"So sad to read that the New York State Senate voted down the Gay Marriage Bill. It saddens and sickens me that modern government and society has learned nothing from history but continue the vicious cycle of ignorance and intolerance whilst quoting and twisting from a bible that at its root, preaches love and understanding and equality for all.
"Shame on all those who judge others so harshly that they will rob them of their civil liberties. Shame on those who will attempt to strip others of their dignity and their right to walk among us as equals on this earth. Shame on those who teach our children to discriminate and hate.
"Love is love is love is love. And it is rare and divine. So let all of us attempt to preserve it... in any manner we can. And by all of us, I really do mean all of us. Because lord knows there's certainly not enough of it flowing around us in this life."
Her plans for dealing with budget deficit will be outlined tomorrow.
Hart had been working with Maddy Prior when the pair were approached by Ashley Hutchings, fresh from Fairport Convention, with a view to creating a new band. The original line-up, with Terry and Gay Woods, collapsed early on; the Woods were cut and replaced by Martin Carthy and Peter Knight.
This version of Steeleye Span enjoyed success on the folk circuit, but a further line-up change introduced a sound drawing more firmly on rock. Hart became, perhaps, the world's greatest electric Appalachian dulcimer player during this period.
The new mix worked well - the band did a stadium tour of the US and hooked up with Mike Batt. This collaboration led to the high-water mark for the band, the UK number five hit All Around My Hat, in 1975.
The band continued, but with diminishing success and in 1983 Hart quit. Beset by ill-health, he moved to the Canary Islands, where he worked as a writer and photographer.
Hart returned to Britain this year for treatment for lung cancer; this proved ultimately unsuccessful and he returned home to La Gomera last month. Hart, who was 61, is survived by his second wife, Conny, and two children.
This is All Around My Hat, performed on Crackerjack in 1976:
Presumably the idea of going to a country where nobody knows or cares who they are is appealing, so they can spend a few months with people going "who are you?" instead of "no, seriously, what have you done with the actual Sugababes?".
Quite why they believe a nation that has a Beyonce would be in search of a Heidi Range isn't clear.
9.00am BBC2 - Great Railway Journeys Alexi Sayle on the Hejaz Line. Really just an excuse for this, though:
10.55am Channel 4 - The World's Greatest Pop Star Beyonce, apparently, although I'm given to understand there's serious demands to re-run the election.
1.00 Classic FM - Dial A Carol Handy if you've been on hold for a week and still haven't given up, I suppose.
3.05 BBC2 - Ready Steady Cook Kenny Ball and Chris Barber in an all-jazz cook-off. The year is nearly over.
4.00 6Music - Lamacq's Top 40 of 2009 The closest we're getting to a Festive Fifty, anyway
6.30 BBC1 - Top Of The Pops I'm not entirely clear how this is different from the Christmas Day one. Perhaps Fearne will wear a different pair of shoes.
8.00 ITV2 - Fearne And Alesha Dixon Challenging documentary as Fearne chooses between "fabulous" and "brilliant" and "amazing" to describe Alesha's life
8.00 Sky One - All Star Don't Forget The Lyrics Two - count 'em - slices of the programme which makes the last round of Buzzcocks look like Gascoigne-era University Challenge
8.00 Bio - Bryan Ferry Oddly, the Biography channel has chosen to spend the day playing concert films instead. Much of the day is Buble-stuff, but it picks up a little towards the end of New Year's Eve
8.50 Standing In A Street In Eastbourne Looking Through A Cardboard Box - Toploader pretend they're on television
9.00 ITV3 - Celebrating The Carpenters Richard Carpenter forced at gunpoint to pretend insipid readings by lesser, current acts are in some way a tribute to the work of his late sister
9.00 Bio - Amy Winehouse Live From when she did the sort of thing that she was originally famous for
10.00 Bio - Franz Ferdinand Surprising choice for Bio's day o'gigs; perhaps they've lost their Bloc Party tape 10.00 ITV3 - An Audience With Lionel Richie Close-ups of Ronnie Corbett and the Anglia weathergirl as Richie builds to Dancing On The Ceiling
11.05 ITV3 - An Audience With Cliff Richard While 2009 turns into 2010? Seriously?
9.20 BBC4 - Guitar Heroes At The BBC From Bowie to Horselips.
10.50 Five - The Cheryl Cole Factor "How quickly can we gloss over the assault, do you reckon?"
11.00 BBC2 - Jool's Annual Hootenanny As inevitable as a new year's day hangover, the big question remains: when did this change from feeling like a bit of festive fun into something more akin to an office party thrown by WOMAD and a bunch of Butlins redcoats? Dave Edmunds is on, but... oh, lord: Boy George, Lily Allen, Dizzee Rascal, Kasabian and Paolo Nutini.
Midnight Radio 3 - Late Junction Where the sort of people that Jools hopes watches his programme will be for New Year.
1.20am BBC2 - Best Of Glastonbury 2009 This programme has been removed due to a copyright claim by The British Broadcasting Corporation.
Featuring classic interviews from the past two decades, new and unseen photos, and Noel Gallagher's track-by-track guide to 'Definitely Maybe', it's the ultimate guide to the band we sadly bid goodbye to in 2009.
Or are still going in 2010. Like the magazine you're trying to sell is claiming.
Expanding his remit from commenting on how many copies of Susan Boyle's album has sold, HMV Smartking Gennaro Castaldo has now taken to offering advice to The Pope. If Benedict thinks he is infallible, he should find out how infallible Gennaro is.
Castaldo considers that The Priests were outselling the Pope's own record this week:
But there is hope for The Pope, according to Gennaro Castaldo of HMV, who advises his Holiness to keep at it and perhaps appeal to the masses next time.
"This is The Priests' second album, and they have a pretty decent following which crosses over into the mainstream," he said.
"It makes an ideal Christmas gift for many people while The Pope's record, 'Alma Mater', on the other hand, is a bit of a one-off recording, and has quite specialist appeal."
The Pope is believed to have spluttered a bit at this, and was still muttering 'I've played the bloody Yankee Stadium' as he tumbled to the ground.
The Big Chill sold out to Festival Republic, who've already squeezed every penny and every ounce of character out of Glastonbury and Reading. Technics decks and Linn CD players came out of production.
6.00am ITV - GMTV I know, I'm not going to have posted this before it happens. But nobody really wants or needs to see Chipmunk doing his new song in Ben Sheppard's face-hole, do they?
10.35am Channel 4 - JLS Love Jacko For some reason, JLS list their favourite songs by the man who died before they were born, surely? Tomorrow, Diversity choose their ten favourite impressionist paintings.
2.00 Radio 2 - Great British Songbook Of The 1980s Together at last: Chris Tarrant and Nik Kershaw.
6.00 Radio 2 - Best Of Maida Vale That's what they're calling Charles Hazlewood's programme celebrating the studio. And yet the listings promise Jamie Cullum.
7.15 Radio 4 - Front Row John Wilson should really know better than to build a programme around the "surprise" that women are having hit records.
8.00 ITV2 - Fearne And Peaches Geldof Fearne Cotton peers into a deep, dark abyss. It's actually a rip-off of that Angel where the exorcised the demon that was afraid of the child it had possessed.
9.00 BBC4 - Sounds Of The 80s Following straight on from, erm, the Electric Dreams from the 1990s, but you should never look a gift horse wearing eyeliner in the mouth
9.00 ITV - Piers Morgan's Review Of The Year Well, he helped spoil it, he might as well clean it up. Of course Louis Walsh and Amanda Holden guest on it.
9.00 E4 - The Greatest Songs Of The Noughties Well, in your opinion, maybe, E4.
10.00 Radio 1 - Rob Da Bank And Friends Enjoying an early outing, one of the few upsides of the destitute Radio One schedules this week.
11.40 ITV2 - Ghosthunting with The Happy Mondays "Thank god they commissioned it, I only had 'Jenny Frost: Coconut Shy Operator' left on my pitch list."
BRMB wasn't supposed to be broadcasting the Queens Speech on Christmas Day; so when it turned up in the Sky News feed instead of the news, Tom Binns cut in to the broadcast and got back to playing the sort of low-demand music BRMB thrives on.
Unfortunately, there were a couple of complaints and a death threat, and so now Binns has been permanently binned by BRMB.
David Lloyd, Orion Media Group's programme and marketing director, said: 'On Christmas Day, one of our presenters, Tom Binns, made some inappropriate comments surrounding the Queen's speech.
'We do not condone what he said in any way; whether said in jest or not. We are making contact with the small number of listeners who were offended by Tom’s comments and have complained to us to convey our apologies, and have also apologised on air.
'Tom will now not be featuring again on our radio stations.'
If there were only a small number of listeners who complained - and these were people who cared so much about the Queen's Speech they had chosen to listen to a station that it wasn't on - why have they sacked Tom?
Born Andre Kyles, Omega backed up Organized Konfusion's MCs Prince Po and Pharoahe Monch during the early 90s, before moving into management and artist development.
Omega's cancer had been believed to be in remission; he died shortly before Christmas.
Let's not lose sight of the real issue at the heart of this twat trying to let indoor fireworks off on a plane above Detroit: it caused a slight delay for Rod Stewart in his travel plans.
Not only did Madonna's decision to take a child rather than supporting Mercy where she lived mean that a Malawian children's home lost a potential source of regular, ongoing support, but the linking of Madonna to the home's name has destroyed the other support the Kondanani home needs:
A source tells the [Daily Mirror], "We find it a day-to-day struggle to survive. Some days we don't even know if there will be enough food to feed the babies. Donors are not giving because they are under the impression Madonna paid us vast amounts of money."
Head of the orphanage, Annie Chikhwaza, adds: "I was never offered a penny. I did not expect any either."
Well, no, the direct handing over of cash might have led to some cynical suggestions that Madonna was buying a child. However, you do wonder if she couldn't have found a few quid in one of her many houses to help the other kids out, don't you?
The drummer with Avenged Sevenfold, The Rev, has died, the group have confirmed,
James Owen Sullivan was one of the founding members of the band, which came together in 1999. The Rev had been his high school nickname; this, coupled with the band's reference to Genesis often led to Avenged Sevenfold being confused with a Christian outfit in its early days. An appetite for heavy drug use and a songbook drawn from the sort of subject matter considered shocking for American metal soon put paid to that.
In 2004, the band signed with Warners, drawing the sort of investment required to push the band to the Hot Topic shoppers. Their last album, 2007's Avenged Sevenfold, shipped half a million copies in the US and went into the top ten.
Last month, the band started work on a new collection.
The Huntington Beach Police Department say that initial indications are that Sullivan died from natural causes; he was 28 and is survived by his wife.
It's a brilliant idea: the government is going to subsidise computers for the poorest families in Britain, acknowledging that access to the internet is a vital part of modern education and citizenship.
Yes, it turns out the first years of this millennium were as rubbish as you're remembering. These were the best-selling albums:
1. James Blunt - Back to Bedlam (2005) 2. Dido - No Angels (2000) 3. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black (2006) 4. Leona Lewis - Spirit (2007) 5. David Gray - White Ladder (2000)
Roll on 2010. Or the day when they switch off gravity and we all float out into space.
Even more oddly, The Sun has started to use png images instead of text for the headlines on its webpages. Even if you choose to not have images loaded automatically, still they come in as image files. Perhaps this is part of the paywall lowering - if you want to discuss the headlines in the pub, in the way Gordon insists you do, you have to pay to print them out on pieces of card?
10.40am BBC2 - Who Do You Think You Are? Rory Bremner. He had a hit record as The Commentators. He counts.
God, the pickings are so, so slim this week.
11.05am Channel 4 - Lily Allen: Under The Skin Unless she changes her mind, wipes the tapes and pretends she never really meant to make the programme in the first place.
Noon Radio 1 - Arctic Monkeys Live From August 2009, so you can almost hear the first little voice in the crowd saying 'I think maybe they've spread themselves too thinly...'
1.00 Radio 1 - The Chart Of The Decade For some reason, chopped into three daily chunks instead of being delivered in a single, magisterial, all-day, schedule sweeping gesture. If Radio 1 don't think it's worth a bit of fuss, why should we?
3.10 BBC2 - Ready Steady Cook Toyah Wilcox cooks up something against the clock. The Thunder In The Mountains calls for a Rennie half an hour later.
6.00 Radio 2 - The Class Of 2009 Paul Gambaccini picks the best new artists of the year, and his choice should be enough to shut the Radio Centre's claims that Radio 2 is obsessed with young people and popularity right out the water.
8.00 BBC4 - Electric Dreams Open University-tastic domestic electronics history 101 gets a rerun; tonight, it's the 1980s, which means there's a guest appearance from those members of Ultravox who don't get asked to make circus school documentaries for Radio 4.
9.00 Five - Celebrity Shock List Seriously, who exactly is shocked by Lady GaGa? Entertained - briefly - maybe. But shocked?
10.20 Channel 4 - Alan Carr: Chatty Man Special So, Channel 4 seem to have given up looking for a proper vehicle for Carr's talents and are just going to churn this out, over and over. Still, anything that spares us another series of Ding Dong. Spandau Ballet shuffle by, trying to avoid catching anyone's eyes.
10.50 BBC1 - Sting's Winter Songbook Billed merely to reassure you that you're better off hanging out until last orders.
11.00 Discovery Real Time - LA Ink The Game visits Kat Von D's tattoo shop. Even less happens than you might expect.
11.30 BBC Radio 7 - Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World Stuart Lee and Richard Herring from 1992. In passing, it's worth noting that the Fist Of Fun wikipedia entry calls for a citation on the claim that the fake Rod Hull would believe the real Rod Hull would require gifts of jelly.
11.45 ITV2 - Ghosthunting With Louis Walsh And Boyzone From, you know, before the very set-up of the programme started to sound like a bad joke
If you take the most extreme measure of how much unlicensed file sharing "costs" the UK music industry - the one-download-is-one-lost-sale model - it's £200million a year, according to the BPI.
So how much will the music industry's favoured measures to stop unlicensed filesharing cost to implement? Erm, £500million, says the Government.
The difference being, of course, that this is a real half a billion pounds, that we'll have to find, in order to fund a bunch of repressive security measures that will, at best, save a few private corporations less than half of the cost of that security.
How does that make sense?
Obviously, some sort of figures have to be made up to justify the move:
Impact assessments published alongside the Bill predict that the measures will generate £1.7 billion in extra sales for the film and music industries over the next ten years, as well as £350 million for the Government in extra VAT.
So we're paying half a billion now in order to let a few international companies eventually make that back? Possibly?
More worryingly, the report says that just the very first stage of the plans - the stiff warning letter - is going to wipe the equivalent of a town the size of Leeds off the web:
Ministers have not estimated the cost of the measures but say that the cost of the initial letter-writing campaign, estimated at an extra £1.40 per subscription, will lead to 40,000 households giving up their internet connections.
That's people who've not done anything wrong at all, the people who struggle to make ends meet, losing their web connections because the management of Sony Music are afraid that someone might be listening to Alicia Keys without paying. If Labour really want us to believe - in an election year - they're the party of social justice, can this legislation really go ahead?
It's a quiet time for any sort of release, never mind top-notch free mp3 singles. So hats off for Cosy Recordings, sharing out Cats On Fire's The Hague single.
Kurt Cobain was reborn as a halfwit in a computer game. Courtney Love angrily denied that she'd signed off on the deal and told us to watch for the lawsuit and product recall as proof. We're still waiting.
And this, surely, used to be Boxing Day? Slim pickings, certainly:
Noon Channel 4 - 4Music Favourites: Shakira Nowhere near as much fun as she looked like she would be when she first appeared; it's almost as if the joy went out her work the moment she signed the sneakers contract
7.00 Radio 2 - Electric Proms: Shirley Bassey Goooooooooo-oldfinger
7.00 Radio 1 - Radio 1 Live: The Live Lounge Tour Jo Whiley collates all the times she's been genuinely amazed to hear a scruffy indie band do a cover of a pop song.
8.30 BBC1 - Celebrity Mastermind This is the one we've been waiting for: Stuart Maconie in the black chair. Not clear yet if his specialist subject will be the collected works of Amon Duul or the genesis of the Wigan pie shop.
9.00 E4 - Celebrity Big Brother Top 20 Moments Perhaps we might finally find out just how Maggot from GLC qualified. Didn't they just leave him in the house in the end?
12.45am ITV2 - Ghosthunting with Scott Mills Looking for ghosts at Radio One. It does turn out that the wailing voice they could hear was actually Adrian Juste, who had been hiding in a cupboard ever since they dropped him from Saturdays.
It must be hard, not actually having any purpose in life beyond the occasional journey to kill sentient creatures, but you have to worry for Otis Ferry, don't you?
“We’re in the middle of the biggest f***-ups in British history, the economy,” he continues, focusing his shrewishly handsome features on me and exasperatedly swinging his Converses up onto the coffee table. “The sheer shitness of our country ... Hunting affects 0.0001% of the population, and then you’ve got Cowell and some woman [Emily Thornberry MP] standing up and saying, ‘Can we have our PM’s assurances that he won’t let his government repeal the ban on hunting?’”
So, Otis believes that hunting is a very, very minor concern, and set against the scale of other challenges facing the nation, is a terrible waste of time?
So he’s glad that David Cameron, who has hunted in the past, recently said that a Conservative government would put the issue of repealing the law to a vote.
Ah, so it's a total waste of time to talk about hunting when it's talking about banning it, but a sensible priority if you're talking about repealing the ban?
Ferry seems to believe that he's some sort of martyr - convinced that the Government, for example, has had him thrown in jail because "embarrassed" at how popular hunting is. That would be the hunting which only affects "0.0001% of the population", of course.
Still, don't run away with the idea that Ferry Junior is a one-issue twit. He's also unpleasantly right-wing on other issues, too:
His mission now is “saving rural England”, he says. “We have such a magical country which is fading so quickly. I’m really not racist, but immigration is a huge issue for me ... I don’t understand how it works and hate the thought of being accused of depriving poor Mrs Punjab of her [right to come here] but we’re all packed onto this tiny island, and I genuinely believe we are maxed out. But no one is brave enough to say there are too many people in this country.”
Well, yes. I can think of one person who we'd all be better off without, at least.
I don't know how much money Bryan spent on his kid's education, but if I was Ferry senior, I'd be seeking a repayment:
“I’m not some kind of pervert,” he says. “Are you a pervert for watching a cheetah pulling down a gazelle? Are you a pervert for watching David Attenborough? Is David Attenborough a pervert?” He flips open his laptop and shows me a recent episode of the BBC’s Countryfile on hare coursing in which John Craven referred to the watching of hare coursing as a “perverse pleasure”. “No, John,” he shouts at the computer screen. “Do the f****** investigation properly!” He pauses. “I sent him the dictionary definition of ‘perversion’, but he hasn’t replied yet.”
Otis doesn't see the distinction between a cheetah killing an animal to eat and the rich son of a rock star killing an animal for sport.
You've got to love the idea of John Craven getting a letter from someone which asked him to read the definition of perversion. That's one for the plastic gloves and a call to the police department, isn't it?
You can’t ban something because you don’t think it needs to happen,” he says.
Eh?
There's one last chunk to digest before we move on:
He admired David Attenborough, “but then I saw him on Loose Women and I had to turn it off because he was flirting with these fat, ugly women. I thought, this is not the David Attenborough I want to be dreaming of . . .”
Gennaro Castaldo, a spokesman for the HMV record-store chain in the U.K., attributed Boyle's numerous TV appearances in Britain following her second-place finish on Talent , to the sales results. Fans have followed her career from the start, he observed, "so when the album comes out, quite a few of them will go out and buy the album, too."
Ah. Thanks for that... um... insight, Gennaro. The quote presumably ended "look, sorry, I've just taken the turkey roll out the oven so I really need to get back into the kitchen. Call me in the new year, okay?"
This used to be called Christmas Sunday, didn't it? And used to get a special illustration across the top of the Radio Times listings. Why aren't Fox News investigating that, eh? Doubtless it's been renamed to avoiding upsetting people, right?
7.00am 6Music - The Best Of George Lamb It lasts three hours. How?
2.45 Radio 4 - Joan Armatrading's Favourite Choirs Desperately close to commissioning using 'Youth Hosteling With Chris Eubank' as a template
5.30 6Music - Stuart Maconie's Freakzone A 1969 special. But it's always roughly a 1969 special at the Freakzone.
6.30 BBC1 - Comic Relief: The Net Result Gary Barlow and Chris Moyles nip over to Uganda, partly to see where Comic Relief money went, and partly so Chris Moyles can feel like he's got liberal attitudes towards homosexuality.
8.00 Five - The Abba Years Promises to include "the hugely successful spin-offs". Chess?
8.00 ITV3 - An Audience With Donny And Marie Radio Times calls his "a huge slice of nostalgia", thereby confusing something you can remember with something you used to like.
10.55 Film4 - Backbeat Doomed-to-sell-through-VHS but actually quite good Beatles biopic, focusing on the other one. Not Pete Best, no.
12.40am Channel 4 - Hits And Headlines: Christmas Number Ones Headlines? At Christmas? It reminds me of the first time Murdoch made his staff go in on Christmas Day to produce papers for the 26th, and whoever was editing The Times that day, challenged by the BBC as to why they were there, muttered that the stock exchanges in the Far East were open - "and so maybe our stories will come from there." Because The Times is always leading on the Manilla stock exchange.
EMusic CEO Daniel Stein didn't deny that the company would consider a sale.
"We're opportunistic stewards of capital," Stein said in an interview with The Post. "If an offer was made that created value for our shareholders, we'd listen to it."
He then continued "how about you? Would you like to buy us? We'd knock something off for cash. We could do a deal. I'll throw in new tyres... come back... please..."
Actually, eMusic is doing alright, but it seems to have reached a point where it won't grow much more without something extra to offer. It's thinking that extra might be a streaming service for its members, although why you'd go from not wanting eMusic stuff to own to wanting it to stream, and not going somewhere else isn't clear.
Hull ISP Karoo started disconnecting filesharers. Radio City's all-talk City Talk station got permission to erm, play music. Guy Hands was begging the banks to accept they'd never see half a billion quid they'd lent Terra Firma to buy EMI ever again - if you're a record label, taking money and giving nothing in return is known as "write off"; perhaps file sharers could say they're seeking a write-off of label investment?
10.00am Radio 2 - David Tennant & Catherine Tate They're off Doctor Who, you know.
11.25am ITV - I Dreamed A Dream Who can forget that moment when the lost figure, looking a little odd and very sweaty, first appeared on Britain's Got Talent? It seemed like it was all a cruel joke, putting someone so ill-equipped in such a febrile atmosphere, leaving them to sink or swim. Still, Piers coped, and now he's going to interview Susan Boyle.
1.30 BBC1 - Bridge To Terabithia You know, seeing films like this makes me think maybe it's better for all of us if Zooey Deschanel concentrates on the singing.
3.00 Radio 3 - World Roots Ladysmith Black Mambazo still trying to make amends for helping out Paul Simon; this week's penance is playing the Dome, Brighton.
4.05 Channel 4 - Come Dine With Me The race to the saucepan bottom sees "Little" Jimmy Osmond feeding Caprice, Nancy Sorrell and some bloke who washes hair for a living.
6.15 Radio 4 - Loose Ends Amongst the guests is Edwyn Collins
7.00 Sky One - Johnny Cash Christmas Special From 1978. Which I think means Angela Rippon doing the high-kicking, doesn't it?
9.30 The All-Star Impressions Show What the world needs now, it turns out, is Joe Pasquale pretending to be Lady GaGa. Make a programme that reverses that, ITV, and then we'll talk.
10.55 BBC2 - The Young Ones Showing as part of BBC2's Slapstick night (oh, how low the ideas for theme nights have got), this is one of the ones with Madness as musical guest.
11.00 Biog - Donny & Marie Osmond Some siblings gets their own Biography; some make soup for Nicky Clarke.
12.15 Radio 4 - Street Circus Midge Ure goes to circus school. No, it's not a painfully self-aware surreal comedy.
Big Brother And The Holding Company bassist James Gurley died Monday.
Although legendary as part of the late 60s San Francisco scene in its own right, Big Brother's main appearance in rock history comes as the band which gave Janis Joplin her big break. The band shared a single house at one point, Monkees style.
The band crumbled after Joplin quit to go solo; Gurley spent two years caught in a legal nightmare after he injected his wife, Nancy, with heroin. She died of an overdose; murder charges were laid which resulted in Gurley eventually receiving probation.
He remarried in 1972, and spent the next two decades working with various acts, most notably the new wave outfit Red Robin and The Worms. Big Brother And The Holding Company were reactivated in 1987; Gurley remained with the band for a decade, before stepping down to concentrate on his solo projects.
UPDATE 26th December: Sadly, Kristin Hersh has confirmed that Vic died during Christmas Day. There's a memorial donations page been opened.
UPDATE Christmas Day night: The Examiner.com report which orginally reported Chesnutt's death has been updated during the course of the day; Vic is now said to be in a coma, but still alive. Don Wilkie of Constellation Records has confirmed that he is in "the middle of a serious medical situation".
This was the original post from earlier today when The Examiner and Spinner were reporting his death:
Sorry to report the death of Vic Chesnutt, who has died after what is believed to have been a suicide attempt.
Following a car accident in 1983, when he was 18, Vic Chesnutt had been left a paraplegic. Two years later, he relocated from Zebulon to Athens, Georgia, first joining The La-Di-Das and then moving on to solo work. It was this folk-rock work which caught the eye of the local scene, leading to Michael Stipe producing Chesnutt's debut work. The respect in which Chesnutt was held amongst the alt-rock royalty was demonstrated by the 1996 tribute album Sweet Relief II, which attracted contributions of covers of his work from REM, Madonna, Garbage, The Smashing Pumpkins and others.
Beset by much tragedy in his life - the car accident, death of loved ones, drug problems and massive medical debts - Chesnutt told an NPR interview that he had attempted suicide four times in the past.
A tweet from Kirstin Hersh on Christmas Eve suggested that he had made another attempt; he appears to have overdosed on muscle relaxants, slipping into a coma from which he would not recover.
According to the complaint and restraining order application, Marlowe asked Simmons for his view on monogamy, and Simmons responded by telling Marlowe to get his shot and leave. The filings state Simmons then lunged and attacked Marlowe, taking the video camera, then turned on Manzo when she tried to get the camera back.
Apparently this was twenty-five grands' worth of distress. It's all up to courts now.
