Category Biographies

One of the first recording artists to be signed to The Beatles’ Apple Record label, Mary Hopkin was born in Pontardwe, Wales on the 3rd of May 1950. Mary took weekly singing lessons as a child and they certainly paid off when, through her early teens, she began her singing career as a folk singer as part of a local group The Selly Set and Mary. Mary would also tour around her local clubs playing solo gigs.Read On...

Top of the Pops in May 1976 was when Dolly Parton gently landed like a butterfly on my own, and the UK’s pop music consciousness. The American country music singer with her platinum blonde hair, voluptuous figure and, most importantly, her beautifully distinctive soprano voice won her a new fan base not only in the United Kingdom but across Europe–particularly in Sweden, where she would become a regular in the Swedish record charts. Like an American butterfly, Dolly Parton had found a new garden where the grass was nearly as green as her homeland's.Read On...

The United Kingdom’s first Eurovision Song Contest winner was born Sandra Ann Goodrich on 26^th February, 1947 in Dagenham, England.

By 1967, Britain was still very much riding on the crest of the Swinging Sixties wave when virtually everything British was popular, certainly in the music world where The Beatles and The Rolling Stones ruled.  The women were also doing well with the likes of Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark selling bucket loads of records the world over.  Glasgow Celtic became the first British winners of the coveted European Football Cup. Even England’s footballers were on top with the World Cup Jules Remae still gleaming after their 1966 triumph.

Yet the United Kingdom still lacked a winner in the Eurovision Song Contest since the contest first started in 1956...

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Sylvia Plath was born on October 27 1932, in the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital. She had a decent childhood until her father, Otto, passed away a week and a half after her eighth birthday. This is thought to be the beginning of her lifelong mental troubles, as well as going on to inspire countless poems.Read On...

In 1950 an enthusiastic eleven-year-old schoolgirl with her head full of music cut her first record in a local record shop in Ealing. Dusty’s first recording was Irving Berlin’s When The Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam. Dusty O’Brien (it was ten years later that she would arise as Dusty Springfield) was on her way down her own yellow brick road to a world of magic that would bring her iconic fame and fortune.Read On...

Grace Patricia Kelly was born on the 12th November 1929 to wealthy parents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her father, John Brendan “Jack” Kelly was, as well as a self made millionaire, also a successful sculler; he’d won three Olympic gold medals as part of the American rowing team. Her mother, Margaret Katherine Majer, was the first coach of the women’s athletic teams for the University of Pennsylvania. Grace was the third of four children; she was named after her father’s sister, who died when she was very young. Growing up, the only thing Grace ever wanted to do was perform; she was absolutely passionate about wanting to become an actress.Read On...

Britain was enjoying life between the two World Wars when Petula Sally Owen Clark cried her first note to the world on 15th November 1932. Little did her English father Leslie Clark and Welsh mother Doris realise that their daughter would grow up to be one of Britain’s most distinguished recording stars and actresses ever born from this incredible Island that has and continues to flourish and give to the world. Petula’s parents worked as nurses at Epsom, Surrey and this is where she would spend her childhood.

The childhood of Petula Clark was where her natural born talent to become an entertainer was ignited. At the tender age of six her father took Petula to the theatre for the first time after which she was determined to become an actress like her idol Ingrid Bergman. However her first public performance anywhere was as a singer in 1942, at a department store in Kingston upon Thames with an orchestra backing her. The nine year old singer was rewarded with a tin of toffee and a watch.Read On...

Singer; songwriter; actress; television personality; radio personality; model and business woman, Lulu was born Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie on the 3^rd of November 1948 in Glasgow.

The girl who would go on to have a massive US number one hit single when she was just nineteen already had a manager by the age of twelve; Marion Massey.  Massey would guide Lulu (who would eventually become her manager’s business partner) through the unforgiving world of show business for the next twenty five years.  Under Massey’s wing, thirteen-year-young Marie Lawrie joined a local touring group called The Bellrocks and for the next few years she would gain invaluable experience performing on a stage every Saturday night.

1963 was a year that changed the fortunes of many aspiring pop artists and f...

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The Oxford English Dictionary says this about flappers:

Flapper. noun. Informal (in the year 1920’s) a fashionable and unconventional young woman.

The word was in use as far back as the sixteen hundreds. The word “flap” was slang for young prostitutes in 1631.  It evolved through the years to be used to describe not only very young prostitutes, but also for very lively and forward girls in their mid-teens. In the early 1900s the word “flapper” was also used to describe young female acrobats performing on stage. The Times carefully described the term “flapper” in the mid 1900s as a young lady who has not yet been promoted to long frocks.

The word “flappers” also became to be used to describe young, independent women after the First World War (1914-1918), when young women and girls were...

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Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. (Apple advertising campaign, 1997)

Some could argue that Steve Jobs began his career in his parents’ garage, tinkering on the work bench his father built for him. Or it could have been when his adoptive parents moved to Mountain View, California, long before the area was known as Silicon Valley. Or it could have been when he rang the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard for spare parts, and ended up with a summer internship.

Whatever you believe to be the beginning of Jobs’s career, there’s no doubting that the stars were aligned...

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