Katy Perry surprised to discover nine year-old doesn't have much idea about music industry

Katy Perry always dreamed of being a brand releasing celebrity-endorsed perf... hang on, I mean pop star, don't I?

Katy Perry always dreamed of being a pop star. Yet, she tells Elle with a note of wonder, it's not like she thought it would be:

On being a pop star in today's society: "It is a hundred times harder a dream than the dream that I dreamt when I was 9 . . . You think you signed up for one thing, but you automatically sign up for a hundred others. And that is why you see people shaving their f*cking heads."

Whoever would have thought that a nine year-old might imagine an adult world that isn't quite aligned with how the world actually works. There's probably a bunch of people stood in train cabs this morning going 'when I was seven, I'm pretty certain I expected trains to have faces and pretty much I'd spend my time shovelling coal into a hole'.

Perry also talks about the Superbowl:

We love this opportunity, but once you decide you're gonna do the Super Bowl, you're gonna have no f*cking life for six months. It is the biggest thing. Anyone that's ever done it has been scared sh*tless. You stay off the Internet for the five days afterward.

The Super Bowl was, actually, five days ago and, given the lead times for Elle to publish, it's surprising she's able to say what she did for five days after an event which wouldn't have happened at the time she was talking.

By far the strangest thing though is Perry's suggestion that Adele might not know how many Mexican restaurants there are in London:

"Adele is so real and couldn't care less about the trappings of fame. She came to a show at the Hammersmith Apollo in England and stole my after-show burrito. She's like [heavy British accent], 'How the f*ck did you get a burrito in England?'"

Wahaca? Chipotle? Cantina Laredo? Daddy Donkey? Benito's Hat? Or maybe someone just bought a tortilla, beans and some cheese from any supermarket anywhere?

Thank Christ Perry wasn't eating a cactus taco; Adele would probably have assumed she'd been kidnapped and woken up in Cabo San Lucas.

Kelis swaps Milkshake for egg nog

It's in no way odd that Kelis' new project is a Christmas food cookery show.

No, really it isn't; she's a proper, certified chef:

“My mom had a catering business growing up, so I fell in love with cooking early on,” Rogers, a Le Cordon Bleu-certified chef and saucier, tells the Daily News.

“We’d make everything from couscous to Swedish meatballs.”

- I understand that Kelis is not just a certified chef, but she's got some other skills as well
- Saucier?
- Compared with Jamie Oliver, I suppose she is, yes.

Dermot O'Leary: Battered, but still chipper

Dermot O'Leary isn't just a Radio 2 dj and ringleader at the declining X Factor circus. Oh, no. He's a fish magnate, too.

Slightly less of a fish magnate. He's had to close his fish restaurant in Poole, but he's stressing that a sister shop in Brighton is thriving:

He [said] “Sadly we decided that Fishy Fishy Poole should cease trading owing to the current financial climate.

“Fishy Fishy Brighton continues to trade as normal.”

I'm not a marketing expert, but I suspect part of your problem might have been in calling the places Fishy Fishy. It's the sort of twee name that would actual repel people as they walk down the street. It would make Captain Birdseye decide he'd rather have a kebab.

GWAR manage to turn condiment range into violence against women

There's two things here. First, GWAR, even if you're launching a chilli sauce - even a hot chilli sauce - you're still just getting into selling condiments.

That puts them in the same space as, well, this guy:

However, if you must try and stretch your brand into sauces, condiments, pickles and chutneys, try not to do it like this:

The band's guitar player Balsac, has said that Gwar-B-Q sauce "is mostly made out of the blood of really hot chicks." He adds that such a use is "a terrible waste of fine ass, but ultimately worth it because this sauce is absolutely delicious."

Ha ha ha, murdering women and making food out of them. Hilarious. I can't imagine why HP haven't brought out an Ed Gein Limited Edition flavour.

Peter Andre, wash your hands

Remember Peter Andre's cafe that he opened up in East Ginstead a while back? It's had a pretty unimpressed reaction from Mid Sussex District Council who came to see how clean it was. The East Grinstead Courier and Observer reports:

Danny Andre – Peter's brother – said everything is now up to scratch.

"Everything is spotless in there," he told the Courier & Observer.

"It always has been. It was just a couple of things, that got rectified the same afternoon."

Hmmm. The coffee shop scored just one star out of a possible five - which under the rules means "major improvement necessary" - hardly the sort of thing you could "rectify" the same afternoon.

Andre's puppetmasters didn't seem to have got the 'pretend it's a couple of things' memo:

Gemma Wheatley, from Peter Andre's management company, said: "It was nothing to do with any problems with dirtiness or cleanliness, it was purely mechanical.

"They asked us to put cladding around the back of the tiles and the sink was in the wrong place."

Is moving a sink something you can rectify in an afternoon?

Anyway, everyone's certain that the next time round they'll get a four or a five.

Gordon in the morning: Kasabian are packing

A couple of paragraphs about what Kasabian eat on tour. It might make something to pad out a fanzine, if it was a very large one. Or - if you're Gordon - it's a news story:

Serge Pizzorno said: "We've got Uncle Ben's fried rice, stir-fried rice, noodles and baked beans. It's like a tuck shop.

"It's 2am, we're starving, so we'll knock on Marty, our security guy's door and he just goes 'Come in' and you sit around the microwave. It's pretty special."

Mmm. That is so interesting.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Placebo

A couple of months ago, Filament magazine [NSFW] ran an interview with Placebo's Steve Forrest that they'd originally printed in the magazine in 2009:

If you were stranded on a desert island with Stefan and Brian, who would you eat first?

Definitely Brian. Both of them would be easy to take down, but although Brian is a small man, he does have more meat on his bones than Stef, and would probably keep me and Stef alive until help came. Plus I don’t think Stef would feed both me and Brian, so just to fill my belly I would have to then kill Brian, but would only be able to eat half of him due to already having had a helping of Stef, and that would just be a waste.

Songs About Cooking

You might have seen this before, but until @pgofton posted it yesterday I hadn't:

Steve Albini's cooking blog.

I used Jacques Pepin's method of making julienne of carrots: using a vegetable peeler, cut long strips of carrot, then stack them, roll them lengthwise and slice into thin ribbons. This gives a much longer, nicer looking julienne than using a grater. I also sliced the cabbage core thinly for more substantial texture.

Come on, James Martin - surely you should be sending an invite to Albini to join the Saturday Kitchen?

Gordon in the morning: Backstage with Britney

Gordon worries for the staff working on Britney Spears' tour:

The singer has given caterers strict instructions not to make any junk food because she's not allowed it.

Hot dogs, pizza and cookie dough ice cream have all been blacklisted.

Well, that doesn't sound too bad - after all, most of the schools left alone by the coalition adopt a similar policy. Healthy. They can scoff pizza when they get back to the hotel, right?

If that's not gutting enough, they are going to have to listen to MICHAEL JACKSON songs constantly.

Okay. THAT is cruel and unusual. And somewhat uncalled for.

She has stockpiled his tour DVDs and enlisted the help of his dance team to recreate his routines.

Given how successful the preparations for the last Michael Jackson dates went, you might be better off nomming down the cookie dough ice cream, Britney.

Lady GaGa fans demand pizza to poke in their faces

A PR email promoting something or other flops into the inbox, boiling with rage about Lady GaGa. Apparently some people have confused her with Jesus out of those books:

LADY GAGA LEAVES THOUSANDS OF FANS HUNGRY AT TODAY SHOW CONCERT AFTER PROMISING FREE PIZZA.

Thousands of fans from all across the nation waiting on line for 24 hours for Lady Gaga’s free concert were promised free pizza from Lady Gaga herself on Twitter. The fans went hungry all night long when there was not enough pizza to go around and thousands were glued to their coveted spot and had no food.

To be honest, if you're planning to queue up 24 hours for something, and think 'I won't bother taking any food, as there's a vague promise that I might get a slice of pizza here on Twitter', you may only have yourself to blame if you wind up a little happy.

The deep thoughts of JLS: Aston

I won't have ketchup in a posh restaurant - it's disrespectful to the chef. Now, if my mum cooks a meal, I'll try not to put ketchup on it!

Aston Merrygold only uses the HP at The Ivy.

Kelis: The rest is gravy

Apologies if cornflower: Kelis is thinking about launching her own range of sauces. Apparently, she's just completed a course at a cookery school and now has a certificate which allows her to make her own sauces.

I know what you're thinking. But even I'm not that desperate for a cheap punchline.

Taco Bell offer to feed bands

It's wrong, it's very wrong. But it's so very, very good. Taco Bell are offering bands free taco bell foods as part of their regular Feed The Beat promotion.

Five hundred dollars worth of Taco Bell bucks (or money-off coupons, in other words), which works out at about 600 cheese roll-ups. Enough to keep a drummer happy.

And, don't worry, bands: they've cleaned up the kitchens:

Peter Andre reaches the stage of sitting by the door looking sad

Obviously, there is no real dignity to be lost in the affair of Peter Andre and Jordan, but dignity-like substance that Andre has been clinging to - you know, the one where he screamed at the mother of his children through the medium of Star magazine; that substance - seems to have evaporated:

Peter Andre is releasing a cookery book of "meals for one".

Rumours that his next single will feature the sound of a fork popping through cellophane and the lonely ting of a microwave announcing the slight overcooking of a reclaimed chicken product in some sort of sauce are almost certainly going to prove to be true.

Griffin done... portion control

Time to check in with Zoe Griffin, "the UK’s coolest party girl." This morning she's thinking about, erm, tappas:

When you order a selection of bread, olives, chorizo, calamari and patatas bravas etc, you may think it is all quite healthy but you never know exactly how much to order. And I hate wasting food, so I always end up trying to eat it all.

Isn't eating something you're not enjoying wasting food - it's not like forcing down an extra portion of squid is going to put its tentacles back and release it into the sea.

And does anyone really have trouble ordering tappas? Isn't a generally useful rule of thumb to get three items, plus a bread, and if that turns out not to be enough you can order some more?

Still, Zoe has some advice:

Tip of The Day: It’s way less stressful - and better for you - to go to restaurants that serve full meals on plates.

I don't know about you, but I'm going to write that on a Post-It note and stick it somewhere I can always see it.

So: Zoe is never starstruck by celebrities, but can be brought down by some olives and feta.

Heather finds a niche

Whoever would have thought? Heather Mills' vegan restaurant is doing kind of alright. Although it's not just the meat that had been removed, according to the Evening Argus:

Diary-free, eh? That's great news, as I can't stand dates.

The precise measure of success, though, seems a bit shady:

And it seems the former model’s new venture is changing many people’s attitudes towards vegan food, as between 700 and 1,000 vegan products are sold at the venue every day.

I've not, I think, heard of a restaurant hail the number of items it sells rather than covers served, money taken or profit made. The sense this is a bit of a rewritten press-release doesn't let up further in to the article:

The cafe’s cakes, which are transported around on a travelator similar to that found in sushi bars, are also proving to be a popular treat for those with a sweet tooth. About 1,000 are being sold every week.

A travelator? You mean a conveyor belt, surely? A conveyor belt similar to that in every supermarket in the country?

The cafe’s website has also been popular, with more than 3,000 hits on VBites’ opening day.

Hmm. This is starting to sound a little desperate now. What next?

"The window of the restuarant has been a hit, too. On opening day alone, there were seventeen and a half eyes peeking through the windows in every half-hour period."

Atomic Kitten against the fats

Natasha Hamilton has taken time off from frisking customers going to her nightclub to visit Downing Street as part of a campaign against unhealthy food:

“As a mum I’m always conscious of needing to make sure my kids stay healthy and active.

“We play such a key role in shaping our children’s future so from an early age I’ve taught my kids to understand the importance of having a balanced diet and that they only have junk food as an occasional treat.

“It’s up to us as parents to act now and help protect the health and wellbeing of our children.”

Natasha is part of a campaign that's trying to reduce the amount of time nasty, unhealthy food gets advertised on TV. Man, I know the other ex-Kittens didn't get on with Katona now, but trying to get Gordon Brown to banish her from TV? That's harsh.

Winehouse mash-up

The News of the World seems incredibly excited over its Amy Winehouse's amusing tongue-in-cheek complaints about Simon Cowell. Someone rang her doorbell, she was amused rather than angry - it's not a great revelation, is it?

Hang on, though, there's more:

In the astonishing outburst in Camden, north London, Amy admitted she was sitting indoors in her UNDERWEAR eating COTTAGE PIE.

I think there's a macro at the News International tabloids that automatically caps up the word "underwear" - but who knew cottage pie was that important? Something that you might, indeed, admit to. Perhaps it's the decision to eschew the lamb of a shepherds pie in favour of the beefy delights of the cottage pie which so upset the paper. Does Winehouse care nothing for the hill farmers of Wales?

Trash Can Sinatras weekend: Cooking

As we approach the end of the Trash Can Sinatras weekend, here's a glorious clip from a Scottish TV programme, Square Meals, which sees the band getting made a square meal. It dates from 1995, but we are assured they have had proper food since then:



[Part of The Trash Can Sinatras weekend]

It's like Eggs And Baker for a new generation

Rock stars and cooking - they go together like ballet dancers and removing supporting walls. With the exception of David Van Day and his chip shop. That is, until now, and Blip.TV's cooking with rockstars.

Here, Nada Surf invite you to do some cooking:



[via the MusicSlut]