Victoria Pendleton in Esqure

Even with the Tour de France in full swing there is always time to take a sideways look at the lovely Victoria Pendleton; Olympic Gold medalist from Beijing.  Victoria makes the cover of Esquiremagazine’s August issue, which was out yesterday, in a preview for some delightfully slinky pictures inside.  

We can’t think of any other British sportswomen who has made the cover of both Esquire andFHM.  How the image of cycling, particularly women’s cycling, has changed in Britain in the last decade.  It would have been unthinkable for a lady cyclist to appear on the front cover of Esquire ten years ago.  Let’s hope that Esquire, unlike FHM, actually paid Victoria for her session.

The glory of Pendleton's body, of course, is her magnificent haunches and of all the Esquire pictures this one best captures the power in her upper legs and glutes.

It is good to see, in this Olympic year, that magazine publishers and others are starting to realise that some people find fit, toned women attractive and that to be sexy they don't have to be emaciated sticks.

Triple P likes a girl who packs a bit of muscle.  Perhaps it's something to do with the amount of time he spent admiring lady rowers at college!  Last year Triple P was chatting to a UK national team rower at a charity fun run.  She was wearing lycra shorts and a top and had sculpted shoulders and upper arms, powerful glutes and those bellied rear thighs that rowers have.  Delicious! 

Meanwhile, Victoria has also been seen shaking her lustrous locks for a Pantene shampoo advertisement.  

She’s also been seen promoting EDF Energy in a dress made from wire. At least it’s a better image than Hovis’ bizarre Pendleton-as-Britannia picture.  

Victoria has done a lot of shoots for bread company Hovis, who always seem to find strange things for her to do in their pictures.  They have also had her pose as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and as an angel and devil.   Who knows what they have planned for her next?  The proof of the fact that she has gone mainstream is that they no longer see the need to include a bike in her pictures.

Earlier this year Victoria launched her own range of women’s bikes, including this rather natty retro number, at car accessory and bike retailer Halfords.  She now even has her own retro-cycle company style logo.

The bikes have been a great success; partly because of the popularity of the BBC period drama Call the Midwife which features our baby-delivering heroines setting off for calls on similarly be-basketed bicycles.

We're sorry to see her promoting evil antipodean media magnate Rupert Murdoch but if you are part of British competitive cycling it's hard to avoid, given the huge amount of money Sky are putting into the UK's cycling programme.

This shot is a good one of her thighs, which, sadly, some photographers try to disguise.  It's like hiding Jessica Ennis' stomach.  In our wildest fantasy we would have a naked Pendleton sat astride an equally naked Ennis' midesction and wriggling about whilst we poured Laurent Perrier Rosé Brut over them both (based on a true incident - as the film posters sometimes say - with a couple of Italian ladies in the eighties).

She even manages to look good in the slightly odd- judo-style team uniform she modelled a few weeks ago.  Triple P is worried, however, that like Jessica Ennis, the ladies are spending far too much time in photo shoots and not enough time training.  We are concerned that the pressure of home expectations may get too much for some of our Olympic favourites.  Hopefully our pessimism will be proved wrong!  This is the picture we want to see again!

You have read this article cycling / Girls in the news / Olympics / People we like / sport with the title People we like. You can bookmark this page URL https://sarareinke.blogspot.com/2012/07/victoria-pendleton-in-esqure.html. Thanks!

Happy Birthday Darcey Bussell!

Darcey never looked comfortable vamping it up

Triple P likes a good ballerina and few were as good as the gorgeous Darcey Bussell.  She was electrifying when we saw her at Cobent garden a few years ago.   Darcey is 43 today and was announced as the new judge on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing two days ago.

In her element

Triple P thinks Darcey is a wonderful dancer but is slightly worried about her appearing as a judge on Strictly.  She needs to realise that any technical comments have to play second fiddle to an appropriately theatrical performance to not be eclipsed by Craig, Len and Bruno; none of whom are exactly quiet personalities.  Arlene Philips held her own as she was as over the top as the rest of them and Darcey will need to do something special to avoid looking dull.  Personally, much as we love Darcey, we think Karen Hardy would have been a better choice.

Hope she proves us wrong!  Happy Birthday Darcey!

You have read this article Babes. Calendar girls / Girls in the news / People we like / TV with the title People we like. You can bookmark this page URL https://sarareinke.blogspot.com/2012/04/happy-birthday-darcey-bussell.html. Thanks!

Another Gold for Victoria Pendleton

Varnish (front) and Pendleton go for it!

Agent Triple P's favourite cyclist, Victoria Pendleton, won another gold medal yesterday in the UCI World Cup team sprint, along with Jess Varnish who produced the ride of her life to power the duo to a new world record. 

Unexpectedly beating the hitherto invincible Australians it was one of two gold medals for Britain's womens squad last night as the team pursuit trio beat the Canadians.

Vicki in full flight

 

This was the first event in Britain's new 6,000 seater Olympic velodrome and it augers well for the main event in August this year, especially as Pendleton has said she has had trouble motivating herself, lately.

Pendleton continues to model regularly although is surprised that she keeps being asked as she claims retouchers have to do so much work on removing her scars.  One of her crashes was so nasty she actually stopped breathing for a while.

The seat of her power

She got in trouble for posing for this picture for a session for the Evening Standard last year, enraging (probably flabby) feminists.  She doesn't seem to care much for the feminist cycling sorority however, thank goodness.

Congratulations Vicki!

You have read this article Babes / cycling / People we like / sport with the title People we like. You can bookmark this page URL https://sarareinke.blogspot.com/2012/02/another-gold-for-victoria-pendleton.html. Thanks!

Fifty years since the first human in space...

Yuri Gagarin on board Vostok 1 April 12th 1961

Agent Triple P was very much a child of the Space Race: the first piece of music we remember was Telstar by the Tornados from 1962 (incidentally the first single by a UK group to make it to number one in America) which celebrated the first AT&T communications satellite of the same name. Even though we were too young to remember it we can’t let this week pass by without noting the achievement of Yuri Gagarin in becoming the first person in space on April 12th 1961.

Gagarin during flight training in 1955

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born on 9th March 1934 in Klushino, west of Moscow. The village was occupied by the Germans during World War 2 and one of his brothers and his sister were taken to Germany and forced to work as slave labourers by the SS, although they both returned home after the war. In 1950 after working as an apprentice at the Lyubertsy Steel Plant in Moscow he was transferred to a technical college in the Volga river port city of Saratov. He joined the local air cadet force and learned to fly, being recommended for the Military Pilot’s School at Orenburg in 1955. He made his first jet flight in 1957 in a MiG-15. Posted to the grim Luostari airbase in Murmansk, nearly 200 miles inside the Arctic circle, when mysterious recruiting teams arrived from Moscow looking for volunteers to fly a new secret craft he and his new wife Valya, who had just given birth to a baby daughter, thought that anything had to be better than Luostari.

The Vostok 1 spacecraft just before the historic flight

 

He found that he had joined the new cosmonaut squad and underwent intensive training. His diminutive size (he was 5’2”) helped in his selection, given the tiny capsule being developed. Eventually the choice as to who would become the first human in space came down to two out of the twenty trainees: Gagarin and Gherman Titov. The authorities thought that Titov was too middle class and as Gagarin’s parents both worked on a collective farm (although they were far from the peasants that the Soviets made out) he got the nod.

Vostok 1 on the launch pad in Kazakhstan

 

On April 12th at 7.10 am Gagarin climbed aboard the tiny spherical Vostok 1 capsule on top of Sergei Korolev’s R-7 launcher. Gagarin’s bravery cannot be in doubt as the launcher had failed on 25 of its 60 preceding flights; not exactly a sure thing!  He literally was going where no man had gone before!

Let's go!

 

After an hour’s delay to re-fit the capsule’s hatch everything proceeded normally, with the cool as a cucumber Gagarin’s heart rate being measured at just 64 beats per minute. Koralev, on the other hand, had to take heart medication as he was having chest pains.

Vostok 1 launch

At 9.07 the engines were ignited and, with a cry of “poyekhali!” (let’s go!) from Gagarin, Vostok 1 was blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome’s Site No 1. Ten minutes later Gagarin became the first human in orbit. In the next hour Gagarin circled the earth moving from East to West and crossing Siberia, the Pacific, the tip of South America, then over Central Africa, Egypt and Turkey.

 

The landing procedure did not go so well and after the rockets fired to begin the descent, over Angola, the service module which was supposed to separate from the capsule remained attached by wires. This affected the stability of the craft and it was only once Vostok 1 was over Egypt that the wires connecting the two parts of the spacecraft burnt through so that the service module was jettisoned and the correct landing pattern was achieved.

 

The capsule after landing

 

As was planned. Gagarin was ejected from the capsule at 7km above the ground and made a separate parachute drop from the capsule. They both came down to earth in the Saratov region, ironically not very far from where he had made his first flight. Gagarin was met by a terrified farmer and his daughter and had to explain that although he had indeed, as they feared, come from outer space he was a Russian like them!

The track made by the Vostok capsule on landing

The authorities soon flew in by helicopter to collect him where he was greeted with a deserved hero's welcome.

Gagarin, still in his flight suit, is greeted by Soviet soldiers

He spent the next few years touring the world as the Soviets felt that he was too valuable a propaganda instrument to risk on another space flight, much to Gagarin’s disgust.  Although he was a popular ambassador, memorably once refusing to sit under an umbrella in an open-top drive in Manchester despite torrential rain so that people could see him, the years on the road took their toll on him. 

Gagarin meets Gina Lollobrigida at the Moscow Film Festival

He turned to alcohol and women to get himself through the long tours away from home and his frustration at being unable to fly again.

Gagarin his wife and Khrushchev read the newspaper accouts of his flight

It was only when Nikita Khrushchev was replaced as premier by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964 that Gagarin was allowed to go back to work; helping out on the new Soyuz spacecraft. Gagarin found a huge number of technical problems in the craft but the KGB wouldn’t let these be reported in case it interfered with the planned launch of Soyuz 1 which was designed to occur on May Day 1967, to celebrate 50 years since the Russian Revolution. Soyuz 1 took off as scheduled but the parachute system on the capsule failed on re-entry resulting in the death of Gagarin’s friend, cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov.

MiG-15UTI

 

Gagarin was determined to get back into space although Komarov’s death meant that the authorities had essentially banned any possibility of this. In order to improve his flight reflexes, however, Gagarin started training flights again. It was on one of these, in badly deteriorating weather, on 27th March 1968 that he and his instructor Vladimir Seryogin flying a two seater MiG-15UTI had a fatal crash. The exact causes are still unknown but an official enquiry, whose documents were only declassified in 2003, believed Gagarin had made a rapid movement in the plane; possibly to avoid a weather balloon.

Celebrations at the monument marking the landing point of Vostok 1 on April 12th 2011

Yuri Gagarin was only thirty-four years old when he died but his achievement will live on forever.

Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968) First Human in Space: April 12th 1968

You have read this article People we like / Rockets with the title People we like. You can bookmark this page URL https://sarareinke.blogspot.com/2011/04/fifty-years-since-first-human-in-space.html. Thanks!

Sir George Shearing (1919-2011)

George Shearing photographed by Bruno of Hollywood (who was, incidentally, father of Playboy Playmate of the Month for December 1966, Susan Bernard!)

Another musical hero gone yesterday in the person of Sir George Shearing, one of the very last great jazz pianists from the immediate post-War period.

Battersea born Shearing was the son of a coalman (Triple P is old enough to remember coalmen delivering weekly sacks of coal to his house when he was small) and was blind since birth.  He started to learn the piano at the age of three and by the time he was eighteen was already recording and performing on BBC radio having started performed in pubs in London at the age of sixteen.  He turned down the chance to continue his formal music studies at university.

During the Second World War he teamed up with violonist Stéphane Grappelli, who had escaped to London from occupied France.  He recorded with Grapelli again in 1976 on his album The Reunion.

He moved to the US in 1947 and became a US citizen ten years later.  He formed his  quintet in 1949 which added a vibraphone to the usual piano, bass, drums and guitar.  Shearing's distinctive style was influenced by the Glenn Miller Orchestra's reed section, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy and Frederick Delius amongst others.  Coming in at the end of the frantic be-bop era he was instrumental in ushering in the more reflective "cool jazz" of the fifties. The classical nature of much of his playing leant itself to backing by a full orchestra as well as his work with smaller ensembles.

He also worked with a number of singers over his long career, such as Mel Tormé, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole.  Shearing's work with Cole on Nat King Cole sings/George Shearing Plays, especially one of Triple P's all time favourites, Let There be Love is a marvel of delicacy and laid back phrasing.

Shearing was also a composer of around 300 pieces, notably the standard Lullaby of Birdland (Birdland was a New York Jazz club) which he claimed took ten minutes to write.  At his 80th birthday celebration concert at Carnegie Hall in 1999 he introduced it by telling the audience: “I have been credited with writing 300 songs. Two hundred ninety-nine enjoyed a bumpy ride from relative obscurity to total oblivion. Here is the other one.”  Dave Brubeck, a close friend, also performed at that event and is now really the last of the great jazz pianists, who started in that period in the thirties and forties, at the age of ninety.

Shearing became the first naturalised US citizen to be knighted, by the Queen, in 2007.

He continued performing well into his eighties and, indeed, Agent Triple P saw him perfom in Toronto some years ago.

You have read this article Music / People we like with the title People we like. You can bookmark this page URL https://sarareinke.blogspot.com/2011/02/sir-george-shearing-1919-2011.html. Thanks!

Rick Wakeman!

Agent Triple P was just coming out of HMV near Bond Street Tube yesterday and who should be wandering along the street but Rick Wakeman!  Triple P was very excited and had to forcibly restrain himself from saying something to the keyboard wizard! 

Rick Wakeman's White Rock was the very first non-classical record we bought, in 1977.  We also really like Criminal Record (his best album in Triple P's opinion) and Rhapsodies but are less keen on his vocal works (King Arthur, The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Journey to the Centre of the Earth, for example, despite them being his best known pieces).

White Rock, Criminal Record and Rhapsodies are no longer available as the record company that issued them. A&M, was bought out in 1998 and the current owners have no intention of re-releasing them, although some tracks from all three are available on his Voyage, compilation.  After long searches, that in the case of White Rock totalled nearly two decades, Triple P managed to get official Japanese issues of the CDs mainly, we seem to recall, from the much missed Sam the Record Man store on Toronto's Yonge Street.

You have read this article Music / People we like with the title People we like. You can bookmark this page URL https://sarareinke.blogspot.com/2011/02/rick-wakeman.html. Thanks!

John Barry 1933-2011

John Barry composed the soundtrack to many of the better parts of Agent Triple P's life.  He had been unwell for some time and had ceased to conduct or compose but he is still an enormous loss to the world of music and not just film music.

Rather than re-hash his life, as the many obituaries are doing at present, Triple P would just like to present his favourite pieces from his recorded output, starting, of course, with the Bond films.

Probably no-one will ever no now how much of the James Bond theme was Barry and how much was Monty Norman.  Certainly the part played by Vic Flick on the guitar was Norman as it was based on a song he wrote for a musical but it is of course, all about the arrangement and that, at the minimum, was Barry.

From Russia with Love is first real Bond soundtrack and still one of the best although in many ways atypical, partly because he was still finding the formula.  Nevertheless, there is some wonderfully atmospheric music here.  The title song was entirely composed by Lionel Bart as Barry didn't feel confident to write a big song at that point.  Barry's arrangement of Bart's song in Guitar lament is quite haunting and then leads into Man overboard with its single timpani note and soaring strings over a pizzicato background.  James Bond with bongos is also one of the better versions of the theme used in the films.  Agent Triple P was in Istanbul last week and had this soundtrack on his iPod a lot!

With Goldfinger Barry found his stride and this was the composer's own favourite Bond score. This time he did compose the music to the classic Main title.  Actually, more of a favourite of Triple P's is the swaggering big band Into Miami tune which depicts the aerial opening shots of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.  Triple P had this playing when he arrived at the Fontainebleau a couple of years ago!   Alpine drive is a cool and glossy rendition of the main theme which some fifteen years or so we had on our walkman as we drove up the very mountain pass in Switzerland which Bond and Goldfinger drive up. The final Triple P pick from this score is Bond back in action again; the very best use of the theme in the whole series of films.

Thunderball is, we have to confess, our least favourite of the early Barry Bond scores as there is far too much tedious music to accompany all the equally tedious underwater action.  However, it does introduce the first piece of slinky Barry Bond cocktail music in the superbly lush Cafe Martinique; a Henry Mancini-type arrangement of Barry's Mr Kiss Kiss, Bang, Bang theme.  This piece has a permanent place on Triple P's cocktail playlist which he plays in hotels around the world whilst getting ready for dinner; hopefully whilst accompanied by an attractive companion sipping Champagne, as we manged last week in the Pera Palace.  Another even more Mancini like piece is the slinky arrangement of Thunderball that follows on the album.  A final favourite on this soundtrack is Death of Fiona; another arrangement of Mr Kiss Kiss, Bang, Bang with groovy bongos, muted brass and a nice simple bass underpinning building to a frantic crescendo as the unfortunate Fiona is dealt with and then returning to its initial sound to indicate that no-one has noticed anything untoward.

You Only Live Twice contains some marvellous music not least the title track You Only Live Twice with its cascading strings and Nancy Sinatra providing one of the best title themes of the series.  The instrumental version Mountains and Sunsets is a standout too. Capsule in Space is another highlight and, indeed, Barry would use the same approach for another space theme in Diamonds are Forever.  Finally for this soundtrack Fight at Kobe Dock shows how different Barry's approach to scoring action cues was from his contemporaries.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service saw a new approach for a new Bond with On Her Majesty's Secret Service being a successful and unusual orchestral title track.  Journey to Blofeld's hideaway introduces an appropriately Alpine vibe; maybe its all the Richard Strauss like brass.  The cocktail highlight of the score is the utterly gorgeous Try.  Indeed it is the best cocktail piece Barry ever wrote, beginning with bass and twinned piano and vibraphone before introducing some of the slinkiest strings he ever produced (which is saying something).   This album also includes the worst Barry Bond track Do you know how Chistmas trees are Grown?  It has bells and a kiddie choir. Far too much exposure to Lionel Bart!  Horrendous!

Next we have Diamonds are Forever which is Triple P's all time favourite Bond score.  Again this is rather atypical and Barry uses some musical effects that were unique to this soundtrack; in particular the use of flutes and piccolos.   Diamonds are Forever itself is one of the strongest title songs in the series.  Death at the Whyte House is probably the best sustained slow action piece that Barry wrote; with a ground bass backing flutes and brass.  Tiffany Case is the soundtrack's big cocktail piece.  Another Triple P pre-dinner favourite!  007 and Counting is a good re-working of the space theme from You Only Live Twice.  Airport Source is a tenor saxophone led piece that makes far more impact  than its short appearance in the film would normally allow.  The Whyte House is a Triple P favourite when tooling about Las Vegas and sounds like the theme tune to a seventies TV show.  Nearly every piece in this soundtrack is worth listening to.

Probably the last reasonable Barry Bond score was for Moonraker, with a good Main Title and the rather effective Bond lured to pyramid.  Flight into space adds to the trio of good "space" pieces Barry produced for Bond films. The Man with the Golden Gun wasn't really classic Barry and nor were Octopussy, A View to a Kill or The Living Daylights.

In part two we will look at the best bits from his non-Bond music.

You have read this article Music / People we like / Record covers with the title People we like. You can bookmark this page URL https://sarareinke.blogspot.com/2011/02/john-barry-1933-2011.html. Thanks!