With a title like that, what else can you say? Tuesday 6th May sees the first of a series of nights called Mushaboom! (exclamation mark compulsory) at The Carlton Club in Whalley Range, south Manchester, and I’ll be DJing.

No doubt I’ll be playing some Fiery Furnaces, Of Montreal, Xiu Xiu, Beck, Neon Neon and loads more inbetween sets from Tom Hickox, Sparky Deathcap and Klaus Says Buy The Record. All in all it should be a good night. Hopefully I’ll see you there!

Find out more at their Facebook group.

By the way, here’s a quick progress update on the EP - promo copies will start to be sent out at the weekend and I’m filming a video for ‘My Little Test Case’ in the Northern Quarter of Manchester on Thursday. If you’re around that day, look out for me with a clown mask and a baguette. That’s all I’m saying for now!

Don’t forget, if you haven’t heard ‘My Little Test Case’ yet, you can hear it on my Myspace page right now.

In the run up to the release of the new ‘Kingdom Hearts’ EP I’ve launched a page on Facebook where you can listen to songs and ‘interact’.  So head along there now and become a fan!

Yes, the new Star Fighter Pilot EP is called ‘Kingdom Hearts’ and is going to be available as a download from the Filthy Little Angels website from the 29th of May. If you’d like a preview though, head over to my Myspace page where you’ll find I’ve uploaded the track ‘My Little Test Case’. Let me know what you think!

Here’s the artwork…

The full track listing is:

1. My Little Test Case
2. When We Break Up
3. Cultural Song
4. 33 Suns

I’ll upload another track from the EP closer to release so keep checking back!

In what might be considered a sideways move, I’ve been booked to play a Prince tribute night at The Ruby Lounge in Manchester on the 11th of May.  Details are on the Live page.

Not sure what song I’m going to do yet.  I’m quite tempted to do ‘Batdance’ but I’ve no idea how you’d actually cover a song built of samples from a film without it sounding very silly indeed!

On Easter Saturday I “went on down to South Park” and “had myself a time”. The South Park in question was the one in Darlington, rather than the cartoon one in Colorado. Between snow showers I stood around in a T-shirt, trying to disguise how cold I was, while Louise took some rather ace photos of me.

You can find them over on the Photos page. Media bods will be glad to hear that the new ones are well over a megabyte in size each - nice high quality!

While I was away at the weekend I had some new press shots taken.  Look out for them here (hopefully) later on tonight!  In the meantime, a quick gig review.

Last night I was down at Night & Day for the first night of Chris T-T’s UK tour.  Support came in the form of Lucy And The Caterpillar.  A solo artist, rather than a band, I’ve missed her Manchester shows to date.

She’s certainly what you’d call twee.  Unashamedly so too.  If you write a song about knitting yourself a mascot in the shape of an owl then you’re so completely and utterly twee that there’s no point trying to hide it.

Giggling through her set with a northern twang she reminded me of Victoria Wood for some reason.  At one point she stopped the song she’d started by dedicating to a friend called Sarah to ensure us “I’m not a lesbian!” to much laughter in the audience.  She’s the only act I can think of that could play a Primary School and the Camden Crawl and fit in at both.  Funnily enough, that’s exactly what she’s doing!

Then Chris T-T took to the stage.  If you’ve read my biog you’ll know I cite him as an influence.  It’s not that I sound much like him, but he’s a songwriter with a unique viewpoint and isn’t afraid to expand his sound with interesting production techniques.

Starting off alone on stage, he rattled off the night’s only song from his ‘9 Red Songs’ protest song album, ‘The Huntsman Comes A-Marching’, followed by the oldest song of the night, ‘Open Books’.

This was the first time I’d seen him with a band (they got stuck in the lift) at the last gig I caught him at!  Once the band were on stage (Night & Day, luckily, has no lifts) we got loads of tunes from his rather ace new album ‘Capital’ as well as his previous London-centric album, ‘London Is Sinking’.

Combining ‘leftist protest singer’ with imaginative songs about things like giraffes flying (that one wasn’t played last night, although Lucy And The Caterpillar could have covered it without it sounding odd) makes Chris T-T unique.  I really don’t know why he’s not better known.  Do yourself a favour and go out and grab ‘Capital’.

You can catch Chris T-T on tour until the 20th of April.  Dates on his site.

Thanks to Hip Young Gunslinger who has done a write up on ‘Stalk Tonight’.  He manages to compare it to both ‘Teachers’ by Daft Punk and ‘Delilah’ by Tom Jones, which certainly impresses me.

You can hear the track at my Myspace, although I’ve just finished a new version that has a lot more bass!  I’ll upload that soon.

Apparently 59.5 seconds (the length of ‘Stalk Tonight’) isn’t quite short enough, though.  Fellow Mancunians The Ting Tings have a song that lasts just 47 seconds.  I hereby challenge any other Manchester musicians to beat that.  The only rule is that it needs to have at least one verse and one chorus.

The shortest track I can find  in my collection is ‘Bit 4′ by Aphex Twin at 25 seconds, but I’d hardly call that a ’song’.  I also have an MP3 of ‘Citizen’s Band’ by Super Furry Animals which clocks in at just 6 seconds and consists of Gruff Rhys singing one line followed by a cymbal crash, although that’s got to be a mistake…

I’ve just added a Video section to the site.  So far it features the video for ‘Another Penny’ along with the first two Web Transmissions.  There’ll be another one of those soon.  Don’t forget you can always visit my Youtube Channel, where you’ll find all my videos along with links to videos posted by others that feature Star Fighter Pilot action!

The ‘1 minute songs’ project Filthy Little Angels are working on is growing!  It’s now going to be a double 7″ release (so much classier than a 12″!).  In addition to my song ‘Stalk Tonight’ it’ll also feature such notables as Darren Hayman, Wojtek Godzisz and the brilliant Say.  It’ll be unmissable!  We’ll have pre-order details up here as soon as they’re available.

Hello and welcome to the new Star Fighter Pilot website. A redesign was long overdue so here it is!

There are lots of exciting things on the way in the next few months. A new EP is due out in May (more on that soon) and I’ll be contributing to a new 7″ on Filthy Little Angels in the summer. It’s going to feature 16 bands each doing songs lasting no more that 1 minute. In a burst of creativity I wrote and recorded mine over the weekend. It’s called ‘Stalk Tonight’ and you can hear it now on Myspace!

If you’re subscribed to the blog at the old site make sure you subscribe to the feed here too, as this will be replacing the old blog eventually.