MUSIC GOSSIP QUEEN COMES FULL CIRCLE

Less than a year after Dianne Bennett was unceremoniously fired from her post at the Hollywood Reporter, the flamboyant queen of pop gossip will be back on the beat--at (surprise) the Hollywood Reporter.

Saying she has “no hard feelings” about her sudden dismissal early last year, Bennett said she will be in print again at the Reporter, where her weekly “Soundtrack” column had provided a controversial chronicle of the tumultuous ups and downs of the record biz. Bennett, who said she will not revive the column, explained that her new Reporter duties will include covering the “totality” of the entertainment business.

“Honey, I am totally thrilled,” Bennett said. “(Hollywood Reporter publisher) Tichi Wilkerson and I have been hugging and kissing ever since I heard the news. I’ll be doing hard news as well as lighter items, not only about music but film and TV as well. And I’ll be doing those very special interviews with hard-to-get people, you know, talking to Michael Jackson, not just about whether he’s a good kisser, but about his film career.

“I told you they’d miss me when I was gone,” Bennett added. “I’m the bubble-gum on the shoe of show business.”

VIDEORGY: There’s one heavy-metal band you won’t find on MTV these days--Motorhead, the thundering British horde led by Lemmy Kilminster (the man who once boasted that “if this band moved in next door to you, your lawn would die”). The group’s new video, “Killed By Death,” features Lemmy as a leather-clad biker who roars around town, stroking the thighs of a well-endowed young lovely seated on the back of his cycle. Lemmy’s misadventures leads him to a series of run-ins with the authorities, who first attempt to kill him with a firing squad and then, more decisively, in an electric chair. The clip concludes with Lemmy’s funeral, which ends with him rising from the grave, roaring off again (with his gal in tow) on his cycle.

The group’s record company, Island Records, thought so much of this passion play that it had two of its female execs, dressed in chains and biker regalia, personally deliver the video--also wrapped in chains--to MTV programming chief Les Garland. However, all this lavish attention went to nought. MTV has refused to air the clip, with a spokeswoman for the video channel saying it was turned down because of “excessive and senseless violence.”

Kris Puszkiewicz, who heads the video division at Island Records, acknowledged that the video was “risque.” But she added: “We don’t feel it’s any worse than a lot of other videos they play, clips like the Rolling Stones’ ‘Too Much Blood.’ My feeling is that if the video had been by a more prominent band that MTV wouldn’t have had so many qualms about playing it.”

According to MTV, the video channel doesn’t give special treatment to superstars. “We felt the Stones video had a statement to make,” the spokeswoman said. “It wasn’t just senseless violence--it was making a comment on the violence in our society.”

ADVICE AND DISSENT: The days when pop stars used to be coy about their sexuality--at least when it came to homosexuality--are apparently over. Following in the footsteps of such openly gay British popsters as Tom (“Glad to Be Gay”) Robinson and Frankie Goes to Hollywood (which has a song on its current record called “Krisco Kisses,”), the latest British pop sensations to freely discuss homosexuality are Bronski Beat, a young band that has dominated the English charts in recent months.

The group’s new album, “Age of Consent” (on MCA Records), even made room on its lyric sheet for a rundown on the worldwide laws regarding the minimum age for lawful gay relationships between consenting adults. The statutes vary from country to country--in England and Wales, the lawful age is 21; in Greece, it’s 18; in Poland, it’s 15; in the Soviet Union, it’s completely illegal, while in Spain homosexuality is “punishable by law as either a case of ‘public scandal’ or ‘corruption of minors.’ ”

However, if you want a copy of the record with all this timely information, you better hurry. After getting a mixed reaction from radio stations and record stores across the country--especially in the South and the Midwest--MCA is deleting the references. The official word from a label spokesman is: “Considering the past sensitivities of several Midwest record store chains, we have made a judgment decision to omit the list of homosexual age-of-consent laws from future pressings of the record.”

AND NOW HERE’S THE NEWS: Two members of Duran Duran--John Taylor and Andy Taylor to be exact--have taken a temporary break from the Fab Five (that’s temporary , Duranies) to put together a band (and a new album) called Power Station. The results of the new solo project will be out next month on Capitol Records, featuring such stellar musicians as Chic founder Bernard Edwards (who produced the record), Chic drummer Tony Thompson and vocalist Robert Palmer. The band’s debut single, which should be popping up on your radio dial any day now, is titled “Some Like It Hot.” . . . The latest installment in the record industry’s musical-chairs game finds longtime CBS Records A&R; exec Peter Philbin leaving CBS to join Elektra Records as its head of West Coast A&R.; Philbin had long been a major creative force at CBS, working closely with such artists as the Bangles, Karla Bonoff, the Psychedelic Furs, and Jules & the Polar Bears as well as serving as a key figure in Bruce Springsteen’s early career at the label. Philbin (who is also known as the talent scout who tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade CBS to sign Prince) takes over at Elektra next week. . . . And while we’re on that collaboration theme: a bevy of local rock talents will be part of the lineup of the upcoming Freeway Poetry Series, which begins tomorrow night at 8 p.m. at UCLA’s Kerchkoff Coffeehouse. The free performances, produced in association with Harvey Kubernik’s Freeway Records, will include spoken word performances by Black Flag’s Henry Rollins, X’s John Doe, the Blasters’ Dave Alvin and local composer Jill Fraser.

AND WAIT, THERE’S MORE: “The Cool and the Crazy,” the wacky rock radio show which offered such off-beat fare as the Frostbite 500 and the Battle of the Lou Reeds, is back on KCRW-FM (89.9) tonight at 10 p.m., a little more than two months after the station’s management abruptly canceled the show after determining its music was “inappropriate” for the show’s former time slot.

“It was a little frenetic for Sunday morning, especially for some of our regular listeners,” said KCRW music director Tom Schnabel. “But we felt it also brought in a lot of new listeners, so we decided to juggle the schedule around and put it in a more appropriate time-slot.

Hosted by Vic Tripp and Art Fraud (aliases for Gene Sculatti and Ronn Spencer, two creators of the pop hipster-guide “The Catalogue of Cool”), the program promises to continue it’s eccentric roller-coaster ride down pop’s memory lane, offering such make-believe rock nonsense as a special mail-order album offer, “Elvis: The Fat Years,” and an interview with film director Francis Ford Galaxy, who will discuss the making of his $60 million punk-rock epic, “The Rotten Club.”