BARBARA Orbison was married for 20 years to the American rock'n'roll legend Roy, so the pronounced German accent on the telephone is a bit of a surprise.
Since Orbison's death in December 1988, however, Barbara Annemarie Wellhonen Jakobs-Orbison (born 1951 in Bielefeld, Germany) has kept the flame very much alive.
"I don't have to do anything," says the music producer and publisher. "It's an i
ncredible legacy."
However, Mrs Orbison likes to keep herself busy: she recently produced a book, Only the Lonely: The Roy Orbison Story, and tonight she will preside at a major Orbison birthday shindig in London.
Artists performing their own take on Orbison classics such as Oh, Pretty Woman and Crying include Norway's Tone Damli Aaberge, made famous by Norwegian Idol, Robin Gibb's son Spencer and the Scottish songwriting duo of Simon Reid and Louise Stanners.
The pair, who met studying popular music at Edinburgh Napier University, have done a version of You're the One. "I don't know them, but I listened to their audition and loved it," says Mrs Orbison.
Snack snob snubs?MUTTERINGS of no-shows at the Glasgow Art Fair? The programme claims galleries from Barcelona to Stonehaven, but notable by their absence this year are London gallery owner Rebecca Hossack, a regular of several years' standing, as well as classy Glasgow gallerists Roger Billcliffe and Ewan Mundy, and almost everyone from Edinburgh's healthy gallery scene.
The capital's one representative in sight yesterday was Ricky Demarco. He's a big fan of the Glasgow fair, having sold £65,000 worth of art there in the past three years, and 78 of his own watercolours and drawings last year.
For 2009, he's armed with a collection including a nice line up of Peter Howson sketches and prints. "The fair should be supported by everyone," he says. "Four to five years ago all the Edinburgh galleries were supporting it."
"I don't know the reason they are not here," says director Pete Irvine. "They did not apply. May be it's an Edinburgh-Glasgow thing."
A gallery source in Edinburgh blames "a low level of interest, and ultimately, sales". The art fair throws a good party, he says, but the Edinburgh crowd always knew they had to be on that 11pm train. Several galleries also withdrew with wrinkled noses, it is said, after Twiglets were served at one bash…
Burning legal issueSOMERSET'S eccentric hotelier Mark Miller plans an auction with a difference at his Glencot House hotel this June. In his Burning Art Festival, which he claims he will film for the Turner Prize, any art that doesn't meet its reserve price will be tossed on the bonfire.
The trouble is that a proprietorial letter has now arrived from the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, warning him to change the name.
Lets just hope Edinburgh's Beltane Fire Festival isn't a party to the suit – or the Wickerman Festival in Dumfries and Galloway, which has burned a few men of its own.
