It actually has a really cool message. There’s nothing wrong with being Gay.

M.I.A. recently gave some very candid opinions to NME regarding Lady GaGa and Twilight!

Do we still need record labels?
Are they even interested in making money from music anymore? Lady Gaga plugs 15 things in her new video. Dude, she even plugs a burger! That’s probably how they’re making money right now – buying up the burger joint, putting the burger in a music video and making loads of burger money.

Do you think those programmes and the internet have destroyed the mythology around popstars?
I don’t know. Again, there’s Lady Gaga – people say we’re similar, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music’s reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic. She sounds more like me than I fucking do! That’s a talent and she’s got a great team behind her, but she’s the industry last stab at making itself important – saying, ‘You need our money behind you, the endorsements, the stadiums’ Respect to her, she’s keeping a hundred thousand people in work, but my belief is: Do It Yourself.

How important are image and visuals to your music?
Very. But it’s not like “Haus of Gaga” (laughs). Me blindfolded with naked men feeding me apples and shit.

Would you ever make a record for a Twilight soundtrack?
They asked me. Luckily Jimmy [Iovine, chairmen of M.I.A.’s US label Interscope] had beef with the Twilight people, so he stepped in and told them to fuck off.

Glee: The Music, The Power of Madonna CD has just gone on pre-sale with almost a month left until the all Madonna episode goes on the air. The CD won’t be available until April 20th.

1. Express Yourself
2. Borderline/Open Your Heart
3. Vogue
4. Like A Virgin
5. 4 Minutes
6. What It Feels Like For A Girl
7. Like A Prayer

Evanescence will finally release another record, after waiting four years since their last album dropped

Except don’t expect the same Evanescence you once knew!

For starters, only one person remains from the original Grammy-winning band – Amy Lee. You’ll recall that all the original boys in the band parted ways with Amy sometime ago to form a new group called Fallen, with new lead singer Carly Smithson.

It’s safe to say that Amy hasn’t spoken to her original crew in sometime, but she emerges now with new set of musicians and a new sound for the band. She explains:

“It’s not an organic record. Our idea is to take synthetic and atmospheric sounds and find a way to blur the line between organic and synthetic… There is something really cool happening in music right now. There are bands that sound like they’re from another time — it’s like ’80s throwback music with analogue synthesizers and Moogs. I love it. I’ve been listening to a lot of La Roux.”

Five years after the release of her 2005 eponymous masterpiece, Swedish pop genius Robyn is coming back with three new albums that will roll out across 2010, according to an interview in Swedish magazine Bon.

Among her bounty of new, more “dance-oriented” songs is a “rap duel” with Snoop Dogg, a track produced by Röyksopp called “None of Dem” that she says sounds like a Timbaland song, one called “Fembot” that’s about “30-year-old women who want to get pregnant” (Robyn turned 30 last year), another one called “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do”, and “Dance Hall Queen”, which was produced by Diplo and mysteriously found its way onto the internet earlier this month. So yeah, feel free to get excited.

Jennifer Lopez better get comfy in her Louboutins because she has to start pounding the pavement looking for a new record label. A source announced this afternoon that J.Lo and Sony Music Epic Records were parting ways, yet there is some contradiction to the reasons why. Some say the split was amicable, stating Jennifer had finished her contract and was now ready to move elsewhere. Some are suggesting that Sony dropped her after disagreements over her 7th studio album, Love?, which has now been cancelled and will not be released. Neither Sony nor Jennifer have made an official statement yet.

ROBERT PATTINSON has been approached by SIMON COWELL to sign a major record deal.

The young actor has been told he can basically write his own cheque.

To make things even sweeter for Robert, other record companies have got wind of the offer and a bidding war has broken out.

Robert, who plays vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight films, is a keen musician who plays piano and guitar.

The star has even contributed songs to the Twilight soundtracks.

His pipes are pretty good too and record bosses reckon his singing voice could turn out to be a big money-spinner.

A source said: “Robert is reluctant to be turned into a pop star – and takes his music very seriously.

“He is a bit wary of signing up with Cowell who is, of course, associated with X Factor and pop.

Did the Black Eyed Peas jinx itself Saturday night when the group opened France’s NRJ awards with its No. 1 anthem, “I Gotta Feeling?”

Even though the song predicts that “tonight’s gonna be a good night,” it actually turned out to be embarrassing for the hip-hop pop act that was mistakenly announced as the winner of the best international group honor, the New York Daily News reports.

Fortunately, the Peas did not take the stage when presenters Ke$ha and French choreographer Kamel Ouali accidentally called the group’s name.

The German rock band Tokio Hotel was the actual winner.

After realizing the error, Ouali apologized. He said that the information card was confusing because it listed the winner and the other nominees. The crowd booed.

Ouali acknowledged the crowd’s annoyance, and blamed NRJ for listing all of the candidates on the card.

Emma Bunton has confirmed that the Spice Girls are working on a new project together.

In an interview with Fabulous, the singer said that she is not yet able to announce what the iconic girl group have in store for the future.

Bunton commented: “We are always creative when we get together and come up with ideas. Sometimes they surface, sometimes they don’t. We’re not at a point where we can say what.”

Asked directly whether anything is currently in the pipeline, the star replied: “Absolutely, a new venture of some sort.”

The band have previously been tipped to reunite for a special World Cup project later this year. Meanwhile, other reports have suggested that they are planning a stage musical based on their rise to fame.

Bunton is currently appearing as a judge on ITV1′s Dancing On Ice.

Ke$ha has maintained her hold over the US singles chart, securing a fourth week at number one with ‘Tik Tok’.

Lady GaGa’s ‘Bad Romance’ remains in second position, while Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’s former chart-topper ‘Empire State Of Mind’ climbs one place to three.

Ke$ha notches up a second entry in the Top 10 with 3OH!3 collaboration ‘Blah Blah Blah’ at seven.

Further tracks from her debut album Animal, ‘Your Love Is My Drug’ and ‘Take It Off’, debut at 27 and 85 respectively.

Elsewhere, Rihanna jumps six places to nine with ‘Hard’, the peak position last single ‘Russian Roulette’ reached on the Billboard Hot 100, while Young Money’s ‘BedRock’ climbs four places to eight.

The top ten singles in full (click for our reviews):

1. (1) Ke$ha: ‘Tik Tok’
2. (2) Lady GaGa: ‘Bad Romance’
3. (4) Jay-Z ft. Alicia Keys: ‘Empire State of Mind’
4. (5) Iyaz: ‘Replay’
5. (5) Owl City: ‘Fireflies’
6. (9) David Guetta ft. Akon: ‘Sexy Bitch’
7. (-) Ke$ha ft. 3OH!3: ‘Blah Blah Blah’
8. (12) Young Money: ‘BedRock’
9. (14) Rihanna: ‘Hard’
10. (7) Jay Sean ft. Lil Wayne: ‘Down’

Parachute by Cheryl Cole

I don’t tell anyone about the way you hold my hand
I don’t tell anyone about the things that we have planned
I won’t tell anybody
Won’t tell anybody
They want to push me down
They want to see you fall (down)

Won’t tell anybody how you turn my world around
I won’t tell anyone how your voice is my favourite sound
Won’t tell anybody
Won’t tell anybody
They want to see us fall
They want to see us fall (down)

I don’t need a parachute
Baby, if I’ve got you
Baby, if I’ve got you
I don’t need a parachute
You’re gonna catch me
You’re gonna catch if I fall
Down, down, down

I don’t need a parachute
Baby, if I’ve got you
Baby, if I’ve got you
I don’t need a parachute
You’re gonna catch me
You’re gonna catch if I fall
Down, down, down

Don’t believe the things you tell yourself so late night and
You are your own worst enemy
You’ll never win the fight
Just hold on to me
I’ll hold on to you
It’s you and me up against the world
It’s you and me

I don’t need a parachute
Baby, if I’ve got you
Baby, if I’ve got you
I don’t need a parachute
You’re gonna catch me
You’re gonna catch if I fall
Down, down, down

I don’t need a parachute
Baby, if I’ve got you
Baby, if I’ve got you
I don’t need a parachute
You’re gonna catch me
You’re gonna catch if I fall
Down, down, down

I won’t fall out of love
I won’t fall out of,
I won’t fall out of love
I won’t fall out of,
I won’t fall out of love
I won’t fall out of,
I won’t fall out of love
I’ll fall into you

I won’t fall out of love
I won’t fall out of,
I won’t fall out of love
I won’t fall out of,
I won’t fall out of love
I won’t fall out of,
I won’t fall out of love
I’ll fall into you

I don’t need a parachute
Baby, if I’ve got you
Baby, if I’ve got you
I don’t need a parachute
You’re gonna catch me
You’re gonna catch if I fall
Down, down, down

I don’t need a parachute
Baby, if I’ve got you
Baby, if I’ve got you
I don’t need a parachute
You’re gonna catch me
You’re gonna catch if I fall
Down, down, down

Christina Aguilera‘s new album, Bionic, will be released in March, but don’t expect the same old Christina

Although she’s usually known for her piercing high notes, she showing off her softer side on an album that “is about the future.” The hawt momma credits her son Max for “motivating me to want to play and have fun.”

“Maybe I’ve been afraid to do in the past, to allow myself to go to a place of ‘less singing,’” said Christina. “I’m more vulnerable and more strong at the same time.”

Her first single, Glam, has been described as “a poppy, hip-hop inflected throwback to Madonna‘s Vogue.” Not to mention Lullaby, a collaboration with Sia.

Tricky Stewart called the album “one of her best bodies of work.”

“I know that there’s a lot of other cool features, like I know that she has Santigold and Flo Rida on there,” he continued. “She’s mixing it up again. She’s singing R&B again, she’s doing pop. She’s doing it all, but she’s found a way to make it all meet in the middle because she’s so many different things.”

And she got the chance to write with M.I.A., Ladytron, Dr. Luke, Bravery frontman Sam Endicott, Switch and Goldfrapp.

Here’s an article about my new favourite band from the UK, The Dolly Rockers.

Go look them up on youtube and myspace. They Fucking Rock!

Brassy, soon-to-be huge and withering about their rivals, Dolly Rockers give their first interview to a dazed Pete Paphides

At the London media haunt Soho House — where nearly every low-lit nook holds someone either on or in television — certain informal codes apply. Everyone keeps to themselves. It is, on reflection, the worst possible place to meet Dolly Rockers. But on a quiet Wednesday evening, it’s too late to do anything about that. Coming from the narrow wooden staircase, a succession of screams and crashes puts the brakes on every conversation in the dining room.

Oblivious to it all, Brooke Challinor, Lucie Kay and Sophie King burst into the dining room like three ASBO Alices trying to blag their way into Wonderland. They are — in a way that only three 20-year-old women dressed in sequins, stockings, fish-net tights, ribbons and comically small bowler hats can be — quite terrifying.

“We’ve just been papped for the first time!” declares Challinor, the blonde Mancunian gob of the operation. “Three f***ing paparazzi!! Total dilemma really — ’cos obviously, secretly we were dead excited, but we had to be, like: ‘No! Not pictures!!’ — while at the same time making sure they got us from our best side. Then one of them said to the others: ‘Dolly Rockers — I think they might be big.’ I said, ‘Might be?!’ You mean ‘Gonna be!’ Then I took his camera off him and deleted all the ones I didn’t like.”

In advance of the band’s debut single, the thick-skinned paps outside Soho House are already deferring to Dolly Rockers. How soon before the rest of Britain follows suit? July was pencilled for the release of the trio’s WAG-baiting debut single Gold Digger. A fortnight ago, however, Scott Mills, standing in for Chris Moyles, decided to air another tune, Je Suis Une Dolly, a Breezer-glugging Brits-abroad hybrid of Blur’s Girls And Boys and Bill Wyman’s 1981 hit (Si Si) Je Suis Un Rock Star.

What happened next lends weight to the theory that in a recession people like their pop as frivolous as possible. In spite or perhaps because of the song making Girls Aloud sound like Coldplay by comparison — sample lyric: “Got nowt to lose in the Moulin Rouge/ And we’ll flash our pants when we can-can” — the ensuing demand caught their record company off guard. EMI was left with no choice but to rush out a download of Je Suis Une Dolly, complete with a video secretly filmed on the Tube.

On the rooftop terrace of Soho House, it becomes clear that Dolly Rockers’ abrupt rise has bypassed another vital process through which all groups — even the cool “non-manufactured” indie types — must undergo when signing to a major label: media training. It may have a faintly sinister ring to it, but it basically involves being told: (a) not to turn up drunk for an interview; (b) not to talk over each other; and (c) not to say anything about other artists that may cause offence lest you alienate their fans.

Dolly Rockers’ media training is, however, not due for four more days. Despite this, in many ways, they are managing perfectly well, by (a) turning up to this interview in varying states of inebriation; (b) deciding that if one of them has an urgent need to interject, she must call out the specially-designated made-up word, “Halabip”; and (c) saying only things about other artists that might cause offence. Girls Aloud are “unreachable… [with] a look that you could never get close to without a huge entourage”. Pristine female fivesome the Saturdays come off particularly badly (“They could have been five completely different girls and nobody would have given a shit”) The only exception right now is Miley Cyrus. Mention her two-year liaison with the abstinent Nick Jonas of the chastity-pledging Disney band the Jonas Brothers, and it elicits a flood of sisterly sympathy.

“Two years is a long time to go out with a virgin,” says Kay, the group’s sole Londoner, currently dating a model, and self-styled “love child of Russell Brand and Pat Butcher”. “I’m not surprised she kept starting arguments.”

Where the currently single Challinor is concerned, you suspect it’ll take more than media training to smooth the wilder edges of someone who claims she would be “the biggest chav in the world” had she not met her marginally more middle-class bandmates. Certainly, her idea of a fun night out isn’t for the faint of heart. “Do you know what Brooke did when she wanted to go home?” Kay says. “Instead of doing what a reasonable person would do and saying: ‘Girls, I’m tired. Let’s go home.’ In her drunken mind, she thought: ‘Let’s fake a panic attack, lie on the floor shaking outside a nightclub until an ambulance comes, and then admit that she was absolutely fine.’ ”

As Challinor maintains a sheepish silence, it’s back over to King: “Halabip! I went in the ambulance with her. Sitting in a wheelchair with a hospital nightie on, she’d realised it was too late to come clean.’”

At this point, anyone with vague memories of a trio called Dolly Rockers on The X Factor three years ago would be forgiven for thinking that this couldn’t possibly be the same Dolly Rockers whose progress to the final eight of that year’s talent show brought out a hitherto unseen fatherly side to Louis Walsh. And yet, a cursory detour to YouTube confirms that, save for a wholesale triple personality transplant, the well-scrubbed, wide-eyed ingénues of 2006, timorously tackling Sugababes songs, are, to a woman, the camp, cackling, innuendo machine seated before us.

So why did Dolly Rockers conceal their true nature from us when they were on The X Factor? Displaying the same hit-making instinct that has supplied her husband with, um, one Top Ten record in three decades, it was Sharon Osbourne who took the girls to one side and gave them some “motherly” advice. “Do you know what she did?” Kay says. “We were personally told by her in the toilets that if we played on the ‘cutesy’ thing, then girls wouldn’t feel threatened by us. Hence if you watch the clips, we’ve got no make-up on, we all have flat Ugg boots and denim skirts and pink T-shirts. And we’re singing covers of Sugababes and Spice Girls songs. A lot of people who have been on X Factor try to capitalise on the connection. We’re trying to put it behind us.”

According to Kay, that meant “we had to demanufacture ourselves”. Having met through a small ad in The Stage — just as the Spice Girls had once done — they “let go” of the manager who had put them together. “He was into the whole ‘sex sells’ idea,” King says. “We were called Innocence. It wasn’t good.” After a tip-off from Walsh — who assured them that they had star potential, “just not yet” — they spent a year with the producer and co-writer Ray Hedges trying to find their sound.

Hedges picks up the story. “The last thing I wanted to do was work with X Factor rejects, but they literally appeared at my door talking like delirious people. They came in and saw a gold disc I had for working with Cher, and promptly did a rendition of The Shoop Shoop Song (It’s in His Kiss). They did a dance routine that was so naff that we fell about laughing. Bizarrely, from that point, we just loved them. Their rawness and loudness was so natural, it was just a matter of getting them to be themselves on the records.”

When the breakthrough came it was with North vs South, a frenetic cat-ruck that redraws battle lines last marked out at the height of the Blur/Oasis wars, but brightly suggesting that the two factions sort it out at an agreed motorway services in the Midlands. Shortly afterwards came Champagne Shirley, a bizarre but brilliant conflation of early Arctic Monkeys and surly proto-Britpoppers Shampoo: “She comes from Hull/ But she talks like the Queen/ She wears haute couture/What the f*** does that mean?” “On the same day we posted the first of those songs on our MySpace site,” Challinor recalls, “we had record companies on the phone to us. It was that instant.”

Midnight has come and gone. In an hour Dolly Rockers are due on stage at the weekly Trannyshack club night at the nearby Raymond Revue Bar. While King goes to the toilet, the other two smuggle drinks in their jackets and file on to the pavement directly outside Soho House, where an unkempt bearded man, possibly in his late 30s, floats the notion that one of them might “care to sponsor a tramp”. This is the precise spot where other celebrities get themselves photographed handing over cash to a poorly down-and-out. Kay — still dressed in bowler hat, fishnets and sparkly top — is at pains to explain to him that “hard as it may be to believe, right now I’m quite literally poorer than you are”.

By this time King has rejoined us. “I think I upset someone in the toilets,” she confides. “This woman told me she was from Columbia Records, so I said: ‘You should come and see my group. It’ll be educational.’ She told me that she was the one who signed the Ting Tings and flounced off.”

Are they actually going to make it their mission to offend every single person they meet in the 400 yards that separate them from their destination? “You should hook up with us in five days’ time,” Challinor says, “and see if media training has turned us into the Saturdays.” Is that likely? “What do you think?” Kay says. “We’d lose the will to live. If the Saturdays joined our band, they’d be ripped to pieces.”

Je Suis Une Dolly is available to download with various videos from www.thedollyrockers.com

These 18 year old Irish twins, John and Edward Grimes, took the UK by storm with jaw-dropping performances of Ghostbusters, Oops… I Did It Again and Rock DJ, on hit talent show The X Factor, despite being unable to even hold a tune. They were cometitors on the famous X-Factor

This is a head-scratcher. After grabbing our attention on Britain’s Got Talent, Susan Boyle debuted I Dreamed a Dream last week – and it’s already smashing records. The album banked 701,000 copies, which puts Boyle not only at No. 1 for the week (over Adam Lambert, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga, no less!), but also at the top for first-week numbers for the year. In addition, the sales figures earn her the title of the best debut by a female solo artist in the history of Nielsen SoundScan.

I was super surprised to hear that Girlicious wasn’t over.

They dropped the black girl, Tiffanie and are changing their sound to be more “International Pop.”

Their new CD launches in Feb 2010.

Hits Daily Double is sticking by their earlier sales prediction for Adam Lambert and Susan Boyle.

Susan is going to be the big winner, coming in at #1 with 625-675K in sales.  Adam Lambert’s For Your Entertainment is set to come in second, with 210-230K

Susan’s debut would be the year’s biggest debut, beating Eminem’s 608K for his Relapse album.

Lady Gaga’s seven-song Fame Monster EP will sell between 190-210k, putting her at #3. Her just-released two-disc Fame Monster deluxe edition should add another 130-150k to that album’s total.

Carrie Underwood is set to sell 100-120K this week.

I’m at the Imogen Heap concert in Montreal at Le National.
She hasn’t started yet but I’ll update thi later with more pics