If there is anything that can make a strident music fan salivate in anticipation, it’s the idea of an unreleased track or lost album from a favourite band. It’s like catnip for the musicolo...
Django Reinhardt was a legendary jazz musician and considered by some the greatest guitarist who ever lived, even more so when you find out he did it all with two fingers. He began as a nomadic...
Perhaps you remember the feeling of unearthing a really great gem at the record store – a forgotten band from another time with an original sound that sends those feel-good electric impulses ...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/03/21/have-you-heard-about-the-world-of-habibi-funk/
In 1962, a reporter with the New York Post got a tip that screen goddess of the 1940s, Veronica Lake, was working as a barmaid in the lobby of the Martha Washington Hotel, a low rent boarding h...
In 1966, David Bowie had a chance encounter with Vince Taylor an early exponent of the British Rock and roll scene. Taylor had been a leather-clad, chain-wielding rocker from the 1950s, a combi...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2024/01/05/the-real-ziggy-stardust-who-lost-his-career-to-acid/
Imagine popping out for groceries and running into The Doors frontman Jim Morrison or Canadian rocker Neil Young, maybe scoring an invite to Joni Mitchell’s house for dinner or a BBQ at Jimi ...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2023/12/13/a-breezy-hike-through-laurel-canyons-1960s-music-mecca/
The best way to make fast friends with a taxi driver in the Middle East? Ask them a simple question: “Fairuz or Umm Kulthum?” Sensational diva, singer, songwriter and actress, affectionatel...
Agnès Varda throughout her career was seen as belonging to the older generation. A pioneering photographer, writer, filmmaker and artist, at the beginning of her career and at barely 30 years ...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2023/11/30/how-to-introduce-agnes-varda-to-the-next-generation/
These are a few of my favourite things about a 1970s French musical called “Donkey Skin”: A giant cat throne, a surreal banquet with candy-coloured flora, a snow globe grave, talking roses ...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2021/03/23/refine-your-mood-board-with-this-1970s-french-fairytale/
The first time I saw this Cyd Charisse dancing was on a VHS copy of Singing in the Rain that I’d been gleefully gifted by my parents. With a total of just seven minutes airtime and not a sing...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2019/03/06/her-legs-shouldve-been-registered-as-deadly-weapons/
There was another Hollywood that thrived once upon a time. From the 1910s to the 1950s, an independent Black American film industry was in full swing, making movies specifically for an all-Blac...
The 1920’s in Paris may have been roaring, but over in Harlem, they were stomping. New York’s playground was not short of an underground boozer, but there was one place in particular that d...
It was a pretty epic Round Table, albeit one held in vain. Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Yves-Saint Laurent and other creative power-houses had joined forces with one impossible goal: to s...
If you were living in Paris during the years that followed World War II and liked to party, you’d better have known Boris Vian. In 1950, he wrote the original guidebook to bohemian Paris a...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2016/12/20/i-wish-i-couldve-partied-with-the-prince-of-saint-germain/
There was a time when these floating hotels that have rested on the lakes of Kashmir since the 1800s, were host to movie stars, artists, writers, famous musicians and wealthy western travellers...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2015/05/27/the-forgotten-houseboat-hotels-of-kashmir/
”If you were operating at the top echelon of the record business, you had to have the Starship,” music photographer Neal Preston told the New York Times in 2003, who held a boarding pass fo...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2013/07/10/im-with-the-band-on-their-private-jet/