X-Cetra: How our pre-teen record became an unlikely hit

In the year 2000, four pre-teen best friends from California – Ayden, Jessica, and sisters Mary and Janet – had the idea of starting a pop group. They called themselves X-Cetra and started writing songs. They asked Mary and Janet's mum Robin, an experimental musician, for help recording an album, which they called Stardust. Robin paired the girls’ songs of pre-teen crushes, joy and angst, with some tracks sent to her by a producer friend in Berlin. But when the girls finally heard the finished record, which sounded a lot stranger and more experimental than the Spice Girls-esque sound they had been imagining, they were mortified. On the verge of becoming teenagers, and with adolescent self-consciousness kicking in, they pushed the album to one side and deliberately forgot all about it. The girls grew up and eventually lost touch as they left home for college and got on with their lives. It would be 20 years before a chance internet search by one of the girls revealed that not only was a copy of their album Stardust online, but people seemed to really like it. Not long after, in a surreal turn of events, they got a call from a record label, who wanted to reissue it. A quarter of a century late, X-Cetra were about to hit the big time.

Ayden has directed a documentary about the band called Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story.

Presenter: Asya Fouks
Producer: Zoe Gelber

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(Photo: A collage of two images of X-Cetra. In the left image, from left to right, Ayden, Janet, Jessica and Mary in the year 2000. In the right image, the same girls in 2026. Credit: Robby Klein/Getty)