Rise of the House of Usher

APPEARING ON Channel 4's Richard Blackwood Show during his last visit to Britain, clean-cut US R&B star Usher Raymond IV startled the crowd with the following anecdote. He was performing at the Harlem Apollo, one of the sacred sites of US soul music, when the time came for him to remove his trousers (one of two live performance traditions for which he is globally celebrated - the other being the ritual sacrifice of a pair of designer trainers, which he leaves on the stage every time he does a show, marking his terrain in a marginally more hygienic way than a wolf might).