When Lily Allen stepped up to collect her third Ivor Novello award of the night earlier this week, few would have recognised the chiselled features of her Californian collaborator, who stood beside her at the podium. While the famously feisty songstress from Hammersmith is a household name, Greg Kurstin is the pop industry's best kept secret.

Lily Allen broke down in tears as her song "The Fear" scooped three prizes at the Ivor Novello Awards yesterday.

Lily Allen broke down in tears as her song The Fear scooped major prizes at the Ivor Novello Awards today.

The week in books

Lily Allen will battle it out with a group of virtual unknowns championed on Twitter by Stephen Fry for a top songwriting award.

It may be an understandable reaction to the criticism of her as a "Lily Allen lite", which followed her 2007 breakthrough, or simply the influence of a naturally broadening taste in music, but on My Best Friend Is You Kate Nash seems determined to forge a new, more individual musical personality for herself.

Bad news for tramps, teenagers, rock stars and Prince William – cider is going up in price.

Female music video directors are fast becoming first choice as their musical counterparts take over the pop charts. Emma Love talks to six women making their mark on a male-dominated industry

Dizzee steals Lily's big night

If you ask me, which you haven't done for a while now – where have you been? – it's about time we stopped taking "A Source" and "A Close Family Friend" quite so much for granted. These two work tirelessly across all the tabloids and celebrity gossip magazines and, without them, where on earth would we be? How would we keep up to speed on Madonna splitting up with her latest fella ("He felt he had nothing in common with her," said A Source) or how Peter feels about Jordan's re-marriage ("He hit the roof when he heard," said A Close Friend?). Where would we be? I mean, it's not like you can sit in an office and just invent this sort of thing between, say, marking up cellulite with big red arrows or putting a big black "X" on Lily Allen's outfit, is it? Don't you think these people have enough to do with their big red and black marker pens as it is? Don't you, even, think they need to get on with spotting Sarah from Girls Aloud eating a croissant outside a café in Primrose Hill?

Lily Allen looks set to enjoy one of the shortest retirements in pop after announcing a festival appearance - just four months after her "final" gig.

Is there such a thing as a gay dinosaur? I only ask because of a distinct lack of logic in some of the arguments being advanced by David Cameron in the hope of becoming the next prime minister.

Materialism is one thing, wanting to appear sexually available quite another