Damon

DAMON ALBARN has found the woman to drag him off his very own melancholy hill.

The Blur frontman’s 25-year relationship with Suzi Winstanley ended four years ago, but now I’m told he has been secretly dating long-time Gorillaz collaborator Rebecca Freckleton for almost a year.

And now, things have got more serious, as pals say the couple are shacked up in his London pad.

My exclusive photos show that Damon and Rebecca are absolutely smitten, and I’m told they’ve been inseparable for months.

I first heard whispers about their relationship late last year, with friends telling me Rebecca and Damon’s friendship was moving to the next level.

Over the past few months, the pair have been seen together in public on a handful of occasions.

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“Damon and Rebecca are in love and their friends couldn’t be happier for them,” one insider told me.

“After his split from Suzi in 2022, Damon took some time to find himself again. It was a few years later he started to grow closer to Rebecca.

“They’ve been seeing each other for almost a year now.

“He’s got a place in London and she’s there all the time with him.

“She’s been seen out walking his dog, too. They make a lovely couple and it’s been great to see Damon so happy again.”

I first revealed Damon and Suzi, the mother of his daughter, Missy, had split three years ago.

The pair ended their relationship in 2022, with friends revealing the news early the following year.

Damon, who wrote On Melancholy Hill for Gorillaz album Plastic Beach in 2010, poured his heartbreak into Blur’s comeback album, The Ballad Of Darren, which came out in 2023 and went straight to No1.

And he had the same success with Gorillaz’s latest record, The Mountain, which hit the top spot in the album chart back in March.

Rebecca was on board for that project and sang backing vocals on their track, The Empty Dream.

Damon certainly won’t have any of those with Rebecca by his side.

Ayda now inactive

WHEN one door closes, another opens – and that’s exactly what’s happened to Robbie Williams and his wife Ayda Field.

After he launched new clothing line Hopeium last week, hers, Ayda Activewear, was put on ice.

Former Loose Women panellist Ayda debuted her range of cool athleisure clobber back in 2022 and it was initially a big success – but things became more tricky.

A source said: “The market is fiercely competitive and while Ayda Activewear did take off, business has been tough recently.

“The way the markets are, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for brands like this to operate.

“Naturally she hopes one day she could open it back up, but only time will tell.”

Shoppers visiting Ayda’s website are now greeted with a message blaming “sizeable tariffs and overall economic uncertainty” for a “pause” in trading.

In a personal note, she wrote: “I envisioned clothes that were ready to reflect and tackle the chaos of my life and make me feel f***ing fantastic while doing it. Thanks to you all, I got to do just that.

“It’s been an absolute pleasure and I thank you so much for the enduring support. For now we’re hitting the pause button but don’t worry – we’re still stretching and dreaming . . .  and wearing leggings every damn day.”

Amen to that, Ayda.

SAM SMITH says they have never been as proud of an album as new record, Hazel Eyes.

The LP came out yesterday and is reminiscent of their 2014 debut, In The Lonely Hour. It is all about falling in love with fashion designer Christian Cowan.

Sam, who confirmed their engagement last month, said: “I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of myself or an album.

“This album will always mark one of the most magical, confronting, happiest and challenging times of my life as a person and an artist.”

Sam will play two nights at Manchester’s Albert Hall on September 3 and 4 before kicking off an eight-night residency at the London Coliseum on September 8.

NETFLIX has snapped up the rights to a documentary all about US singer and actress Jessica Simpson.

The project will be headed up by Joe Pearlman, who directed Robbie Williams’ 2023 series on the platform.

Jessica found fame as a pop star in the early noughties alongside Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, with hits like I Wanna Love You Forever, With You, and a cover of These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.

She’s since sold 20 million records and had a high profile marriage, and divorce, to American singer-songwriter Nick Lachey.

CELEBRITY Big Brother star Danny Beard may wear wigs in his drag shows, but he wants everyone to know the importance of hair care.

The performer is the new face of the Method haircare brand – creating a full dance video to show off his not-so-natural locks.

Apparently, 71 per cent of us say freshly washed hair has a positive effect on our mood.

To be fair to Danny, I also perform a full choreographed dance routine in the shower.

Pixie: I’ll do Marilyn proud

PIXIE LOTT arrived in style for the press night of her new West End show, Who Killed Marilyn?, in a white Cadillac.

She wore a slinky pink, white and gold dress for the event at London’s Emerald Theatre and told how she hopes to show the real person behind Marilyn’s Hollywood alter-ego.

Pixie, who posed for pics with husband Oliver Cheshire, said of the play: “Marilyn was the character she created, but this is more from her Norma Jeane side. It’s her telling her own story, right from the beginning, right up until the end.

“ I was always aware of obviously the very glamorous Hollywood icon side and maybe more of her vulnerable side and fragile side, but not this strength and the intelligence – that side of her that hasn’t really been spoken about.”

Shaggy’s 007 heaven

SHAGGY lived up to his name when he got hitched at the GoldenEye resort in Jamaica – where Ian Fleming wrote James Bond – by intimating he got frisky on the author’s desk.

The It Wasn’t Me singer, who married wife Rebecca in 2014, admitted: “It’s a magical desk. I did a different kind of magic on the desk – but we’re not going to talk about that.”

On Alan Carr’s travel podcast Life’s A Beach, Shaggy also said one of the best things about being a celeb is never complaining.

“I just have someone complain for me,” he said. “I’m famous. I can do that.”

Some claim new MJ biopic is a cover-up

MICHAEL JACKSON’s biopic sequel will explore the sexual abuse allegations made against the late King of Pop, but won’t tell it from the victims’ side.

The Smooth Criminal singer’s nephew Jafaar Jackson, played him in the first film, Michael, which came out this year and made more than $1billion at the box office.

He has said the follow-up will be from MJ’s point of view. But that has already ruffled feathers among people who believe it will skate over the serious allegations.

Jafaar told GQ Middle East: “The second film will give more insight from his point of view, because [the allegations] are always from someone else’s.

“It’s someone else’s story . . .  and it’s mainly driven by an agenda. That’s the issue we have as a family – not having Michael’s voice heard. That is very important.”

There are high hopes for the sequel, after the first movie became the highest-grossing biopic and has sent Jacko’s greatest hits album back up the charts.

In the spirit of Zeus’ law to be generous toward guests, I’m honored to welcome classics professor Emily Wilson to the land of film criticism. As she’s recently learned, it’s an adventure that sails smack into islands of musky internet trolls and clashes with cinematic and literary titans like Christopher Nolan and Joyce Carol Oates.

Nolan credits the opening line of Wilson’s 2017 translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” — “Tell me about a complicated man” — as partly inspiring his adaptation of the ancient epic, which, nearly a month into its release, is soldiering toward a billion-dollar box office gross. Symbiotically, Wilson’s edition is now the No. 2 bestselling book in the country. That Wilson’s incendiary essay in the London Review of Books revealed she doesn’t think much of Nolan’s blockbuster struck some as hubris, including Oates, who took to social media to decry the scholar’s “tone of dismissal” and “haughty superiority.”

If you haven’t been following the controversy, Wilson felt that Nolan had flattened the saga by mostly erasing the Greek gods and Odysseus’ wit, lust and thorny contradictions. Oates likened the tone of Wilson’s critique to the “crude language of MAGA folks.” In short: Wilson snuck a 2,700-year-old poem through the gates of mainstream taste — and after that victory, her arrogance left her marooned.

Sounds familiar if you’ve read Homer. Less so if you’ve only seen the film. Wilson is right that Nolan’s movie lacks Odysseus’ egomaniacal brilliance.

I’m here to play peacemaker. Wilson adores Odysseus so much that she has his bow tattooed on her right leg. Frankly, Nolan doesn’t seem to like the wily, libidinous and violent trickster-veteran of the poem — half Rhett Butler, half Rambo in “First Blood” — as much as Wilson or I do. Because if he did, that Odysseus would be onscreen.

But having seen his movie twice, it’s obvious that Nolan is less interested in Wilson’s first line than her fifth: “Tell the old story for our modern times.” That, he’s done. His take on Homer is, as I wrote in my original review, “a moralistic ‘Oppenheimer’ prequel.” For the record, I like it anyway.

Film critics and translators start work in the same place. Step one: What is the artist’s intent? Wilson considered the entirety of Homer’s tale and decided the right word for polytropos was “complicated.” I weighed what Nolan chose to protect, tweak and abandon in his own version and concluded that he wanted to make an action-tragedy about societal decline.

Movies must be measured against their own ambitions. A stoner comedy can’t be graded like a Shakespearean drama (and vice versa). Here’s where Wilson runs aground. She wants to allow Nolan creative freedom, knowing that the Greek playwrights rebooted figures like Odysseus and Medea just like Marvel treats Spider-Man. There’s even a spinoff of the original poem in which Odysseus has kids with Circe.

Yet, storytellers have to protect the core of their characters. Medea must be angry, Spider-Man must be helpful and Odysseus, dang it, must have swagger. Damon doesn’t.

This is why Wilson deserves empathy even if she can’t bring herself to grant Nolan the same grace. As a professor of classics at the University of Pennsylvania, she’ll be on the front line of academics condemned to unteach Nolan’s heavily altered screenplay to students who will arrive quoting it chapter and verse. For decades to come, high school kids — probably even a few high school teachers — are just going to pop in his Blu-ray and call it a day.

Nolan does hit his target, eventually. Yet his script wobbles. He’s made a movie about Odysseus’ remorse for inventing the Trojan horse without a crucial scene: the moment he invents it. We see Odysseus silently stroll the beach outside Troy, but not the pride he must have felt running back to base to pitch an idea that will finish the war and let his allies go home. The emotional arc Nolan wants to trace should start there. The beat’s absence is confounding since Odysseus also needs to appear clever (and never does).

This is what it means to measure a film against its ambitions. Only after we accept that Nolan is solely interested in human mistakes can we gauge his disregard for the Greek gods. I dig that choice — it’s bold — yet still think he flubs it by not replacing the magical powers of Charlize Theron’s Calypso and Zendaya’s Athena with, say, a personality. What a waste of two terrific actors. It’s no wonder Oates stuck up for him. Her novel “Blonde” also stripped the agency from love goddess Marilyn Monroe and its own 2022 movie adaptation launched a thousand hot takes.

There will never be a faithful modern film version of “The Odyssey.” No, not even whatever AI slop Elon Musk claims he’s green-lighted, a project I’m sure will come to fruition as fast as his any-year-now claim that he’s landing on Mars.

The issue isn’t just the poem’s length. It’s that today’s audiences have zero stomach for happy endings about horrible wrongs. We can barely rationalize the slaughter of the suitors. No one wants to watch Homer’s gory scene after that, when Telemachus cruelly orders a dozen enslaved girls to clean up the mess and then executes them too.

Only a seven-and-a-half hour Italian miniseries produced by Dino de Laurentiis in 1968 dares mention that second bloodbath and even in that, the women are hung offscreen after we’ve been assured (fictitiously) that the maids tried to kill them first. (Side note: Dino’s Penelope, played by the mighty Irene Papas, is my favorite.)

Previous movie adaptations of “The Odyssey” soft-pedal or ignore the hero’s postwar PTSD. You catch a glimpse of it in the two-part NBC special from 1997 in which Armand Assante’s Odysseus rescues a Trojan toddler. But mainly, he spends more time hot-tubbing with Vanessa Williams’ Calypso.

That’s not a knock. The ’90s “Odyssey” is as tacky as Caesars Palace but Assante’s smooth-talking horndog is closer to my ideal Odysseus than Damon’s neutered mope. He sleeps with both Calypso and Circe and still earns his tender reunion with Penelope by choosing her beloved wrinkles over those gods’ immortal perfection. (For what it’s worth, Oates is a fan of it too. Wilson has yet to comment.)

Only the two most recent versions — Nolan’s and Uberto Pasolini’s 2024 “The Return,” starring a sinewy Ralph Fiennes — center on Odysseus’ culpability for the carnage of the Trojan War. Damon’s Odysseus is numbed by the massacre of Troy’s civilians; Fiennes’ hates himself for leading the best men of Ithaca to their death, gutting his own community in the heedless destruction of another. I’m tempted to diagnose the current gloom as the result of our own post-9/11 forever wars.

The 21st century has seen enough genocide for Homer to compose a hundred sequels. Only those stubbornly ignorant to the human cost of actual combat would be psyched to bring on more of it. (Just ask the veterans in my family how they feel things are going in Iran.) At the end of “The Return,” when Fiennes stands entrail-smeared before his beloved Penelope, she recoils from the horror of the battlefield brought right into their home.

That interpretation has its flaws too. The middle stretch has a concocted outdoor chase sequence that feels like a clumsy campground slasher. Wilson applauded its “stylish sparseness.” Fair enough. I’d still love to invite her and Nolan and even Oates to a banquet of wine and roasted fowl and have a blast agreeing to disagree. No weapons allowed.