Star 27
1, 2, Begin Now

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to cite The Boomtown Rats as a major influence on your band and still walk away with your credibility intact. But frankly who cares when you’re lighting touch papers under some of the sparkiest pop bangers this side of Sparks’ exalted '70s output? Not Star 27, it would seem.

Lead-off track and recent Steve Lamacq fave ‘Bukowski’s Secret’ is the accidental music soundtrack to the aforementioned outfit’s ‘Dick Around’ smashing happy hardcore records over its head with a penny whistle up its arse. It is to novelty records what Eno was to muzak in the late seventies.

Then there’s ‘Soldier On Son’, a fizzing cocktail of punch-drunk guitars and blasting sax that shifts through the gears with alarming ease, like a youthful Supergrass after an elightening evening spent sniffing bins.

After which senseless rogering they get all chivalrous on our asses with a fine slice of starry-eyed, Divine Comedy-esque balladeering in ‘Welcome Home’, before bowing out on a high – literally - with the teetering, tightrope waltz of ‘Don’t Hurt Him’.

As great eccentric pop EPs go (and I can think of literally one) it ain’t quite Ice Hockey Hair, but on this evidence Star 27 can justifiably dream of scaling such giddy heights – just keep those arousing Geldof fantasies on the sweet and low, okay guys?