by Lydia Wilson

The rock’n'roll world is bracing itself for a hectic round of nappy changing this October – Blur, Oasis and U2 are all expecting babies.

U2’s Bono and his wife Ali have confirmed they are expecting their third child in October, and Oasis bad-boy Liam Gallagher’s wife Patsy Kensit is reported to be expecting their child around the same date. Completing the trio, Damon Albarn’s girlfriend Suzi Winstanley is due to give birth the day before Lethal Weapon star Kensit on October 9.

38-year-old Bono is said to be delighted about the prospect of his family’s new arrival, who will be a brother or sister to Jordan, 10, and Memphis Eve, 8.

His spokeswoman says, “Bono and Ali are expecting another child, and we think it’s due in October. They are delighted, as you’d expect.” She adds, “We don’t know whether it’s a boy or a girl.”

© 1999 WENN. All rights reserved.

Bono plays himself in his first fiction film. U2’s lead singer inspires director Phil Joanou to shoot his own life story.

by Chris Willman

Some people would contend that U2’s Bono is always acting. (And ever since he adopted the wraparound sunglasses and “Fly” persona, he might not disagree.) Nevertheless, his official onscreen thespian debut is a supporting part — as himself! — in director Phil Joanou’s “Entropy,” which premiered this past weekend as the L.A. Independent Film Festival’s opening-night-gala attraction.

Joanou’s most famous feat remains the 10-year-old U2 concert film “Rattle & Hum,” though his subsequent credits include conventional pictures such as “State of Grace” and “Heaven’s Prisoners.” Says Joanou of Bono, “He’s my toughest critic and one of my best friends. This guy loves nothing more than to kick the s— out of me on a regular basis.” The singer had some advice for the auteur a couple of years ago: “His take was, ‘Being a director-for-hire is like covering other people’s songs, which is great, but they’re not your songs. Write your own song.”‘ Read the rest of this entry »

Will a hit be put out on U2 this fall for their crime of teaming up with Salman Rushdie — the noted author condemned to death by Iran’s Ayatollah for his “blasphemous” novel “The Satanic Verses”?

Speaking yesterday at upstate New York’s Bard College on the eve of the release of his new novel “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” Rushdie said the cause-championing Irish rockers have put music to a lyric he’s written into his new book and will include the completed song in the next U2 album, due in September.

According to our spy (Bard-attending daughter Hilary), who sat in on the lecture, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” is a told-in-flashback saga of India’s top female rock star, who’s been killed in an earthquake, her surviving husband (also a musician) and a photographer.

Evidently, not every musician sent an advance of Rushdie’s book was as impressed as U2. “Madonna put her copy in a shredding machine,” Rushdie told the students. “I was hoping to sticker the cover, ‘As shredded by Madonna,’ but we were advised not to.” No sense getting her spiritual followers in an uproar, too.

Rushdie, who still travels on the sly with a phalanx of security guards, made his Bard appearance with only a few hours of advance notice, and still packed the university auditorium. Doubtless other stops on his book-publicizing tour will be just as cautiously undertaken.

© 1999 Philadelphia Daily News. All rights reserved.

Everyone wore black, and many wore long, tapered gunslinger’s jackets as they paid sartorial tribute, as much as anything else, to Johnny Cash in a concert at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Tuesday night.

Until the last minute it was an open question whether Cash himself would perform. In 1997 Shy-Drager syndrome, a neurological disorder related to Parkinson’s disease, was diagnosed, and Cash, 67, has been absent from stages for 19 months.

The advertisements for the concert, which was taped for a TNT “Masters Series” special, did not indicate that he would attend, and no reference was made to his impending appearance during the two-and-a-half-hour proceedings.

Antithetical to the haunted, solitary nature of Cash’s songs, the production was nearly as Hollywood as New York gets. Actor Jon Voight was the host, and introductions were read off a prompter by Kevin Bacon and Tim Robbins. Read the rest of this entry »