If Katy Perry has one major achievement beyond her music, it must certainly be putting women at ease, on a global scale, for wearing tonnes of makeup. We first came across it with her bright (dare we say gaudy) nails on her The One of The Boys artwork (to get some Katy Perry style inspiration though check out this showcase of nail art – and while you’re at it this site also has a good collection of updos) which seemed to put her foundation in context. Soon enough we forgot that she’s hiding behind half an inch of war paint.

Then we were suddenly snapped out of it when Russell Brand posted the quickly deleted photo of her in her natural state.

Her recent appearance on X Factor too gave us a bit of a shock. Her pink hair couldn’t take away from the overdone foundation even by the standards of the Saturday night preening fest. The thing is though, she does it so bloody ruddy well. Perhaps if you saw her in a club you might be surprised when the lights came up at the end of the night, but this is showbiz and we reckon she consistently pulls it out the bag.

So here’s out top ten list of who overdoes the makeup to perfection in pop:

1. Katy Perry
2. Lady Gaga – and we’re not talking about her costumes, we mean when she’s looking ‘natural’.
3. JLS – these boys don’t mind being touched up.
4. Gwen Steffani – she’s been rocking the same make up since the early 90s.
5. Rihanna – check out the Shy Ronnie video to see how it should be done.
6. JLO – She’s like Dorain Gray.
7. Cher Lloyd – OK we’re not sure this is a good look, but we’ve become accustomed to her face.
8. Nicola Roberts – She’s always on any list we do.
9. Avril Lavigne – A pioneer of the faux emo look.
10. Christina Aguilera – Have you seen Burlesque?

If you have any further suggestions then let us know.

Picture Courtesy of José Goulão

Two Door Cinema Club, Kaiser Chiefs and Cold War Kids are among the roster of acts who will be showcased on the site in a series of nine episodes known as OFF Shows, which will run until the end of the year.

Part of Universal’s OFF TV, the OFF Shows offer exclusive music content and intimate access to the featured artists.

The site also offers Black XS fans and rock addicts the chance to win concert tickets, backstage passes and free downloads, along with functionality which enables the user to experience being a rockstar for themselves in a totally unique online experience.

Check out some photos of the launch at the famed Paris venue La Maroquinerie. Things got a little crazy with stage-diving, guitars getting smashed all over the place and ill-advised tattoos. (Non-permanent, kids, let’s not get too crazy.)

Find everything at www.bearockstar.com You can also check the Off Shows out on Black XS YouTube channel – www.off.tv.

• Other Posts From Across The Web:

So we’ve had a few days now to calmly and rationally consider the fact that Girls Aloud will be returning in 2012. We’ve calmly danced our tits off to ‘Something Kinda Ooooh’ approximately 37 times, and very rationally spent our ‘should probably be working’ time watching every Girls Aloud video that currently exists on youtube.

But after the initial excitement some creeping doubts have started to nibble away, arising mainly from the rumours that Xenomania won’t be producing a new Girls Aloud album. Xenomania have produced every Girls Aloud album except their first one, and are basically responsible for that distinctive ‘Girls Aloud’ sound that came to define a large part of the noughties. It’s incredibly rare in today’s current pop climate for an artist to work with a single producer for such a long space of time, let alone to knock out four albums together. The result is that you can hear a pleasant continuity between ‘What Will The Neighbours Say’ and ‘Out Of Control’, along with a progression and maturing of the sound. You couldn’t imagine a song like ‘Call The Shots’ on ‘What Will The Neighbours Say’, but you can definitely hear the seeds of songs like ‘Call The Shots’ planted in earlier material.

So where do the Aloud go from here? Well they’re standing in the middle of a big musical crossroads and they could go one of four ways:

1) Girls Aloud and Xenomania get back together.

This would be a pleasant outcome, but we’re not really sure how it would happen. Sometimes it’s better to move on from something and try new things, but at the same time it’s hard to let go of something you know is amazing. Perhaps Xenomania might start sending Girls Aloud 3am drunken texts to the effect of:

‘G.A WE WOZ AMZING 2GETHER WHY DID WE EVA BREAK UP????? XX’

‘LMAO. You’re drunk. LOL. Go to bed’

‘IM NO DRUMK I ONLY AD 2 STELLAS AMD A JAGERBOMB. MISS U SSSSO MUCH XXXX’.

We’re pretty sure this would have a successful outcome. Drunken texts are almost always successful, right?

2) Girls Aloud find a new producer.

This is where it could get interesting. There’s no shortage of amazing British producers out there, and the right match could see Girls Aloud taking a new and intriguing direction. A Richard X produced Girls Aloud album could be quite exciting couldn’t it? YES IT COULD.

3) Girls Aloud go it alone.

In theory this is quite an interesting idea- Girls Aloud alone in the studio bouncing off one another, staying up all night drinking Diet Pepsi and writing songs together. Sarah would rock up at 2am with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a kebab, while Cheryl would make everyone cry with tales of cheating husbands and malaria. Then they’d write a cool electro synth ballad about cheating husbands who catch malaria and it would all be VERY CREATIVE AND EDGY.

Or it could just be five women sitting silently in a room counting ceiling tiles and looking pretty.

4) Cheryl Cole gets her old mate Will. I. Am to produce.

Let’s try not to get all hysterically overdramatic about this, but this scenario would be THE WORST THING TO HAPPEN TO THE WORLD OF MUSIC SINCE SCATMAN DIED. Birds would fall out of the sky, small children would claw their mother’s eyes out and old ladies would start chanting biblical versus on the number 19 to Chorley. In others words the world would be a BAD AND SCARY PLACE. It’s not that Will. I. Am is completely terrible- he’s had his fingers in a fair few musical pies, and some of those pies have been quite tasty thanks. But Will. I. Am and Girls Aloud would be like dunking doughnuts in lamb stew. It doesn’t work. It will never work.

Overall we’re not really too demanding. We’d just like Girls Aloud to return on top form- to remind us why we love them so much, but also show us something new and exciting. The first single should also sound a bit like ‘The Loving Kind’, with bits of ‘Untouchable’ and ‘Jump’ thrown in for good measure. And it should have the amazing ‘five choruses instead of versus’ structure of ‘Biology’. And Nicola should get to sing at least 29% of it. And Kimberly should have a talking bit, because she hasn’t had a talking bit since the brilliant ‘Oh. Boy…..’ bit in ‘Something Kinda Ooooh’, and if there is one thing that Kimberly Walsh is VERY good at, it is talking in a song.

BUT LIKE WE SAY, WE’RE NOT TOO DEMANDING.

Let’s remind ourselves why Girls Aloud are amazing shall we

We’re all used to Rihanna grinding away in her videos. She’s undoubtedly got the most famous thighs in the business. A lucky fan though has managed to experience them close up as she got a bit carried away during her performance in Baltimore:

It seems she’s continuing to raise awareness of sexual assault as this poor woman was plucked from the crowd and given her a good old riding while she’s helpless. One can only guess what happened when they disappeared below the stage.

This kind of raunchy behaviour is bound to add to the critics who say Rihanna is just using sex as a marketing tactic. These are the same critics who seem blind to the fact that pop has been getting progressively more sexualised for donkeys’ years and that Rihanna is also producing some of the best pop output of the decade so far.

Still, we’re pretty sure this display of dry humping is going to add a few pounds on the average ticket price for her gigs.

Nicki Minaj has been out and about making friends in the most unlikely of quarters as she has buddied up with Kristen Stewart. This is a good tactic for her after she made enough enemies to last her a lifetime. Well, just one major enemy. However, it is Lil Kim and she’s more bitter than a thousand middle aged divorcees.

So how did the pair meet? It was at the MTV Movie Awards where Minaj presented Kristen with her award for Best Female Performance (Emma Watson eat your heart out!). While the pair seem have very contrasting personalities thee was no clash of in your face loudness verses a more introverted quietness. In fact Nicki Minaj had this to say about their meeting backstage:

“Kristen had shoes on that didn’t hurt her feet. And she didn’t care that they looked really kind of crusty. But I did too! I had my Uggs on backstage. So that made me bond with her. She’s cute.”

We hope Minaj can get K-Stew to start making some outrageous comments. We’re big fans but we’d love to see her blow up and finally slag someone off. It’d be cathartic.

So there are a few competing theories coming out as to why Cheryl Cole got the boot from the X Factor. Rumours we’re bound to fly but we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the tattles tales over in the states. Each version is so scandalous in its own way that we want to believe them all! Here are the front runners about what happened.

• Paula Abdul was a massive bitch

This is our favourite. Apparently there was such a lack of chemistry between the two that Paula actually stooped to getting the crew to pretend they couldn’t understand our Cheryl. We love the idea of a sort of Marjorie Dawes/Meera situation between the two divas.

Here’s what a source is quoted as saying to Now about the row:

“Cheryl didn’t help herself either. Instead of playing up to Paula, she took the bait and she was cold towards her when the cameras were off. Cheryl has told pals she feels there was a conspiracy to make her life as difficult as possible on the set.”

“It was things like the crew and production people constantly going: “Huh?” and “What?” at everything she said when the network bosses were around. It was as if they went out of their way to prove a point.”

“On one occasion Cheryl said she couldn’t get to a meeting because there were so many of Paula’s huge entourage crowding around and blocking her access, practically having a party and completely ignoring her.”

“Cheryl was fuming and she confronted Paula about her bitchy attitude. They had an explosive row with insults flying everywhere. It got so heated that Cheryl’s infamous temper kicked off and she called Paula c*** to her face. Her fate was sealed after that.”

Wow! She used the C word. We don’t care that this might not be true. We’re a glass half full bunch and this is too explosive a story not to be believed.

• Cheryl Sat About Eating Digestives

Chezza is a simple northern lass. What does she do when she goes over to the US. Soak up the culture, go about on a big campaign trail….of course not.

A Fox production executive told The Mirror: “Instead of attending the Grammy Awards and the Coachella music festival, putting herself out there in America, she sat in her hotel room eating digestive biscuits.”

This was construed as being “negative”, but screw the haters, Kimberly would be proud.

• Her Accent

Many are saying this is the most likely, but we just don’t buy it. Chucking her off was an extraordinary decision. Fox has done plenty of focus groups about her twang and the execs were satisfied. Something big must have gone on behind the scenes.

If it were true  though, Ant and Dec better look out who reportedly told her to stay true to her Geordie accent.

• It’s all a PR stunt

We rejected this out of hand at first, then there were a couple of things that made us give it a bit more credence. Firstly, remember the who Louis Walsh being replaced by Brian Friedman fiasco. That had more than a whiff of a PR stunt about it. If you were going to replace someone would it really be with Brian? He’s not a big star, but he is a friend of the show. Louis went on chat shows giving the game away in our opinion by protesting how disappointed he was and how awful it had been. Nicole and Cheryl are similarly friends of the show so a planned switch doesn’t seem totally out of the question.

Then we were reminded of this clip. Louis Theroux spent a considerable amount of time with Max Clifford for one of his documentaries. A big chunk of it centered around Simon Cowell, a client of Clifford, possibly being gay. After Clifford admitted the best way to deal with such a situation would be to create a relationship, Louis questions him about a supposedly scandalous kiss and tell story that had appeared in the paper, seemingly authorised by Clifford.

So there’s a great deal to suggest Simon is prepared to play the media. While planting a kiss and tell to faking a public downfall of the nation’s sweetheart a bit of a leap, he’s had plenty of time to expand on his plots.

Phew! Well we’re tired out from rumour mongering. In case we annoy Clifford (we know you google your own name) we should point out everything is alleged and a nice bit of scandal around the site would do us the world of good in PR terms.

Oh and if you do have some time, here’s a few nice picture of Cheryl from happier times for you to click through.

Lady Gaga’s album sales have been going crazy this week as Born This Way is storming in at number one in the charts. The phenomenal stat though is that it is outselling the rest of the top 30 put together – this in a week where Adele continues to go strong and the Prodigy, who still excel in shifting albums, will be coming in at number two.

I'm sure my mum had one of these in the seventies.

This isn’t just happening over in the UK though, in the US it’s set to become the highest selling album in one week since NSync’s celebrity whipped up pre pubescent girls into a buying frenzy. Projections show she’s going to sell about 1.25 million over there in just 7 days.

So how did she do it and what can the industry learn?

Well first, there’s of course her (over)exposure. She’ one of the hardest working people in pop and each day, whether it’s appearing on another chat show or zip lining onto the Good Morning America show she’s always up early doing something to gain column inches. She does all this along side a massive touring schedule.

There’s something more though, something which the music industry has been arguing and even lobbying against since the dawn of Napster, namely she’s been giving her music away for free.

It’s always between her and the Bieber who is the  most watched on Youtube, yet her album sale haven’t been dented one bit. At the same time she gave away a full stream of her record to The Metro. She’s also put up a fair few new tracks on Spotify. So the traditional argument from the execs is that this will kill sales. Nobody will pay if they’re able to get it for free.

To be fair this does have some logic to it, but the upside of the online culture is usually ignored. A Youtube video is no substitute for having an album, they are different experiences. What Youtube effectively does is give you an advert with a few hundred million impressions for your song. It’s exposure on a huge scale. For every one person who says they won’t get your album because it’s on the web they’re are two more who will buy it (very rough ratio). Same logic for Spotify and it being on the Metro.

The team behind her have realised this, and now they reap the rewards.

Others though have been forcing through the Digital Economy Act to give the labels the power to take bloggers, sharing sites and even Youtube off the net if they infringe their copyright.

The importance of these album sales goes beyond just Lady Gaga. The law is currently in a state that will take years to reverse on copyright and ignores the commercial realities of the situation. What’s more there’s only one side whispering in politician’s ears.

While the ability of business to ignore shining lights has more than a million example to prove it, these album sales could cause some chin scratching in certain boardrooms.

The Saturdays have just release the video for “Notorious” with some considerable hype. Pretty much every UK music publication has written about it and analysed it on its own merits. This left us scratching our heads though. The Saturdays must be popular right? They’re everywhere, how can they not be huge pop superstars? The fact remains though that they’ve never had a number one. In 2010 their three offerings – Ego, Missing You and Higher – charted at number 9, 3 and 10 respectively. Their studio albums haven’t done any better, both peaking (if it can be called a peak) at number 9.

This seems nuts! They get an exposure other acts would kill for, yet the girls just aren’t turning out the fans to buy their stuff. Well let’s have a look and see if this one will be different:

Now to an untrained squinted eye looking from a distance this could be a Girls Aloud video. Right down to the speeded up twitchy movements and shots of ankles marching in a line it looks like an effort from their older girl group template. And perhaps here is where the problem lies. While we’re all used to derivative works in pop music, and even sometimes like the comforting nostalgic continuity of it, this band just haven’t brought anything beyond Girls Aloud.

To be fair they probably weren’t meant to. From the time rumours of Girls Aloud splitting up started, The Saturdays have been touted as the ones to fill their shoes – something which is yet to happen.

We like the girls, but we have to admit they’re not about the music. They’re about being pretty faces that can be added to a T4 On The Beach lineup, that can front a campaign for Dove, that can run a mildly interesting chicken korma ITV2 documentary to fill in when things are quiet between Pete and Jordan. They are, in the end, five celebrities, not five singers. While others would be dropped for such an ad spend to music sales ratio, The Saturdays go on. The reason? Pop music is just a fig leaf that adds a bit of credibility to their other, more lucrative, interests as celebs.

However if they miss the top spot with this song, it would be nice if they’d leave the whole music thing to someone else, and maybe a few other artists can take those precious air play slots.

Picture Courtesy of Beacon Radio

1. Azerbaijan
2. Italy
3. Sweden
4. Ukraine
5. Denmark
6. Bosnia & Herzegovina
7. Greece
8. Ireland
9. Georgia
10. Germany

Blue had been number one for a small amount of time as the results came in. It was tantalising, but proved to be a false dawn as we slowly declined to 11th place. Still, this was a better showing than we have come to expect as memories on “nil points” still loom large, and probably unfairly, over the UK’s collective Eurovision memory.

In our analysis of the night though we first need an apology as we did a really stupid thing on the day of the contest and put our necks on the line with a set of predictions. As it turned out we were mostly right, but we did get judge one country’s entrant’s chances fairly wrongly – namely Sweden. For us it was a bit of a naff song, with too much of a High School Musical overtone, but the public loved it. As soon as it was performed we were inundated with complaints. We still don’t agree it was good, but it definitely was popular – a fact that seemed to be rammed home to us, almost personally, by the fitting lyrics of the song.

As for Azerbaijan’s winner, from the people we’ve spoken to it seems like it was nobody’s run away favourite, but it was Eurovisiony enough for to romp home with a convincing lead. However, the gushing praise for Lena and Alexander Rybak don’t seem to have been replicated with this year’s winners.

As for Italy coming second, we’re totally stumped. It was like a poor man’s Jamie Cullum. Oh well, best to not be bitter we suppose.

A contestant that probably did deserve to do better though was Getter Jaani from Estonia with Rockerfeller Street. To refresh your memory, here it is:

This was one of the more catchy entrants, yet Estonia were left languishing on the right hand side of the board. She seemed to have fun anyway, and she’s got a long career ahead of her in the gay bars of Eastern Europe.

Of course we must have a word about our glorious boys. The Blue lads seemed a bit nervous to be frank. Lee Ryan can usually belt them out but seemed to be strangely soft on the higher pitched vocals. Anthony Costa’s mic also seemed to go down at one point. We’re not complaining or making excuses after the fact, in fact that hiccup probably helped our chances. It became obvious during the performance that this was all going to be down to Lee, and on the night he couldn’t quite summon up the vocal power to secure us a top ten position. Shame.

Our surrogate children, Jedward, did quite well on our behalf with it seeming that lots of Europe “got them” from just one performance. Of course we gave them twelve points, though it was a pity this was reciprocated. Apparently in a vote in Australia the boys came top. Little do the Aussies know what they were voting for, as the boys will be sniffing out any other markets that will have them.

Lastly, we turn to last year’s winner, Lena Meyer-Landrud. While she looked 100% hotter than last year, her song was shitter by an equal ratio. She kept us out the to ten we suspect more by being her than by her performance.

As for the show as a whole we were slightly disappointed. Germany did not live up to the Share The Moment theme of the previous year, and their opening was just plain boring. That presenter guy might be popular in Germany, but to everyone else his opening just seemed like a dad at a wedding. Telling people to feel their heartbeat, and showing a big pulsating heart between songs was quite panic attack inducing too.

Still we all had fun and can’t wait for next year when Azerbaijan will no doubt wow Europe and bankrupt themselves in the process.

Who? Getter Jaani

Country? Estonia

Our Thoughts? Rockerfeller Street is so upbeat and colourful (and so are the outfits) that you will find yourself liking this song. She also comes across as incredibly happy to be part of the competition, which adds a nice endearing quality to her. The song also has a strong beat in the chorus that will bring out some goosebumps in certain quarters.

Across Europe there seems to be nothing but good will for this song, however, nobody seems quite sure it will be enough to get people picking up the phone.

Chances? This all depends on the live performance. Sometimes she can come across as a bit breathless which lets the vocals down – something which a Eurovision crowd won’t forigve. They want dancing, big costumes and smiles – but never at the sacrifice of the vocals.

However, she stands a good chance this year as the only real female frontrunner. She’s pretty cute too and could snatch up all those votes that went to Lena last year.

The best piece of advice for her is to stay away from Lee Ryan before the show, as he will only chat her up and put her off the performance.