Aston "Family Man" Barrett, the former bassist in the 1970s hit reggae band The Wailers, is demanding millions of dollars in a London court from the estate of the late Jamaican star Bob Marley.
Barrett, who fathered 52 children -- hence his nickname, was to reappear in court Friday after claiming he had been denied US$105 million by Marley's widow Rita and Island Records after the singer died from cancer in 1981, British media said.
The case centers on how much Barret and others actually contributed to the group's phenomenal success in which millions of records were sold.
PHOTO: AP
The bass player sat in the back of the High Court last week as his lawyer Stephen Bate told how he and his fellow musicians had been left "desperately short of money" since Marley died.
Bate told the court that Aston Barrett and his drummer brother Carlton were "largely responsible" for providing Marley with a unique sound that brought reggae music to the international stage.
Aston Barrett had been a member of the Upsetters who had a hit in Britain in the late sixties with Return of Django and was even then a highly respected musician known for his distinctive style, Bate argued.
At the time Marley was not well known outside the Caribbean and he told Aston he wanted him to record an album with him because he too wanted international success, Bate said.
Pint-sized pop star Shakira will be honored with a five-tonnes, 5m statue set to tower over her equally sultry coastal Colombian home town, local media reported last week. German sculptor Dieter Patt donated the work, in steel, which will be erected in a square in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla, the newspaper El Tiempo has reported.
The steel version of the Grammy winning rocker and composer was due to arrive by sea yesterday, the report said.
"I want people to think that any girl can start working on her dreams, and that they can come true," the singer said on seeing the work at a fundraiser earlier in Germany.
Shakira, a multilingual Lebanese-Colombian songwriter who reportedly has an IQ of 140, took home the Grammy for best Latin alternative rock album last month, for Oral Fixation number 1, in Los Angeles.
Chester Bennington of the Grammy-winning music group Linkin Park is a father again.
Bennington's wife, Talinda, gave birth in Los Angeles last Thursday to a 4.1kg boy named Tyler Lee, according to a statement from their publicist.
Other details were not forthcoming.
Bennington has two other sons, 10-year-old Jaime and four-year-old Draven, from previous relationships.
Last month, Linkin Park and rapper Jay-Z shared a Grammy Award for best rap/sung collaboration for Numb/Encore.
Linkin Park has sold more than 36 million records worldwide.
Slain rapper Tupac Shakur will join the ranks of celebrities sculpted in wax at the Madame Tussaud Museum in Las Vegas, the city where he was killed in a drive-by shooting nearly 10 years ago.
A 25kg, clay-and-wax effigy, called `Tupac Eternal,' will go on display April 5 at The Venetian hotel-casino, the museum announced.
The former rap star and urban hero will be depicted in his most familiar pose -- shirtless, sporting a bandanna and proudly displaying his many tattoos.
Shakur's precise measurement and body art will be reconstructed by sculptor Jeni Fairey -- the woman behind the museum's wax Beyonce -- with the help of photos provided by Tupac's mother, Afeni Shakur. Fairey's work will have taken 700 hours to complete, the museum said last Thursday.
The first Mrs. Johnny Cash had a line to walk, too, and before she died last year she told about it in a book that will be published early next year.
I Walked the Line, by Vivian Liberto Distin, is slated to arrive Valentine's Day 2007, it was announced last week by Scribner, a division of Simon and Schuster.
The book's title plays off Cash's hit song, I Walk the Line, which he wrote about Vivian. The same title was used for the recent Golden Globe-winning movie that focused on Cash's romance with his second wife, singer June Carter Cash.
The book is based on thousands of letters exchanged by the couple before their marriage while he was overseas with the Air Force, co-writer Ann Sharpsteen said.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
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Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s