*NEWS*

STARSANDHEROES is looking for a new home! After a-year-and-a-bit of sporadic success in various bijou locations around London, we've decided to up stumps and head for sunnier climes...so if anybody has any bright ideas where we can settle down, lay our hats, kick back and so forth in the merry city "they" have been known to call Sydney, feel free to let us know. Cheers!

God, doesn't The Soft Bulletin seem like a million years ago? Well fear not, Coynetes, for The Flaming Lips are well and truly BACK!!! New album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots hits the shops mid-July (ish - depending where you live, it could be the 15th or the 16th as far as we can tell), and initial reports have described it as "whoosh, fuck me, it's even more gigantic than the last one"...here's hoping they don't do a Mercury Rev on us and get swallowed up by uberproduction eh? Whatever transpires, be sure to pop down to the Lips' websiteand watch the video for ace new single "Do You Realise??", ok?

Call it serendipity, call it dumb luck (ok, they're pretty much the same thing, but what the hey), but it just so happens that Luke Slater's releasing a new single and it just so happens to take its name from the very e-ntity you're currently reading. Yep, "Stars And Heroes" is its name, and it's a gorgeous mid-paced electropop squeeze of joy indeed. Flexing his tunesome muscles as only a man who's spent ten years trapped in the melody graveyard of abstract electronica can, our Luke makes wholly brilliant use of former Aloof singer Ricky Barrow (as indeed he does on the bulk of his album-of-the-year-you-read-it-here-first Alright On Top) and proves his place on the Mute roster is well deserved. "Stars And Heroes" is released on July the 8th, and you can watch the video here. Go buy it instead of anything by Fischerspooner...

NB. anyone who thinks Luke nicked his song title off us is, er, kinda missing the point a bit.

A word of warning for fans of Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet: just as surprisingly not-shit, recently-renamed UK popkids Liberty X found the domain name they wanted for their website had already been snapped up by a ropey European porn site, poor Kieran seems to have encountered darstardly usurpers on the net. Go here for the full horror of Berkeley, California modern jazz quartet, er, The Fourtet...or alternatively go here for a pretty good (if a smidge old) interview with the currently-not-actually-doing-much-we-think boy Kieran himself.

(originally published 24th June 2002)