Friends of the Stars have never done things the easy way. Nor have they often gone the right way; at least, not before a couple of ambitious, ill-conceived or simply stubborn blind alleys have been ventured down first.

That’s why the appearance of “Lighting & Electrical”, their first commercially available album, is such a minor miracle.

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Let’s start by admitting it has taken more than two years to release. The cool way of looking at this is they wrote, played, recorded, and produced the whole thing themselves... at home. They roped in expert technical expertise from kindly friends who gave of their time without charge... which kind of means you can’t tap your watch and look miffed at them all the time.

Basically, it’s homegrown. And you don’t rush ‘homegrown’.

The other way of looking at this - the less cool, “accurate” way of looking at this - is that Friends of the Stars can sometimes be guilty of being headstrong about things they later regret. Not tuning the guitars to a piano for the first two or three months of recording, rendering them utterly useless, is a good example of this.

Buy the "Lighting & Electrical" CD from CD Baby