Tags on websites are useful when pretending you’re still a music journalist. If I was looking for words to describe the excellently named Friends Of The Stars I might well have written a piece that used some or all of the following words: country folk harmony pop harmony vocals alt-country Birmingham.

They’re from Birmingham, see, and they’re gearing up to release their second album, ‘Faith’s Meat Kiosk’, on 23 April. Words that don’t appear in tags relating to them, but could prove important, are fried chicken seasoning secret recipe. In a quite brilliant move, FOTS are getting all Reggae Sauce on us and if you buy some of their seasoning, you’ll get the album for free. But we think we’ve spotted a flaw in their marketing strategy – you can only buy the seasoning from music website bandcamp. Not the first place we go when looking for secret recipe fried chicken seasoning we have to say.

More hear…
- There’s a website… and the fried chicken seasoning is available form bandcamp.

Blast. This is good. Better still, this wondrous sound is being made by Charlotte Hatherley, formerly of Ash. She actually left Ash in 2006, which is quite a while ago and makes me feel quite old. Since, she’s released three solo albums and strummed along with the likes of Bats For Lashes and KT Tunstall.

For no other reason than bone idleness, I’ve not given solo Hath my full attention. Which is very remiss as she knows a decent tune when she hears one. Stuff like ‘Bastardo’ and ‘Kim Wilde’ are excellent la-la-la pop. The video for ‘Bastardo’ in particular is time well spent. Charl is nothing if not well connected. The video is directed by her ex-boyf Edgar Wright (Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and the supremely daft Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, etc) and stars David Walliams and Simon Pegg among others.

I interviewed Ash on a number of occasions and we did some bonkers online stuff when I was at NME.COM. Must try dig it out, it really was quite special considering it was back in 2000/2001. Exclusive footage uploaded daily, live tracks, interactive competitions. Lovely people to a man and woman you won’t be unsurprised to hear. And unusually, so was the entire team behind them. Every one of them, lovely.

My most interesting Charlotte fact gleaned from the olden days is that she has two older sisters. Bea, who played in Warm Jets among others, was the middle sister, the name of the oldest sister escapes me, but it began with A. For some reason I think it’s Amy. Their parents, see, named them in alphabetical order. I do like that.

So anyway, the new stuff. Aw, I don’t need to tell you about it. You can hear it for yourself and make your own mind up, right?

More hear…
- There is a website.
- And you can grab a free download of the single ‘Hook You Up’ just for liking the FB page.

All Ears: Magic Alex ‘Chica Chica’

Look. I know. But it’s not like anyone reads this stuff so my almost non existent posting makes no odds. Thing is, I like doing this. I need to do it more. I hereby resolve to do it more.

So anyway, I’ve been meaning to do this post for a while. It’s funny how things catch up with you eventually. I like a bit of twitter and when @magicalex69 started following me it caught my attention. In my Maker days there was a band called Magic Alex who we rather liked.

And lo, @magicalex69 turns out to be none other than Dean Taylor, singer with Magic Alex, the band from my olden days. Imagine. They’re a band whose name frequently pops up when my old music muckers get round a table for some fizzy ones. It was a curious one because their guitarist was John Simm. Whatever happened to him eh? “Oh I know,” says Dean, “all that talent and no reward, it’s been a nightmare for him.”

He was very much on the up at the time having just put in a shift on the excellent TV series “The Lakes”. So were Magic Alex any good or was it shameless oh he’s off the telly head-turning? Don’t all rush at once to answer that. Thing was, as grubby music hacks we spent our lives hanging out with bands… full of famous people. Why on earth would we say Magic Alex were good just because him off of the telly played guitar for them?

They were good, very good, but the John Simm thing did smear the edges. They were a bunch of mates from Manchester, old school pals I think, and they were just doing what pals do. Form a band, have a laugh. It happened that one of their number was a bit famous and they leveraged that to get a bit of attention. Whatever it takes, right? I’ve seen worse crimes.

And when you take a listen, even 10 years on, tracks like “Super KK”, “Chica Chica” (see above), “Older”, “Country Feeling”, they’re all corkers. There’s little doubt they could write a tune and, importantly, to us as at any rate, they were enormously good fun. They made me honk laughing, must try dig out the original piece I wrote.

Dean pointed me in the direction of some old treasures, a few YouTube films that made me shriek with delight, but best of all I discovered there was an album. It didn’t see the light back in the day, but thankfully it finally surfaced in 2009 and is very much worth a listen a two.

The original Magic Alex, for anyone who is still reading, was a self-proclaimed electronics whizz who hung out with The Beatles. He talked a good game, or maybe it was the drugs, but he got the job of building The Beatles a new studio in the basement of the Apple building on Savile Row. His best idea wasn’t the inclusion of 72-track tape machine, but replacing the acoustic baffles around Ringo’s drums with an invisible sonic force field. Like I say, maybe it was the drugs. Google him, he’s worth reading about.

More hear…
- The album, ‘Dated And Sexist’, is here…
- The YouTube vids are here, here and here.

All Ears: … Of Diamonds ‘… Of Diamonds Theme’

In an almost unprecedented move, it’s two-posts-for-the-price-one-Thursday here at MNFB. Usually, you’re lucky if you get two posts in the same month, let alone the same week. The same day? We are feeling a giddy and will probably need a little lie down soon.

So, anyway… we like ellipses round here so this lot are causing us some bother with their very name. For example, we can’t use an ellipse in the title like we usually do, because it looks all odd. So from now on, it’s dashes until we are once again writing about a band without an ellipse in their name.

… Of Diamonds are a girl group from Norwich. They do a kind of harmonious electro pop – which makes them sound like St Etienne, which they don’t. It’s much more raucous than that, much edgier. How much more edge we don’t yet know, because like all the best things, we only get a tantalising glimpse into their world. The YouTube channel features three short videos, which are a bit like peering at them through a fuzzy keyhole. The canteen video is strangely unsettling. They appear to be in Japan, possibly. What we really like is how in this plugged in, switched on, head-full-up world they’ve managed to grab our attention without, like many new bands, having to chuck the kitchen sink at us.

Also on offer are three tracks to flap your ears along to. They say they want people to be able to whistle their tunes, which is always a good thing. And we suspect, when all is revealed, they may well do whistleable by the wheelbarrow.

We really like the wigged out Kraftwerk of ‘… Of Diamonds Theme’ (see above) and the Stereolab-ish ‘Weirdo’ (available as a free download from Soundcloud), but our favourite so far is ‘Frank Says’, of which we only get an tiny glimpse, but it mixes the sweetest la-la-las with a more sinister vocal that stabs at you like knitting needles. It comes on like something we can’t quite put our finger on. Answers on a postcard if you can name that tune. We think it might be Underworld?

Apparently, there’s live dates lined up for October. We’ll be there, no doubt.

More hear…
- A free download of ‘Weirdo’ off of soundcloud.
- A website.
- And finally, the aforementioned YouTube channel.

Okay, so we’ve banged on a-plenty about Space Raiders. Not going to stop now. They’ve just signed the marvellously monikered Penny and Ashtray to their label. Listening with both ears wide open, it’s fantastically squonky stuff and if the Raiders had a label, which they do, this latest signing is akin to asking the hoary old what on earth attracted Debbie McGee to the millionaire Paul Daniels question.

From Osaka, Momoyo Kubo and Tamotsu Ide already have one album of their quite thrilling glitch disco under their stylish belts, 2008′s ‘The Secrets of Galaxy Z’. Bestest news is that number two, ‘Monolith and Mirrorball’ will be heading your way on 28 November.

Here – well not here, but just above, at the top of the page, got it? Good – we have a sneaky peaky at ‘Sex Appeal’ from the forthcoming album. We rather like glitch disco.

More hear…
- Buy stuff here, and here.
- Space Raiders label, right here.