Apologies for the posting haitus these last few weeks, Friends of the Stars have been in the studio recording their 2nd LP, “Faiths Meat Kiosk”, and there will be more on that soon…
Here is Episode 17 of the ever-popular Friends of the Stars Podcasts. This one is called “Things To Do In Denver When You’re Robson” and continues in the fine tradition of it’s predecessors containing as it does lots of great tunes and two blokes swearing
at each other. If it ain’t fucking broke, and all that…
This Episode finds Executive Producer Robson and Craig discussing the process of Podcasting, Submarines and submariners during World War 2, before demonstrating, live on air, the effects of caffiene and sugar on Robson’s brain. Later, they engage in the dumbest audio-based broadcast game of skill since Dave Lee Travis introduced darts to the radio.
Listen:
TRACKLISTING:
Dexys Midnight Runners - Show Me The Bee Gees - Marley Purt Drive The Beastie Boys - Jimmy James Dennis Wilson - Cocktails The Jackson 5 - Sugar Daddy World of Fox - Rules of Engagement Snoop Doggy Dogg - Drop It Like It’s Hot Friends of the Stars - Wagons (Rough Mix, Instrumental)
You’d think we’d be bored of DONK! by now, but we’re not.
Strangely, and despite it’s simplicity and apparent dumbness, it just seems to be the gift that keeps on giving…
….and the prove that we’re correct on that point, new online is the rather fabulous DonkDJ.
In a nutshell, you upload the MP3 of your choice to DonkDJ and within minutes you are able download a donk remix MP3 of your song. It’s probably done by computers, or something, but it’s fair to say that the kids are going totally batshit for it, and it’s taking Twitter by storm.
Completely unable to resist the refected glory of a Friends of the Stars DONK remix, we sent off the song Dragonfly…
Epsiode 14 of the Friends of the Stars Podcast is here….
FOTS-POD#14 “Robson The Headless Thompson Gunner” follows the tried and tested Music + Swearing formula that has proven so successful in previous broadcasts. So successful has this been in fact that interweb subscribers to this rubbish now number more than 20..Who are you people? Seriously. Maybe you’d like to get in touch and ask Executive Producer Robson a question? Email info@friendsofthestars.co.uk with what’s on your mind.
This episode features music from Percy Sledge, The Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra whilst the boys disucss The Movies Of Stephen Seagal, Front Row on BBC Radio 4,Podcasting in the Nude and Whether of not the CIA listen to FOTS-POD.
LISTEN
TRACKLISTING
“Drifting Texas Sand” - Webb Pierce
“Keep and Open Mind” - Captain
“Back in Black” - EC/PC
“It Tears Me Up” - Percy Sledge
“Good Timin’” - The Beach Boys
“I Would Be In Love (Anyway)” - Frank Sinatra
“Step into Christmas” - Elton John
I’m guilty, it’s my fault. I started the #donk thing on Twitter.
I had no intention of starting a wacky internet craze or meme surrounding the word ‘Donk’, I was merely thinking aloud and the internet did the rest. Honestly, it did.
By way of background, Put A Donk On It is a record by The Blackout Crew and is without a doubt one of the high watermarks of popular music in the 21st Century so far. The fact that it wasn’t a global hit remains an absolute mystery to me. Here’s how it goes:
I’ve become mildly obsessed with the record and the word “Donk” has become part of my everyday vocabulary. Why simply say “Yes” when you can say “Put A Donk On It!”? So, when the following thought occurred to me at around 4pm today, I posted it onto my Twitter profile:
(If you don’t get the image, the Tweet said “How long would it take to make “Donk” a trending topic on Twitter? #donk”)
Like I say, it was an idle thought. I didn’t really expect an answer, but I got one just the same. The answer, it turns out, is 1hr and 31 minutes. Within minutes of posting the message, my own small corner of Twitter went #donking mad. The vast majority of my personal Twitter network are, like me, from the Birmingham area and so were all online at the same time, which helped. A few of them responded to my question and quite quickly a few of them retweeted my message. Once again, I thought that would be the end of it.
Then two very interesting things happened…
Firstly @jakedubber started to insert superfluous #donks into his tweets and other people began to copy him. Then @jonhickman, @bounder and @pigsonthewing started posting song and movie titles with the word ‘Donk’ replacing certain, similar words (“Donk Go Breaking My Heart”, “Honky Donk Women” etc) and it became a game….a game that caught on super fast.
Quite quickly every other Tweet on my screen featured the word #donk in some form or another, and a search revealed that the word was indeed a trending Twitter topic, which isn’t bad going considering that Valentines Day and Follow Friday are extremely popular subjects today.
At the time of writing this (7pm UK time, 3 hours after my original tweet), the United States has began to wake up for the day and many are wondering what on earth #donk means.
I’ve no idea how long Twitter will keep on donking, but I suspect it won’t be very long, but if it does keep going hopefully this post goes some way to explain it. In a nutshell, blame the Brummies.
…and if you’d care to comment, please don’t forget to put a banging donk on it.
On 12th February 2009 Birmingham will be joining over 100 confirmed cities around the world in a night of fund raising, partying, competitions and all round fun.
Everyone attending Twesitval will be automatically entered in to the main prize draw for a Nintendo Wii games console with guitar hero. There will also be a raffle on the night with a fantastic range of prizes kindly donated by various Twitter folk. The raffle will take place around 10pm on the evening and people will need to be there to pick up their prize on the night.
Friends of the Stars have donated a special raffle prize for the event. The band will record a cover version of a song of the winner’s choice, tagging the resulting MP3 file with a special dedication and photograph, before putting the song online. With the event so close to Valentine’s Day, the lucky winner may chose a song and dedication for a loved one, or alternatively a song that they’ve always thought would sound rather marvellous when performed by a harmony-heavy country/folk outfit.
Brum Twestival is being kindly hosted by Poppy Red. It’s in central Birmingham, located between Moor Street and New Street Stations, and many of the major city bus routes pass right by it. On the evening there will be some food provided, as well as a coupon for a free drink on the door (pending sponsorship). As well as some music and games, there will be a projector setup up so a live Twitter stream can connect the event with others around the world at other city Twestivals. Tickets are £5 and are available here, but limited to 200 only and already going fast.
Thanks to all those kind souls who have added tunes to our Spotify playlist. There are currently 27 tunes in the list, from artists as diverse as Genesis, Hijack, Devo and…erm…Rolf Harris. The list remains open to new selections.
To add to the playlist you need a Spotify account. If you already have an account, click here
We’ve created a collaborative playlist on Spotify.
Craig kicked things off with “Showdown” by ELO and “Put A Donk On It” by The Blackout Crew…..let’s see what kind of monster this playlist grows into from here.
To add to the playlist you need a Spotify account. If you already have an account, click here
One of the best online music resources to emerge in the last couple of years has to be The Hype Machine. For the uninitiated, The Hype Machine is an aggregator of MP3 music blogs that allows punters to search for blogs and websites that have both written about a particular band and also made an MP3 available ‘for evaluation purposes’.
Type in the name of a band and it returns a list that you can plough through and listen to right there on the page, or alternatively follow the links to the original sites and read more. Think of it like a Google that returns nothing but music and reviews, and to understand how comprehensive the service is, how deep it digs into the lonely corners of the internet, you can even find reviews on and music by Friends of the Stars.
A statement such as ‘it’s an aggregator of Mp3 music blogs’ would have made absolutely zero sense as little as 5 years ago, so we’re very much not in Kansas anymore, and it hasn’t taken long for savvy folk to cotton on to the fact that blogs are a great way of reaching a wider audience. Equally, it hasn’t taken most music bloggers long to realise that there is a living to be made and free music to be had by producing a regular and trustworthy source of new music and comment. PR and Record Companies are now desperately cosying up to the very people they recently wanted to shut down and it seems even your Grandparents could explain to you what a Tastemaker is. We’ve come a long way in a short amount of time.
So, does the fact that a lot of people have written about a particular record make it a ‘good record’? Obviously and categorically not. I won’t name names here, but there were one or two albums released in 2008 that were both underwelming and overexposed, but what’s new…..
Does the fact that a lot of different people, each servicing their own niche audience (of whatever size), have chosen to feature (for whatever reason) the same album during the same calendar year make for a more interesting list than most 2008 lists? Yes, obviously. The Hype Machine’s 2008 Zeitgeist is, then, a quantative list of the artists, albums and songs written about by thousands of independents worldwide and online during 2008.
Each section is being released in chunks of 10 over the next few days. Yesterday saw the release of 50-41, today is 40-31 and so on and so forth until Friday 9th January, when we find out who and what is Top of the Pops. Aside from this being a clever way of making us all return each day, it also infuses this particular list with some authentic, old-fashioned tension - the like of which the actual charts haven’t had since the Top 40 countdown actually meant something….and that, by the way, is a good thing.
We’ve recently engaged the services of Jake Dubber, a very talented young man indeed, who will be looking after the back-end and general design of the site.
He’ll be making some changes to the look and feel of this place, so things might look a bit strange for a while before he settles on something we all like.
His first task, however, will be to unravel the massive ball of string that is the mess we’ve made of things on the server. Once he’s done that, and providing we haven’t gone to jail for using child labour, Jake will be redesigning the whole place.
Welcome, Jake…
….and remember, you’ll be working with a lazy bunch of shiftless souls who have a collective inability to take anything seriously, least of all their career in the music business.
It’s almost the end of 2008 and End-of-Year lists will be popping up all over the interweb, so here’s me adding mine to the growing online pile
Mine is a random mixture, shown in no particular order, of some of the cool/weird things that happened to me in 2008. It also has some of the things the band got up to, some of the music I happened to like and also just a little bit about some of the interweb doohickeys that caught my eye.
Here goes…..
1: THE RISE OF FLEET FOXES
This time last year no-one had heard of them, then back in March Campbell played me “White Winter Hymnal” and I was straight away smitten. In May I saw them play in Nottingham and got hold of The Sun Giant EP. Their debut album came out in the summer and I saw them play again in October, a much bigger show this time, in Birmingham. The album, also called Fleet Foxes, is currently sitting near the top of many end-of-year music magazine polls, rounding off quite a year for a band with quite a sound
2: “I AM BURIAL” = TABLOID NEWS
This was a strange one. During the summer months there were a lot of column inches devoted to the real identity of Dubstep artist Burial, and there was even a daft rumour that Burial was actually Fatboy Slim. All of this gave me an idea to start selling t-shirts with slogans such as “I am Burial” and “I’m With Burial >>>” etc and so along with Andrew Dubber I set up a shop at iamburial.com and less than 36 hours later it had made page 19 of The Sun. Seeing something go from the inside of my head to the eyes of 4 million Sun readers in less than 2 days was very odd indeed. During that time the designs caused quite a stir on various Drum n Bass message boards and even got mentioned on telly before we were eventually asked (very nicely) by Hyperdub Records to remove the site, which we did. We sold 1 t-shirt.
3: THERE WAS ONLY ONE DORIAN WOOD
In March we put on a night at Kings Heath’s fashionable Hare and Hounds. Dorian Wood from California USA played, and so did Dorian Wood from Kings Heath UK. The boys from Hot on the Heels of Love did a DJ set and we also did a turn. It was a great night, and Anna singing with Dorian Wood (USA) was a real highlight…
4: POP STARS SAT ON MY SOFA
To cut a long and strange story very short…in July our neighbours had their wedding reception at a local pub, the local pub double-booked the room and the also double-booked Kevin Rowland ended up DJing at the wedding. When the party at the pub finished most of it moved back to our street and Kevin waited for his taxi at my house. He sat on the sofa drinking a glass of pop and we had a chinwag for about half an hour. I’m a huge fan of Dexys Midnight Runners and it all went down a bit like this.
Other popstars on our sofa this year were Stephen and Hannah from The Accidental, who stopped over after playing at The Moseley Folk Festival in August, and Mike from Bentley Rhythm Ace, who lives 2 doors away and popped round to ask if I had any hair gel (I didn’t).
5: BIG LADS REGUARLY PINCHED MY DINNER MONEY….
In 2008 there were plenty of new interweb doohickeys to keep my inner geek happy. There are far too many to mention here, but Blip.FM and Spotify were two new music services that came my way, as did the excellent way of sharing mixes using Drop.IO. Twitter became both indispensable and a worrying obsession, and Tweetdeck was the best of the services I used in connection with it. Then there was Remember The Milk, which was my spare brain and secretary until Gmail launched it’s own version recently. Finally, Profilactic helped me ‘prevent an online identity crisis‘ and similar service Ping.fm meant I could update my Facebook status without ever having to bother to log in, which was nice.
6: WE WROTE NEW SONGS FOR A NEW ALBUM - “FAITHS MEAT KIOSK”
We’re not a band known for working particularly quickly, but during 2008 we have not only written, demoed and arranged the songs for our next album, Faiths Meat Kiosk, we’ve also started to record it. Things are going very well so far and we are yet to shoot ourselves in the foot with any random acts of self sabotage….but it’s early days. Here are demos of two songs that will be on the record.
We saw him play at The Robinin Bilston, the very same venue I saw Stephen Seagal’s band play in 2007. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Richie was many several times better than Thunderbox.
8: JAMES SUMMERFIELD WAS ON COMMERCIALLY INVIABLE RECORDS
In August our label, Commercially Inviable Records, released the quite lovely album Count To 10 and Start Again by James Summerfield. Thanks to some nice people buying our wares the label is miraculously halfway solvent, which is as much of a shock to me as it is to anyone else. Next year the label will be releasing an album by Glaswegian dustbowl balladeerSleepy Eyes Nelson.
Listen:James Summerfield - “Another Day With You’s Like Torture”
9: PODCAST GOLD!
2008 was the year when we pulled our fingers out in terms of podcasts. The 6 individual podcasts released this year were downloaded by hundreds of people and subscribers to the feed went into uncharted territory (double figures!). The podcasts themselves settled into a formula, each being a 40-minute mix of swearing and music that came into being whenever Executive Producer Robson and a member of the band found themselves sitting around, talking and drinking in front of a microphone. Should there be a large swearing and music shaped hole in your life you can subscribe here.
10: THE PHANTOM BAND
A late addition, this, but definitely worth mentioning in the round-up. I went for a pint with my pal Clutch last week and he told me to listen to The Phantom Band. He said they were a band from Scotland making music that was a mixture of Folk and Krautrock, which sounded very much up my street. He also said they were the best new band he had heard in a long, long time. I managed to get an advance copy of their forthcoming debut album, Checkmate Savage, and everything Clutch said is true. Wait until you get a load of a song called “Folk Song Oblivion”, or the crazy Doo-Wop break 3 minutes into a song called “Throwing Bones”.
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Welcome!
Friends of the Stars are a Country / Folk band from Birmingham, UK and have been Commercially Inviable since 2000
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 net.
How we go about releasing our records and subsequent others remains to be seen, so this site will document that experiment, amongst other things. 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.
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