Doherty apologises from the, uh, yeah, whatever

Earlier in the week, Pete Doherty's holiday snaps developed into a minor flurry of front-page stories what with the drugs and all.

Now, Pete's said he's sorry, sort of.

His "apology from the heart" might have been a little more convincing if he'd not burbled it out when he bumped into a cameraman as he was putting the rubbish out - nobody likes the staged, formal apologies of disgraced Conservative politicians, but this had the air of "yeah, I been meaning to apologise and if I can do it while putting the recycling out, that's two birds from one stone, innit."

The apology in full, then:

“Can I just apologise from my heart for that stuff that was in the paper. I was really out of my nut and that’s why I went into rehab.”

It's believed that he intends to say sorry to Kate Moss should he run into her at the bottle bank ("or failing that, I've got an old wardrobe needs taking down the tip.")

Geldof in unlikely teaming with concept of "peace"

Casting around for something to do, Bob Geldof is apparently getting involved in a television channel to promote world peace.

How on earth would that work? "I've just had a phonecall from our enemies on the other side of the line. They say that they were channel surfing last night after Will And Grace and saw a programme made by Bob Geldof which told them war, war is stupid, and people are stupid. They want to make a treaty, but say can we do it quickly before Saturday Kitchen comes on?"

Of course, he's not such a fool as to do this with his own money: it's being funded by one of those richly-resourced but ultimately impotent groups of Very Important People: Point of Peace, in this case.

BBC News says vaguely that Point of Peace "supports the work of Nobel Peace Laureates." They're slightly shadowy - a Google turns up a page which says merely

Point of Peace is a human rights organisation based in Stavanger, Norway, with a mandate to support Nobel Peace Prize Laureates in urgent need of media, dialogue and communication assistance in their home countries and internationally

and the second return is a hit from TripAdvisor discussing their role as a Norwegian Tourist Attraction.

A pdf document explains in a little more depth - Bob Geldof is listed as an "other" (presumably not in the Lost sense) between the advisory council and the board of directors; we suspect this role might have swung the contract for the channel landing in his lap rather than a showreel consisting of The Word, Big Breakfast, and various projects featuring members of his family.

Apparently, they're hoping that the Peace Channel will have a "You Tube effect" - we're sure that kids who otherwise would be kidnapped and pressed into serving in, say, the Lords Resistance Army in Uganda will be delighted at the initiative.

I can get you out of my head

Well, turning up in the tabloids with other women might not have worked, but it seems telling tabloids he was appearing in other tabloids with other women has done the trick.

Kylie and Olivier have officially split.

There was just one last thing for them to do together, and that was break it to the press:

"Olivier Martinez and Kylie Minogue have officially confirmed that they are no longer a couple.

"They have made it clear that the decision to go their separate ways was mutual and amicable.

"The media's false accusations of disloyalty have saddened them both. The two remain very close friends."

We love the "offically" bit, as if there's some assize office somewhere that has stamped papers to make sure all the details are straight.

And the winner is... Westlife again?

The Ireland music awards could, if they were savvy, try to position themselves as some sort of Golden Globe-y event, a bellwether leading off the music awards season.

Instead, year after year, they announce that Westlife are the "best pop act" - it's seven bloody years running now.

As if that wasn't enough, they gave most of the prizes to Snow Patrol.

Winners in full, then:

Best Irish DJ: (as in the radio, not djing)
Ray D'Arcy

Best Irish band:
Snow Patrol

Best Irish male:
Damien Dempsey (Beat Van Morrison for the title)

Best Irish female:
Luan Parle

Best Irish pop:
Westlife

Best live performance:
Snow Patrol - Marlay Park

Best international group:
Scissor Sisters

Best international male:
Justin Timberlake

Best international female:
Lily Allen

Best international album:
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, I'm Not, Right?

Best folk/traditional artist:
Sharon Shannon

Best Irish album:
Snow Patrol – Eyes Open

Best New Irish Act:
Director

Hope for 2007:
Royseven

Lifetime achievement:
Clannad

Humanitarian award:
Paul Brady, Director of The Belvedere Youth Club

Industry award:
Larry Gogan

Shockwaves hair products sponsor a spot of fan-bashing

Shockwaves range of hair products is currently underwriting a trail of chaos as The Automatic attempt to turn every night on the NME tour into some sort of clash with fans.

It's not known if the band are deliberately targeting fans who turn up at gigs wearing hair products made by rival firms, or no hair products at all. However, in Belfast, Shockwaves paid for keyboardist Pennie to smash a fan's glasses, while in Dublin its largesse underwrote the cost of a ruck between Pennie and a fan who lit up a fag.

Other hair products are available, as are hats, which can save a lot of time brushing in the mornings.

How soon is forever?

In an upcoming interview, Johnny Marr has described How Soon Is Now as The Smith's "most enduring song":

"When we'd done 'How Soon Is Now?', we knew it was something else."

The new Healers (Marr's sometime band) do a really good job of it. I know Morrissey still does it live, too. But Tatu's version was just silly. Plastic music."

Still, it wasn't so bad you didn't cash the royalty cheques, we bet.

SXSW: We're not for fans, and we won't tell you who's playing

Brent Grulke from SXSW has upset half of the population of Texas and much of the music world with an interview in the Austin Chronicle. He was challenged on why the usual longlist of performers at the festival has yet to appear:

BG: The largest thing is we're not trying to promote to consumers at all, and we want to be able to put out an accurate list. Once we put any kind of list out, we get all kinds of demand for it, people trying to figure out, "Oh, I need to get there; I need to get to this venue." We also get artists saying, "Oh my God, how can you have us competing with this, competing with that?"

Instead of releasing acts piecemeal, it makes more sense to get as good a sense as we can of all the acts we want to invite and put together a schedule that makes the most sense, we believe, for the largest number of people attending. The thinking was that it didn't do us any great favors having this information available earlier, because it creates this huge, huge, huge consumer buzz, and then we'll get so many phone calls of people saying, "Can I get tickets to the Stooges?" These things take up a tremendous amount of our energy and resources.

DoneWaiting's SXSW blog explains why Grukle's plans to withhold band details until the last minute is a bad move; further commentary is offered by, erm, commenters.

Missing the point

We were surprised to receive an email encouraging us to "Vote for your favourite indie artists" - especially since the message was just beating up trade for the Fratellis, Wolfmother, Snow Patrol and Johnny Borrell and the Razorlights.

As if to ram home the missing of the point of "indie", the email came from Universal Music. It's like having a Republican Queen, boys.

A Brave New Wave goodbye

CBC has announced a planned revamp its Radio 2 network into an "adult-orientated music service" which will act as a "flag-waving Canadian music service". In the process, much of what made the old Radio 2 interesting has been thrown aside - including Brave New Waves. Having said that, the programme had effectively been throttled back in 2006 when the staff were laid off and a series of reruns embarked on. It seems CBC had hoped to kick all the life out of Radio 2 much earlier, and hadn't counted on Brave New Waves clinging on so long.

Will Vietnamese authorities make Tet offensive to British tabloids?

Apparently, as part of the Lunar new year celebrati