Vinnie Pasquantino homered and drove in three runs, Bobby Witt Jr. had four hits and the Kansas City Royals beat the Angels 9-4 on Thursday night.
Michael Lorenzen (7-11) gave up two earned runs and five hits with a season-high nine strikeouts and no walks in 5⅔ innings for the Royals.
Jo Adell, Nolan Schanuel and Mike Trout each homered for the Angels (71-88). Trout’s two-run shot — his 23rd of the season and 401st of his career — cut Kansas City’s lead to 5-4 in the eighth.
However, the Royals (80-79) scored four in the top of the ninth, a rally highlighted by Salvador Perez’s two-out, three-run double off Angels reliever Sam Bachman, to pull away.
Mitch Farris (1-3) gave up four earned runs and five hits in five innings, striking out five and walking two, for the Angels, who have lost 11 of 13 games.
Pasquantino’s team-leading 32nd homer, a two-run shot to right field in the first, gave him a team-high 110 RBIs on the season. Adell pulled the Angels to 2-1 in the second with his team-high 37th homer.
Pasquantino had a run-scoring fielder’s choice in the third and Witt had an RBI double in the fifth to push the lead to 5-1.
Schanuel’s solo shot in the sixth brought the Angels back within two, but Adam Frazier’s pinch-hit RBI single in the eight made it 5-2.
Key moment: Bachman was one strike away from escaping a bases-loaded jam in the ninth, but Perez hit a drive off the base of the center-field wall for his game-breaking hit.
Key stat: The Angels struck out 13 times, bringing their major league-leading total to 1,603 — tied for fourth-most in major league history. With three games left, the Angels are 51 shy of Minnesota’s single-season record of 1,654 strikeouts, set in 2023.
Up next: Angels RHP Kyle Hendricks (8-10, 4.79 ERA) will start against Astros RHP Jason Alexander (4-2, 4.83 ERA) at home on Friday.
TOKYO — When Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone powered though the final curve of the 400-meter final at world championships, she glanced to her right and saw something that hadn’t been there in a while.
Another runner.
She had a race on her hands.
The best way to explain how McLaughlin-Levrone became the first woman in nearly 40 years to crack the all-but-unscalable 48-second mark in the 400 is that the opponent she beat Thursday night on a rain-glistened track in Tokyo, Marileidy Paulino, broke 48 seconds, too.
“You don’t run something like that without amazing women pushing you to it,” McLaughlin-Levrone said.
The final numbers in this one: McLaughlin-Levrone 47.78 seconds. Paulino 47.98.
They are the second and third fastest times in history, short only of the 47.60 by East Germany’s Marita Koch, set Oct. 6, 1985 — one of the last vestiges from an Eastern Bloc doping system that was exposed years after it ended, but too late for the records to be stripped from the books.
McLaughlin-Levrone, who stepped away from hurdles to see what she might be able to do in the 400 flat, said she was every bit as focused on winning the title in a new event as going after a record that had always been thought unapproachable.
American Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone reacts after winning gold medal in the women’s 400 meters final at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo on Thursday.
(Eugene Hoshiko / Associated Press)
And Paulino, the reigning Olympic and world champion in this event, wasn’t just going to give it away.
This was an even race, the likes of which McLaughlin-Levrone hadn’t been part of in at least three years in the hurdles, as the runners rounded the stretch. McLaughlin-Levrone opened a gap of about four body lengths with 30 meters left, but Paulino was actually gaining ground when they both lunged into the finish line.
“At the end of the day, this wasn’t my title to hold onto, it was mine to gain,” McLaughlin-Levrone said. “Bobby uses boxing terms all the time. He said, ’You’ve got to go out there and take the belt. It’s not yours. You’ve got to go earn it.’”
Bobby is Bobby Kersee, the wizardly coach who helped transform McLaughlin-Levrone into the greatest female hurdler ever and might be doing the same in the 400. Brutal training sessions with one-time UCLA quarter-miler Willington Wright were part of the regimen.
“I felt that somebody was going to have to run 47-something to win this,” Kersee told The Associated Press. “She trained for it. She took on the challenge, took on the risk. She’s just an amazing athlete that I can have no complaints about.”
As the times came up on the scoreboard, the crowd roared. The enormity of the moment wasn’t lost on anyone.
Nobody had come within a half-second of Koch’s mark until this race. Third-place finisher Salwa Eid Nasar clocked 48.19, a time that would have won the last two world championships.
“It’s just amazing what the 400 has become the last couple years,” said Britain’s Amber Anning, who finished fifth in 49.36. “I love it, it makes me want to step up my game. To see it done, it gives hope to us that anything’s possible in the 4.”
Paulino, meanwhile, was more focused on her unique place in history than not winning the race.
“I’m thankful for having the opportunity to break 48,” she said. “I still feel like a winner. I’ve spent five years every day training for this.”
McLaughlin-Levrone took up the 400 flat in 2023, but injuries derailed her run at a world championship that year. She focused on hurdles last year for her second Olympic gold medal in the event, then came back to the flat for 2025.
When she ran 48.29 in the semifinal, she broke a 19-year-old American record and said she still felt she had “something left in the tank.”
Then, with a push from Paulino, she let it loose.
“Today was a really great race for track and field, and I’m grateful to put myself in position to bring an exciting event to our sport,” McLaughlin-Levrone said.
It’s still an open question as to whether she will stick around in this race long enough to go after Koch’s record, or return to the hurdles, where the number “50” hangs out there much like “48” did in the race she won Thursday night.
Nobody had thought much about 50 seconds in hurdles until McLaughlin-Levrone started breaking the record in that event on a semi-regular basis. Four years ago at the Olympics, she lowered it to 51.46 in the empty stadium in Tokyo.
American Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone crosses the finish line, winning the women’s 400 meters final at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo on Thursday.
(David J. Phillip / Associated Press)
She broke it three more times and then, in Paris last year, took it down by another .28 seconds to 50.37.
Over time, those races became mere matters of McLaughlin-Levrone against the clock.
This time, something different — a bona fide showdown for the gold medal that knocked down a once-unthinkable barrier in racing.
Whatever McLaughlin-Levrone’s next move is, it’s bound to be fast.
“I think, now, 47 tells her that she can break 50,” Kersee said. “Knowing her, she’s probably going back to the hurdles and try to take what she learned now in the quarter(-mile) and try to execute a plan to run 49.99 or better.”
Millie Bobby Brown and Jake Bongiovi have started a family, welcoming their first child a year after they tied the knot.
“Stranger Things” star Brown and Bongiovi (son of singer Jon Bon Jovi) announced in a joint Instagram post shared Thursday that they had adopted “our sweet baby girl” over the summer. The young pair — Brown is 21 and Bongiovi is 23 — did not share additional information about their little one. Their post also featured a drawing of a willow tree.
“We are beyond excited to embark on this beautiful next chapter of parenthood in both peace and privacy,” the couple said, adding, “And then there were 3.”
Brown, who famously broke out in 2016 for her portrayal of the telekinetic Eleven in Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” has hit a number of personal milestones in the time between the series’ fourth season in 2022 and its fifth and final chapter, which will touch down later this year.
The British “Enola Holmes” and “Electric State” actor reportedly struck up a romance with fellow actor Bongiovi over social media in 2021, and they got engaged in April 2023. A year later, Bon Jovi confirmed rumors about his son and Brown’s wedding, telling BBC’s “The One Show” it was an intimate affair and that his son “is as happy as can be.”
The couple also had a second ceremony in Tuscany in September, according to Vanity Fair. Brown later confirmed her marriage to Bongiovi, sharing in October several photos from that luxurious event.
In the years since her Netflix debut, Brown has also turned her focus to her studies, other business ventures — including her makeup and clothing lines — and running her own farm in Georgia, which also serves as an animal rescue. Bongiovi, on the other hand, made his acting debut in 2024 with the film “Rockbottom” and is set to appear in the upcoming film “Poetic License,” according to IMDb.
Brown enters motherhood as she prepares to close a chapter that defined most of her teen years. Netflix will release the final episodes of “Stranger Things” in three batches: the first on Nov. 26, the second on Christmas and the finale episode on New Year’s Eve.
“I am nowhere near ready to leave you guys,” Brown told her “Stranger Things” crew and cast in a video shared in December. “I love each and every one one of you and I’ll forever carry the memories and bonds we’ve created together as a family.”
It seems Brown will now also have the comfort of her baby girl when that grand finale comes around.
Fifty years ago, L.A. free-jazz titan Bobby Bradford moved into a rambling, verdant house in Altadena. The cornet and trumpet virtuoso, who performed in Ornette Coleman’s band and taught jazz history at Pomona College and Pasadena City College for decades, chose the neighborhood partly because it was bustling with artists. He finally had enough bedrooms for his young family to thrive in a bucolic corner of the city with deep Black roots.
In January, Bradford’s house burned down in the Eaton fire, alongside thousands of others in his cherished Altadena. At 91, he never imagined starting his life over again in tiny rented apartments, with decades of memories in cinders.
Despite it all, he’s still playing music. (He said that while he did not receive grants from major organizations such as MusiCares or Sweet Relief, a GoFundMe and others efforts by fellow musicians helped him replace his cherished horn.)
At the Hammer Museum on Thursday, he’ll revisit “Stealin’ Home,” a 2019 suite of original compositions inspired by his lifelong hero — the baseball legend and Dodgers’ color-line-breaker Jackie Robinson, a man who knew about persevering through sudden, unrelenting adversity.
“That’s all I have left,” Bradford said, pulling his horn out of its case to practice for the afternoon. “I’m [91] years old. I don’t have years to wait around to rebuild.”
For now, Bradford lives a small back house on a quiet Pasadena residential street. It’s his and his wife’s fifth temporary residence since the Eaton fire, and they’ve done their best to make it a home. Bradford hung up vintage posters from old European jazz festivals and corralled enough equipment together to peaceably write music in the garage.
Still, he misses his home in Altadena — both the physical neighborhood where he’d run into friends at the post office and the dream of Altadena, where working artists and multigenerational families could live next to nature at the edge of Los Angeles.
“We knew who all the musicians were. Even if we didn’t spent much time all together, it did feel like one big community,” Bradford said. “We knew players for the L.A. Phil, painters, dancers.”
L.A.-based jazz composer/musician Bobby Bradford plays the cornet while rehearsing his original composition in his Altadena home in 2019.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
These days, there’s a weariness in his eyes and gait, understandable after such a profound disruption in the twilight of his life. He’s grateful that smaller local institutions have stepped up to provide places for him to practice his craft, even as insurance companies dragged him through a morass. “The company said they won’t insure me again because because I filed a claim on my house,” he said, bewildered. “How is that my fault?”
But he draws resilience from his recent music, which evokes the gigantic accomplishments and withering abuse Robinson faced as the first Black player in Major League Baseball. As a child in 1947, Bradford remembers listening to the moment Robinson took the field, and while he has always admired the feat, his understanding of Robinson has evolved with age.
“It was such a revelation to me as a kid, but later I was more interested in who the person was that would agree to be the sacrificial lamb,” Bradford said. “How do you turn that into flesh-and-blood music? I began to think about him being called up, with a kind of call-and-response in the music.”
The challenge Bradford gave himself — evoking Robinson’s grace on the field and fears off it — caps a long career of adapting his art form to reflect and challenge the culture around him.
With Coleman’s band in the ’50s and ’60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures. He played on Coleman’s 1972 LP “Science Fiction,” alongside Indian vocalist Asha Puthli. “Ornette played with so much raw feeling,” Bradford said. “He showed me how the same note could be completely different if you played it in a different chord. I had to learn that to play his songs.” His longstanding collaboration with clarinetist John Carter set the template for post-bop in L.A., charged with possibility but lyrical and yearning.
American jazz trumpeter Bobby Bradford performs onstage circa 1980.
(David Redfern / Redferns)
He’s equally proud of his decades in academia, introducing young students to centuries of the Black American music that culminated in jazz, and the new ways of being that emerged from it. At both Pomona College and Pasadena City College (where Robinson attended and honed his athletic prowess), Bradford helped his students inhabit the double consciousness required of Black artists to survive, invent and advance their art forms in America — from slavery’s field songs to Southern sacred music, to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and into the wilds of modernity.
“You always had that one kid who thinks he knows more about this than I do,” he said with a laugh. “But then you make him understand that to get to this new Black identity, you have to understand what Louis Armstrong had to overcome, how he had to perform in certain ways in front of white people, so he could create this music.”
He’s been rehearsing with a mix of older and younger local musicians at Healing Force of the Universe, a beloved Pasadena record store and venue that reminds him of the makeshift jazz club he owned near Pasadena’s Ice House in the ’70s.
Places like that are on edge in L.A. these days. Local clubs such as ETA and the Blue Whale (where Bradford recorded a live album in 2018) have closed or faced hard times postpandemic. Others, like the new Blue Note in Hollywood, have big aspirations. He’s hopeful L.A. jazz — ever an improvisational art form — will survive and thrive even after the loss of a neighborhood like Altadena displaced so many artists. “I remember someone coming into our club in the ’70s and saying he hated the music we were playing. I asked him what he didn’t like about it, and he said, ‘Well, everything.’ I told him, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for you then,’” Bradford laughed. “You can’t live in Los Angeles without that spirit. There are always going to be new places to play.”
Bobby Bradford rehearses in Pasadena.
(Michael Rowe / For The Times)
He’s worried about the country, though, as many once-settled questions about who belongs in America are called into doubt under the current president. January’s wildfires proved to him, very intimately, that the most fixed points in one’s life and community are vulnerable.
Even Jackie Robinson, whose feats seemed an indisputable point of pride for all Americans, had his military career temporarily scrubbed from government websites in a recent purge against allegedly “woke” history.
“I thought we had rowed ourselves across the River Jordan,” Bradford said, shaking his head. “But now we’re back on the other side again. We thought we had arrived.”
Who knows how many years of performing Bradford has left. But as the sound of his melancholy horn arced through a sweltering Pasadena afternoon, one couldn’t help but be grateful to still have him here playing, even after losing everything.
“You know, in his first game, in three times at bat, Jackie Robinson didn’t get a hit,” he said. “Folks said, ‘Oh, it’s so sad. We told you he couldn’t play on a professional level.’ But when you dig into it, you discover that he didn’t get a hit at the game, but he laid down a sacrifice to score the winning run.”
Bobby Whitlock, the keyboardist, singer-songwriter and co-founder of the blues-rock group Derek and the Dominos, has died. He was 77.
In a statement, his manager, Carole Kaye, said, “With profound sadness, the family of Bobby Whitlock announces his passing at 1:20 a.m. on Aug. 10 after a brief illness. He passed in his home in Texas, surrounded by family.”
Although Derek and the Dominos is perhaps best known for launching singer and guitarist Eric Clapton into solo superstardom, Whitlock was a key contributor to the group’s 1970 debut “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” and an influential session musician and singer-songwriter in his own right.
Whitlock was born March 18, 1948, into a poverty-stricken early life in Millington, Tenn., a suburb of Memphis. His keyboard and piano skills, formed around Southern church traditions, led him to eavesdropping on sessions at Stax Records’ studios, which took notice of his uncommonly soulful musicianship. Stax Records signed him to its new pop-focused imprint HIP — he was the first white artist to join singers like Otis Redding and Sam & Dave at the label group.
His major breakthrough came when he was asked to join Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, an acclaimed rock-soul combo whose collaborators included generationally important artists like Duane and Gregg Allman, Leon Russell, George Harrison and Clapton.
Delaney & Bonnie and Friends took Whitlock on tour with Clapton’s supergroup, Blind Faith, and Clapton used much of that band’s lineup to record his 1970 solo debut. He later asked Whitlock to join him in a new combo (with bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon), assembled to back Harrison on “All Things Must Pass,” which became Derek and the Dominos.
“The empathy amongst all the musicians outcropped most noticeably in Bobby Whitlock, in whom Eric found an accomplished and sympathetic songwriting partner and back-up vocalist,” Clapton biographer Harry Shapiro wrote in “Eric Clapton: Lost in the Blues.”
On “Layla,” the group’s sole studio LP, Whitlock wrote or co-wrote half of the album’s songs, including “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Tell the Truth.” A U.S. tour featured opener Elton John, who wrote in his autobiography that, among the Dominos, “it was their keyboard player Bobby Whitlock that I watched like a hawk. He was from Memphis, learned his craft hanging around Stax Studios and played with that soulful, deep Southern gospel feel.”
While the band’s drug use and personal tensions eventually led to a split, Whitlock released his self-titled solo debut in 1972 and “Raw Velvet,” a follow-up that same year. As a session musician, he played on the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.” and Dr. John’s “The Sun, Moon & Herbs.”
He continued releasing solo material through the ’70s, returning in the ’90s and often collaborating with his wife and musical partner CoCo Carmel.
“How do you express in but a few words the grandness of one man who came from abject poverty in the south to heights unimagined in such a short time,” Carmel said in a statement to The Times. “My love Bobby looked at life as an adventure taking me by the hand leading me through a world of wonderment from music to poetry and painting. As he would always say: ‘Life is what you make it, so take it and make it beautiful.’ And he did.”
Whitlock is survived by his wife and children Ashley Faye Brown, Beau Elijah Whitlock and Tim Whitlock Kelly.
PIANIST and co-founder of Derek and the Dominos, Bobby Whitlock, has died at the age 77.
The rock icon died of cancer after a short battle with the illness as his heartbroken wife leads the tributes.
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Bobby Whitlock has passed away after a brief battle with cancerCredit: Getty
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Whitlock was the pianist and co-founder of Derek and the DominosCredit: Getty
His manager, Carole Kaye, confirmed his death this morning saying he died at home in Texas at 1:20am.
The legendary rockstar surrounded by his loved ones when he passed.
More to follow… For the latest news on this story, keep checking back at The U.S. Sun, your go-to destination for the best celebrity news, sports news, real-life stories, jaw-dropping pictures, and must-see videos.
CHICAGO — Bobby Jenks, a two-time All-Star closer and World Series champion with the Chicago White Sox, has died, the team announced Saturday. He was 44.
The White Sox said Jenks died Friday in Sintra, Portugal, where he was being treated for adenocarcinoma, a form of stomach cancer.
Jenks helped the White Sox win the 2005 World Series, saving four games in six appearances during the postseason. He was an All-Star in each of the next two seasons while saving 41 games in 2006 and 40 in 2007.
He retired 41 consecutive batters in 2007, matching a record for a reliever.
“He was embarrassing guys, good hitters, right away,” former White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko said in a video tribute.
Jenks saved 173 games for the White Sox from 2005 to 2010 before finishing his career with 19 appearances in 2011 for the Boston Red Sox. For his career, he was 16-20 with a 3.53 ERA and 351 strikeouts in 348 appearances, all in relief.
“He and his family knew cancer would be his toughest battle, and he will be missed as a husband, father, friend and teammate,” White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf said in a statement. “He will forever hold a special place in all our hearts.”
Jenks began his career with the Angels, who drafted the hard-throwing right-hander in the fifth round of the 2000 amateur draft. He was eventually placed on assignment and picked up by the White Sox.
He is survived by his wife, Eleni Tzitzivacos, their two children, Zeno and Kate, and his four children from a previous marriage, Cuma, Nolan, Rylan and Jackson.
“As a teammate,” said former White Sox outfielder Aaron Rowand, “he was the best.”
Millie Bobby Brown was known for her role as Eleven in Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things which aired in 2016 – but she didn’t make her film debut until 2019
06:00, 19 Jun 2025Updated 06:06, 19 Jun 2025
The sequel to Millie Bobby Brown’s first ever film is airing on TV tonight(Image: Getty Images)
Stranger Things fans can prepare to watch Millie Bobby Brown on screen tonight – in a role worlds away from her portrayal as Eleven on the hit Netflix show.
Millie Bobby Brown rose to fame when she starred in the Netflix phenomenon, although it wasn’t the star’s first TV role. Before that, she had minor roles in television series including Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. However, it was her portrayal of Eleven that significantly boosted her career.
A huge name on TV, Millie didn’t make her film debut until 2019, when she made her feature film debut in in the Godzilla sequel, Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Now, ITV is set to air the sequel to the film, Godzilla vs. Kong, which was released in 2021.
Millie Bobby Brown stars in the 2021 film(Image: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
The movie will air on ITV tomorrow night – with a late start time of 11.45, wrapping up at 1:20am on Friday morning. The feature length film will air straight after the late debate. The film has a run time of 1 hour and 53 minutes, but this will be slightly longer due to the adverts on the channel.
Millie reprised her role as Madison Russell, the daughter of Monarch’s Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) and Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler).
Godzilla vs. Kong is the fourth instalment of the Monsterverse franchise, in which Millie’s character returned.
In the 2021 film, playing on ITV tonight, her character became the main human tied to the Godzilla storyline.
The movie is airing on ITV tonight(Image: WARNER BROS)
However, the Stranger Things star didn’t appear in the fifth instalment Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and her character is not mentioned in the film.
During filming of Godzilla Vs. Kong, Millie’s co-stars Brian Tyree Henry and Julian Dennison opened up about how much fun she was on set.
“In between takes, [we] would literally sing our hearts out. It was a lot of fun,” said Henry. “She also likes to bark,” he told Metro.
“I don’t know if that was like a moment for her, like a period of a time where she was just into barking,” Dennison added. “But she would just bark like before a take, if she needed energy, she would just go, ‘woof, woof, woof, woof,’” he continued, although he revealed he had “seen worse from actors.”
Millie has continued to star on the big screen, with her latest movie, The Electric State released on Netflix earlier this year.
Posting a black and white throwback of himself as a child, Freddy wrote: “You know what I don’t need rehab! I just need a holiday with a good group of boys or a retreat.”
Freddy stunned followers when he opened up about a long-standing smoking addiction and a desire to make peace with his dad after a tense family rift.
In a heartfelt post, he said: “I want to be clean so I can life happily and have healthy relationships with people and be there for all of my family rather then feeling like I’m in the middle and have to choose a side.”
Freddy also shared hopes of mending things with his famous father, saying: “I want to play football and take up boxing. I want to be happy and be in a healthy relationship and have a healthy relationship with my Nana and my father.”
Freddy Brazier reunites with dad Jeff before heading to rehab in Spain amid concern over gran’s ‘harmful’ influence
The former Strictly finalist has become a regular at the Hare Krishna temple in Soho, where he takes part in communal prayers, chants mantras and helps prepare meals.
Friends say Bobby’s interest in spirituality has grown over the past year and is helping him process the lasting impact of losing his mum to cervical cancer in 2009, when he was just five.
A volunteer at the temple told MailOnline: “He’s here every Saturday without fail. He joins our kitchen session, learns the prayers – this isn’t a gimmick.”
A family friend added: “Bobby had a difficult life. His mum dying left a mark on him, as it would.
“Hare Krishna is somewhere he seeks solace. It might seem strange, but for him, it works.”
Last year, The Sun published images of Bobby joining in cha-cha-chanting at a Hare Krishna gathering on Oxford Street, where he was even seen handing out leaflets.
Bobby said of the movement: “I’ve had the blessing of meeting some incredible devotees who have really taken me under the wing and been really merciful upon me.
“And they are just the most beautiful, happy, content, smart, intelligent people.”
Bobby Brazier has risen through the ranks to become a well known face on British TV.
As the son of Jade Goody and Jeff Brazier, he has been well-known amongst the public from a young age.
Bobby first embarked on a showbiz career when he was just 16-years old when he started modelling.
The star made his catwalk debut in 2020 at Milan Fashion Week, but it wasn’t long before he had his eyes on a TV career.
He shot to prominence in 2022 when he was cast as Freddie Slater in EastEnders.
The incredibly acting skills displayed on screen earned him the National Television Award in the ‘Rising Star’ category.
His famous dad was in tears as Bobby accepted the award on stage in front of the likes of Holly Willoughby and Alison Hammond.
It wasn’t long before BBC bosses wanted him to take part in the 21st series of Strictly Come Dancing.
He clearly impressed the viewers with his dancing skills as he made the grand final and was a runner-up.
Since then, viewers were delighted when he returned to his role in the long-running BBC One soap.
An EastEnders spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that Bobby Brazier will be leaving EastEnders, and we wish him all the best for the future.”
A telly insider revealed: “Bosses had a meeting with Bobby only recently as they had a plan in mind for a storyline, and it just so happened that Bobby was also thinking that now was the right time to look for other opportunities outside the show.
“The timing of the decision worked for both, but his final scenes are not for a while yet.
“The character has had a great run, but the time is now right for Bobby to look for other opportunities, and for EastEnders to wave goodbye to Freddie Slater.”
Referee Bobby Madley has said he “hates” the video assistant referee technology in football because it takes the “emotion away” from the game.
Madley officiates matches in the English Football League (EFL) and is a fourth official for Premier League games.
The EFL does not use VAR in regular league games, but it has been employed across matches in England’s top flight since the start of the 2019-20 season.
“As a fan, hate it, hate it. Love the Championship, love League One – I’m still a fan,” said Madley, who was speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival during an event on technology in sport.
“I love League One because you score a goal, you look at the referee, you look at the assistant, he hasn’t put his flag up, it’s a goal.
“It [VAR] takes that emotion away from it and football is a game where there could be one moment in the game, one goal, and that’s it.
“To take that emotion away, to have to wait and wait, and what feels like an eternity, as a fan I’m not a huge fan of that experience.”
Madley refereed 91 Premier League matches between 2013 and 2018 until he was sacked by Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL) after sending a video mocking a disabled person to a friend.
He moved to Norway and officiated in the country’s lower league before accepting an opportunity to return to English football as a National List referee in February 2020.
He took charge of one Premier League game in 2022-23 and another the following season but did not referee a top-flight match in 2024-25.
“There’s so much money in football, it’s business-driven. So any mistake is perceived to cost people money,” added Madley.
“And I don’t think most football fans were clambering over each other to get video technology.
“The players weren’t, the referees weren’t, but the people who run football, they are multimillion-pound and billion-pound people, and they had issues with referees getting things wrong.
“I think we’ve got to the stage where people go, ‘Sorry, we’re ruining football with this now’.
“But we knew the monster that had been created. As referees, we knew what was coming.”
“What a long, strange trip it’s been” for the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir – or Bobby Weir, as he goes by these days.
As Deadheads among you will know, that immortal line comes from one of their best loved songs, Truckin’.
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Legendary Grateful Dead co-founder Bobby Weir, 77, brings a symphonic spin to his music – and he’s finally back on a London stageCredit: Todd Michalek
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Weir with Grateful Dead, including his late soulmate, guitarist Jerry GarciaCredit: Redferns
A Weir co-write with Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and lyricist Robert Hunter, the bluesy, steady-rolling shuffle has been recognised by the United States Library Of Congress as “a national treasure”.
The same accolade applies to Weir himself. It was he who took lead vocals on the song which references a drugs raid at the band’s hotel on Bourbon Street, New Orleans, in 1970.
At 77, he is chief keeper of the Dead’s flame, performing their music as leader of two bands, Dead & Company and Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros.
It is the second of these offshoots that us British Deadheads (yes, I count myself among them) are getting excited about.
On June 21, Weir is heading to the UK for the first time in 22 years, the last time being with another of his post-Dead bands, RatDog.
He and Wolf Bros — Don Was (bass), Jeff Chimenti (piano) and Jay Lane (drums) — are taking to the Royal Albert Hall’s hallowed stage with the 68-piece Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.
They will present reimagined songs from what Weir describes as “the Dead songbook” and a sprinkling of compositions from his solo career.
And that’s the reason why I’m on a video call to one of America’s most intriguing and long-serving musicians.
It’s a fine spring evening in London and an equally balmy lunchtime on the West Coast, where a clear blue sky frames Weir’s distinctive, distinguished features.
‘A sense of being’
His swept-back grey/white hair with matching walrus moustache and beard, as well as his piercing brown eyes, give him the air of one of rock’s elder statesman.
But, before we get stuck into his symphonic London show, it’s time for a Grateful Dead recap.
It’s important to note that they were not just a band but also a way of life.
They fostered unrivalled community spirit, putting themselves and the original Deadheads at the forefront of the counterculture movement in the late Sixties.
They were a rallying point for all those pot-smoking folks with tie-dyed clothes, beaded necklaces, sandals and long hair. They were — to borrow hippie parlance — far out, man!
When I first heard rock and roll, I realised I had something of a calling. I was seven, eight, nine years old when Elvis Presley was a big star. He had an energy about him that I related to.
Being part of a giant family gave the Dead “a sense of being and a sense of purpose”, decides Weir.
At just 16, he had hooked up with Jerry Garcia, five years his senior, in the Californian city of Palo Alto to become the Dead’s youngest founder member, beginning his “long strange trip” playing the band’s music.
“Number one, it’s the only thing I’m equipped to do,” he tells me, choosing his words carefully. “I’m dyslexic in the extreme, so an academic career was never a move on the board for me.
“When I first heard rock and roll, I realised I had something of a calling.
“I was seven, eight, nine years old when Elvis Presley was a big star. He had an energy about him that I related to.
“Soon, there was only one thing I was really interested in — making that kind of music.”
Weir says the arrival in the US of The Beatles, as leaders of the “British Invasion”, also had a profound effect.
“The Beatles looked like they were having a lot of fun — they were bright, they worked well together and their music reflected that.
“It’s pretty apparent that in three or four hundred years, people will still be talking about them. Maybe if we [the Grateful Dead] are lucky, we’ll also make that cut!”
Weir’s imposing rock vocals and richly textured rhythm guitar provided the perfect foil to Garcia’s ethereal delivery and intricate lead guitar.
They conjured up a transcendent fusion of rock, country, jazz, gospel, ragtime, you name it, and were masters of improvisation on extended jams involving tracks such as the epic Dark Star.
Today, Weir admits that never a day goes by when he doesn’t think about Garcia, who died in 1995 aged 53, effectively ending the Grateful Dead (if not live performance of their music).
“Jerry and I were soulmates,” he says. “I did stuff that he didn’t do and he did stuff that I didn’t do. We relied on each other.
“The whole deal was that we would keep doing it for as long as we were having fun — and we did.”
Weir also has bassist Phil Lesh on his mind, a fellow founder member who died last October aged 84.
Back in the day, when we were playing these songs, this [orchestrated sound] is basically what was going on in our heads.
“I’ve thought about him a lot lately and I haven’t come up with any greater clarity other than he was a friend of mine — he taught me a lot and I like to think I taught him a lot.
“He was a musical mentor but, at the same time, my way was not his way. I had to sort the catfish from the trout, as they say, when ideas came up.
“Now, I’m just going to let that all pass.”
It’s a full 60 years since The Grateful Dead formed and 30 since Garcia’s death but Weir is still pushing on by bringing his special concert to the Albert Hall, a venue he’s never played before.
“I’ve only heard about it in songs but I’m looking forward to it for sure,” he says, surely in reference to The Beatles’ A Day In Life with its line, “now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”.
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Jerry Garcia was a founding member of the band Grateful Dead and died in 1995
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Weir pictured with Wolf Bros
The event follows similar outings by Weir in the States and he believes the addition of a full orchestra is not as strange as it seems.
“Back in the day, when we were playing these songs, this [orchestrated sound] is basically what was going on in our heads,” he says.
“We were hearing a much fuller representation than our instruments allowed us to play.
“So, we imagined how songs could sound and we reached for those timbres. This is an opportunity to actually do it.”
For an artist so defined by improvisation, I’m intrigued by the prospect of him playing with an orchestra and all the attendant constraints.
When I mention this, Weir latches on to the theme and says: “This is the point I wanted you to remind me of.
“Right now, we have to stick to a given arrangement. What’s on the paper is what’s going to get played BUT that’s not where we’re taking this.
“What’s afoot is trying to get it so the orchestra can improvise relatively freely.”
‘I’ll need 100 iPads’
Weir explains his plans for a team of “improv leaders” sorted into “various sections of the orchestra with a multiple choice of riffs”.
“I’m probably going to need Apple to give me a hundred iPads to make it work,” he adds with a wry smile.
“But if it works for us, it will work for any of the composers. I’m thinking of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — the start of the second movement. You could employ this kind of thing until hell won’t have it no more!”
Weir returns to matters in hand, namely the Albert Hall show and what the audience can expect — ie the unexpected as is the Grateful Dead way.
He says: “We’ve got a couple of dozen songs orchestrated. Right now, it comes out at roughly five and a half hours of music. We’re already at the point where you don’t know what you’re going to hear.
“That’s how we’ve done things all along and that’s how I intend to go on. That said, there will be new additions for the London performance because they’re up and ready.”
Weir senses that his audience will be open-minded about orchestral arrangements and prepared to “get with it” on this latest sonic adventure.
“This is for the folks who want to hear something that’s a step beyond where it’s been — and this is surely that!” he exclaims.
So, are we likely to see the cosmic Dark Star, which once ran to 43 minutes but usually clocks in at about 20.
“Dark Star is orchestrated,” replies Weir. “I won’t say I’m taking requests but I’ll take it into consideration. We haven’t got there with the setlist yet.”
When I was 15, I decided on a terribly romantic thing to do — run off and be a cowboy.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see if he’ll play his most cherished Dead co-writes — Sugar Magnolia, Playing In The Band, Estimated Prophet, Hell In A Bucket, Throwing Stones or, of course, Truckin’.
While Garcia forged an intuitive songwriting partnership with Robert Hunter, yielding Uncle John’s Band, Ripple, Stella Blue and other classics, Weir fell out with Hunter when creating crowd pleaser One More Saturday Night.
He confesses: “There was a lot of tension because I write lyrics too and Hunter was not real good with that. He liked to play it closer to the vest.”
So Weir turned to his pal, the late John Barlow, for collaborations. “Barlow and I went to school together,” he says. “We grew up together.
“When I was 15, I decided on a terribly romantic thing to do — run off and be a cowboy.
“I worked on Barlow’s parents’ ranch in Wyoming. Over the years, we would live out there in a little log cabin and write.
“And I’ll tell you this — we’re just starting to crack the nut on some of our compositions with the orchestral work.”
In this free-ranging interview, full of unexpected twists and turns, a bit like a Grateful Dead live set, I ask Weir about his early visits to England.
He recalls the 1972 Bickershaw Festival, near Wigan, a doomed venture partly organised by late TV host Jeremy Beadle.
The Dead played a five-hour set to the mud-covered crowd and Weir says: “I remember it well. It was a rainy occasion!”
During that tour of Europe, they also did two nights at Wembley Arena (then called Empire Pool) and a four-night stand at London’s Lyceum.
Weir says they were a band at the peak of its powers, celebrated by the live triple album, Europe ’72.
“We were young and strong but jet lag was a serious business,” he adds. “We took it into consideration in ’72 and held off for a few days.
“But we were in a phase when the band was high and we delivered the goods.”
This year, Weir has also been delivering for Dead & Company (with John Mayer on lead guitar) at the state-of-the-art Sphere in Las Vegas.
The venue projects moving images on to the inside of the huge spherical auditorium but, says Weir, it’s still not fully prepared for the Dead’s freewheeling attitude.
“Mind-blowing as it is, it’s still a work in progress because a great deal of technological development needs to be done before content people can be faster on their feet.
“When that work is done, it’s going to surpass opera in terms of what you can deliver from one stage.”
As for this restless soul Weir, he believes that his musical journey is only just “coming to fruition”.
“It’s been complicated so it was always going to take a while,” he admits. “I’m not sure I totally understand what it is that I’m up to but I have a handle on it now to take the nextsteps forward.”
It seems that this line from Truckin’ could have been written for Bobby Weir.
“Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me.”
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Weir says ‘Jerry (right) and I were soulmates, I did stuff that he didn’t do, and he did stuff that I didn’t do. We relied on each other.Credit: Redferns
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On June 21, Weir is heading to the UK for the first time in 22 years
