The Pussycat Dolls are NOT splitting up. No. Definitely not.

If there’s one rule in pop music that is set in stone, it’s that news that bands are breaking up are immediately preceded by a denial that they are breaking up. So when a representative for Pussycat Dolls announced that, contrary to rumours, the band are NOT breaking up, they just substantially added to those very same rumours.

Pussycat Dolls famously made a career out of a single (Don’t Cha) whose subtext was ‘we’ll do that thing in the bedroom that made your girlfriend scream “eww, no” when you suggested it that night after you came back from the pub’. The Dolls’ founder Robin Antin explained that if they were going to split up, the news would come from him.

Not from singer Ashley Roberts who is alleged to have weepingly claimed they’d broken up in a recent visit to the UK. What would she know? Doesn’t she realise they have a third album, greatest hits and farewell tour to do before they’re allowed to split. IT’S POP LAW!

Pussycat Dolls are currently working out their differences (read: notice periods) recording their third album. Except they’re not splitting up. Not that any of this is particularly interesting anyway since Pussycat Dolls are a business product and Antin’s denial is no different from the CEO of a major corporation putting spin on 1st quarter losses in order to protect share prices.

This article really belongs in the Financial Times right next to an article about how iPods are definitely NOT blowing up and causing burn injuries.

[story by Simon Sharp]

Follow hecklerspray on Twitter

Nicole Scherzinger has spoken of her desire to get her man to take her up the aisle.

Clean that filthy mind, you! We mean an actual aisle in a place of worship and not the back passage way that all her other lovers have taken her down, with convincing talk that it would only sting for a day or so afterward.

Well, whichever well-lubricated aisle she had in mind, the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls has decided to get engaged around July, to her man candy Lewis Hamilton. Note to future gold diggers: just being with a man who is desired by many is not enough when you become rich and famous, “Greedy Bitch-itus” has to overcome you and you have to marry the boy too.

Not that from what it seems anyone has bothered to tell Lewis, but his girlfriend Nicole is desperate to wed him and sees the pair of them getting engaged, all official like, in the next few weeks. We are pretty sure at least one of you needs to be drunk and at least one of you has to actually have proposed, in order for it to be a proper engagement, but Nicole is not a details person she is an action person. She is not a damn thinker, she is a doer!

After all, she did not manage to rise to the dizzying heights of the “least ugly” singer in the Hot Tranny Mess Dolls from sitting around thinking all day. No siree. (She got there from scratching the furniture in her record bosses office and peeing on the carpet until they caved in).

Back to business, Nicole has spoken to a UK glossy magazine and says that in essence she is engaged in her own mind. Taking nothing as insignificant as the desires of her partner into consideration, the Doll revealed that she does not see why one would wait to marry when in love and that July in particular works for her to become engaged (hint, hint).

From Hello! magazine:

“Would I get married? For sure and, yeah, the Dolls can be the bridesmaids,” she said. “But I have to get engaged first. Late July is looking good.“Marriage is a seal of love. On my solo album I have sung about how much I love that and what the whole process would mean to me. Who needs a reason to seal their love?”

And you may like to know that, yes girls, pressuring a man to stay with you or in Nicole’s case propose to you is a fantastic way to keep him around. That won’t give him the heeby jeebies at all and if you want to do something extra-special to convince him of your love, you want to get “accidentally” knocked up as well… can’t hurt*.

*hecklerspray staff and management do not condone getting preggers to keep anyone around, or pretending to be preggers by stuffing cushions up your jumper/ drinking too much fizzy pop and pointing to your full belly and trying to convince your partner that way. Get yourself a kitten rather than a baby, they are much more fun anyway.

This was a guest blog by Amy Grindhouse, who is just marvellous.

You! Follow hecklerspray on Twitter!

What she seemingly has never been called though, is ‘too sexy’. Until now. Ahead of an upcoming tour around Asia, the youth wing of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party have raised issue with the Canadian poplet with the dead eyes. For being too sexy.

The world can be a very odd place. Now, we understand it may be a more conservative way of life over there, but calling Avril Lavigne ‘too sexy’ is akin to calling Brooke Hogan a ‘purveyor of finely thought out political commentary’ – it just doesn’t fit. How, exactly, is looking really bored on stage considered sexy, even in a culture where sexuality is somewhat repressed, or hidden away?

Answers on a postcard.

But that is the route the complaint has taken, and it’s one that’s sure to raise some issues about the portrayal of pop stars, movie stars and those generally in the public eye as sexual icons. Either that or it’ll just get tossed under the rug with the rest of the comments that might actually raise some intelligent discussion about how artists become highly-sexualised commodities more with each passing day.

This is, as an example, the same Avril Lavigne that started out as a ‘pop punk’ girl, wearing rather modest shorts, normal t-shirts and singing about being tough in the face of her crappy little relationships, or something. Now she’s essentially a whore, dressing like a tart in order to get on TV as much as possible, singing about utter shite. It’s a clear, blatant marketing decision – as the old adage says: sex sells.

And now it’s getting her into trouble, so we can all laugh. Just as we did with the spitting.

Speaking to the Associated Press, a spokesman for the Islamic Party, Kamarulzaman Mohamed, said:

“It is considered too sexy for us. … It’s not good for viewers in Malaysia. We don’t want our people, our teenagers, influenced by their performance. We want clean artists, artists that are good role models.”

So who would the youth wing of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party want instead? Well, according to the AP:

Malaysia requires all performers to wear clothes without obscene or drug-related images and be covered from chest to knees. They must also refrain from jumping, shouting, hugging and kissing on stage.

So, someone who doesn’t like drugs or obscenity, who doesn’t move much and who won’t want to get off with anyone in their audience? From the world of music?

In other words, not many artists play Malaysia.

The Pussycat Dolls did play back in 2006 mind you, which makes hecklerspray wonder what exactly the Malaysian government thought they were getting when they were booked. Whereas other groups and artists could conceivably be covered up, asked to tone down their lyrical content and to stay still, hiring a glorified bunch of strippers to do a live stage show was never really going to fall within the realms of ‘decent’.

But hey – who are we to comment? We’re always naked at hecklerspray.