Benjamin Diamond

Stardust was a one-time musical collaborative effort consisting of producers Thomas Bangalter, Alan Braxe, and vocalist Benjamin Diamond. They released their only single, "Music Sounds Better with You", on 20 July 1998.

History

The project released the popular club track titled "Music Sounds Better with You" in 1998. The song, which is based around a sample from the 1981 song "Fate" by Chaka Khan, was recorded in Paris by Daft House productions, where Bangalter, one half of the popular French house duo Daft Punk, is based. The song was conceived in Rex Club, Paris, where the trio were playing a live set. Bangalter and Braxe created the instrumental, which Diamond instinctively sang the title words over. The next day they laid down the track in the studio, adding the Chaka Khan sample. The song reached #2 in the United Kingdom and spent two weeks at #1 on Billboard Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart in the United States in August and October 1998 respectively.

The song remains the only release of the trio. Shortly after the release Bangalter was offered 3 million dollars to produce a full Stardust album, but Bangalter, Braxe and Diamond have not worked together since. Diamond and Braxe resumed their ongoing solo careers, and Bangalter, along with his usual partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, went on to release the second Daft Punk album, Discovery, as well as releasing other house music tracks solo or with other partners.

The video for "Music Sounds Better with You" was directed by Michel Gondry. It features a boy who has just purchased a toy plane. Back at home, while he builds his plane, he switches channels on his TV to a program which features the top 5 chart songs. Some of the music videos shown have Stardust themselves singing their new song and others, which have a resemblance of 80s music videos including Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love".

In 2018, Braxe and Diamond revealed that they and Bangalter returned to the studio to work on a remastered version of "Music Sounds Better with You" for the song’s twentieth anniversary re-release. This version was released on 28 June, 2019.

Members

Benjamin Diamond started as a punk rocker in the band Chicken Pox, but taking inspiration from artists such as New Order, Michael Jackson, and Roxy Music, he veered towards electro. However, he is best known for his collaboration in Stardust with Bangalter and Braxe. He sang the lyrics in their 1998 single "Music Sounds Better With You", which was an international success. This sparked interest in Diamond's own music.

In 2000, he released his first album Strange Attitude, which included his earlier singles "Little Scare" and "In Your Arms (We Gonna Make It)". The following year he released the EP Solitaire, which included a number of tracks he had produced especially for the Dior Autumn-Winter'01 fashion parade. In Martin James's book French Connections (p. 275), his record company at the time (Sony) is suggested to have wanted Strange Attitude to be an album in Stardust-style. At the same place, Benjamin Diamond says that he found it "very difficult to go back to my own style of music after Stardust". At around the same time, Diamond was involved in the somewhat short-lived music group We In Music.

However, in mid-2005, he released his second album, Out of Myself, which was much more rock-oriented than his first album. Let's Get High and There is a Girl were released as singles. The song from his third album Cruise Control, "Baby's On Fire", was used in the 13th and 14th episodes of the 4th season of the American comedy-drama series Ugly Betty.

Discography

Singles