Page 6 - Barry Egan News Today

Bill Bailey is in the office shed in his London garden. His phone died 10 minutes into our interview. Over the course of the next hour, I call him back 20 times and his agent twice. To no avail.

On Thursday at 2pm, the greatest musical quartet of the 20th century released their final song. The world – as it often was for The Beatles – was waiting with bated breath. . .

Plus a musical about Australian history from the Chaser, an Oliver Twist spin-off set down under and a small-town priest with a sniper rifle

The Edge said Exit Planet Dust by The Chemical Brothers was his favourite album of 1995. The U2 guitarist, it turned out, was in a long list of admirers. The Village Voice reviewer James Hannaham compared the English electronic duo to Beethoven in terms of artistic genius. The dance maestros – Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons – whipped crowds into a frenzy and Rowlands’ brother Huw would ring his own answering machine from the floor of their shows to capture the undiluted euphoria.

For someone who has sold almost 20 million albums, James Blunt has more than his fair share of haters. Noel Gallagher called him boring, while Paul Weller said he would rather eat his own faeces than duet with him.

At 9pm on the dot last night, Picture This arrived onstage at the 3Arena to wildly enthusiastic applause.

Booked as the headliner recently at a major venue in the UK, Sultan Stevenson arrived unannounced at 1pm and asked someone of vague officialdom in the venue could they unlock the Steinway on the stage.

Last week, Oliver Callan suggested taking a picnic into the cinema to help get through the three-and-a-half hours of Martin Scorsese’s new movie Killers of the Flower Moon.

‘Before the throne of the invisible god – kneel, kneel, kneel,” Corinne Bailey Rae sings on her cosmic-soul album Black Rainbows. Her eponymous song was playing on earphones as I walked in the sweltering heat of Dallas, Texas, last week. I’d flown over to meet Bailey Rae because she is headlining the Guinness Jazz Festival in Cork on October 29 at the Opera House.

The cover of Bobbi Arlo’s new single, the spacey banger ‘Ode to Ü’, has two people in an embrace, looking out a window. The two people, it transpires, are Ms Arlo and her girlfriend.