Live in Bristol!

Commercially Inviable artists Richard Burke, World of Fox and Friends of the Stars will be sharing the bill in Bristol on Friday 5th Febuary at the Grain Barge.

Meadowlands Festival 2010

Friends of the Stars are late additions to the bill at the 2010 Meadowlands Festival in Lewes (which we believe is in Sussex), and takes place over the May Bank Holiday weekend of 29th and 30th. We’re not sure at the moment whether we will play on Saturday or Sunday, or indeed where on the bill, but we’ll post more details as and when we have them. In the meantime, here’s the festival poster.

A Full Squad Treading The Boards

Just a gentle reminder that tomorrow, 6th November, Friends of the Stars will be treading the boards once again, playing as a full band for the first time in a wee while in support of rising folk star Beth Jeans Houghton.

Details…

Beth Jeans Houghton with support from Friends of the Stars and Banksa

Friday 6th November
The Hare And Hounds
106 High Street
Kings Heath
Birmingham
B14 7JZ
Doors Open 8pm
Admission £5.00

Here’s the blurb from the promoters, Lunar Society:

This month once again we bring you 3 fine acts. Beth Jeans Haughton, Friends of The Stars and Banksa.

Beth Jeans Houghton was born in Transylvania to a pack of albino wolves who raised her on chewing tobacco and stuffed clams. Beth is also Observer Music Monthly rising star for July.

Her very limited edition first release sold out almost instantly and second release Golden has further proved her to be a talented songwriter.  She’s played alongside a diverse collection of artists including Fiona Regan, Imogen Heap, and Scott Matthews and what more endorsement could she need than when Devendra Banhart interrupted his Greenman Festival set halfway through and invited her to play her own song.

Friends of the Stars emerged earlier this century from the fated ashes of John Peel favourites The Toques.
Principal members Anna Russell (vocals, keyboards), Craig Hamilton (vocals, guitars), Cam Docherty (guitars, vocals) and Phil Robinson (drums) hail from Birmingham, UK via Brighton, Northampton and Kilmarnock.  Friends of the Stars share out song-writing and vocal duties, with Anna’s soaring voice on its own or complimenting Craig or Cam’s more weather-beaten tones.

Banska is singer /song writer Rowena Knight. She is based in Birmingham and proves that creativity and originality are still alive in contemporary acoustic music.  This is Folk music with a unique atmospheric sound and driving rhythms with a rocky edge.

Radio Spiritworld and free Conet Project

Thanks for the h-h-hyperlinks, Uncle Campbell

Hi-ho folks,

I finally remembered my log-in so I can unburden myself of things that my brain tells me all the time… that’s what the Internet’s for, right?

Things are progressing on the album front - most if not all of the recording is done now but we might add a few more sparkles before we start final mixing with the mighty @bethmcgowan

Other musical projects are being cooked up - more on them when it’s safe to break cover, but I can say that, at some point before we die, we might actually have a… gulp…body of work. Yikes but also hoorah! Hoorikes!?

Ok, the main point of this post was to recommend the Podcast Radio Spiritworld by the brilliant Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz .

I first listened to this a few months ago so it isn’t new but if you haven’t heard it, you have to. Even more than their two hilarious series’ of Look Around You…

Ghosts

…Radio Spiritworld somehow manages to spot-on spoof something that never existed.

I won’t spoil the Radio Spiritworld fun by describing this anymore because I’m pretty sure you’ll get a real kick from how original and weirdly familiar it is (maybe it does exist after all). Apparently they are making a series for Radio 4 too - well done the BBC, you big daft twat, you did a thing right.

Having said I won’t spoil it… if you, like me, scared the living crap out of yourself as a youngster by purposely listening to shortwave radio late at night, you will either be pleased or sent wimpering in abject fear to the corner of the room, curled up in a foetal ball, by this - a link to the entire Conet Project files to download.

Indeed, I dunno, you might even be pleased that you have finally found means by which you can send yourself to the corner of the room, wimpering in abject fear, curling up in a foetal ball (different folks etc…).

Good friend of FOTS, the venerable Dubber, has written about these Number Stations before- although that was probably five or six of his different blogs back (I cannae keep up with you Andrew old chap!). They also inspired one of the remixes he did for us a couple of years ago. No one really knows, verifiably, what they were (and, I think, still are) but it seems pretty clear they were a means of transmitting code between Cold War spies?… governments?…aliens?…the dead?

By the way… while i was writing the last bit, iTunes Genius decided to play  - tcp d1 17 4 note rising scale irdial -  you scary Genius!

Anyway, after I discovered Radio Spiritworld I discovered Robert Popper’s blog - a place of daily hilarity. (my new hero) Robin Cooper’s phonecalls and podcasts are a reason enough to explore and there’s lot’s more greatness therein… he even used a recommendation of mine a few days ago and was kind enough to mention our blog, thanks Robert.

OK, see you soon for the gig in November supporting Beth Jeans Houghton (I’ll be the one in a foetal ball!)

Stay great chums and remember, if you have kids yourself, blast The Conet Project into their rooms before they go to sleep every night - it’ll be good for them.

Nighty night …

Kids need shortwave radio to prevent them becoming in anyway involved with or the slightest bit interested in X-Factor

…beep…beep.. (Greensleeves played on a Glockenspiel)…beep…beep ..ACHT… zwei… sieben sieben… ACHT… ACHT… sieben.. ACHT

A Date With Beth Jeans Houghton

Friends of the Stars will be supporting rising folk star Beth Jeans Houghton at the Hare & Hounds, Birmingham on Friday November 6th. The line-up is completed by Banksa, and doors open at 8pm.

See you there. 

From the Lunar Society site….

Come November we’re back once again at The Hare And Hounds after our brief diversion in October.

This month once again we bring you 3 fine acts. Beth Jeans Haughton, Friends of The Stars and Banksa.

Beth Jeans Houghton was born in Transylvania to a pack of albino wolves who raised her on chewing tobacco and stuffed clams. Beth is also Observer Music Monthly rising star for July.

Her very limited edition first release sold out almost instantly and second release Golden has further proved her to be a talented songwriter.

She’s played alongside a diverse collection of artists including Fiona Regan, Imogen Heap, and Scott Matthews – and what more endorsement could she need than when Devendra Banhart interrupted his Greenman Festival set halfway through and invited her to play her own song.

Friends of the Stars emerged earlier this century from the fated ashes of John Peel favourites The Toques.

Principal members Anna Russell (vocals, keyboards), Craig Hamilton (vocals, guitars), Cam Docherty (guitars, vocals) and Phil Robinson (drums) hail from Birmingham, UK via Brighton, Northampton and Kilmarnock.

Friends of the Stars share out song-writing and vocal duties, with Anna’s soaring voice on its own or complimenting Craig or Cam’s more weather-beaten tones.

Banska is singer /song writer Rowena Knight. She is based in Birmingham and proves that creativity and originality are still alive in contemporary acoustic music.

This is Folk music with a unique atmospheric sound and driving rhythms with a rocky edge.

Friday 6th November
The Hare And Hounds
106 High Street
Kings Heath
Birmingham
B14 7JZ

Doors Open 8pm
Admission £5.00

The Million Dollar Rematch….This Time It’s Personable

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 Friday 8th May 2009 we are bringing together these two unique talents to play on the same bill for the second time… It’s the Million Dollar Rematch.

Here’s what happened last March, when we did this for the first time when Anna sang with Dorian Wood USA:

(FEED Readers can see the video here)

Friends of the Stars and Commercially Inviable cordially invite you to kick off your 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.

We hope to see you there.

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DORIAN WOOD (USA)

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.

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.

THEY SAY: “Elevator Music for people descending into hell”

FRIENDS OF THE STARS

Commercially Inviable Since 2000, this alt-country outdfit 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.

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.”

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INFORMATION:

Email info@friendsofthestars.co.uk

Call +44 (0) 7740 358 162

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USEFUL LINKS:

FRIENDS OF THE STARS

THE HARE & HOUNDS

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DIRECTIONS:

LOCATION ON MULTIMAP.COM FOR DIRECTIONS

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10 Things That Were Great In 2008

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.

Chicken Bone (DEMO)

Bubble of Hate (DEMO)

7: I MET RICHIE HAVENS

This is me and my mate Stuart with Richie Havens.

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 balladeer Sleepy Eyes Nelson.

DOWNLOAD: 4 Track James Summerfield Sampler

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”.

So, that was the year that was….

Wishing you a happy 2009

Kick it, Chuck

Me and the missus saw Public Enemy last night in Brum. It was the only UK show of their current tour  during which they are playing the whole of “It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back“. It was pretty awesome as it goes. They even told the crowd when we were entering Side 2, but I think most folk there knew the record well enough to know that. It was a joy to hear those tunes played live again.

Chuck and Flavor also made several mentions of their show at The Hummingbird in 1990. I was at that one aswell, and the tshirt I bought still fits me.

Fannying About On A Yacht…..

This is me performing a version of Rio by Duran Duran from the recent Songwriters Cafe event at Birmingham’s Orange Studio. The event was a reunion show for a much-missed former fixture of the Birmingham music landscape….

In 1997, when Buick 6 was but a mere twinkle in my eye, I was a regular performer at Paul Murphy’s “Songwriter’s Cafe” - a bi-weekly Sunday afternoon music event held in Birmingham city centre bar that saw performances from local artists and singers as well as visits from some more well known folks such as PP Arnold, Simon Fowler (Ocean Colour Scene) and Alan Tyler (The Rockingbirds, Come On Down & Meet The Folks).

The often chaotic nature of the events were trundled along nicely by Paul’s back-of-a-fag-packet approach to any sort of performer running order and in particular the (at the time) relatively novel concept of being able to get roaring shitfaced in the pub all afternoon on a Sunday. The Songwriters Cafe that took place on Easter Sunday 1998, following just days after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, was a particularly happy and rawkus affair. Happy days indeed.

It was a damn shame when SWC closed down at some point in 2000, although I’m glad to say that Paul and I have remained in touch - he played at our album launch party last year, in fact. When he called some months back asking me to play a set at his reunion show I jumped at the chance. As with the old shows on Bennetts Hill, I had a 15 minute slot and got to play some songs to a lovely, appreciative audience and the slightly daft version of Rio seemed entirely in keeping with the SWC spirit.

It was just like old times.

x

Read more about the recent Songwriters Cafe event here in the Spaghetti Gazetti Review.

Live Video and Photos from the Dorian Wood night - 21/03/08

Here are some things that were captured on Friday….

Anna singing with Dorian Wood (USA) on his song ”Watsonvilled”…

..and some photos from the night.

There are many more photos to see in this handy Friends of the Stars / Dorian Wood FLICKR set

Friends of the Stars

Dorian Wood (UK)

Dorian Wood (USA)

There will be some audio to come just as soon as Dorian USA gets home to California and makes it Interwebable.

Were you at the show? Leave a comment below with your thoughts…