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Post-punk band Public Image Ltd are among the acts competing to represent Ireland at Eurovision this year.

The band, which includes the Sex Pistol’s John Lydon (formerly known as Johnny Rotten) on vocals, wants to enter a song titled “Hawaii”.

The group will be competing to represent Ireland in the contest, which will be held in Liverpool later this year.

The song is reportedly about Lydon’s wife Nora, who lives with Alzheimer’s. The pair have been married for over 50 years and Lydon cares for her.

“Hawaii” is reportedly a love song to Nora: “It is dedicated to everyone going through tough times on the journey of life, with the person they care for the most,” said Lydon.

“It’s also a message of hope that ultimately love conquers all.”

1/2 PiL will be competing to represent Ireland at Eurovision 2023 with their new single Hawaii - which is available...

The school previously had a Master of Arts accredited by the Royal College of Art.

The UK’s National Film and Television School (Nfts) has been given degree awarding powers for the first time, starting from January 1, 2023.

Granted by the Office of Students, the school will be able to award degrees in its own name. Previously the Masters of Arts degree gained by Nfts students was accredited by the Royal College of Art.

A spokesperson for The Nfts, whose alumni include Roger Deakins and Lynne Ramsay, said the change means they can update current and future courses more efficiently.

John Wardle,...

Tributes have been paid to Keith Levene, a founding member of punk bands The Clash and Public Image Ltd, who has died aged 65.

Hailed as an innovative guitarist who helped shape the sound of punk, Levene cowrote the song “What’s My Name” from The Clash’s 1977 debut album.

Singer-songwriter Lloyd Cole described Levene as a “bona fide guitar genius”.

Levene, who had liver cancer, died at his home in Norfolk, The Guardian reported.

He left The Clash before they released their first record, then co-founded the Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious.

After the the Sex Pistols disintegrated in 1978, Levene teamed up with their vocalist John Lydon, as well as drummer Jim Walker and bassist Jah Wobble to form Public Image Ltd (PiL).

Author Adam Hammond, with whom Levene was reportedly writing a book about PiL, wrote on Twitter: “There is no doubt that Keith was one of the most innovative,...

Keith Levene, a founding member of the Clash and Public Image Ltd, died on Friday, Nov. 11. He was 65. His former bandmates Jah Wobble and Martin Atkins confirmed the news via social media. Levene, who had liver cancer, died at his home in Norfolk, England, per The Guardian.

“Rip Keith Levene – a guitar tone like ground up diamonds fired at you through a high pressure hose,” Andy Bell of Ride tweeted.

While Levene’s influential fretwork shaped the sound of punk and post-punk to come, one of his first gigs was...

Innovative guitarist Keith Levene, a cofounder of The Clash and later with Public Image Ltd., died Friday at 65 of liver cancer at his home in Norfolk, UK. Author/writer Adam Hammond confirmed the death.

“It is with great sadness I report that my close friend and legendary Public Image Limited guitarist Keith Levene passed away on Friday 11th November,” Hammond wrote. “There is no doubt that Keith was one of the most innovative, audacious and influential guitarists of all time.”

Hammond added, “Keith sought to create a new paradigm in music and with willing collaborators John Lydon and Jah Wobble succeeded in doing just that. His guitar work over the nine minutes of ‘ Theme’, the first track on the first PiL album, defined what alternative music should be.As well as helping to make PiL the most important band of the age, Keith also founded The Clash with Mick Jones...

Brian Eno will celebrate the 25th anniversary of A Year With Swollen Appendices with a new edition, out February 9th via Faber and Faber.

The producer will write a new introduction to the book, originally published in 1996. It contains diary entries and reflections on his 1995 collaborations with David Bowie (Outside), U2 (Original Soundtracks 1 as Passengers), Jah Wobble (Spinner), and more. Several letters are also included, as well as essays on topics ranging from ambient music to CD-Roms.

The hardcover anniversary edition will be printed on pink paper, with two...

Harold Budd, the acclaimed composer known for his minimalist works and collaborations with Brian Eno, died Tuesday. He was 84. Steve Takaki, Budd’s manager, confirmed his death, adding that the cause of death was complications due to the coronavirus.

“A lot to digest,” Cocteau Twins frontman and frequent Budd collaborator Robin Guthrie wrote on Facebook. “Shared a lot with Harold since we were young, since he was sick, shared a lot with harold for the last 35 years, period. Feeling empty, shattered lost and unprepared for this. … His last words to...

Brian Eno’s collaborative albums with John Cale and bassist Jah Wobble — 1990’s Wrong Way Up and 1995’s Spinner, respectively — will be reissued with a handful of bonus tracks each. The sets will arrive on August 21st via All Saints Records.

The reissues coincide with the 30th anniversary of Wrong Way Up and the 25th anniversary of Spinner. The bonus tracks on Wrong Way Up are “Grandfather’s House” and “Palanquin,” which appeared on the b-side of the “Spinning Away” single. And the bonus tracks on Spinner are “Stravinsky,” an...

When John Lydon begins a warm and humorous conversation by saying, “Hello, I am very much alive for anyone who is interested — don’t worry though, I’ve been working hard at not being,” you know he’s taking the piss. For all of his notorious snark and cynicism, the thing that comes through loudest in his post-Rotten, post-Sex Pistols career with Public Image Ltd. (a.k.a. PiL) is how joyful and hard-working he is, and how ebulliently he speaks of those who’ve stuck with him — including his wife, Nora Forster, and this longest-ever line-up of PiL, with whom he’s collaborated for ten years.

That unity hasn’t always been there, which is the point of the recently released and currently screening Lydon/PiL documentary, “The Public Image is Rotten.” Then again, it’s been that mash-up of musicians, old pals and frenemies that have made up what is 40 years of PiL,...

Tabbert Fiiller on John Lydon: "I never thought about that in relation to Annalisa. There's also, like, he was very shy as a child and then, certainly after or during the Sex Pistols…" Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Following the world première at the Tribeca Film Festival of The Public Image Is Rotten, shot by Yamit Shimonovitz, director Tabbert Fiiller went with me into the John Lydon style that took us to Comme des Garçons, Julian Schnabel and pajamas, Muriel Spark's The Public Image, John Waters at a PiL concert, and wildlife. Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, and Moby count PiL as an influence.

John Lydon: "John is so good with words. I was just trying to keep up. We shot every day."

John Lydon's Public Image Ltd. started out as Keith Levene, Jah Wobble, and Jim Walker,...

According to original Public Image, Ltd bassist Jah Wobble, PiL (as the cool kids know them) were in the running to score Martin Scorsese’s 1980 boxing film Raging Bull. “We [John Lydon and I] ended up sitting in a penthouse apartment with Scorsese,” explains Wobble in his 2010 autobiography, Memoirs Of A Geezer: Music, Life, Mayhem. Scorsese was apparently in the audience at PiL’s first New York show at the Palladium in April of 1980 and dug the band. “Because of the combination of my first-ever jet lag, speed comedown, booze and general tour weirdness, I was very spaced out (I think I must have had a puff as well). My memory is a bit hazy.”

Wobble goes on to detail the evening describing Scorsese as “a cat on a hot tin roof, he just couldn’t’ sit still.” According to the bassist, Scorsese was “jabbering away like ...

Stage and screen actor who excelled in playing authority figures and appeared in TV shows such as Brookside and Lovejoy

Malcolm Tierney, who has died aged 75 of pulmonary fibrosis, was a reliable and versatile supporting actor for 50 years, familiar to television audiences as the cigar-smoking, bullying villain Tommy McArdle in Brookside, nasty Charlie Gimbert in Lovejoy and smoothie Geoffrey Ellsworth-Smythe in David Nobbs's A Bit of a Do, a Yorkshire small-town comedy chronicle starring David Jason and Gwen Taylor.

Always serious and quietly spoken offstage, with glinting blue eyes and a steady, cruel gaze that served him well as authority figures on screen, Tierney was a working-class Mancunian who became a core member of the Workers' Revolutionary party in the 1970s. He never wavered in his socialist beliefs, even when the Wrp imploded ("That's all in my past now," he said), and always opposed restricted entry to the actors' union,...

Made In Britain: Warp Films At 10 | Leeds Young Film Festival | Made In Prague | The Servant with Q&A

Made In Britain: Warp Films At 10, London

The Made In Britain initiative continues with a celebration of Warp Films, which has brought us such quintessentially British fare as This Is England, Four Lions, Submarine and Kill List. The company celebrated its 10th anniversary in its Sheffield hometown last year, and now brings its back catalogue to London, plus events including a Warp special of Adam Buxton's Bug and a special screening of Shane Meadows's Dead Man's Shoes at the Queen Elizabeth Hall this Friday, with live music from Jah Wobble and members of Unkle.

BFI Southbank, SE1, Fri to 30 Apr

Leeds Young Film Festival

Children's movies have found their expensively animated groove in today's cinema, but this festival usefully reminds those born in the 21st century what they've been missing.

Jah Wobble has revealed that John Lydon contacted him before reforming Public Image Ltd last year. Together with Keith Levene and Jim Walker, the bassist and Lydon were the founding members of the post-punk group. The current version of PiL features Lydon together with Lu Edmonds, Bruce Smith and Scott Firth. Asked about the band's comeback, Wobble told Metro: "John did call but reformation is a risky thing for me; I'm definitely a bloke who needs to (more)...

Original Public Image Ltd. bassist Jah Wobble turned down the chance to rejoin his bandmates on tour because he's convinced Sex Pistols singer John Lydon only reformed the group to make "money." Lydon created the group in 1978 after the Sex Pistols split, but the band has been on hiatus since 1992.

The star announced in 2009 he would be resurrecting the group for a series of dates in December that year and several music festivals throughout 2010, but Wobble refused to reprise his role in PiL. He says, "I was asked last July and I definitely did think about it and talk about it to an extent, but it just wasn't the right move for me. It just wasn't the way I would do it. I don't care, I think it's great and I'm not bothered at all."

"I suspect with John it's about two things - raising money efficiently and quickly and...

Odeon Entertainment and Mvd Visual will release the 80 minute doc, Sid!- By Those Who Really Knew Him on November 17th. The new package is the first intimate full-length documentary on the life of 'Sid Vicious', 30 years since his death from a heroin overdose at the age of 21, charting the fall and rise of the "Sex Pistols" guitarist from punk hero to cultural icon. Sid's controversial life is profiled with interviews from Jah Wobble (childhood friend, founder "Pil"), Steve Severin ("Siouxsie and the Banshees"), David Vanian ("The Damned"), Malcolm McLaren ("Sex Pistols" Manager), Viv Albertine ("The Slits"), Ron Watts ("100 Club"), Glen Matlock ("Sex Pistols"), Rat Scabies ("The Damned"), Caroline Coon (Writer/Artist), Vivienne Westwood (Designer), Marco Pirroni ("Adam & The Ants"), John Tiberi ("Sex Pistols" Tour Manager), and a whole lot more. "...Featuring previously unseen archive footage and filmed in HD, this new documentary provides the most definitive and...

John Lydon has said that he is looking forward to playing his old songs with the newly-reformed Public Image Ltd. The post-punk group was founded by former Sex Pistol Lydon with Jah Wobble, Jim Walker and Keith Levine in 1978, but after several personnel changes has been on hiatus since 1992's That What Is Not. Of the band's upcoming live reunion with a new lineup, Lydon told The Guardian: "It feels clean. It's refreshing. We'll see where we can go. Some things may be quite similar. Some may not. "For me, the best rock is not what you play - it's what you're not playing. The Sex Pistols were too rigid. PiL allowed me to express proper emotions. (more)...