So, I’ve been asked by Andrew Dubber to join his online writing venture - Music Think Tank - and will be contributing ideas, articles and comments about the music world and the internet as part of this new group blog.
There will be some cross-posting between here and MTT as some of my writing will be relevant to both. However, the tens of readers of this site can rest assured that I won’t be discussing the rules of MP3 Tagging or the like here. To put it simply, Music Think Tank will be about acheiving success in the new music business and this site will continue in it’s fine tradition of documenting the exact opposite.
Anyway, it’s a buzz and an honour to be involved with the group as it contains some very clever folks.
In the late 1990s in California Dorian Wood decided to track down his worldwide namesakes using the interweb and eventually got in touch with Birmingham-based Dorian Wood. Finding someone who shares your slightly out-of-the-ordinary name on the other side of the globe would be one thing, but to find out that you are both involved in the creation of strange and beautiful music is something quite altogether different.
On Good Friday 21st March 2008 we are bringing together these unique two talents to play on the same bill for the very first time.
Friends of the Stars and Commercially Inviable cordially invite you to kick off your Easter weekend with a night of music, dancing and collaboration.
If your name is also Dorian Wood then you’ll receive FREE entry but proof of identity will be required.
Boringly-named individuals will need £3 to gain access.
His recently-released Bolka album is without doubt one of the best things we’ve all heard in a long time and really, really deserves to be heard by a much wider audience. Dorian has a voice that is really beautiful and he writes songs that call to mind Rufus Wainwright, The Blind Boys of Alabama and Anthony Hegarty - all rolled into one.
LISTEN: Dorian Wood - “Well, Well, Well”
THEY SAY: “Wry, wistful and deliciously eerie, BOLKA is a valentine to the brokenhearted”
DORIAN WOOD (UK)
One half of the marvellous and frightening TeaTowel, the Friends of the Stars remixer of choice and the man behind the world’s only and best Happy Hardcore covers band, Pete_Prescription. Dorian will be playing brand new compositions freshly minted in his Kings Heath studio so expect Krautrock, Melody, Noise or something else entirely.
LISTEN: Friends of the Stars - “Feelin’ Blue” - Remixed by Dorian Wood
THEY SAY: “Elevator Music for people descending into hell”
FRIENDS OF THE STARS
Commercially Inviable Since 2000, this alt-country 3-piece have harmonies, tunes and hooks in abundance and after surviving over 7 years of mild success and self-inflicted disappointment they bring you songs from ”Lighting and Electrical”, their first full-length album.
LISTEN: Friends of the Stars - “Old Souls”
THEY SAY: “Their new disc is packed with the kind of authentically sad, lovely, and whiskey-drenched tunes that are tragically absent from the modern country FM dial.”
Here are some recent photos, including one of the lesser spotted Executive Producer Robson in what can only be described as a coquettish pose. Hang on to your hats, kids
Some dude in America is selling his entire record collection on eBay - The collection contains over 6 million titles spread across 3 million records and a boat load of CDs, cassettes and 8-track cartridges. The seller will only let it go as a whole and will not let buyers cherrypick.
I would give mine and your right arm to own this. Seriously.
The starting bid is $3m and so by my calculations we will need to shift around 45,000 copies of “Lighting and Electrical” in order to be the succesful bidder.
Here’s a link to our shop and remember, folks, every purchase counts.
On Friday 21st March we’re putting on a very special night at The Hare & Hounds, Kings Heath, Birmingham.
The night is all about a very special talent all the way from from California USA, the wonderful Dorian Wood, who is touring the UK in March and April playing songs from his debut album “Bolka”
The Bolka album is without doubt one of the best things we’ve all heard in a long time and really, really deserves to be heard by a much wider audience. Dorian has a voice that is really beautiful and unique and he writes songs that, personally, remind me of Rufus Wainwright, The Blind Boys of Alabama and Anthony Hegarty - all rolled into one.
Here’s a taster of what to expect…
Dorian Wood - “Well, Well, Well”
LISTEN
Dorian Wood - “Man in a Pink Bunny Suit”
LISTEN
It’s going to be a great pleasure to support Dorian on this leg of his tour and we’ll be playing songs from our “Lighting & Electrical”LP, songs from our dim and distant past and songs from our inevitably disastrous future.
We’re also delighted that it’s in the Hare and Hounds as it’s not only a famous old Birmingham venue (Nirvana, erm..Frank Skinner) but it’s also within stumbling distance of our houses!
The event is also on GOOD FRIDAY and so marks the beginning of the Easter bank holiday weekend, which means you’ll need to bring a coat as it’ll more than likely be snowing.
We’ll post more information about the gig very shortly including speical DJ guests, door times and ticket prices. In the meantime, mark the date in your diary and spread the word
Pete has been kind about our band in the past and in a round-up of other Birmingham blogs/websites he has this to say:
And also on the “lovely people” tip, Friends of the Stars blog well because their souls are pure. What started off as a jokey diary of how rubbish they were at getting their album out has turned into a savvy promotional tool for their music and the scene they operate in, though I suspect a lot of this savvy was accidental.
Rubbish? Savvy? Accidental?
Being this slapdash and chaotic takes time and effort, Pete.
It won’t have escaped anyone’s notice that it’s nearly Christmas. So by way of wishing you all a happy time here’s a tune we recorded for Christmas in 2001 or 2002 (I can’t remember exactly). We didn’t write the song, but the Spacemen 3 lyric is all our own work.
It’s taken us until late 2007 to finally release a proper album but since we started in 2000 we’ve written a boatload of tunes and at various stages during the intervening years have even recorded a few of them. We’re currently in the process of pulling together a compilation of these which we’ll be bunging out at some stage in 2008 as a Digitial-only release.
The collection is to be called “Community Punishment Workshop” and will cover the years 2000-2005, featuring the singles we released for Winnebago and Bearos Records, the sessions recorded during our time with Sanctuary and songs from “Gun Quarter Tapes“, the album we almost but never quite finished in late 2004.
The thinking behind all this is that releasing “Lighting and Electrical” has been something off a watershed for us, so the comp is intended to draw a line under the past, tie up all the loose ends and see us we move forward free of incumbent old songs and into 2008 clear-headed as we begin recording the second and third albums at the same time (more on that soon..)
Beth McGowan, our trusted mixer and fixer, is in the process of making the songs on “Community Punishment..” all nice and sparkly but in the meantime we’ll be leaking a few out on the site over the coming months and the first up of these is a tune called “Hard Road“
“Hard Road” comes from the “Gun Quarter Tapes“ sessions, which was our first stab at recording ourselves ‘properly’, rather than just making 4-track demos. At the time of recording this we had just parted company with Sanctuary and were once again hell-bent on going it alone, which is how we started out initially and probably should have stayed…but there you go.
The song was recorded in our Birmingham lock-up, which was a room in a damp Hockley basement where the drum kit sat in the corner on a very flimsy piece of floor above a 20 foot drop into the canal…..and Boo-hoo-hoo…we only had one pair of shoes between us….and Boo-hoo-hoo….we walked there every day in the rain….and boo-hoo-hoo… we had to eat coal to keep warm…and boo-hoo-hoo-hoo hoo.
Incidentally, the fabulous Courtesy Group lived in the room next door to us at this time and the racket they made was always an inspiration.
With “Lighting & Electrical” we used computers for the first time, but “Hard Road” was recorded on one of these..
…which at the time we purchased it was pretty cool, but ultimately revealed as limited. It only had two inputs and so most parts were recorded track-by-track and the only way to record more than 8 tracks was to take a stereo mix out into a Minidisc player and then feed it back onto two tracks before starting all over again on Track 3, and so on. Even so we were pretty chuffed with the sound we got.
More blasts from the past soon.
x
PS - It seems “Lighting and Electrical” is now also available at Napster
If the green light is on then there is somebody home.
Welcome!
Friends of the Stars are a Country / Folk band from Birmingham, UK and have been Commercially Inviable since 2000...The purpose of this site is to tell our tale.
We are releasing records on our own Commerically Inviable imprint. The first album, "Lighting & Electrical" is available here and at various other locations on the interweb.
How we go about releasing our records and subsequent others remains to be seen, so this will document that experiment and journey. To writing, recording and performing we are now adding 'releasing records' to our list of activites.
We have been friends for a long time, playing and sticking together through thin and thin. We are prone to horrendous collective errors of judgement and have made some mistakes in our time. We'll no doubt make more of these in the near future. We also make some pretty decent tunes.
If you have any questions then please feel free to email info@friendsofthestars.co.uk and we'll get back to you.
