went on to helm Jonathan Livingston Seagull. A live set from the Troubadour, finally released two years ago, previewed material that surfaced on Lorca (1970). The album was named after the murdered Spanish poet, whose simultaneously violent and tender poetics Buckley was vocally mirroring. On the song 'Lorca' itself, and on 'Anonymous Proposition' and 'Driftin',' Buckley floats and stings over a languid blue-note haze – crooning and stretching half-tones over shapeless stanzas.

"We never had any music to read from," bassist John Balkin remembers. "We just noodled through and went for it, just finding the right note or coming off a note and making it right." Buckley regarded the title track as "my identity as a unique singer; as an original voice."

The timing wasn't great. Now tuning into such mellow songsmiths as James Taylor, the Love Generation was in no mood to follow in Buckley's wayward footsteps, any more than Buckley had kowtowed to Elektra's craving for old-style troubadour charm. As Holzman says, "he was making music for himself at that point...which is fine, except for the problem of finding enough people to listen to it."

"An artist has a responsibility to know what's gone down and what's going on in his field, not to copy but to be aware," the creator responded. "Only that way can he strengthen his own perception and ability"

Around this time Holzman was poised to sell Elektra, which upset Buckley Although major label offers were on the table – "a lot of bread, which makes me feel really good" – he decided that money wasn't the issue: "That's not where I'm at. I can live on a low budget." After some deliberation he signed to Straight, a Warners-distributed label formed by Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa. "It would be better for me to stay with one man who had taken care of me," he said. "No matter what anyone thinks of Herbie, he's a great dude." But he capitulated to Cohen's demand to record a more accessible record: aptly named, Blue Afternoon (1969) is a collection of narcotic folk-torch ballads.

"Tim always wrote about love and suffering in all their manifestations," says Lee Underwood. "He felt that underneath love was fear, fear of love and success and attention and responsibility" In the album's centrepiece, 'Blue Melody', Buckley keens: "There ain't no wealth that can buy my pride/There ain't no pain that can cleanse my soul/No, just a blue melody/Sailing far away from me." In 'So Lonely', he confessed that "Nobody comes around here no more". In press material for the album, Buckley said the songs had been written for Marlene Dietrich.

Blue Afternoon beat Lorca to the shops by a month. With two albums vying for attention, his already diminished sales potential was halved. (Lorca didn't even chart). Buckley never commercially-minded, was still looking forward. "When I did Blue Afternoon, I had just about finished writing set songs," he told Zigzag. "I had to stretch out a little bit...the next [album] is mostly dealing in time signatures."

Has any troubadour ever stretched out quite as Buckley did on 1970's Starsailor? Buckley's third album in a year in the words of bassist John Balkin, was "a whole different genre". Balkin, who ran a free improvisation group with Buzz and Bunk Gardner of the Mothers, had introduced Buckley to opera singer Cathy Berberian's interpretations of songs by Luciano Berio, inspiring the ever-restless Buckley to new heights. Over throbbing rhythms and atonal dynamics, the Gardners' blowing was matched by Buckley's gymnastic yodels and screams: one moment he sounded like an autistic child, the next like Tarzan. Everything peaked on the title song, with its 16 tracks of vocal overdubs. Larry Beckett, recalled to add impressionistic poetry to expressionistic music, also had a field day: to wit, the likes of "Behold the healing festival/complete for an instant/the dance figure pure constellation." Indeed.

"For the 'Starsailor' track itself," recalls Balkin, "we wanted things like Timmy's voice moving and circling the room, coming over the top like a horn section, like another instrument, not like five separate voices. His range was incredible. He could get down with the bass part and be up again in a split second."

Fiercely beautiful, Starsailor is a unique masterpiece. Aside from 'Song To The Siren', the album was the epitome of uneasy listening. "Sometimes you're writing and you know that you're not going to fit," Buckley responded. "But you do it because it's your heart and soul and you gotta say it. When you play a chord, you're dating yourself...the fewer chords you play, the less likely you are to get conditioned, and the more you can reveal of what you are."

If Starsailor came close to Coltrane's 'sheets of sound', it was hard not to see it as commercial suicide. Attempts to reproduce Starsailor live didn't help. "The shows Tim booked himself after Starsailor were total free improvisation, vocal gymnastics time," recalls Balkin. "I can still see him onstage, his head down, snoring. There was one episode of barking at the audience too. After one show, Frank Zappa said we sounded good, and he wasn't one who easily handed out compliments."

"BUCKLEY YODELLING BAFFLES AUDIENCE," ran a Rolling Stone headline. As Herb Cohen says today, "he was changing too drastically, playing material that audiences weren't necessarily coming to hear and that was beyond the realm of their capability"..."An instrumentalist can be understood doing just about anything, but people are really geared to something coming out of the mouth being words," a resentful Buckley said in a subsequent press release. "I use my voice as an instrument when I'm performing live. The most shocking thing I've ever seen people come up against, beside a performer taking off his clothes, is dealing with someone who doesn't sing words. If I had my way, words wouldn't mean a thing."

Buckley was driven into deep depression by Starsailor's failure. Straight wouldn't provide tour support, the old band had fragmented because there was so little work for them, and Buckley was reduced to booking his own shows in small clubs. At last he shared the bitter, neglected status of his jazz idols. Underwood confirms that in order to take the sting away, Buckley dabbled in barbiturates and heroin. When Buckley prefaced 'I Don't Need It To Rain' on the Troubadour album by saying, "This one's called Give Smack A Chance", it was a dangerous joke. "He was mocking the peace movement, the whole Beatles mentality of the day" says Underwood.

At least his personal life had improved. He'd re-married, bought a house in upmarket Laguna Beach (subsequently painted black to outrage the neighbours), and effectively gone to ground. "I'd been going strong since 1966 and really needed a rest," was Buckley's explanation. "I hadn't caught up with any living." He also inherited his wife Judy's seven-year-old son Taylor.

Judy doesn't recall any drug abuse. Nor does she remember Tim driving a cab, chaffeuring Sly Stone or studying ethnomusicology at UCLA, as the singer often claimed at the time. Instead, she recalls Tim reading voraciously catching up with his favourite Latin American writers at the UCLA library and channelling his creative urges into acting.

The unreleased 1971 cult film Why? Starring OJ Simpson was shot during this period. "It was their first film but both Tim and OJ were incredible actors. The camera loved them," remembers co-star Linda Gillen. "Tim had this James Dean quality He's so handsome in the movie and yet such a mess! You know those Brat Pack kind of films, where people play prefabricated rebels who see themselves as kinda bad but they have a PR taking care of business? Well, Tim was the real deal. He didn't give a fuck how he looked or dressed. He had no hidden agenda. He had an incredible naivety.

"We used to improvise in the film. Tim's character talks to the effect that you can't commit suicide. You can't amend your feelings for other people; you have to find that thing that's good in you and keep that alive. A lot of the group had been onto my character about taking heroin but Tim would always be the sympathetic one. But that was Tim. He'd understand where they were coming from, why they would do what they did.

"On set, I used to hum to myself to fight off boredom and Tim would pick up on what I was humming, like 'Miss Otis Regrets', and we'd end up harmonising together" she continues. "I loved Fred Neil, and asked if he knew 'Dolphins', which he sung for me. He'd say 'They got to Fred Neil, don't let it happen to you'. He'd talk in this strange, paranoid, ominous way, about 'the man'. That night, we went to buy Fred's album and bypassed Tim's on the way! He never hustled his records to me; he wasn't a self-promoter.

"I wondered why Tim was working on this schleppy movie, because I knew people like Roger McGuinn who were making millions, and he said, very silently 'I need the money'. We were only earning $420 a week on the film, and I said, is that all the money you have right now? and he said, 'No, I'm getting a song covered,' which I think was 'Gypsy Woman' which Neil Diamond was going to do."

Meanwhile, the comic plot of his unfilmed screenplay Fully Air-Conditioned Inside was based on a struggling musician who blows up an audience calling for old songs and makes his escape tucked beneath the wings of a vulture, singing 'My Way'...

WHEN AN ALBUM FINALLY EMERGED IN 1972, Buckley had once again avoided covering familiar ground. Greetings From LA was a seriously funky amalgam of rock and soul. His youthful verve might have gone, but his wondrous holler whipped things along. "After Starsailor, I decided to re-evaluate, and I decided the way to come back was to be funkier than everybody," he boasted. But would radio stations play a record as shocking lyrically as Starsailor had been musically?

Judy was the new muse ('An exceptionally beautiful woman, provocative and witty too," says Underwood) and the album was drenched in lust. In a year when David Bowie made sex a refrigeratedly alien concept, Buckley wrote a set of linked songs in a sultry New Orleans populated by a constellation of pimps, whores and hustlers. "I went down to the meat rack tavern," was the album's opening line; and it closed on, "I'm looking for a street corner girl/And she's gonna beat me, whip me, spank me, make it all right again..."

Buckley explained his reasoning to Chrissie Hynde when she interviewed him for the NME in 1974. "I realised all the sex idols in rock weren't saying anything sexy – not Jagger or [Jim] Morrison. Nor had I learned anything sexually from a rock song. So I decided to make it human and not so mysterious."

Producer Hal Willner who subsequently organised the Tribute To Tim Buckley show at St Anne's Church, Brooklyn, remembers the singer at this time. "I saw Buckley live four times, including two of the best performances I've ever seen. He was everything someone could look for in music, totally transcendent. The first time took 100 per cent of my attention, like taking some sort of pill. You'd expect it from guys like Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra, but that's a very rare feeling to get in rock. Another time he opened for Zappa in his Grand Wazoo period, and the audience was incredibly rude to him, booing and heckling. But he handled it beautifully just carrying on, talking sarcastically, trying to get them to blow pot smoke on the stage. He was a genius in every sense. He should be seen on the same level as Edith Piaf and Miles Davis."

"Rock'n'roll was meant to be body music," Buckley stated in Downbeat magazine. But diehard fans wanted to know why he was now singing rock'n'roll. "His last albums were dictated somewhat by business considerations," says Lee Underwood, "but few understood they were also dictated by major music considerations. Where else could he go after Starsailor's intellectual heights except to its opposite, to white funk dance music, rooted in sexuality? At least Tim's R&B was honest, unlike the over-rehearsed stuff that pretends to be spontaneous. Greetings is still one of the best rock'n'roll albums ever to come down the pike. Throughout his career, he constantly asked and answered a question that can be terrifying, which is, Where do we go from here? People criticised him during Lorca and Starsailor and wanted him to play rock'n'roll, but when he did they said he sold out."

True compromise was far more detectable on 1974's album Sefronia, released by Cohen and Zappa's new DiscReet label under the Warner Brothers umbrella. "Everyone was second guessing where he should go next," says his old friend Donna Young, "and Tim started listening to what other people thought."

Some new-found literary acumen was displayed on the title track, a ballad as lush as the album's reading of Fred Neil's 'Dolphins'. But five of the songs were covers, including the sappy MOR duet 'I Know I'd Recognise Your Face', while pale retreads of Greetings' honeyed funk served as filler. Guitarist Joe Falsia was now in the Tonto role, Underwood having stepped down to deal with his drug addiction. Herbie Cohen was obviously calling the shots. "Some of those songs were beautiful but you have to get through Herb's idea of what is commercial," says Underwood.

As commercial compromises go, Sefronia was terrific – radio-friendly and lyrically approachable – but Buckley knew the score. "If I write too much music, it loses, as happened on Sefronia. Y'know, it gets stale." In reference to the folk-rock era, he observed that "the comradeship is just not there any more, and it affects the music." His boisterous barrelhouse sound was showcased at 1974's Knebworth Festival in Britain, where Buckley opened a bill that included Van Morrison, The Doobie Brothers and The Allman Brothers Band. It was his first UK show since 1968, and few knew who he was.

Photographer Joe Stevens reacquainted himself with Tim at a DiscReet launch in London: "He was sitting at a table signing autographs, which I couldn't have imagined him doing before. When he saw me he said, 'Come on, let's get out of here,' before they'd even said, 'Ladies'n'gentlemen, Tim Buckley!' We hit the street, took some photos, then took a taxi back to my place. He spent two days curled around my TV set, cooing at my girlfriend. We got calls from Warners accusing me of kidnapping their artist! You could see what had happened to him. The youth had gone out of his face, and his smile would break into a frown as soon as it had finished."

Look At The Fool (1975), with its frazzled, Tijuana-soul feel, was purer Buckley again, but the songwriting meandered badly – 'Wanda Lu' remains one of the most ignominious final songs of any brilliant career. "It just seemed that the more down he became, the more desperate he sounded," his sister Kathleen told Musician magazine. "The work of a man desperately trying to connect with an audience that has deserted him," pronounced Melody Maker. The photo on the back cover caught Buckley with a quizzical, defeated expression. Look at the fool, indeed. Honest to the end.

In 1974, Buckley wrote to Lee Underwood: "You are what you are, you know what you are, and there are no words for loneliness – black, bitter, aching loneliness that gnaws the roots of silence in the night..."

"Tim felt he'd given everything to no avail," says Underwood. "He was even suicidal for a short while because he felt there was no place left to go, emotionally speaking. He was gaining new audiences and improving his singing within conventional song forms, but comments that he'd sold out made him feel terrible. He never understood his fear of success, and remained divided and tormented to the end. I urged him to take therapy shortly before his death, when he was feeling very bitter, to the point of suicide, but he said, 'Lose the anger, lose the music'."

"We saw a lot of him over the years as disillusionment set in," says Clive Selwood, who, inspired by Buckley's session for BBC's John Peel Show, later founded the Strange Fruit label and its Peel Sessions. "When we first met he spent his leisure time cycling across Venice Beach, guzzling a six-pack. When we last met, he was carrying a gun, in fear of the reactionary side of American life, who despised his long hair. He said, 'If you're carrying a gun, you stand a chance'."

"He continually took chances with his life," adds Larry Beckett. "He'd drive like a maniac risking accidents. For a couple of years he drank a lot and took downers to the point where it nearly killed him, but he'd always escape. Then he got into this romantic heroin-taking thing. Then his luck ran out." Buckley's most revered idols were Fred Neil – who chose anonymity rather than exploit the success of 'Everybody's Talkin'' – and Miles Davis, both icons and both junkies. "He lived on the edge, creatively and psychologically" says Lee Underwood. "He treated drugs as tools, to feel or think things through in more intense ways. To explore."

One planned exploration was a musical adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel Out Of The Islands and a screenplay of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. Of more immediate consequence, Buckley had won the part of Woody Guthrie in Hal Ashby's film Bound For Glory. The role might have restored him to public consciousness as well as financial independence, but in the end it went instead to David Carradine.

Buckley was still up for playing live. After a short tour culminating in a sold-out show at an l,800-capacity venue in Dallas, the band partied on the way home, as was customary An inebriated Tim proceeded to his good friend Richard Keeling's house in order to score some heroin.

As Underwood tells it, Keeling, in flagrante delicto and unwilling to be disturbed, argued with Buckley: "Finally in frustration, Richard put a quantity of heroin on a mirror and thrust it at Tim, saying, 'Go ahead, take it all', like a challenge. As was his way, Tim sniffed the lot. Whenever he was threatened or told what to do, he rebelled."

Staggering and lurching around the house, Buckley had to be taken home, where Judy Buckley laid him on the floor with a pillow. She then put him to bed, thinking he would recover; when she checked later, he'd turned an ominous shade of blue. The paramedics were called but it was too late. Tim Buckley was dead.

"I remember Herb saying Tim had died, and we all just sat there," recalls Bob Duffy, Buckley's old tour manager. "It wasn't expected but it was like watching a movie, and that was its natural ending."

"It was painful to listen to his records after he died," says Linda Gillen. "I remember how vibrant he was. He had that same lost alienation as friends who had committed suicide. He was smart, wonderful, mean nasty, kind, racist, and a loyal friend, all kinds of contradictions. A true original."

"When he died, I took a week off," remembers Joe Stevens. "He was special – an innocent in an animal machine."

IN 1983, IVO WATTS-RUSSELL of the 4AD label had the inspired notion to marry the vaporous drama of the Cocteau Twins to Buckley's 'Song To The Siren'. Punk's Stalinist purge was over, and the result was a haunting highlight of post-New Wave rock, launching both This Mortal Coil and Buckley's posthumous reputation.

Before he died, Buckley had been planning a live LP spanning the various phases of his career. Sixteen years later Dream Letter was released to great acclaim. "Nobody would have listened before," reckons Herb Cohen. "Things have their own cycle, usually close to 20 years. You have to wait."

"He knowingly compromised his fierce artistic ideals, but his gut feeling was that he'd get more freedom later," says Larry Beckett. "If he'd gone into hiding for 10 years, no end of labels would have recorded anything he wanted. Things do come around."

"He was one of the great ballad singers of all time, up there with Mathis and Sinatra," believes Lee Underwood. "He would have pulled out of his youthful confusion, expanded his musical scope to include great popular and jazz songs. Tim Buckley didn't say 'I am this, I am that'. He said, 'I am all of these things'."

© Martin Aston, 1995

[therealriver1]

The Last and Final Part 4/4

⦁ Rogue 2007 (This one has got to be one of my favorite killer croc movies set in the Australian outback) ⦁ Pitch Black 2000 (If you liked Doom then you'll love this sci-fi/horror film starring Vin Diesel) ⦁ National Treasure 2004 (A thrilling adventure film starring Nicholas Cage. If you liked Relic Hunter, you might enjoy this one) ⦁ There's Something About Mary 1998 (All the men are in love with Cameron Diaz in this wacky rom-com) ⦁ The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants 2005 (A cult classic that keeps me smiling from ear to ear) ⦁ From Dusk till Dawn 1996 (A creepy film about killer vampires directed by Robert Rodriguez) ⦁ Drag Me to Hell (Also check out Sam Raimi's Evil Dead if you like horror) ⦁ Columbiana 2011 (Zoe Saldaña is absolutely badass in this action-packed thriller) ⦁ Chef 2014 (Food porn. All the food looked so good it had me salivating! A charming film starring Jon Favreau and Sofía Vergara) ⦁ Splice 2009 (A sci-fi film starring Adrien Brody performing controversial science experiments. This movie is not meant for sensitive viewers) ⦁ Fright Night (I never watched the original that was released in 1985 but this one starring Colin Farrel as the bad guy was pretty good) ⦁ The Beach (A film that you need to watch at least once starring Leonardo DiCaprio) ⦁ Gorgeous 1999 (A feel-good comedy/action film that is lighthearted starring Jackie Chan and Shu Qi) ⦁ National Security 2003 (A fun action film starring Martin Lawrence and Steve Zahn as security guards) ⦁ E.T Extraterrestrial 1982 (A charming alien film from director Steven Spielberg. We used to have the DVD at home, and I would watch it all the time) ⦁ A.I Artificial Intelligence 2001 (A futuristic fantasy film about a robot child that wants to become a real boy much like Pinocchio. A real gem of a movie that had me crying at the ending) ⦁ The Devil's Advocate 1997 (Keanu Reeves and Al Pacino as the devil. Need I say more?) ⦁ Interview With a Vampire 1994 (Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as vampires. That's all I'm going to say) ⦁ Bicentennial Man 1999 (A touching film starring the late Robin Williams as a robot butler) ⦁ Norbit 2007 (Eddie Murphy as Rasputia was so funny you will laugh out loud!) ⦁ Malibu's Most Wanted 2003 (I might say this one is a guilty pleasure but so is everything else on this list) ⦁ Kung Fu Hustle 2004 (If you still haven't watched this please do. This wild lighthearted comedy makes for a good time) ⦁ Enter The Dragon 1973 (A Bruce Lee classic that is a must-see!) ⦁ Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars 1985 (Starring Summo Hung and Jackie Chan this is one of my favorite action comedies to watch) ⦁ The One 2001 (Jet Li playing multiple versions of himself was so cool) ⦁ Hide and Seek 2005 (Robert De Niro & Dakota Fanning were both great. You need to see this if you haven't) ⦁ The Rundown 2003 (Great action flick starring Dwayne Johnson) ⦁ Nacho Libre (Jack Black is so funny in this movie, it was really entertaining to watch) ⦁ John Tucker Must Die 2006 (A playful comedy that's fun to watch) ⦁ Shanghai Noon 2000 (Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson make such a fun duo) ⦁ Ghost Ship 2002 (Ghosts on a ship! Need a say more?) ⦁ Space Sweepers 2021 (A great Korean film 8/10! I liked it very much I just don't know why it took me so long to watch it) ⦁ Game of Death 1978 (A gripping action film starring the late martial artist Bruce Lee makes this another classic to watch) ⦁ Shaolin Soccer 2001 (Another fun comedy from Stephen Chow, the same director that gave us Kung Fu Hustle. This movie is equally hilarious) ⦁ Solo: A Star Wars Story 2018 (There are so many Star Wars movies and I enjoyed all of them but there are just too many to mention) ⦁ Star Trek 2009 (A solid movie in my opinion and a great franchise) ⦁ Letters To Juliet 2010 (I got to see this in the cinema and thought it was such a sweet rom-com) ⦁ Thor Ragnarok 2017 (Yes, I liked the first Thor movie, but I liked Ragnarok more)

We have finally reached a conclusion! Phew, it felt like that list went on forever! That was my version of memorable movies to watch, and I am quite satisfied with my selection. I added a lot more older movies to my list because I felt like they were better back then. Every new release that I've watched recently has fallen short of my expectations, the quality is just not the same as it was back then. Every time I watch a new movie it just feels like something is missing. Maybe my standards are just too high. I will say I am picky person when it comes to what I watch and invest my time in hence I've decided to stay away from films for now. I will stick to watching tv shows and hopefully 2024 has better options for us this year. If a new movie does however pique my interest, I will be sure to rave about it to everyone.

Thanks for reading and take care!

[intoxicatingimmediacy]

"The line between a Clipping. and Slayer gig is tighter than you'd think."

Daveed Diggs' alt hip hop group challenge notions of heaviness at Roadburn Festival 2024 - Clipping. show why hip hop's more extreme edges should be more embraced by the alternative scene

Hip hop might not be the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to Roadburn Festival, but the Dutch event has quietly embraced the genre's more alternative, boundary-pushing elements in recent years. In that sense, Clipping. are a perfect booking for the festival, the trio - made up of rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes - delighting in a sense of abjection that lets them sit comfortably alongside previous Roadburn bookings like Moor Mother, Dälek and Backxwash.

But while Clipping. share an affinity for massive, mechanised beats and liberal application of low-end, they boast something of a secret weapon in Diggs. A Tony-award winning actor, Diggs has an undeniable star quality that shines throughout the performance, bringing a sense of charisma and theatricality which elevates the group's two sets over the festival.

“Lets do some scary shit,” Diggs declares and sure enough the group's first set - to a packed Main Stage on Thursday - kicks off with Nothing Is Safe. Built around a sample of John Carpenter's Halloween, the track is a perfect primer to the group's horrorcore sensibilities, explored directly elsewhere with the Candyman referencing Say The Name but ever-present, hackle-raising bass providing a springboard for Diggs' flow, which ranges from a steady trickle on tracks like Bout That to all-out rapid overflow on Taking Off.

Where on record the group delight in lurking in the spaces between minimalist beats, live they create a constant sense of menace, low-end grumbling and lurching from shadows while beats feel like they grow ever-more claustrophobic. For all of their horror sensibilities, Clipping. also have massive hooks that seize the audience like a vice, tracks like Check The Lock and Shooter tapping into almost mainstream territories with rhythmic, .

The group also have something special in mind for their Roadburn appearances. "Fair warning: this is going to fuck you up," Diggs teases, before introducing R&B singer Counterfeit Madison as a special guest, adding a whole new dimension to their sound. Appearing in both sets, Madison contributes a Nina Simone-like soulful, deep vocal to the set that provides an emotional, cathartic release against the hissing, clanging beats, first on All In Your Head (the 2019 track that first brought her together with the group), but then on subsequent songs across the set as she adds entirely new textures like gospel (Story 5), pop (Enlacing) and delta blues (Long Way Away).

Though Madison guests in both sets, overlap is minimal. The pitch-black interior of The Terminal for the group's second appearance might be better suited for their artistic expression of darkness, but the second set arguably feels more like a party. Club Down is a dancefloor banger by Clipping. standards and the sight of members of crowd shouting "gangster shit" feels like a cultural coup that cements the alternative sphere's adoption of hip hop, There's still fangs to their delivery, however; Pain Everyday makes use of skittering electronica that feels like bugs buzzing across the skin, while Body For The Pile makes exceptional use of violent, dark imagery.

In fully embracing lyrical narratives of violence, abject horror and societal decay, the line between a Clipping. and Slayer gig is tighter than you'd think. The frantic breakout of a song like Wriggle offers an altogether different vision of thrash, while the intense rhythmic pulse of Body & Blood could be employed just as effectively by anyone from Ministry to Swans, an implacable industrial press. Even in a weekend that presents the powerful doom intensity of Khanate, howling sludge-noise of Couch Slut and technical death metal prowess of Blood Incantation, Clipping. offer an alternative vision of extremity that proves heaviness isn't the purview of metal alone.

[canmom]

Animation Night 145: Brid Bard

...Bard Brid? Sorry, the line’s not very clear here. Say again...

Oh, Brad Bird?

OK, so. Imagine there’s a really dad-like guy who directs movies. Someone for a lot of nostalgia for his childhood during which, Cold War not withstanding, he was impassioned by witnessing The Jungle Book (not unlike a certain Richard Williams) and encouraged by supportive parents to pursue animation. And it went well. Really well. Our boy Brad got an ‘unprecedented’ internship at Disney with Milt Kahl(!) off the back of his film The Tortoise and the Hare, had a chill time at high school, then went to CalArts on scholarship where he studied alongside John Lasseter (keep an eye on him. not just because he might sexually assault somebody but also because he’ll be in this story later), Tim Burton and Henry Selick.

In short, about the most direct and uncomplicated route into animation you can imagine.

Brad Bird joined Disney (their investment paying off) in 1978, working on films like The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, but soon clashed with the studio heads who he judged not to be upholding principles he believed Disney represented. (He would be vindicated in a way by Don Bluth throwing down the gauntlet a few years later and kicking off the ‘Disney Renaissance’.) One of his last contributions must have been to The Brave Little Toaster, where he worked alongside the future founders of Pixar.

There followed a few years in which he moved to the SF Bay Area (perhaps not so gentrified back then(?) but Bird definitely had money), pitching projects left and right. One of his big passions was to adapt the comic book The Spirit. Mostly he tried experiments that didn’t pan out, like making a CG film at Lucasfilm with Ed Catmull, later founder of Pixar. He worked on The Plague Dogs (AN 86) until he got fired again.

Nevertheless, his reel of hypothetical films did catch the eye of Steven Spielberg, who absorbed Bird into his company Amblin Entertainment in order to expand his short film The Family Dog, co-created with Tim Burton, into an episode of the anthology series Amazing Stories. (Family Dog would later spawn a disastrous spin-off series in 1993, but by this point Bird had moved on). I think it’s worth noting this one because it gives a sense of what sort of original ideas Bird is working with: a dysfunctional suburban family as seen through the eyes of their dog. ‘Dysfunctional suburban family’ would be the centre of... almost every single one of Bird’s works since.

Bird continued to work under Spielberg’s wing, still clashing with execs; he got straight-married in this time to film editor Elizabeth Canney. Things seemed to be going well enough, despite his frustrations - until his sister Susan was killed in a murder-suicide by her estranged husband. This understandably fucked with him pretty hard. After a few years of depression he recovered, enough to take an invitation to work on The Simpsons in 1989 after Matt Groening was impressed by the cinematography in Family Dog. (Seriously he’s connected to just about everyone in the animation industry!) He continued on the Simpsons throughout the early 90s, working part-time to ‘oversee the script-to-animation pipeline’ and introduce this same filmic sensibility, as well as contributing to other animated sitcoms like The Critic and King of the Hill.

Let’s fast forward to the end of the 90s. As we’ve discussed... many times on this webbed site, this is when the steam of the ‘Disney Renaissance’ was about to run out, and the new CG era was about to begin. Our boy Brad, meanwhile, is struggling trying to juggle being a Dad(TM) with spending all his time making animated films. Which leads to Brad writing... a story about a suburban family strained by one of them being a superhero, yeah.

But Brad wouldn’t get to make this film just yet. Instead, his successful pitch was something called Ray Gunn, a scifi story about a detect in an Art-Deco retrofuturistic world. This movie also did not get made... but it’s because Warner bought up the studio Turner that was making it, and shut down Ray Gunn. Instead, they offered Bird a different animated film with a nostalgic bent, adapting childrens’ book The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, which was in its turn written to help his children cope with the death of his wife Sylvia Plath (yeah that Sylvia Plath!). Bird liked the pacifist themes of the novel, but while the children’s book has the feeling of a parable, he gave it a concrete setting in the 50s, and centered the story on the paranoia of the Cold War, seen from the point of view of an innocent boy.

So with this first movie we see start to see the major preoccupations of Brad Bird come into play (though he did not write the screenplay in this case). The Iron Giant comes in the middle of a brief handful of traditionally animated films made by Warner to ride on the coattails of Disney; the others include Space Jam and Osmosis Jones. They were by and large not very successful; The Iron Giant was the one critical success but failed for blah blah marketing y’know reasons. Like most of Bird’s films, the core relationship is a father [figure]-son one, in this case beatnik artist Dean who lives in a junkyard and ends up becoming surrogate father to nine-year-old protagonist Hogarth.

The themes of the film are pretty on the nose: in an idyllic American small town (Bird explicitly referred to Norman Rockwell and sitcom character Ward Cleaver) masking severe paranoia falls a harmless alien robot. It’s viewed as a threat by everyone but the social outcast and the child. The military get called in, gung-ho to throw around their toys; by the time the townspeople figure out that they’ve been huge cunts, a missile is in the air. What saves everyone is the fact that our nine-year-old protagonist has gone to the effort of teaching the Giant good old American values, so it goes and intercepts the missile in a heroic sacrifice... undercut with a final hint that it can regenerate. In fact Bird originally planned an ending where full scale war breaks out between the US and USSR, but ultimately this was softened.

What sells it is charming character animation. The production seems to be the opposite of most animated film stories: meticulously planned, prevised and storyboarded, while making effective use of cel-shaded CG for vehicles and mecha scenes, putting it among the first works to experiment in that direction. In another anime-like touch, the animation of the film was divided up by scene rather than by character.

And, within the American full animation tradition, it’s probably one of the only films to address the Cold War at all. Of course there are others from other countries! When The Wind Blows is probably the most direct; anime is rarely directly about the Cold War (the Future War 198X controversy excepted) but it’s implicit in most works that deal with sci-fi and military themes such as Akira. And in modern times, now that it’s History and serious animated dramas are more accepted, you get films like Funan about the Cambodian genocide. In the USSR... it’s complicated.

But in America... while animation studios were recruited en masse to produce WWII propaganda, for the most part animated films from the 50s through to the 80s don’t really touch on the war. They adopt mythological past settings, or tell stories closer to home. Perhaps by the time of The Iron Giant, with the war over, and the specific setting now 50 years in the past, it was considered safe enough.

The characters of Bird’s film are very much archetypal. It’s kind of a fable about the Cold War, and in the final edit of the script, a reassuring one. The ‘illusion of life’ animation techniques are used to imbue each character with enough charm and specificity but they are largely defined by their roles. I’m not saying this to criticise; this is precisely the model of film that American animation specialises in and it uses it to very good effect. Ultimately though because it’s a fable, you can only take so much from it.

Despite the commercial failure of The Iron Giant, it did finally give Brad some clout as a director. A certain John Lasseter to a new studio that was making serious waves in animation... yeah, you know them, it’s Pixar. I wrote about early Pixar back on Animation Night 75, so go check that out if you like.

At Pixar, Bird ended up directing the studio’s sixth film, finally getting a chance to follow up on his pitch for The Incredibles which features... that’s right... a suburban family with a beleaguered father in a setting designed to nostalgically reference a mid-20th-century American aesthetic. Mmm.

By this time, Pixar movies had started to establish a formula. The characters would be some kind of high concept centering on characters like toys, bugs, monsters or fish that wouldn’t face the limits of rendering humans. Usually they would center on a duo of male characters who would start off at odds and but gradually build a bond over the course of the film. They’d be suitable for kids but have enough comedy to amuse adults. There would be a villain to overcome, and a wider sphere of quirky buddies to support the main duo. Women would be almost nonexistent. At this time, it seemed that Pixar could do absolutely no wrong; their films were basically always hits.

But even so, I remember when The Incredibles came out. It hit the nerd sphere like a bomb. I remember all the memes about Edna Mode (voiced Brad Bird) shouting ‘no capes!’; I also remember the articles that argued that the film was in fact Objectivist propaganda.

Looking back, it’s hard to entirely disagree with them! The thrust of The Incredibles is that an ungrateful public rejects the special superheroes, leading to an end to their romantic days of vanquishing evil and staging dramatic fights on top of trains; now they’re all caught up in the banality of the capitalism. Bob, aka ‘Mr Incredible’, works in a miserable cubicle as an insurance salesman; Helen aka ‘Elastigirl’ is an exhausted suburban housewife trying to rein in somewhat estranged superpowered teenagers. The pencil-necked bureaucrats of Society, you see, have denied them the chance to exercise their special abilities as they did in the romantic past.

But lo! There is a new supervillain after all; it is Syndrome, once a starry-eyed young superhero, who after a rejection by Mr Incredible, came up with a plan to create a high-tech scheme to sell gadgets that would make just about anyone be able to use superpowers - even if, the arc words declare, ‘if everyone is special, no-one is’, a sentiment that basically goes unexamined further. However, his plan to stage a superhero battle to sell these gadgets backfires resulting in an out of control robot. Luckily, the Incredible family have been united over the course of their adventures and can defeat the robot, society reevaluates the superhero issue, and the captains of industry heroes can assume their proper roles of being naturally better than everyone.

It is, looking back with adult eyes, a very strange narrative to be pushing; it’s possible to see the feelings that Bird must have put into it but damn lmao dude’s got some shit to examine. But as a film it’s technically pretty much impeccable, with memorable sequences that got memed about as much as any animated film from the 2000s. It opened ‘families amirite fellas’ as an avenue for Pixar to tell stories about, which they’d dig into much further later with films like Inside Out.

But I won’t spare too any more words on The Incredibles, since I’m not actually planning to show it tonight. No, the other film of Bird’s I’m planning on showing is...

Ratatouille! A film whose influence lasted so long that you’ll get an extended parody even in 2022′s Everything Everywhere All At Once. As far as Pixar high concepts go it’s pretty up there, centering on a food-loving rat Remy who befriends a chef and hatches a scheme where he will give instructions by tugging on his hair while hiding under a chef’s hat. This concept was not due to Bird but to Jan Pinkava, director of Geri’s Game, who had developed the film for years; Bird was pulled in to attempt to salvage what Pixar saw as a hopelessly mired production. Bird, with some reticence, took the established design work, but rewrote the script into something that better fit his tastes in filmmaking. Pinkava for his part refused to comment, but left Pixar not much later.

So the Brad Bird angle enters in the secondary plot, with Remy’s relationship with his dad who doesn’t understand his artistic passion for food. The story is probably what you’d expect given these elements! ‘Probably’ because... I actually haven’t seen this movie, it’s like the one major gap in my knowledge of ‘classic’ Pixar films.

Since Ratatouillie, Bird departed animation and started directing live-action films, including an episode of Mission Impossible that breaks the formula (unless it’s got some kind of dad arc I don’t know about), and Tomorrowland which gets back on the 50s nostalgia train. I haven’t seen any of them so I can’t really comment too much except to say that it sounds like Tomorrowland doubles down harder on the vague Objectivism angle lmao.

But rather than an explicit philosophical conviction, which Brad Bird the self-described ‘centrist’ doesn’t particularly seem to have, it seems more that it’s just a channeling of not entirely examined frustrations about his difficult time getting established as a filmmaker. Bird, it seems, grew up basically being told he was a one of a kind animation genius, and entered the animation industry with a lot of romantic expectations which were frustrated by its reality. It’s easy to read his films as mostly being about how people didn’t understand clever Brad Bird.

Bird is a bit of an odd case in another way. Like basically all animators he rails against the ‘animation is for children’ stereotype of the medium that just doesn’t seem to break, yet his films are very much about archetypal characters with very clearly defined, abstracted arcs. Perhaps that’s just what he’s able to make. But he doesn’t seem to be interested in pushing the envelope anywhere particularly weird or discomforting. Beyond his ambition to bring live action cinematography in to animation, his ‘superpower’, once he got to exercise it, seems to be that he’s very good at planning. His scripts are tightly focused, his productions are on schedule, and he’s the guy you call in when old Jan isn’t finishing his movie on time.

Still, all these criticisms aside, he’s one of the major influences on the subsequent decades of CG films, and his films are consistently very solid. So if you’d like to join me - with apologies for the late start - we’ll be watching The Iron Giant and Ratatouille over at twitch.tv/canmom. Hope to see ya there, films start in about 15 minutes!

[justforbooks]

John Motson: The unmistakable voice of football known simply as ‘Motty’

John Motson, who has died aged 77, was BBC television’s “voice” of football for almost half a century, commentating for Match of the Day from 1971 until his retirement in 2018 and becoming affectionately known as “Motty”.

“I remember my first game, Liverpool against Chelsea,” he recalled. “They kicked off and my heart sank because I thought, ‘What do I say now?’ I still remember the feeling. I realised I had a lot of work to do.”

Alongside the energy and passion he brought to the game, that work was evident in his trademark style of reeling off statistics written on an A4 sheet of card in felt-tip pen for each match. Motson put this “obsession” for facts and figures down to being “terrified of not knowing enough or making a mistake” in his early days. He admitted to “overdosing” on it, and gradually used less background information in his commentaries.

Nevertheless, his filing system continued to grow – as did his library of more than 500 football record books. On top of the stats, he displayed an eloquence for describing the occasion. When Liverpool were beaten 0-1 in the 1988 FA Cup final by the unfancied Wimbledon – known for the eccentric behaviour of their players and fans – he spontaneously summed up: “The Crazy Gang has beaten the Culture Club.”

Earlier, at the end of the 1977 FA Cup final, when Manchester United – captained by Martin Buchan – beat Liverpool 2-1, Motson must have been silently thrilled that it enabled him to put his research into action and say: “How fitting that a man called Buchan should be the first to ascend the 39 steps to the royal box”, recalling “ The Thirty-Nine Steps” celebrated spy novel by John Buchan.

His ability to remember every detail of each game he covered also made Motson ideal company away from the pitch. If, for example, he was asked about a Division One Southampton v Birmingham City match at the Dell in the 1973-74 season, he would not only recall the result and those booked, but describe in detail Peter Osgood’s perm and the pattern made by a set of studs on a shin.

However, he was not averse to the occasional “Colemanballs”, emulating the verbal gaffes of his fellow football commentator David Coleman, who was presenter of Match of the Day by the time he started on it himself. Among Motson’s were: “The World Cup is truly an international event”, “The goals made such a difference to the way this game went”, and “For those of you watching in black-and-white, Spurs are in the yellow strip”.

In his long career commentating on more than 2,500 televised games, Motson covered nine World Cups (1974-2006), 29 FA Cup finals (1977-2007, missing just two) and nine European Championships (1976-2008).

He stepped back from his position as the BBC’s lead commentator in 2008, saying he had thought about the forthcoming World Cup in South Africa two years later and “just didn’t feel quite up for it”. His last live commentary was the Euro 2008 final, with Spain beating Germany 1-0 in Vienna.

However, he continued commentating both for football highlights on Match of the Day and for BBC Radio 5 Live until 2018. His final TV commentary was for the Premier League match between Crystal Palace and West Bromwich Albion.

Motson’s standing meant that he became part of the impersonator Rory Bremner’s repertoire of characters, complete with the sheepskin coats that became another of his trademarks on screen after he reached for one when horizontal sleet started falling during an FA Cup tie at Wycombe Wanderers’ ground in 1990.

He had them made to measure in Savile Row, central London, able to afford them on an income that he said gave him security after growing up in a family where his father’s income was “very modest”.

John was born in Salford, which was then in Lancashire, to Gwendoline (nee Harrison) and William Motson, a Methodist minister, brought up in London and educated at Culford school, near Bury St Edmonds, in Suffolk.

His father took him to a Charlton Athletic football match when he was six and, spending childhood holidays in Lincolnshire, his mother’s home county, he supported the non-League team Boston United.

As a teenager, Motson played the game himself in the Barnet Sunday League, as well as becoming a Barnet and Potters Bar youth table-tennis champion.

On leaving school, he began his career in journalism as a reporter on the Barnet Press in 1963. He then moved to the Sheffield Morning Telegraph (1967-68), where he started covering football, qualified as an FA preliminary coach and freelanced for BBC Radio Sheffield.

In 1968, he moved to BBC Radio Sport in London and was first heard nationally as presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday-evening after-match Sports Session (1969-70) before commentating on live matches for Radio 2 (1969-71).

He switched to television and Match of the Day in 1971 following Kenneth Wolstenholme’s departure – becoming TV’s youngest football commentator, aged 26.

Motson found himself describing the disaster at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield for the 1989 FA Cup semi-final between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, which resulted in the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans.

During three seasons from 2001 when the BBC lost rights to Premier League highlights to ITV, Motson commentated for Radio 5 Live. On leaving the BBC in 2018, Motson commentated for talkSPORT, as well as appearing regularly as a pundit on the commercial radio station’s football shows.

Ten years earlier, reflecting on the influence of money in football, he had observed: “It’s true that the game has changed so much, and in many ways not for the better, but it is still the game. It is still beautiful and it still has the power, as few others things, to move nations and continents and, every four years, the world.”

Motson, whose autobiography, Motty: 40 Years in the Commentary Box, was published in 2009, was named the Royal Television Society’s commentator of the year in 2004 and won a Bafta special award in 2018. He was made OBE in 2001.

In 1976 he married Anne Jobling, and she survives him, with their son, Frederick.

🔔 John Walker Motson, football commentator, born 10 July 1945; died 23 February 2023

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