late January, 2005
- Tsunami Charity Single Tipped as Instant No 1
By Anita Singh
(Scotsman, January 23, 2005)
A charity single in aid of the tsunami victims is being released tomorrow and is tipped to go straight to number one. Grief Never Grows Old is written by former DJ Mike Read and features Sir Cliff Richard, Bee Gees Robin and Barry Gibb, Boy George and Brian Wilson. ... The single looks likely to end Elvis Presley's record-breaking run at the top of the charts he has occupied the top spot for the past three weeks with three different songs. Grief Never Grows Old will only need to sell around 30,000 copies to knock Elvis off the top.
- Teen Singer Keeps Elvis from Top of British Charts
(Yahoo! News / Reuters, January 23, 2005)
Elvis Presley has stumbled in his attempt to score a run of consecutive British No. 1's after his 1959 hit "A Fool Such As I" only reached second place, according to sales data from the Official UK Charts Company Sunday. The late King of Rock 'n' Roll was beaten to the top spot by an 18-year-old American R&B singer, Ciara Harris.
- R&B star halts Elvis chart reign: Ciara has already taken the song into the US Billboard top three
(BBC News, January 23, 2005)
R&B newcomer Ciara has prevented Elvis Presley from scoring a record three consecutive number one singles with three different songs. Her single Goodies went straight to number one while Presley's re-released A Fool Such As I entered at two. All 18 of Presley's UK chart-toppers are being re-released to mark what would have been his 70th year. ... Record company Sony BMG are reissuing Presley's hits as limited release singles, with fans eager to buy all 18 to fill a collector's box that went on sale in the first week. Last week Presley's One Night became the 1,000th number one single in UK chart history.
- Teen Singer Keeps Elvis from Top of British Charts
(Yahoo! News / Reuters, January 23, 2005)
Elvis Presley has stumbled in his attempt to score a run of consecutive British No. 1's after his 1959 hit "A Fool Such As I" only reached second place, according to sales data from the Official UK Charts Company Sunday. The late King of Rock 'n' Roll was beaten to the top spot by an 18-year-old American R&B singer, Ciara Harris.
Presley's record company is reissuing 18 former UK No. 1's over consecutive weeks to mark the 70th anniversary of his birth, and had topped the charts the previous two weeks with successive re-releases of "Jailhouse Rock" and "One Night." ...
- Elvis Presley Scores A Hat Trick
By Paul Cashmere
(Undercover, January 23, 2005)
Elvis Presley has clocked up his third number one single in as many weeks this week in the UK. Elvis' 'A Fool Such As I' will replace his 'One Night' at number one which replaced his 'Jailhouse Rock' just one week ago.
'A Fool Such As I' will then become the 1001st number one single in the UK since charts began in 1952. Elvis therefore has the 999th, 1000th and 1001st number one singles. The momentum is being driven by a Sony-BMG campaign to promote what would have been the 70th birthday of Elvis this month. The King's domination may not end here either. Sony-BMG will release all of Elvis' eighteen number one hits in the UK this year.
- Oreana collector suffers a cute frog fever
By TONY REID
(Herald & Review, January 23, 2005)
Elvis Presley, no doubt underappreciated for his philosophical insights, has nevertheless caught the mood of rampant frog collector Sharon Ferrill. She also happens to love Elvis and has The King on the CD player singing "That's all right Mama, that's all right with you," which neatly sums up Ferrill's approach to living life her way and indulging herself in the ferocious pursuit of frog knickknacks.
Her vast collection of whimsical ceramic, plastic, shell, fabric, concrete, wood, glass and quartz amphibians fills up every nook and cranny in the 19th-century farmhouse she lives in near Oreana. She's made some room for Orville, her husband, but pretty much everyplace else is wall to wall frog. ...
- ElviCities is strictly for the Elvis Presley webmaster. The idea created by Jordan Ritchie is another first in the Elvis world
(i-newswire.com, January 23, 2005)
Jordan, who is the webmaster of an Elvis site himself - Jordan's Elvis World (www.jordans-elvis-world.com is now offering free and paid hosting. The free plan includes a generous 50mb of space with unlimited data transfer as well as a free @elvicities.com web-mail account. The paid hosting ranges anywhere from 300mb of space to 650mb of space. Again with unlimited transfer as well as numerous POP/SMTP email accounts, as well as other addons. See website for details. So again, if you are an Elvis webmaster who already has a site, and are tired of your current host - or a new webmaster wanting to start your own Elvis Presley website, look no further. ElviCities is the answer! All pages are hosted on a dedicated server with 1GB of RAM, large hard drives, and a fast connection to the network. There is security knowing that the system has 99.9% uptime, Guaranteed. Visit http://www.elvicities.com/index.html for more details.
- Chicago Tryout of All Shook Up Ends Jan. 23; Broadway Beckons Feb. 20
By Kenneth Jones
(playbill.com, January 23, 2005)
The company of the Broadway-bound musical All Shook Up packs its bags in Chicago Jan. 23 and prepares to come to Broadway after lessons learned in its Windy City tryout. Following fine-tuning at Chicago's Cadillac Palace Theatre (Dec. 19-Jan. 23) the new Joe DiPietro-Christopher Ashley musical All Shook Up returns to New York rehearsals and has a first preview Feb. 20 at the Palace Theatre on Broadway. Opening night on Broadway is March 24.
The Chicago run offered audiences there DiPietro's original plot about a leather-jacketed stranger (played by Cheyenne Jackson) who shakes up a dull Eisenhower-era American town ‹ all to the music made famous by Elvis Presley. (The musical direction and arrangements are by Stephen Oremus, who might be considered one of the stars of the show.) At the start of the Chicago run, the score overflowed with songs by many writers that Elvis made rich: "Blue Suede Shoes," "That's All Right, Mama," "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Jailhouse Rock," "Heartbreak Hotel" and more. ... What the producers want you to know, foremost, is that All Shook Up is not a biography about Elvis Presley. The King isn't a character in this original musical fairy tale that's in the tradition of Shakespeare's As You Like It, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Like lovers opening their eyes to surprising love, it's about a town awakening to romance and possibility - with music being the alarm clock.
Those who thought the new show was only about songs made popular by Elvis will be surprised to learn that Shakespearean comedies also inspired the show's plot, an original tale packed with romantic yearnings, mismatched partners, deception and disguise. Although All Shook Up is set in the middle-America of 1955 - the period when Elvis emerged - the musical's characters and plot twists conjure the sparring lovers and surprise couplings of The Bard of Avon. "In Joe's first draft was the idea of Shakespeare together with Elvis, which is the first thing that was really interesting to me," said Ashley, who was Tony Award-nominated for directing The Rocky Horror Show. "In it is the idea that if the girl can't get the guy she wants, maybe she should dress like a guy to be his buddy and see what happens..." ...
- Elvis has left the markets: Stocks are off to their worst start since 1977
By DANIEL DUNAIEF
(New York Daily News, January 22, 2005)
The Dow's had its first three-week losing streak to start a year since 1977. That could be bad news for investors: in 1977, the index dropped 17%. Stocks have limped so far this year to the worst losing streak since 1977, and some investors are wondering whether it's time to look out for even worse on the horizon. The Dow finished out its third straight losing week, the worst beginning for the market in 28 years when Jimmy Carter was sworn in as president, Elvis was still alive in Graceland and long before Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Fed. ...
- She Wears My Ring star dies
(edinburghnews.scotsman.com, January 22, 2005)
AMERICAN singer Solomon King - famous for She Wears My Ring - has died at the age of 73, it was announced today. King, who worked with Elvis Presley's backing group, The Jordanaires, was suffering from cancer and died yesterday in Oklahoma. ...
- Women share hunk of burning love for the king
By Gary Demuth
(The Salina Journal / AP, January 22, 2005)
The first time Mary Settle heard Elvis Presley sing on the radio, she was, as Elvis once put it, "All Shook Up." The 13-year-old from Rogers, Ark., had never heard a singer like Elvis before - a powerful, soulful voice who brought a raw, emotive power to soon-to-be classic songs like "That's All Right," "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and "Good Rockin' Tonight." This was the summer of 1954, when Elvis recorded his first songs at Sun Records in Memphis, Tenn. Long before he was anointed the "king of rock 'n' roll" and made his first television appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show," the former truck driver from Tupelo, Miss., performed at small clubs and concert halls in the south, including nearby Little Rock, Ark. Settle begged her mother to let her attend a concert, but her mother refused. Elvis already was notorious for his hip-swinging gyrations, and Settle's mother wasn't about to let her sweet, innocent daughter "watch something from the devil," Settle said. "It broke my heart, but my mom's words did not stop me from listening to him," said Settle, now 62 and living in rural Assaria. "I baby-sat and bought every record and album that hit the stores. I loved him the first time I heard him sing, and I love him just as much today." Settle has remained a loyal Elvis fan for 50 years and has devoted a small bedroom at her home to Elvis memorabilia. This includes posters, books, movies, framed photographs, bedspreads, pillows, lamps, purses, a life-size cardboard cutout and a model reproduction of Graceland, Elvis's Memphis home.
Settle may be a fanatical Elvis fan, but there are countless others like her around the world. An international fan-based organization called Elvis Meet-up currently boasts 5,697 members in 353 groups that includes New York, London, Belfast, Sydney, Vancouver, Singapore and Budapest. Each group, coordinated through the official Elvis Web site, http://www.elvis.com, generally meets on the first Tuesday of each month. The Salina-area meet-up was formed four months ago. Members gather at a local restaurant, which is decorated in a 1950s motif that includes a hip-swiveling Elvis in the front window. So far, there only are six members, all women, but Settle is convinced there are many more fans in the area. This January's meet-up was especially important to Settle - on Jan. 8, Elvis, who died in 1977 at age 42, would have turned 70. "I think if Elvis were alive today, he'd still be singing and his voice would still be beautiful," said Settle, who paid tribute to the king by decorating several tables at Spangles with balloons, birthday napkins and a homemade coconut cake. "While Elvis's mother was alive, she made him a coconut cake everyday," Settle said. ...
- CBS pushing Elvis during sweeps
(Zap2it.Com, January 22, 2005)
That old Mojo Nixon song "Elvis Is Everywhere" will apply to CBS during a week of May sweeps. The network has scheduled its four-hour miniseries "Elvis," starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers ("Bend It Like Beckham") as Elvis Presley, for May 8 and 11. On May 13, a new, two-hour special called "Elvis by the Presleys" and featuring interviews with Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley, will debut.
- Volatile times in a struggle between good and bad
By Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
(Financial Times, January 21, 2005)
The British singles charts don't provide many water-cooler moments any more. But recently there have been two - first the dire Band Aid remake and now the race for the 1,000th ever number one, which was won this week by the King himself, Elvis Presley. The Italian-American crooner Al Martino achieved the first UK number one in 1952, when the charts began, with his song "Here in My Heart". In 1982 the 500th was reached, the honour falling to the German Eurovision winner Nicole's "A Little Peace".
Elvis's beyond-the grave snatching of the 1,000th number one follows a canny marketing campaign by his record company, which is re-releasing all his UK hit singles to tie in with the 70th anniversary of his birth. Last week he topped the charts with "Jailhouse Rock", the 999th number one. This week it is "One Night", which originally came out in 1959. Elvis's main rivals for the 1000th number one were the Manic Street Preachers with their dreadful, pompous song "Empty Souls". It fell short and will leave no mark on posterity: for that, we can breathe a sigh of relief.
Nonetheless this wasn't the epic tussle between good and bad that the most memorable races for number one provided in the past, such as when the singing actors Robson and Jerome kept Pulp's "Common People" off the top spot with their wretched cover of "Unchained Melody" in 1995. On that occasion, the forces of evil triumphed. This time the better song won, though it is hard to raise a cheer. In fact it is more likely to induce gloom, for the presence of the long- dead King back at number one says a lot about the moribund nature of the top 40. ... This sense of loss, and Elvis's return to the charts, highlight the curious place pop music currently finds itself in. Despite its reputation for youthfulness and ephemerality, it is in fact more than ever suffused with nostalgia. Storm-tossed by unpredictable new technology, its past seems much more simple and appealing than its future. We mourn dying formats such as the single by harking back to a lost age when we held our breath each week during the chart countdown. We welcome new guitar bands that sound exactly like old ones. We knowingly revive past decades, as in the case of Band Aid and the 1980s. For rock'n'roll's founding father to get the 1,000th number one is at once appropriate and depressing: it's a measure of how lost we are in pop's history.
- TOTP books emergency impersonator for Elvis hit
By Daniel Farey-Jones
(Brand Republic, January 21, 2005)
LONDON - Unable to use video footage of Elvis Presley on tonight's 'Top of the Pops' (TOTP), BBC producers have booked an Elvis impersonator to sing the number one single 'One Night', the UK's 1,000th chart-topper. Producers scouted Mario Kombou, the star of Elvis musical 'Jailhouse Rock', to help with their problem. They were unable to secure the rights to use video footage of The King. A 'Top of the Pops' spokesman said: "It's a very special number one as it's the UK's 1,000th. We wanted to pay tribute to Elvis in the best way we know how, so we thought getting a professional would be the best way for 'Top of the Pops' to do that." Last week, 'Top of the Pops' used still pictures of Elvis to accompany his number one 'Jailhouse Rock'. 'Jailhouse Rock' and 'One Night' are the first two of 18 early Elvis UK number ones to be released by SonyBMG over the next few months. The copyright protection on his early songs is expiring, because copyright on sound recordings lasts 50 years after the recording was made. However, the two singles have set new lows for sales, with 'Jailhouse Rock' notching up only 21,262 copies to hit the top spot and 'One Night' just 20,463 copies The BBC said that Kombou is likely to appear on 'Top of the Pops' again next week because the next Presley re-release, 'A Fool Such as I', is on course to give him his third number one in three weeks.
If you have an opinion on this or any other issue raised on Brand Republic, join the debate in the Forum here.
- Name Game: Elvis to Presley
By David McIntyre
(BBC, January 21, 2005)
This week's name game features the one and only Elvis Presley, whose song 'One Night' is at the top of the charts. We want you to come up with six steps between Fulham striker Elvis Hammond and basketball coach Jim Presley. Here is our effort. Can you do better? Send in your attempts using the form on the right. ...
See Tim Casara's site for the truth about the Apacheland Elvis Chapel described in the article below.
- It's now or never: Group hopes to preserve 'Elvis Memorial Chapel'
By Alia Beard Rau
(Arizona Republic, January 20, 2005)
The faded white clapboard chapel at Apacheland Movie Ranch stirs visions of movies star cowboys, gunfights and dusty Western towns. But the only battle it faces now is the one residents are fighting to preserve this little piece of Hollywood tucked into the Superstition Mountains. Apacheland was built east of Apache Junction, near Gold Canyon, in 1960 to attract filmmakers. A bearded Elvis Presley started in the 1969 movie Charro! which was filmed at Apacheland. The set was used often in the TV show Death Valley Days, which featured Ronald Reagan and ran from 1962-1975. Two fires and a waning interest from Hollywood convinced owners Ed and Sue Birmingham to sell the property to residential developers last year. Nearby residents are trying to raise $30,000 to relocate the chapel, which they call the Elvis Presley Memorial Chapel, and the barn to the Superstition Mountain Museum nearby. The barn and the chapel are the only two original buildings to survive both the 1969 and the 2004 fires. ...
- Elvis fans are no fools
(Edinburgh Evening News, January 19, 2005)
ELVIS PRESLEY is set to break another record this Sunday by scoring his third number one in as many weeks. The re-release of A Fool Such As I is outselling closest rival The Chemical Brothers by three to one. It would become the 1001st number one in chart history and give Presley his 21st chart-topper. Presley is currently holding the top spot with the 1000th number one, One Night. The week before he topped the chart with Jailhouse Rock. And Presley fans have been out in force since Monday buying up copies of One Night, which was originally released on April 24, in 1959. Each of the King's 18 chart-toppers is being re-released to mark what would have been his 70th year.
- Elvis 'set for chart hat-trick': Elvis Presley's 18 original UK number ones are being re-released
(BBC News, January 19, 2005)
The late US legend Elvis Presley is likely to score his third UK number one single in three weeks on Sunday, according to early sales figures. The king of rock 'n' roll has already had consecutive chart-toppers with Jailhouse Rock and One Night. A Fool Such As I, the next in a series of 18 reissues, is on course to beat the Chemical Brothers to the top. But his next single, It's Now Or Never, will face a challenge from tsunami charity single Grief Never Grows Old. Sir Cliff Richard, Russell Watson, Boy George, Bill Wyman and members of the Bee Gees, the Beach Boys, America and the Eagles are expected to feature on the charity song. ...
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