Last week, when Yorkshire branches of the Smart Gallery launched a series of limited edition prints by the American singer, they hoped it would spark the interest of the county's musical fans, but had no idea just how sought after the Drawn Blank Series would be. "Honestly we have never known anything like it," says Shelley Cohen of the Harrogate Galley. "We had a record-breaking number of people come to the preview and by lunchtime on the first day, almost the entire stock had been snapped up." With Dylan's career spanning five decades, that's proof perhaps that sometimes the old ones are indeed the best.



The country may be in the grip of a binge drinking epidemic, but the good people at Harrogate Theatre are appealing to more sober tastes. The venue is playing host to a production of Dick Barton – Special Agent and with the show harking back to the golden era of radio and a time when Britain still had its stiff upper lip, there's not an alcopops in sight. Instead, before each performance a golden teabag is being placed under one of the seats and the lucky audience member who finds it secures a year's supply of Yorkshire Tea. Now that's what we call a giveaway.



Celebrities are always complaining that they have been misquoted and Ricky Wilson, for one, wants to set the record straight. A few weeks ago, gossip columnists pricked up their ears after the Kaiser Chief's lead singer had apparently said Oasis were past it and the Leeds band was ready to step into their shoes.

However, according to the Kaiser's drummer Nick Hodgson not all was what it seemed. "Ricky was out, started talking to some guy. He didn't know he was a journalist... he said that Oasis had disappeared.... which is fair enough conversation material on a late night boozy do. But the rest sounds like a load of made-up-in-the-morning journalistic interpretation. All the stuff about music fans seeing us as Oasis's successors – and how Ricky thinks the vocals are really shaping up. Crazy talk."



And someone else who has had their fill of celebrity tittle tattle is Kevin Duffy. After 20 years as a sales rep for various publishing houses and in danger of drowning under a weight of C-list biographies and ghost-written pulp, he decided to put his money where his mouth was, remortgaging his house and starting Bluemoose Books in Hebden Bridge. It's still early days, but aimed at promoting new writing, the latest book to emerge from Bluemoose is Stephen Clayton's The Art of Being Dead. However, while the novel is set against the backdrop of a bleak northern town in the 1960s and follows one man's "descent into a world of chaos, degradation and death", it seems Duffy's links with the world of celebs haven't been entirely severed – Clayton is the founder member of the Lancashire band Tractor which were championed by the late John Peel.