Brett Anderson will celebrate his 46th birthday on stage tonight at the AsiaWorld-Expo alongside his skinny indie band mates and in front of his adoring Hong Kong fans. The androgynous Anderson stirred controversy in the British music press even before his band, Suede, had released an album, infamously “confessing” that he was “a bisexual man who had never had a homosexual experience”. In 1994, Anderson and Suede’s original guitarist, Bernard Butler, reunited as The Tears, the name taken from a line in a poem by Philip Larkin …
The witty Australian broadcaster, who once described Arnold Schwarzenegger as a “brown condom filled with walnuts”, continues to battle against chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and admitted in an interview last year that the disease had “beaten him”. The 73-yearold writer, who also has emphysema and can’t leave his adopted home, Britain, because of ongoing hospital treatment, recently penned Holding Court, a deeply moving poem in which he comes to terms with his fate, reflects on his life and regrets betraying his wife. This year, James published his translation of La Comedia, the poetic masterpiece of Durante degli Alighieri …