Whether it’s by singing about kissing girls or by slightly looking a bit like a man, Katy Perry has never shied away from controversy.

And because of this affinity for controversy, Katy Perry is currently getting the hiding of her life. A couple of days ago The Sun published a photo of Katy Perry posing with a knife accompanied by a headline similar to but not exactly ‘BURN THE WITCH FOR SHE KNOWES MAGICK!’ and now all hell has broken loose.

So, with the sound of tabloid disapproval ringing in her ears, Katy Perry has released a statement saying that she is ‘against all violence’. Problem solved. Now The Sun can get back to the real threat to the nation’s youth – all those pictures of Katy Perry wearing 1940s swimsuits. Seriously, if we start seeing girls dressed as WWII cheesecake models in the street, we’re going to form a mob and burn Katy’s house down.

You know who we feel sorry for? Forks. Over the last few weeks it’s been all knife this and knife that – what with Angelina Jolie buying a knife for her six-year-old son and Kerry Katona throwing a shitty fit about it – and yet the fork, the knife’s humble cutlery partner and perhaps the more versatile implement of the two, has been shunned. Truly, the fork is the four-pronged McCartney to the knife’s pointy Lennon.

And now it’s time for Katy Perry to damage her reputation by association to a knife. Up until now, not much has really been known about Katy Perry, apart from the fact that she once annoyed Jesus by singing a song about kissing a girl and fell onto a big cake the other day. That’s literally it.

Or that literally was it until Wednesday, when The Sun newspaper decided to publish a three-year-old photo of Katy Perry holding a knife quite close to her eye alongside a screaming piece of journalism linking her to the wave of teenage knife crime that’s sweeping the UK at the moment. Because, as we all know, teenagers are easily manipulated and love to emulate their idols.

Incidentally, that’s true – as children we were influenced by everything we saw on TV, which is why we spent six solid months of 1989 dressed as David The Gnome and once tried to kill ourselves because we couldn’t push cuckoo clocks and beachballs out of our arses like Bertha, the mid-1980s animated children’s factory unit. But this is besides the point.

Anyway, astonished that her transparently controversy-baiting photo has actually become somewhat controversial, Katy Perry has issued something of a stunned statement pointing out that death by stabbing doesn’t make her particularly happy. MTV reports:

Her US publicist told MTV News: “Katy Perry is against all violence. The photo in question was taken in 2005 and is in no way related to the current events in the UK.”

It’s just an upsetting coincidence, that’s all, that a photo of Katy Perry wielding a knife has been published during a moral panic about youth-based knife crime.

But if you think this is a storm, just wait until you see the other pictures of Katy Perry from 2005 that happen to eerily echo current news, like the photo of Katy Perry dressed as Sarah Palin skinning a moose, the photo of Katy Perry dressed as a crying stockbroker and the photo of Katy Perry denying that she condones knife crime based on a photo of Katy Perry that was taken three years before that one.