The Second Serve // Harry Palms

Sources have been leaking to the papers that Adele’s decision to postpone her Vegas residency might have as much to do with the huge fights she was having with her design and production team as it does with some of her crew coming down with Covid.

One detail we haven’t yet seen in the press suggests the design element Adele was most unhappy with was a giant pool in the middle of the stage that would fill and empty for various songs. Adele supposedly hated it, with her response to seeing it filled and emptied being: “I ain’t getting in no empty pond and I ain’t doing the whole show in water.”

It has since been scrapped, but there’s currently nothing to fill the big wet hole it’s left behind.

The tie-in gift shop managed to open right on schedule though, selling plenty of marked-up Adele merchandise. Which is lucky, because one of the other things that’s apparently been tossed from the show is a graphics package that cost an estimated million to put together. So they could do with the cash…

One theory that’s gathering momentum with viewers of The Masked Singer is that Panda is Natalie Imbruglia. One clue dropped on Saturday’s episode was that Panda’s life started going in “one direction” before changing (possibly alluding to her career as a soap star before turning to pop). Then she sang 1D’s “Story Of My Life”.

Social media sleuths reckon it’s a bit of a nod to the fact that Natalie was a guest judge on X Factor the series that the band was formed. But longtime Popbitch readers will know that she has a much closer connection to One Direction than that.

A few years after they got big, she gave Harry Styles a tuggie at James Corden’s wedding.

tinhouse writes:
“I worked a little on post production for some of the Pavarotti and Friends concerts and it seemed like the atmosphere for those, on the musical side at least, was often really quite poisonous and Meat Loaf fell foul worse than most.

“When Mr Loaf came to duet on Come Back to Sorrento, he realised that he needed some help and hired a vocal coach to train him to hit all the notes so he wouldn’t look a fool next to a classically trained tenor. It clearly worked because, intimidated by Loaf’s ace performance in rehearsal, Pav made an assistant sit up all night transcribing the entire orchestral score up a tone.

“Having effectively learned the part by rote, Meat Loaf had no chance to adapt his vocal to the new key and you can hear how badly he wavered to try and hit the right pitch. Still, he outlived Pav by 15 years, so who had the last laugh?”

One of the better tributes going around about Meat Loaf this weekend was the snippet from an old Guardian profile where Meat described a time he was chatting with Fergie (the Duchess Of York one) and Prince Andrew tried to push him into a moat. Meat immediately grabbed him, intending to toss the Duke into the moat himself, when Andrew got all pissy about it saying, “You can’t touch me. I’m royal.”

It’s no huge surprise to hear that Prince Andrew is exactly the sort of prick to pull rank like that, but another story we heard this week shows he doesn’t always have such respect for pecking orders…

A writes:
“Prince Andrew was in the same Royal Navy squadron as my father. They were the same rank. On arrival in the officers’ mess, my father went over to introduce himself to his new brother officer. Disdaining to shake my father’s extended hand, he looked dad up and down and said ‘Someone doesn’t know their place,’ before turning his back.”

Online conservative pundits are facing a bit of a crossroads at the minute, currently divided on the matter of which fledgling Free Speech social media platform to get behind and build into a serious competitor for Twitter.

Parler has been trying to boost its profile in the UK this month and improve its image after the platform rather unhelpfully became synonymous with the January 6th attack last year. It’s a tricky thing to shake off but the current CEO, George Farmer, has all the right credentials to do it. The Brexiteer son of a Lord, George married Candace Owens in 2019. At the wedding, the couple served Trump wine, Nigel Farage gave the toast and guests were all given MAGA hats.

Parler’s competition? Gettr: headed up by ex-Trump advisor Jason Miller. You may remember Miller as Trump’s first pick to be White House comms director, until it was revealed that he was having a baby with a fellow Trump staffer around the same time he was also having his second child with his wife. He’s spent the last few weeks chumming up to Laurence Fox on Twitter and giving interviews with Julia Hartley Brewer to get his name about a bit on these shores.

He’s got his work cut out for him rehabilitating Gettr’s profile too though. When it launched last summer, it got off to a slightly unfortunate start when ISIS decided to sign up for accounts – and started flooding the site with extremist jihadi memes promoting violence against the West.

With whispers this transfer window of Erling Haaland’s dad trying to help broker a £100m transfer to Man Utd, and Lionel Messi’s dad Jorge most famous for getting his son a suspended prison sentence over a €4m tax fraud, it’s nice to remember a time when footballers’ dads operated on a different level altogether.

Former Arsenal player Perry Groves told the Sunday Times yesterday about his struggles to get into the professional game – and how his dad, Ginge, was by his side the whole way.

As a kid, Groves thought he was on the verge of signing with Peterborough United, until their manager Peter Morris told him that the whole thing was off. He didn’t think Groves was as good as he’d been led to believe and there was no way the club would be signing him.

To which Groves’ dad countered, “You’re talking out of your arse”, reached over Morris’s desk and grabbed him around the throat.

Needless to say, Perry didn’t sign for Peterborough.

Last week’s audio quizzes involved songs with dance moves, swearword titles and movie soundtracks; this week promises another 50 tracks all smushed up into a series of daily quizzes for you.

They update automatically at midnight each weekday, and today’s theme is: Kind Of Blue.

[Play it here]

Q&A with Sharleen Spiteri, ft. anecdotes about Paris Hilton, Clint Eastwood and Wu-Tang Clan
[Read on Guardian]

The latest Wordle variation: Double Wordle – or ‘Dordle’
[Play two games concurrently]

A supercut of songs that stop when the singer says “Stop”
[Watch on YouTube]

There’s a four-part Bill Cosby series coming soon
[Watch on YouTube]