Dear Friends,

It’s been a while since we added anything to this site, but that doesn’t mean we’ve been entirely idle. We have a new record out inApril 2012, it’s only our second LP in 11 eleven years of making noise. How’s that for a work ethic? More news soon….

Weather is here, wish you were beautiful.

Love,
Friends of the Stars

We recorded the set, so if you missed it and want to hear how it sounded, or were there and would like to hear it again, here it is as a free download. The entire set is about 25 minutes long and the download is about 40Mb.

In truth, it isn’t the greatest quality live recording we’ve ever heard – it was taken from a mobile phone placed somewhere in the tent – so, if you’d just like a taster before you download it all, here is the 2nd track we played on the day, The People’s Express

Friends of the Stars @ Moseley Folk Festival 2010 (40Mb ZIP FILE)

TRACKLISTING

1: Leaves & Stars

2: The People’s Express

3: Wagons

4: Stagger Home Safe

5: Drunk on my Porch

6: I Don’t Love You Anymore

7: Brand New Morning

Our good friend Sophia also took some nice shots as we played…here they are as a Flickr set.

(For people reading this via RSS – here’s the link to Flickr)

Hope to see you at the 2011 festival!

Campbell, Craig & Executive Producer Robson discuss a variety of topics, including Campbell’s brief stint as the Milk Tray Man and his dalliance with a make-up artist called Kindly. The boys then push the boundaries of Voice Over IP technology by trying (and failing) to make beer appear over the internet. There is also a lot of bickering and swearing.

Listen:

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TRACKLISTING:

Blindness – The Fall
Ridin’ In my Car - She & Him
Night of the Long Knives – AC/DC
That Makes It Tough – Buddy Holly
I Can’t Stand The Rain – Ann Peebles
Every Day As We Grow Closer – Alex Chilton
Louisiana 1927 - Randy Newman
Tennessee Blues – Bobby Charles

DOWNLOAD FOTS-POD#23

LINER NOTES:

Blindness – The Fall
Especially for anyone who doesn’t believe the recent chat that Mark E Smith is putting out great, career-high stuff at the moment. I must admit I was one. A few too many late 90s, early naughties dawgs put me off the scent. But I’m like a Bisto kid again with The Fall. MIGHTY

Ridin’ In my Car – She & Him
Don’t tell the Missus but I reckon I may have fallen in love with Zooey Deschanel. This from her and M Ward’s terrific second LP. Her singing really reminds of someone – suggestions on a postcard because I can’t for the life of me place it. What I do know is she is legit. I love her style – not brassy or sassy but just confident and classy.

Night of the Long Knives – AC/DC
They’ve never done a Best Of – criminal really because lots of sniffy people who dismiss AC/DC as metallers would probably then realise that they are one of the greatest rock n roll bands, of all time, no comebacks, period. Question is, would this awesome tune even get on it?

That Makes It Tough – Buddy Holly
Just got the Complete Buddy Holly studio recording box set. Buddy Holly is awesome. AWESOME. Again, purists get sniffy about some of the overdubbing that went on with his demos after he died. Like this one. BUT, excuse me but this sounds like Highway 61 Revisited. Also shows you what an incredible artists Buddy Holly would have become through the 60s. Hard to grasp just how further amazing he would have been

I Can’t Stand The Rain – Ann Peebles
Ann Peebles is a fine singer but what really marks her out from the Southern Soul crowd back then is the fact she wrote the tunes. Now, that’s fine and dandy if those tunes are pleasant ditties. But Ann wrote “I Can’t Stand The Rain”…  as you can plainly hear, that tune kicks your face off.

Every Day As We Grow Closer – Alex Chilton
I don’t know much about this tune. I think it’s a post Box Tops and pre Big Star Alex Chilton solo thing. Anyway, see my thoughts about Alex Chilton below. This tune is really beautiful and probably meant absolutely fuck all to him. Whattaguy. x

Louisiana 1927 – Randy Newman
Every POD I do seems to need Randy Newman. I love him so much. This one is just so beautiful and quietly angry, righteously angry, I can barely believe how great it is. If you need to get into the vibe, think of Katrina and then remember this was recorded 30 years before it. Then get righteously angry yourself.

Tennessee Blues – Bobby Charles
Where to begin? One of the very greatest songwriters to take a breath. Walking to New Orleans? See You Later Alligator? This tune is from his eponymous LP, very hard to find these days, which was recorded up in Woodstock with guys from The Band in the early 70s. This is basically Triple XXX Catnip for me.
By the way, this and the two previous tunes (and the customary  secret track at the end) are a ramshackle, free association tribute to the recently late, very  great Alex Chilton & Bobby Charles.

New Orleans is the right flavour for these blues.

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Happy Birthday, Ronnie.

(from the wonderful Information Is Beautiful website)

(and here’s the link for those reading the feed)

From the marvellous ‘Intercourse With Biscuits’ blog. They say “Absolutely loving this Botswanan guitarist. The technique is really intriguing. Apparently, it’s common there to deliberately ditch two strings.”

As tastemakers have now conclusively identified, getting all mawkish and puffy and snivelsome online over the death of a celebrity is no longer okay, OK?

I myself have long railed (at whom is another question) against the vapid pointlessness of Tweeting my big sad face or “Liking” that one of your school colleagues that you no longer speak to wrote “RIP Lenny Bennett, I remember your name from on the telly from when I was young” (I’ll check whether Lenny Bennett has actually died in a minute and consider deleting this or leaving it in for some ineffable comic effect).

So, imagine the problem when one of your deeply-held heroes dies. It’s an even greater problem when that hero is a guy you mostly loved for being awkward, diffident, unsure or, more likely, unwilling to accept his stellar talent and, in short, someone who probably wouldn’t have liked seeing mawkish tributes to himself. If this wasn’t being written about the untimely death of Alex Chilton from a heart attack at just 59 but about Alex Chilton being justifiably but implausibly honoured at the Grammys, I visualise him standing there bristling a little from disdain and embarrassment, a little awkward twitch, not making eye contact, like George Milton from Of Mice and Men in a tight, starched collar.

Alex Chilton’s application to the higher echelons of rock artistry, as opposed to fame and success of course, is quite an untidy scrapbook of achievements really, when you look at it.

The Box Tops were great, certainly the original and best Blue-Eyed Soul group going, but that was mostly about the songwriting of Dan Penn and Wayne Carson Thompson. Young Alex’s voice was powerful and thrilling of course.

Then came Big Star and, well, Big Star weren’t as good as you think they were. This isn’t clever revisionism. It’s fact. Chilton used to say it in interviews and everyone thought he was being difficult or weird. But he meant it and he’s probably right. It’s not a great mystery that no-one bought Big Star back then, they were a ramshackle and dysfunctional, not great live, version of power pop that The Raspberries and others were selling more of. Plus no-one wanted adult pop songs, adults wanted rock gods, kids wanted cutie-pie pop.

BUT when Big Star were good, mostly Chilton’s songs, they were amazing. The Ballad of El Goodo, Thirteen, Daisy Glaize, Feel and of course September Gurls. All copper-bottomed classics.

The third album “Sister/Lovers” is a favourite of some; it’s wigged out on downers and booze and it’s pretty depressed and depressing. There’s a song called Holocaust on it. People dig it because it wasn’t released until later (no wonder) when Big Star’s cult was percolating in those bedrooms changed forever by punk, then indie. The album is a curate’s egg and has some kind of twisted genius bravery to it, but it IS the sound of an unfinished album played by down-on-their-luck Memphis session guys (Steve Cropper’s on it for fucksake) in the mid 1970s totally bummed on sour mash and Quaaludes. It sounds like a progenitor for the early Palace records in places. It sounds like a lot of odd things to be honest.

Then his later, patchy and intermittent solo stuff went through odd twists and turns, veering this way or that both attracted and energised by the East Coast new wave but also, at the same time, totally rejecting it. Listen to Like Flies On Sherbert. It’s a ride. But he also did wonderful things like his cover of Can’t Seem to Make You Mine, Bangkok, Lost My Job. Patchy, random, brilliant and a bit unsettling. Plenty of spikes and splinters in there.

Even when he came back to playing gigs as Big Star and the Box Tops, he looked pretty pissed off by it all. A wiry-thin, awkwardly morose guy, hardly moving, trotting out September Gurls for college audiences who weren’t even born when he first recorded it and no one cared. But yet he kept on doing it, attracted and repulsed at the same time by his whole career.

Makes me sad to think but, from reading comments from his Memphis friends after his death was announced, apparently he was living a pretty settled life with a wife and son. Maybe that’s why he kept gigging as Big Star, maybe he was just cool with it now. Fair enough and I’m sorry it didn’t last for him.

You might read this and wonder why the hell I would give a shit about Alex Chilton’s death, ‘he doesn’t sound like much of a fan’. Well, every word in here is WHY I’m a fan and why I tweeted my big RIP whilst simultaneously not liking people who do such pointless things. Alex Chilton was fucking great.