#catherine shepherd

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

Have you seen The Hunt for Tony Blair (2011)?

Yes

No

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Voting ended onJan 29

[torchlitinthedesert]

Prompted by this post from @comradesummers and @mending-up-your-fences, I looked up the Beatle bits in Brandi Carlile’s autobiography, Broken Horses. I’d been meaning to post them, and @underthecitysky’s post reminded me!

In 2009, Brandi started a charity campaign:

All the way over in England, a woman named Catherine Shepherd would read this story in an online newspaper. Catherine had been living and working in London for Sir Paul McCartney for ten years. She started out as his PA but left to travel through Africa and Asia and volunteer in AIDS clinics, orphanages, and a women’s mushroom-farming program of all things! Paul called her upon her return and asked her if she’d like her job back. She told him that she saw the world differently than she had before and he said he’d suspected she would. This is how she came to be “Jiminy Cricket”. She went back to work as Paul’s charity coordinator.

Jenny and Teresa’s story [a horrific case of homophobic violence] had really deeply upset Catherine Shepherd too. She followed it too closely, and when she saw that an American singer was a part of a relief campaign, she reached out to my manager to offer some help. She donated auction items and some memorabilia on behalf of Paul to help us raise money for our classes. She offered to donate money, too, although I declined due to some principles I had around “fundraising”, but that’s another story…

[Brandi’s manager suggests she ask Catherine for charity mentoring]

Man, am I glad I did. She gave me advice over email and phone for the better part of a year and it never occurred to me once even that she was a day less than sixty-five years old. I guess I just assumed she was Paul’s age…? I still don’t know why. She was way too brilliant to be twenty-eight.

A year went by and we met in New York City with our long-term girlfriends by our sides. I had heard she was coming to a show because she happened to be in town for Paul. I wasn’t thrilled with meeting the “charity lady” after the show, since all my hip lesbian NYC pals would be there and I wanted to go out. But I agreed and let everyone know I’d catch up with them afterward

When I walked into that dressing room, I was literally speechless. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, and the age shock was profoundly funny…

[Around a year later, now single, Brandi and Catherine start to date]

Cath and I dated for several months back and forth across the Atlantic, always desperate to see each other, until we decided it was time for Catherine to tell Paul she was considering emigrating to America. She let him know that she was leaving, and he asked her to lunch to talk about it. He couldn’t understand why she was leaving to work with this nobody Brandi Carlile person in the States. When she told him that she was gay and in a relationship with me, he immediately called the waitress over and ordered a bottle of wine. They spent hours laughing and talking about Cath’s secret life. She left work in the fall with Paul’s blessing and a beautiful Linda McCartney print signed by him that we have hanging in our living room.

[Catherine moves to the US, with support from Paul, Elton John, and others for her visa application. They have several wedding ceremonies, and the London one includes “a drive to East London in a vintage double-decker bus”. Sadly, Brandi does not say whether Paul had any influence on this transport choice.]

Later on, she talks about working with Paul Buckmaster, composer and arranger, who died in 2017. Brandi found out from a friend’s text:

I woke up to a message on my phone from Ben Folds, a couple of weeks after the session [with Buckmaster]. “I’m so sorry about Paul,” he said. Oh God, I thought. How am I going to tell Catherine that McCartney has died? Then it hit me. It was coming from Ben, so it had to be Buckmaster.

It’s a sad, strange little moment - her sleepy confusion, how protective she is of her wife, and how fond Catherine clearly is of Paul, in the seconds before Brandi’s own grief lands.

There’s one more Beatle moment, when she and her band toured to the UK in 2007, they went to visit Abbey Road:

While we were doing the Abbey Road street crossing, we saw a Rolls-Royce pull into the studio and watched in total amazement as Sir George Martin stepped out of the backseat. He immediately looked at us, knew exactly what we were doing, and gave us a smile and a wave. Just like that he was gone; we’ll never forget it.

[red-carpet-looks]

Catherine Shepherd and Brandi Carlile, The 65th Annual Grammy Awards, 4/2/2024

[sapphiccj]

id like a word with the carliles stylist please. all the iconic looks we’ve been getting lately and you go with that?

[itszonez]

BRANDI CARLILE and CATHERINE SHEPHERD at 64th Annual Grammy Awards (2022)

[underthecitysky]

Paul, Brandi & Catherine Carlile (aka stuff I just learned)

I was reading an article about Brandi Carlile and saw this bit about how she met her wife, Catherine.

“Shepherd, who is originally from the U.K. and coordinated McCartney's charity work for 10 years, first met Carlile over the phone in 2009 when she reached out to donate some Beatles memorabilia to the singer's Fight the Fear campaign. The pair continued to speak on the phone regularly.” (x)

Found that she was also Paul’s personal assistant for 5 years before coordinating his charity work.

Nice to know those pics of Brandi and Catherine and Paul and Nancy leaving the Chris Rock show together last month weren’t just random.

She must know him quite well if she was his PA for 5 years!

More Paul/Brandi/Catherine links (for posterity)

Here’s Brandi and the twins with Paul at his Seattle show in 2016 (from her Instagram)

Also, here’s Brandi singing I’ve Just Seen A Face in 2011 and 2021 😌

[the-moody-doc]

Human Rights Campaign 2022 Los Angeles Dinner 

Source: https://www.gettyimages.at/fotos/brandi-carlile?assettype=image&family=editorial&phrase=brandi%20carlile&sort=newest&events=775777226

[aworldofpattern]

Brandi Carlile on the Grammys 2020 red carpet, with her wife, Catherine Shepherd.

Brandi wore a custom floral satin suit by Wolk Morais.