Starz In Their Eyes

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I sang an approximation of what I thought the guitar riff should sound like and Adam embellished it and played it beautifully.

At some point my mate Sam got his little nephew to record the “When I grow up I’m wanna be famous” line, and that was pretty much it. Tony then came up with the great drum groove, including the brilliantly simple but effective rising drum fill, and Adam recorded the three chords that are the meat of the song on top. What you’ve always considered a great dance tune suddenly has an entirely new inflection; a tale of a singer worried that they are moving closer to the label of ‘one hit wonder’, that their star is dying and that they still haven’t found the happiness they always craved. I went from being a low key, left of centre, bedroom producing, rapper/singer/stoner, to being on Top Of The Pops, and Conan O’Brien in NYC, and countless other places I would never have expected.This means that producers of the show knowingly tell these people that they are good enough at least twice before they make it onto the stage, filling them with hope and self-belief which can then be torn down in front of the nation for our entertainment.

I was also generally angry with the smug and bloated fame machine as a whole, and how the ‘talent’ is often seen as an expendable piece of meat to be used by managers, labels and publicists until their sell-by-date runs out. Just Jack’s 'Starz in their Eyes' in this way is the predecessor for Mike Posner; the upbeat and catchy tune is topped by a cockney vocal that makes it such an entertaining listen – but there is so much more to it than that.I’d been listening to The Clash a lot at the time and decided I wanted a rawer more ‘band’ orientated sound for this song. Whilst I could pick out more of the lyrics to dissect they all tend to suggest the same two things; that fame isn’t what it's cracked up to be and that the industry uses and abuses talent. In the first verse, the lyrics suggest that once someone becomes famous ("VIPerson"), their problems worsen and their paranoia grows.