Stardust - Music Sounds Better With You

Stardust only did this once. One single and then gone, which even at the time felt weird because records that big usually come with a whole plan behind them and this one really didn't.

It was Thomas Bangalter from Daft Punk, Alan Braxe and Benjamin Diamond. Braxe had just put "Vertigo" out on Bangalter's Roule label in 1997 and then got asked to play live at the Rex Club in Paris, so he brought Bangalter along on keyboards and Diamond, who he'd known since school, to sing. They were a track short for the set so they made one, not another club tool that would work for two weeks and disappear, but an actual song with verses and a chorus that someone could remember on the way home.

The loop was taken from Chaka Khan's "Fate" which was an album track from her 1981 album What Cha' Gonna Do for Me. They took 2 seconds from it and looped it for the whole track with not many changes apart from a Rhodes chord progression and a subtly changing bass. Diamond sings over the top.

The first press was on Roule, 20 July 1998, it was intended for DJs, and then a few copies made it over to the Miami Winter Music Conference where the UK DJs all grabbed it and suddenly Roule were shifting something like 250,000 to 400,000 on their own before Virgin rereleased it, with the UK CD and cassette following on 10 August 1998.

It went to number 2 in the UK, it spent two weeks stuck behind Boyzone's "No Matter What", and it ended up the 11th biggest seller of 1998. Number one in Greece and Spain as well, top ten in France and a load of other places, number one on the US dance chart for two weeks, and over two million copies in total.

Virgin offered Bangalter $3 million to do a whole Stardust album after all that, which would have been the easiest money of his life, and they made a few demos together and then just chucked them and said no and never recorded anything else under the name. Diamond has said since he would have carried on while Bangalter just went straight back to Daft Punk.

The track was remastered in 2019 when it was finally released properly on streaming.