Beach Boys' Brian Wilson's torture at the hands of his rotten father and the deep turmoil before his death

His sun-kissed songs and breezy Beach Boy bandmates formed the joyful soundtrack of a generation—a California dream that continues to resonate today.
But behind Brian Wilson's musical genius lay a life shaped by trauma, mental illness, and deep personal turmoil—pain that began in childhood and surfaced even as his fame grew.
Wilson endured a violent upbringing at the hands of his father, experimented heavily with drugs, and became the victim of a manipulative therapist. His brother Dennis fell into the orbit of cult leader Charles Manson. Yet despite it all, Wilson kept making music—until a dementia diagnosis finally silenced his creativity.
On Wednesday, Wilson's heartbroken family announced his death at the age of 82.
'It was hard to feel happy and light when there were sad things in my head,' Wilson wrote in his 2016 autobiography I Am Brian Wilson. 'It was hard to feel free when I was tied down.
'But the only choice was to try.'
And try he did – through childhood abuse, personal tragedies and battles with rampant drug use – with such success that Wilson helped create one of the most successful musical groups of all time.
He battled through lawsuits, fractured relationships with family and bandmates, and a public struggle with mental illness. But he never stopped.
'Whenever I've been told to stop – by someone who thought they had power over me, by something that happened around me, by the voices in my own head – I kept going,' he wrote.
Wilson was still working on music in his final years, even as his health declined and he was diagnosed with dementia.
Following the death of his wife Melinda last year, he was placed under conservatorship at their home in Beverly Hills.
And Wilson, himself, had spent his entire adult life sharing his music – and his pain, often openly and publicly – with the world.
'Music has always been the light in dark times,' he wrote in the final chapter of his book.
The oldest of three brothers, Wilson was born in 1942 in California to Audree and Murry Wilson, an amateur songwriter who instilled his boys with a love of music but was also 'cruel' and 'violent.'
'My dad was violent. He was cruel,' Wilson wrote in his 2016 memoir.
'He drank too much and became a monster - and he didn't know how to deal with his son's fears. Whenever I got afraid, he would yell at me or slap me or call me a p****'
Describing himself and brothers Dennis and Carl as 'kids who get hit,' Wilson wrote how he'd 'think of the things [their father] said always with exclamation points.
'Even if he wasn't yelling, his tone was like that.'
Murry Wilson was thrilled but demanding when Wilson exhibited a particular musical aptitude and started a band with his brothers, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine.
But Murry 'wanted us to work all the time, and nothing we did was ever really good enough.
'He would set up our amps and scream at us to do more.'
Murry Wilson started out managing the Beach Boys, though they fired him in 1964 as their star rose – and as problems began to plague Brian.
He wrote in his autobiography how live performances and TV slots scared him.
'Many of my worst memories are from being nervous up there, and many others are from the things I did to keep myself from being nervous up there,' he wrote. 'Some of the drinking was because of that. Some of the drugs were because of that.
'Some of the voices in my head I heard just before I went onstage, and they didn't have anything good to say about me.'
In 1964, aged 22 and newly married to a 16-year-old, Wilson had a breakdown on a flight to Houston.
'My thoughts swarmed and I blacked out,' he wrote. 'To me I blacked out. To everyone else it looked like I was screaming and holding my head in the aisle.'
Wilson took a temporary break from touring. But he'd also started using drugs the same year, everything from marijuana to acid to cocaine.
'They were ways of dealing with the fact that my head wasn't right,' he wrote. 'But they didn't solve a thing. With the drugs, in fact, came very other kind of problem.'
He was writing more and staying home while falling more and more into drug use. And external problems would come to plague him, too.
At the end of the Sixties, Wilson's brother, Dennis, began associating with Charles Manson after getting to know two of his female followers.
He raved about Manson in interviews and let members of the 'family' stay in his house; Dennis even co-wrote with the infamous killer and recorded one of his songs.
He'd later try to distance himself from the Manson clan, who went on to murder victims including actress Sharon Tate; Dennis declined to testify against the killer but was privately interviewed by authorities before it was deemed his testimony was not needed.
But the relationship between Brian and Dennis, also plagued by heavy substance use, would get increasingly fraught.
In one instance, Dennis allegedly got Brian to buy $15,000 worth of cocaine; the older brother's former bodyguard and another later beat up Dennis, leading to a restraining order against them, writes Steven Gaines in his 1986 book Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys.
Dennis died tragically homeless in 1983, drowning after a day of drinking.
By then, Brian had been divorced five years from Marilyn, who'd given birth to the couple's two daughters, Carnie and Wendy, in the late 1960s. The marriage was unable to weather Wilson's erratic behavior and substance abuse.
He'd also fallen under the control of controversial therapist Dr Eugene Landy, whom he'd first begun seeing in 1975, after the musician had ballooned in weight to 300 pounds.
'He got some results, but he went too far,' Wilson wrote. 'He was getting too involved, and then I found out what he was charging. I confronted him about it. I was pretty angry … I threw a punch and he threw one back and that was the end of it – that time, at least.'
After a few years, however, Landy was called back in to again address Wilson's mental and physical health – and, as time went on, Landy began exerting more and more influence in his patient's life.
That including Wilson's career, with Landy forming business partnerships with the singer and even getting producing credits – all while charging what would be millions in today's money, at times up to $35,000 a month.
'Dr Landy was a tyrant who controlled one person, and that person was me,' Wilson wrote in his book. 'He controlled where I went and what I did and who I saw and what I ate. He controlled me by spying on me.
'He controlled it by having other people spy on me. He controlled it by screaming at me. He controlled it by stuffing me full of drugs that confused me.'
Landy eventually lost his license in 1989 and by the early 1990s had almost entirely left Wilson's life.
The Beach Boy remarried in 1995, later adopting five children with his wife Melinda. They remained married until her death last year.
Around the time of his second marriage, Wilson was also beset by lawsuits – including actions filed by his cousin and fellow Beach Boy Mike Love, who sued Wilson over claims in his 1991 memoir as well as over songwriting credits and royalties.
Wilson lost both his brother Carl, who'd been a lifelong smoker, and mother Audree over a two-month period between 1997 and 1998.
As the years wore on, he'd rejoin the Beach Boys for events and other shows, though even the 50th reunion tour in 2012 was marked by a public rift among members.
Wilson was philosophical in his memoir four years later, recalling a talk show host in the 1970s who'd asked him 'about how I kept going through all of it: through the drugs, through the lawsuits, through the bad feelings that came up between me and the people closest to me.
'I had an answer ready,' he wrote: 'My name is Wilson … Maybe that's where I got the will.'

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The Guardian

11 minutes ago

• The Guardian

‘Youths everywhere were spitting over tinny beats playing off a Nokia': great grime photographer Simon Wheatley

It's an overcast Thursday morning, and photographer Simon Wheatley is doing a soft-shoe shuffle through Roman Road in Bow, east London, as a market stall blares out exquisite 70s funk. 'That's more like it,' he says, with a grin on his face. 'A bit of energy.' This was once grime's artery, its chaotic central hub, even its muse – a street Wiley once told me was 'the nurturer' of local talents like him and Dizzee Rascal. And it was here, in the 2000s, that Wheatley would create a vivid and intimate document of grime in its frenzied flush of youth, and of working-class neighbourhoods like this before they became considerably more sedate. Fourteen years after the release of Don't Call Me Urban, Wheatley's long-sold-out photo-book from that era – once described by Vice as 'grime's Old Testament' – it is finally getting a rerelease, at almost double its original size. I have arranged to meet Wheatley outside the bougie Roman Road coffee shop that was once legendary grime record shop Rhythm Division. This leads to some confusion – there are simply too many bougie coffee shops in succession. 'Back in the day it was absolutely thronging with people,' Wheatley recalls. 'You'd turn a corner and down a sidestreet there'd be six guys doing an impromptu cipher [a freestyle MC-ing performance] – everywhere there were youths hanging out, wheeling around on their bikes, spitting over some tinny beat playing off a Nokia. This was the heartbeat of grime.' Wheatley became grime's documentarian simply by walking out of his front door in Limehouse when he was 'just a broke photographer' in his 20s, and daring to take an interest in his young neighbours. He did so at a time when the media and MPs were condemning the same kids as delinquent 'hoodies' or 'chavs' – as if they were somehow morally culpable for the social problems they were enduring. Photographing rising underground artists for Black music magazine RWD gave Wheatley his 'hood pass', with now-famous images such as Roll Deep's 'ice-cream van' shoot, Skepta in a chip shop, Crazy Titch and his terrifying dog, Dizzee in the studio, Kano dressed as Scarface, or Tinchy Stryder and his crew Ruff Sqwad when they were still in school. Those shoots opened the door – although some suspected he was an undercover cop when he first showed up. 'I remember [Roll Deep's] DJ Target invited me to the When I'm 'Ere video shoot, and I saw this gaggle of youngsters hanging about, looking at me suspiciously. I realised that there was a whole world to uncover, with their lives.' Over time, he won the trust of his subjects. It helped, he thinks, that he is a 'a bit of an odd case, a bit of a weirdo' – an outsider among outsiders. Wheatley insinuated himself into the pirate radio studios and youth clubs that provided the DIY launchpads for so much talent. He shot not just microphone clashes and radio sessions but fights, drug deals, hectic street-corner tableaux and intimate domestic moments; teenagers watching TV, daydreaming, having breakfast, rolling spliffs, writing out lyrics longhand, doing each other's hair. 'For me, the texture of grime is there in the real world,' Wheatley says. 'It's there on the estate, or in the radio stations at 2 o'clock in the morning, where some deeply underground crew would have a slot – the bin bag in the corner overflowing with fast food boxes and drink cans, Rizla packets and rave flyers scattered everywhere.' Don't Call Me Urban is a social document of youthful energy, boredom, angst and joy, as much as it captures a generation of musicians on their way to fame and fortune. 'I always felt that grime was a reflection of that post-Thatcherite social breakdown,' Wheatley continues. 'It was that very coarse expression of a kind of individualism.' The paradox is that it was also 'very much about the community', about mates looking out for each other when nobody else would. He is defensive of the bright, creative young people who went on to change the face of UK music, some of whom have become his close friends; I have been with Wheatley while he buys nourishing groceries for a hungover Hak Baker, the charismatic singer-songwriter Wheatley was shooting in 2006, when he was a 14-year-old MC called Swift Leng. 'Now artists like Stormzy are superstars, people forget that the first wave were treated as an underclass,' Wheatley says. 'Grime now is just regarded as a musical genre, rather than a sociological phenomenon. But it was both of those things: an incredible sound, but also this angst-ridden reflection of youth culture on the streets. That's what gripped me, and that's what I really went hard after, chasing.' At times, this chase would lead him into sketchy situations, with people pulling out long blades at pirate stations (also caught on camera), and the police rarely far away. One night, he found himself in the middle of an empty field by the Docklands Light Railway, shooting a pre-arranged fight – football hooligan style – between boys from the E3 and E14 postcodes. Some of them weren't wildly impressed when his flash went off. 'That was very early on in my grime experience. Naivete has always been my greatest shield,' he laughs. 'I didn't really know what I was doing half the time, or where I was going. Crazy Titch said recently: 'Simon was so brave.' I wasn't brave; I just didn't know!' Wheatley's mentor was Philip Jones Griffiths, the late war photojournalist, and as a photojournalist himself, Wheatley has taken deliberate risks – going through military roadblocks in Chiapas, Mexico, disguised as a peasant while on the trail of the Zapatistas in the late 1990s, or plunging into the Paris banlieues during the 2005 riots. He is a physically dynamic photographer, well-suited to capturing the restless, fidgety energy of teenagers. 'I was a sports fanatic as a teenager,' he says, demonstrating some capoeira moves, 'and photography replaced sport for me as a passion. I can't really teach photography, but I can teach martial arts: I teach a combination of capoeira Angola mixed with yogic breathing and tai chi. I also fast before I shoot, just for a few hours, so my senses are sharper.' First published in 2011, Don't Call Me Urban was quickly out of print and in demand, its price soaring on resale sites as the genre exploded into the mainstream. 'It became almost like a relic that was appreciated by the connoisseurs of the culture, and it became this cult book,' he says – both as a rare visual document of Black British music heritage, and a source of creative inspiration. One of those connoisseur-fans is Clint Ogbenna (known as Clint 419), founder of streetwear clothes brand Corteiz, who turned one of Wheatley's famous shots of Crazy Titch into a jacket, and gave Wheatley the push and financial support to finally rerelease the book. As well as providing a unique document of grime in its heyday, Wheatley's work is a valuable visual record of every day life in east London, before the 2012 Olympics arrived and changed it beyond recognition. He is keen to avoid fetishising the pre-gentrification city: 'Who's to say all those changes are bad?' he asks. 'I'm sure some people are happy their flats have been refurbished. But artistically, texturally, there was something very gripping about a run-down block in a state of disrepair – it almost felt as if it was abandoned to the youth, to make their playground of hope, frustration and despair. There was much more atmosphere – nowadays everything is a bit cleaner.' The expanded edition of Don't Call Me Urban! The Time Of Grime (£65) is available now from Backdoor Editions.

Telegraph

31 minutes ago

• Telegraph

Life after Agadoo: The curse of the ‘Worst Song of All Time'

In the crepuscular gloom of a barely lit stage, a bearded man of pensionable age and with a 52-inch chest is swaying in the barrel-shaped costume of a tropical fruit. Audible, just, is the ghost of Eighties parties past. 'Ah…' chant monk-like voices. 'Ga…' they continue over funereal beats as the portly pineapple approaches a microphone stand. 'Dooo…' Altogether now: 'Agadoo doo doo, push pineapple shake the tree / Agadoo doo doo push pineapple grind coffee / To the left to the right jump up and down and to the knees / Come and dance every night sing with a hula melody!' (Daft dance, carnival whistles, rinky-dink keyboards, frolicking bananas and lurid Hawaiian shirts not pictured. Not yet, anyway.) With what will transpire is a typical mix of the haunting, the humbling and the hilarious, so begins Still Pushing Pineapples: with an image of its subject trapped in the metaphorical comedy clobber that characterises a 40-year novelty pop career that, against the odds, continues. Just about. Premiering at this month's Sheffield DocFest, it tells, in part, the story of Black Lace and their deathless – you might say death-conjuring – 1984 song Agadoo. But really it's the story of Dene Michael. The Yorkshire musician is the sole surviving core member of a group who, having come seventh for Britain at Eurovision 1979 with the song Mary Ann, bestrode the Eighties like a cheesy colossus. Black Lace enjoyed a run of gimmicky hits that also included Superman, I Am the Music Man, Do the Conga and the tinny disco reboot we didn't know we needed, of Hokey Cokey. I've re-listened to these so you don't have to. For the best part of two years, documentarian Kim Hopkins followed Michael as he plied his archaic Black Lace trade for the ageing and expiring holidaymakers of Blackpool, Whitby, Skegness and Minehead, his mobile disco machine, colourful shirts and ego-free pluck rattling in the back of his VW hatchback. The result is a film that – counter-intuitively given the profoundly naff musical subject matter – manages to be tender, empathetic and heartfelt. The 65-year-old director's last film was the Bafta-longlisted A Bunch of Amateurs. About the embattled Bradford Movie Makers, one of the oldest amateur filmmaking clubs in the world, it won the Audience Award at Sheffield DocFest 2022. She then began casting around for a subject for her next project. 'I was seeing lots of these IP – intellectual property – films.' By which she means proprietorial, self-authored films such as Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour. 'And I thought: 'I can't get to Taylor Swift or Madonna. What IP can I get to?'' Then a song this former punk dimly remembered from the mid-Eighties bobbed into her mind like a tiny paper brolly floating in a Sex on the Beach. 'I asked Alexa to play Agadoo. First time I'd heard it for 30 years. I thought: 'What happened to these people? Who are they?'' A quick Google revealed that these people, like her, had their roots in Yorkshire ('I didn't even know they were Brits!'). She duly contacted Michael and invited him to the Bradford premiere of A Bunch of Amateurs, 'to see the type of work that we do. Dean really enjoyed it and agreed for us to film, warts and all.' How does her subject feel about being, in Hopkins' filmmaking terms, the closest Britain has to Swift or Madonna? 'I'll tell you what, Craig, I'm very honoured that Kim did think about us!' replies the doughtily jovial Michael as he and the director share a video call from their respective corners of Yorkshire (she's in York, he's in the Dales). 'It's an honour, really,' he adds, comfy on a couch that's overhung by a Black Lace photograph and a poster from another totem of Yorkshire culture, Kes. 'Not many people get to tell their life story in a movie. So, hard work but very exciting.' Four decades on Michael, now 68, has a career he owes mostly to Agadoo. Written by a group of Frenchmen in the 1970s, Black Lace's cover reached Number Two, spent 30 weeks in the Top 75 and was voted The Worst Song of All Time in a 2003 poll in music magazine Q. The one-time staple of nightclub, holiday cabaret and wedding party is, then, both talisman and albatross – a song the singer dreads performing but has no option otherwise. Because, as great archive footage from Top of the Pops shows, Black Lace had quite the ride. They even enjoyed a new lease of life when, this century, Eighties nostalgia firmly kicked in. Michael recalls one 2015 celebrity booking thus: 'We'd done all these [retro] festivals with 30,000 people there. But the one that stood out for me was playing Ant and Dec's birthday party. It was their joint 40th, and it was in London [at Kensington Roof Gardens]. Everybody that was there was famous, and they were conga-ing around the room. There was Keith Lemon, Belinda Carlisle, Cheryl Cole – she actually got up on stage to sing Agadoo with us. Cheryl was doing the dance beside us!' And they were enjoying the music fully and un-ironically? 'They loved it! And funnily enough, after we come off stage, we was chatting with everybody, and they were all coming up and saying: 'Can we have a selfie with you?' All these famous people!' he marvels. There was markedly less good humour at Leeds Crown Court the following year, when Michael – under his full name Dene Michael Betteridge – was sentenced to six months in jail for fraudulently claiming £25,000 in disability benefits, despite his ability to perform what were described as 'vigorous' dance moves on stage with Black Lace. None of which is featured in Still Pushing Pineapples. Why? 'It's a film set in the present,' says Hopkins, 'with only the first five minutes showing Black Lace's heyday. It's not meant to be a comprehensive story covering Dene's entire life. He had many highs and lows, divorces, wives, children – and on a practical level, there's no archive material aside from some newspaper headlines. It's not relevant to the story I was trying to tell. The defining element of his life is the song.' Now, a decade on, the days of conga-ing in Kensington with Cheryl seem even more distant. As Hopkins' embedded cameras reveal, Michael is imprisoned in a different way. He now performs in notably reduced circumstances, often accompanied by his disabled mother and biggest fan, 91-year-old Anne, with whom he lives in a modest house in Bradford. In one of the few nightclubs left open to entertainers like him, we see the singer do his cheerful best to grab the grannies of Blackpool with his bag of party tunes and well-worn dance routines. At Southport Pontins, this long-term singleton divorcé reconnects with an old pal, single mum Hayley; within two months they're so loved up she's having his name and face tattooed on her arm. (Spoiler alert: reader, he didn't marry her, but they are still together.) Shortly after that, the trio embark on a road-trip. 'One of mum's dying [sic] wishes was to go back to Benidorm,' says Michael, 'because that was one of her favourite holiday places when my dad was alive.' So the new couple buy a Ford Transit Camper Van, plaster it with pineapple-based stickers and head off. Without narration, talking-head interviews or, notably, judgement or condescension, Hopkins crafts a gem of end-of-the-pier cinema verité. Those lows include some floor-clearing gigs when Michael sings his Motown medley and him enduring on-camera cryolipolysis (having his fat frozen), the better to impress his new girlfriend. The highs, meanwhile, are Black Lace turning on the Christmas lights in Wythenshawe town centre. Even the circumstances surrounding Michael's role as the sole torch-carrying hold-out from the good old days fall into Hopkins 'warts and all' category. His original partner in Black Lace, Barnsley native Alan Barton, died in 1995 when the tour bus carrying Smokie, the band Barton had joined after Black Lace, crashed in Germany during a storm. Michael's Black Lace origin story, too, is, to say the least, tricky. At Christmas 1985 he was promoted from backing singer to full-time member of the band, alongside Barton. He took the place of Colin Routh, fired due to, as the newspaper headlines had it, his 'underage sex shame' – a relationship with a 15-year-old (Routh said at the time he thought 'she was in her late teens or early twenties'). 'It's quite a difficult area,' acknowledges Hopkins with some understatement. 'I thought long and hard how to play that. That was also one of the reasons why I wasn't interested in a full history lesson on Black Lace. That would have been a different film. 'What I was really interested in was the fleeting nature of stardom,' she continues. 'In what happens to people when they've committed their entire lives to avoiding that nine-to-five job. Being a filmmaker, I'm in the same position. Dene and I are both from Yorkshire, we're of a similar age, we're both committed to what we do. And when you get to our age, you're left going: 'What was all that about?' That was the thing that really interested me.' Because, against all the odds and, you might say, all common sense, 'Dene is still on the road.' Hence, she says, the film's opening image of Michael dressed in – trapped in – the fruity costume. 'That's the metaphor… and the metamorphosis. There's no escaping the pineapple.' For Michael that remains the case, even when, towards the end of the film, after 40 years' service to the Black Lace 'brand', he's sacked – by text – by the longstanding manager and owner of said brand. He's duly reduced to billing himself as Dene Michael, 'former member of Black Lace'. It leaves only three gigs in the diary, climaxing at that booking in Wythenshawe, 50 miles from his home. It's the loneliness of the short-distance tribute act, with Michael a tribute to himself. But that pineapple must still be pushed. That point was further driven home to Hopkins last summer. Routh died, aged 70, and she filmed Michael watching a video of his old bandmate's Tenerife funeral. We hear the vicar saying that Routh was happy with Agadoo being regularly described as the worst song ever written. 'And of course,' says Hopkins, 'Agadoo was played as his coffin was taken out. 'I thought: 'You can't escape this. You have become part of this. It's one and the same thing.' That was a eureka moment for me. Dean is not going to escape Agadoo. He has to embrace it.' Yet Michael remains as hopeful as he is defiant as he is deluded. As he says at one point, considering the possibility of one more novelty hit and cranking up ChatGPT to have a go at writing one, 'I've still got that ambition, still got that hope'. Which is why, as it says on stickers on his motorhome and VW's bumpers, he's 'still pushing pineapples'. The result is affectionate social realism – or, given the room-emptying qualities that many ascribe to Agadoo and Black Lace, anti-social realism. So much so that the film opens with an on-screen warning: 'This film features scenes from the 1980s that portray attitudes of the time which may or may not align with today's values. Viewer discretion is advised.' Is that, I wonder, a reference to another of Black Lace's, er, bangers, Gang Bang ('a gang bang is the thing to do, we'd like to give you one')? ' Pretty much, yes,' replies Hopkins. 'Wig Wam Bam is also probably pretty difficult these days,' she adds of another of their iffy hits. 'It's basically cultural appropriation – it's about Native Americans.' Michael and Barton famously appeared as themselves in Alan Clarke's classic, Bradford-set, kitchen-sink comedy Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987), performing Gang Bang. Does he still play it now? 'I do to audiences over 18,' the musician replies. 'Obviously, when there's children in there, I wouldn't perform it. But in nightclubs, when they've all had a drink and everything, I do. And obviously people recognise me from the film, although I've changed my image a little bit. So people still know the song and still want to hear it performed.' You'd be hard pushed to describe Still Pushing Pineapples as anything like a typical music documentary, as hagiographic or as even celebratory. It's downbeat, melancholic, but also strangely warming. It's a measured, thoughtful, pathos-rich, slow TV-style elegy for a lost time, a lost culture, a lost Britain. None of which are adjectives or ideas you'd normally connect with a band whose ear-maggot music was very much of its era. Hopkins admits she 'started off with a film featuring party anthems'. But as she followed Michael back and forth along the A64, 'what I saw and felt was something else. Without making too grandiose claims, there's some allegorical feeling about that lie about Britain that we constantly try and [hide].' She mentions Adam Curtis's new iPlayer documentary series Shifty, which digs deep into that very idea (the UK is in 'a hazy, dream-like flux in which no one can predict what is coming next'), and the comparison is valid. 'Dene's fanbase is in Blackpool and Skegness and Minehead, these places that are really struggling. And that fanbase is dwindling. They're getting older. They're dying off. The club circuit's disappearing. So the feeling I had by the end is: the party's over.' On one level, Dene Michael would go along with that. 'I've got spondylitis in the back, and I've just found out I've got prostate cancer. But they've caught it in time. So I'm OK. I'm going to be fine.' But on another level, tickled by his close-up moment at Sheffield DocFest, he's as driven as ever. As Hopkins, radiating affection for her subject, puts it: 'Mum and Dene don't have a glass-half-full philosophy. They're glass-is-completely-full.' So, even though the film draws to a close with Michael concerned about sparse bookings, an empty diary and fears about how he's going to support himself and his mum, the man talking to me now speaks of more gigs – and more hope. 'I choose the venues that I like to perform at now, because I'm sort of semi-retired. But who knows – after this film, I'll probably be back on tour again!' 'I hope so, Dene,' says Hopkins.

Daily Mail​

36 minutes ago

• Daily Mail​

How tragic Anne Burrell ditched 'rock star chef life' to finally find love in her 50s before shock death

Beloved Food Network star Anne Burrell spoke candidly about finally settling down in her 50s—after years of 'living the rock star chef life'—just two months before she was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment. The Secrets of a Restaurant Chef host and longtime Worst Cooks in America co-host was discovered 'unconscious and unresponsive' around 7:50 a.m. Tuesday. The New York Fire Department confirmed to DailyMail they responded to a report of cardiac arrest, though her official cause of death is still under investigation by the Office of Chief Medical Examiner. In a bittersweet twist, Burrell had recently appeared on Tori Spelling 's misSPELLING podcast, where she reflected on meeting her husband Stuart Claxton later in life—after living what she called 'the rock star chef life.' She said she met Claxton on Bumble after finally giving dating apps a shot in her late 40s. 'From when I was a kid, I don't know why, but I always was like, I am not getting married until I feel like I have something in life to share — until I have accomplished stuff,' she shared. In a bittersweet twist, Burrell had recently appeared on Tori Spelling 's misSPELLING podcast, where she reflected on meeting her husband Stuart Claxton later in life—after living what she called 'the rock star chef life' In her 20s and 30s, Burrell sai dshe embraced the whirlwind of her culinary rise. 'I was living my best life! I was like, living the rock star chef life. I was working a lot, and I had a great social life,' she said. But over time, her priorities began to shift. 'I just started to feel like, all right, you're getting a little old to keep on doing this,' she added, reflecting on what led her to seek something more grounded. That turning point eventually led her to Claxton, whom she married on Oct. 16, 2021. With the marriage, she also stepped into a new role—becoming a stepmother to Claxton's 22-year-old son, Javier. 'Kids were never on my radar, really,' the chef admitted. 'I love being an aunt. I have nieces and nephews. So I'm like, [being a stepmom] is the perfect amount of parenting for me.' The resrufaced interview comes after Burrell's friend and chef Elizabeth Falkner claimed that Burrell was in 'pretty decent shape' when she last saw her on June 9 at dinner in New York City. In an exclusive interview with Daily Mail, Falkner, 59, revealed, 'I think Anne looks like she's in pretty decent shape these days, so it's kind of surprising to me.' Not being able to comment specifically on any health issues, if any, she might've battled before her death, she did find her passing 'so sudden and shocking.' 'I know it is very personal to me what happened, and I can't believe somebody even younger than me has just passed away. It's close to home for all of us,' she said. 'The culinary family is like family, so this hurts a lot of us. We just all feel it.' The shock comes from seeing her a few days ago at an intimate dinner she hosted - which she of course was the chef for the 'fun night' - at Soho House on June 9. 'I've seen [her] over all these years, not just on television competitions and shows, but at different parties and events and stuff, and we've always been friendly. 'But just in the last month we've been texting. I said, "Come to my dinner at Soho House, it'll be great to see you." And she brought her husband and we just had such a good time,' she shared about how the famous chefs reconnected. 'It was just so sweet. So this is just really so sudden and shocking.' Burrell even texted her the following day on June 10 to let her know that she and her husband, Stuart Claxton, had a great time. 'She's like, "Thanks so much for inviting us. It was a truly lovely time and very delicious. Please send me some pics so I can post." Falkner paid tribute to Anne on her Instagram after hearing about the shocking news 'And I said, "It was so great to see you, Anne."' The pals even made a pact to 'talk more often.' 'We were like, "Let's just make a point of talking and texting more often,"' Falkner shared, while noting that she is 'very grateful' to have had a special night with the beloved chef and other guests last week. 'I'm just bummed. I feel like [our friendship] just got cut really short fast,' she added. The Worst Cooks in America alum spoke highly about being a mother. 'When she came to the dinner at Soho House, she said that she was very much enjoying being a stepmother,' Falkner said, referring to the star's stepson Javier, 20. 'And her husband's so sweet. She just seemed to be in such a good place. That's the best way for me to describe it. Because being a chef and being a television personality is two major full-time jobs, but enjoying your life outside of that can be challenging. And I think she was definitely enjoying her life outside of that whole world of the networks and all that stuff.' Burrell spoke exclusively with Daily Mail back in April about marital bliss. Her and Stuart got married in 2021 after meeting on a dating app in 2018. 'October will be four years,' she said at the City Harvest gala. 'It seems like it's been four minutes. I don't know if it's a honeymoon [phase], but I feel like it's settled into married life days which I really enjoy.' Falkner told Daily Mail, 'I'm just bummed. I feel like [our friendship] just got cut really short fast' (pictured is an exclusive photo of Falkner with her pal at Burrell's former Brooklyn restaurant, Phil And Anne's Good Time Lounge, shared with Daily Mail) Falkner, who appeared on cooking shows like Iron Chef and Top Chef, recalled meeting Burrell's husband before they got married in 2021. 'I randomly saw her in Rome outside of a restaurant, and I was like, "Oh my God, that's Anne Burrell walking by!" And we said hey and stuff,' Falkner revealed, noting that she and Stuart were on a 'pre-wedding trip.' Describing her passing 'really unfortunate,' 'so sad,' 'unexpected' and even 'tragic,' Falkner believes Burrell's death is a huge loss to the restaurant community since everyone involved is 'another kind of family.' Falkner, herself, said that being a chef is a 'highly stressful job,' but it was something that Burrell mastered throughout her career. 'The thing about Anne Burrell is she wasn't only a TV chef, she was a really good, really good cook, really good chef. She educated a lot of people,' the James Beard Foundation's board of trustees member told Daily Mail. 'I don't even know how she had the patience to do Worst Cooks in America, because I think that would be a challenging show to do patience wise. But she was the real deal. She could cook a lot. She had mad skills. It was always fun watching her cook. I told her I loved watching her on House of Knives.' She added, 'She's one of those people that's kind of intimidating and certainly hardcore as chefs can be. I mean, you kind of have to be that way. It's the only way to teach people how to deal with ingredients and not to mess it up all the time. But she was definitely very sweet... She had a certain kind of sparkle.'