Dubstar: Sister
Of all the songs from the second attempt at a Dubstar comeback album, Sister is probably the most important. Why? Because it was the moment that finally drew focus to the problems we were facing — and showed why the whole idea would eventually have to be abandoned.
Our first single, Stars, came out almost thirty years ago, and it’s worth revisiting the early Dubstar timeline. I met Chris at the end of 1991 in Walker’s Nightclub in Newcastle, where I was working and he was a regular. We started making music a few months later. I met Sarah in the Barley Mow pub in the summer of 1993, and she took over vocal duties from me in early ’94. Chris and I met Paul Wadsworth — not officially in the band, but still integral — in Jesmond in early 1995.
What did these meetings have in common? We were all in Newcastle upon Tyne. (Chris was technically in Gateshead, a mile south, but close enough.) During the Disgraceful era, we were a Newcastle band. We had a studio in the city centre. I was in Jesmond, Sarah in Benwell, Paul in Fenham, and Chris in Low Fell. Pretty much everything we did, we did together: recording, rehearsing, drinking, racing for the last train home from Camden Town.
By the time we recorded Sister in 2010, everything had changed. I was in Hove, Sarah was in London, Chris was in Jesmond, Paul had moved back to the Isle of Wight. The only times we saw each other were during rushed recording sessions — either when Sarah came to mine or when I’d travel to Newcastle with finished tracks, just needing vocals and guitar parts.
In practice, this meant most of the writing, arranging and production fell to me. And because of the narrow recording windows, I’d sometimes head down musical side roads without checking in. To be clear — if Sarah or Chris objected to a track, we’d deal with it. But given how rarely we saw each other, and how all three of us tended to avoid conflict, things occasionally got recorded and signed off that weren’t fully endorsed by everyone.
And so to Sister. If memory serves, Sarah loved it. She always enjoyed the tougher, more aggressive Dubstar tracks. Despite writing and recording it, I was on the fence. I liked the sound of it, but wasn’t sure it felt like Dubstar. I made a couple of rough mixes, then Daren Taliana came in with extra production and a tougher mix. But Chris hated it — and made that very clear on our way to Manors Metro after a drinking session by the Tyne.
And here’s the thing: a musical disagreement is one thing. But Chris rarely spoke like that. It felt like something deeper was going on. And I think it was this:
By 2011, Sarah and I were in our forties, with Chris not far behind. We’d been working on this comeback for nearly five years. Dozens of finished songs, no finished album. Sarah and I weren’t under any major financial pressure or family responsibilities, but Chris was. And ever since things stalled in 2008, I’d been gradually distancing myself from the project and focusing on other musical projects. All of which must have added to the frustration — the lack of progress, the musical detours.
By this point, my biggest motivation wasn’t entirely artistic. It was to hang out with Chris — one of my oldest and dearest friends. I’d long accepted there was no financial future in Dubstar, but there was still the promise of great music and a lot of fun. Which is fine if you’ve got time and money to spare. But it’s not how you restart a business. And it’s definitely not how you support a wife and young family. As Chris put it, the last thing he needed was an expensive hobby.
So for me, Sister marks the point where the trouble we’d been avoiding became impossible to ignore. In some ways, it’s when the bubble burst for the second time.
She wouldn’t go.
Musically, what do we have? Sister is what Make It Better could have been — a tougher, leaner version of the Dubstar sound. Faster than most Dubstar tracks (but still not fast enough). One of the few times I wasn’t writing about myself, Sarah, or life in general. The song was inspired by a story about a young girl who went missing, and how it devastated those around her. There was this heavy sense of guilt among the people left behind. That moved with me. I don’t know if that weight really comes across in the lyric, but that was the idea.
The main arpeggiated part came from a MEHA — Midi Error Happy Accident — that ended up sounding like a quote from Tubular Bells, which I rather liked. Daren toughened up my bass and drum programming, and his mix was brutal, as you can hear. I made a few adjustments later (as I did with Don’t Ask) and Sister settled into what sounded to me like the last song on side one of an album — much like The View From Here years earlier. And a tip of the hat to my Moog Little Phatty for the Ultravox-style bassline. Speaking of which, there are five Ultravox samples buried in Sister. Can you spot them all?
A Moog Little Phatty yesterday
Instrument-wise, the Yamaha DX100 supplies most of the arpeggios, and there’s a guitar chug lifted from Dancing With Tears In My Eyes (that’s sample six). Sadly, there’s not much of Chris in this one. When I looked back through the Logic project, I found dozens of guitar takes, but almost nothing worked. A few blips, a stray strum. Maybe that tells us something.
Thinking Back Now
I like Sister a lot but I’m not sure this version lands. It works as an onslaught of notes, noise, and detached-aggression, but I’m left with the same old question: is it Dubstar? On reflection, it probably sits somewhere between Client and Dubstar — which might’ve been perfect in 2008. But Sister was completed in 2011-13. Too late.
Even so, it holds a special place for me — the only time in the United States of Being sessions I genuinely feel like we went too far, musically. And yet, and yet… it’s a great tune. I can imagine a comeback tour closing with Sister, tearing the roof off. But is that what anyone would want from a Dubstar show? It feels amazing in my head.
This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow Dubstar on Bluesky to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news
Dubstar: Counting Out
Counting Out was one of the very first songs we recorded when Dubstar reformed in 2006. And yet, somehow, it was never finished. Even now, there’s no vocal from Sarah on it. What went wrong?
I’d written it earlier that year — one of the first things I’d composed on Gary Numan’s Yamaha CP-70B electric grand piano. Musically, it came from the same place as Talking In My Sleep a few years before. That restless feeling of needing to stay relevant in the mid-2000s. Trying to move away from the synth textures we’d leaned on in the '90s and seeing if electric pianos could give us something with a bit more movement, a bit more life.
How Dubstar Made Demos
Since the early days — back when we were still called The Joans — the process was almost always the same. I’d be inspired by something that occurred to me or had happened to write a song, usually on piano, though not every time. The words would be finished too, although they rarely survived unchanged after Sarah sang them for the first demo. Then I’d knock together a basic accompaniment on the computer to set the mood, structure, key, and tempo. Then Chris would add guitar, we’d get overexcited, and before long the track would be weighed down by too many ideas. Great fun of course, but then I’d have to strip it all back, quietly deleting the last six or seven decisions so the thing could breathe. There are plenty of examples in the Dubstar cannon where a more minimal approach worked well, and where some tunes were way too busy.
That was often the problem when there wasn’t a vocal to build around. And it wasn’t easy getting one, because as well as living hundreds of miles apart, Sarah and I were totally incompatible key-wise. I write in B to D major, she lives in E and up. So if I wanted to record a demo vocal myself, I’d have to slow the track down, sing my part, then speed it up digitally to match Sarah’s range. It sounded deranged.
So in many ways and on many occasions we were flying blind. Especially Chris who often was working with extreme bare bones of a song. Counting Out is a perfect example of this issue. The demo vocal — mine — was recorded after we’d finished the arrangement. When it finally came to light that the key didn’t suit Sarah, I realised we’d have to redo all the guitars. By then, other better songs were in play. Counting Out was quietly moved to the back of the queue, and when the recordings were shelved in 2008, it got left behind.
Thinking Back Now
When I hear Counting Out now, it sounds exactly like what it was: an act trying to find its footing after a long time away. It’s the mid-2000s to a fault. I can pick out every influence we’d dragged in at the time. It’s a bit Keane, obviously, but there’s also a very clear nod to Ulrich Schnauss that should never have made it past the demo — far too close for comfort. There are those half-time drums I was inexplicably obsessed with back then. And then there’s this repeated idea in the lyrics about outstaying your welcome, which is strangely self-conscious and isn’t my usual song topic.
If I remember rightly, the song came out of me creeping towards forty years of age. Turning thirty hadn’t bothered me. Thirty-one did. Because that’s when I realised the birthdays wouldn’t stop, the most important job was to ensure they kept coming! I remember being fourteen, thinking thirty was impossible. How could I ever be that old? And surely — surely — I’d be dead before then.
Ha — my inner Frenchman speaking.
But when I hear Counting Out today, it feels like a message to the three of us too. A quiet suggestion we probably shouldn’t carry on. Maybe we should leave Dubstar in the past. We didn’t.
This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow Dubstar on Bluesky to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news
Dubstar: 21st Century
Shoegaze and dreampop run through Dubstar’s DNA like the word Blackpool in a stick of rock. It might not be obvious at first, but if you know what to listen for, you’ll spot it.
21st Century is a prime example of this musical heritage. The inspiration came from Twentieth Century, a song on the Pet Shop Boys’ Fundamental album—not in melody or lyrics, but in its use of a century as a thematic marker, a place. It put me in mind of two other songs I love: Twentieth Century by John Foxx and Winona by Drop Nineteens. In fact our own 21st Century owes more than a nod to that Shoegaze classic.
Referencing other songs has long been a Dubstar hallmark. From Chris’s opening guitar flourish in I (Friday Night), through the Owner of a Lonely Heart sample in No More Talk (though lifted from its original source), through If It Isn’t You and its reference to the magnificent Durutti Column to the reference to Cocteau Twins When Mama was Moth in Swansong and even the United States of Being medley in So Say We All, musical callbacks are woven into our work. It’s great to hear Chris and Sarah continuing and even expanding on this tradition in their solo projects too.
Winona and 21st Century begin with nearly identical lyrics: “Now there’s a gap in the twentieth/twenty-first century.” Though the songs take different paths, that opening line has always struck me. It captures a feeling of something missing in our lives — maybe a product of the era we live in?
Written in 2008, 21st Century was built on simplicity, repetition and texture. The guitar parts were laid down at Gavin’s studio, Base HQ, behind Newcastle’s Central Station, while Sarah’s vocals were recorded later at my place in Hove. Aside from the Yamaha CP-70 interlude, the song has only two sections and one overriding mood—a reflective audio poem about the emotional toll of deception.
My old music room circa 2011 where United States of Being was completed, with added laundry
COERCIvE CONTROL
Before gaslighting became a widely used term, I had already noticed how some people manipulate others by controlling their access to information—not just by limiting what they hear, but by shaping how they interpret the little they’re allowed to have. Someone might receive good news or a compliment, only to be told, “They didn’t mean that,” or “They’re after something.” It’s the kind of conspiratorial thinking that’s easily exploited.
But the most insidious tactic is deliberately creating gaps in a narrative that can only be filled with paranoia. Those are the “gaps in the twenty-first century” the song explores.
At the time, I realised that many of my own opinions about people and situations had been shaped almost entirely by just one person’s stories. And those stories were created not out of malice or manipulation, but because gossip and the gossiper —by their nature—demand attention. And gossip is compelling for many reasons, especially the gaps that are left out that you fill with your own imagination. Gossip invites motivated reasoning to fill in the blanks, something I now try to avoid like the plague.
“Don’t judge a person by the stories of others.”
I’ve never considered myself a gossip (at least, I hope not). But looking back, I’ve had moments where my words may have landed the wrong way. If so, I apologize. Around the late 2000s and early 2010s, I made a conscious decision to stop forming judgments based on secondhand tales, this song is one of the results.
THINKING BACK NOW
I’m fond of 21st Century. I think it would have made a great second-to-last track on the original United States of Being. It’s a side of Dubstar that isn’t heard often and it hints at the deeper musical and lyrical terrain we might have explored together. Maybe for the sixth album?
Dubstar: No More Talk on BBC TOP OF THE POPS
In July 1997, Dubstar made our third appearance in just eighteen months on the BBC’s flagship music show, Top of the Pops.
The performance was a blast, and No More Talk went down well. But looking back, our stage setup was a bit bizarre. The director clearly wanted a dramatic double shot of Sarah and her projection, which left me all the way over on stage right. Classic TOTP. It looked great on screen, though—and for once, Paul on drums got a generous amount of camera time.
A special touch that night? We were introduced by Northumbrian legend Jayne Middlemiss. Fun fact: back in 1989, I was in a Jesmond band called Said Liquidator with Jayne’s ex-boyfriend. The North East music scene really was a small world.
And in true Dubstar fashion, we wrapped up the night by hopping on an overnight train to Glasgow—complete with an all-night bar and the management company's credit card. What happened next is a classic Dubstar story...
In the meantime I thought it might be fun to include some of the comments from Twitter that appeared during the broadcast this Friday night. Each made me smile…
Dubstar: The Sweetest Love Song
The Sweetest Love Song was somewhat overlooked as we assembled Dubstar ’s fourth album, still untitled at this time. It was a favourite of Sarah’s, though I must admit I wasn’t particularly keen on it.
I had written the song in 2008 at a moment of great frustration with the state of politics in the world. Claire and I had caught the first signs of the Credit Crunch the previous year while on holiday in Hawaii. At breakfast we would read American newspapers filled with reports of a collapsing housing market and increasing difficulty in securing mortgages. Nine months later, the British media was running stories daily, trying to explain a crisis that, to many, seemed to come out of nowhere—one that would soon cost them their jobs. Nearly eighteen years on, it’s both interesting and disheartening to see how little the UK economy has recovered.
My current Roland Juno-106, the synthesiser that features all over the fourth and fifth Dubstar albums
Lyrically, TSLS reflects the state of the world at the time and questions what role musicians should play in such circumstances. Dubstar was never a party-political act, despite all three of us having strong opinions. Our music didn’t lend itself to protest—we were perhaps too ephemeral for that. Besides, I saw little value in adding to the white noise of dissent unless we had something truly different to add.
In that sense, TSLS is less about protest and more about the feeling of powerlessness in the face of adversity—something that feels just as relevant today. Potentially more relevant.
Musically, the track leans heavily on Roland equipment. The drums are highly processed samples from my old TR-909, while the bass and pads come from my ever-reliable Juno-106. There are also Mellotron lines courtesy of G-Force’s software. But the song’s most striking moments come from our guest vocalists who appeared in sample form.
So, where did these samples come from?
DANCE OF THE MAD
Back in 1989, I was sent a promo 12” of Sly One by an unknown artist named Marina Van Rooy. What caught my attention wasn’t just the track itself but the writing credit, which included a familiar name—Peter Coyle of The Lotus Eaters. A year later, the song was sampled in Dance of the Mad Bastards by Pop Will Eat Itself (a record I love), and in 1997, it became the featured sample in Gus Gus’s sublime Purple.
I actually met Peter Coyle at a Lotus Eaters gig in a basement in Hove in 2002. there was about a dozen people there and I think I was the only one who didn’t know the band personally. I asked if he realised his song had been sampled in so many brilliant records. He was very polite about it—but I’m not sure he knew what I was talking about…
Anyway, while struggling to finish TSLS, I decided to drop in the "oooh ah ha" sample from Sly One—and just like that, boom! It worked instantly, bringing the song to life.
But why stop there? Inspired by Durutti Column’s Otis from the Vini Reilly album, I thought it’d be fun to add more. And if you listen closely, you’ll hear the "who-ohs" from Gary Numan’s Absolution and a falsetto from Morten Harket—the opening vocal flourish from A-Ha’s Living a Boy’s Adventure Tale, one of my childhood favourites (produced by Tony Mansfield, too).
Were any of these samples cleared, permission gained? Of course not. My philosophy was that you had to push boundaries to create something magical—no one ever made great art by playing it safe. And it’s much easier to ask for forgiveness, right? As with so many things in Dubstar world, it was a problem for another day.
THINKING BACK NOW
It’s clear to me that TSLS wouldn’t have survived in this form. Clearing the samples alone would have been far too expensive, and beyond that, the song itself feels incomplete to my ears—almost as if I’d started the writing but never quite finished it.
That said, coming back to it after all these years, I can definitely hear why Sarah liked it so much. For one thing, it gave her another chance to tap into the energy she’d found singing in Technique/Client—something we rarely heard in Dubstar. And musically, it grooves along nicely, with Chris’s funky guitar licks being standout features, holding everything together.
But is it really a Dubstar song? The vocal samples remind me a lot of The Sun Rising by The Beloved, which makes sense given that both acts share an alternative-dance influence. There’s also a strong ’80s feel to TSLS—something that occasionally surfaces in our own records (and record collections).
Would it have ended up on United States of Being? That’s a tougher question. It feels quite different from the other tracks, which is likely why it was overlooked for so long. In the end, it might have worked best as a bonus track on another release. And considering that some of Dubstar’s best songs arrived in that form, maybe The Sweetest Love Song could have found success after all.
Dubstar: It's You - It's Me
It’s You- It’s Me was one of the last songs to be written and recorded during the Dubstar reunion.
My current CASIO CZ101, the bass machine on It’s You It’s Me
When we began working in 2006, our musical style was similar to where we had begun back in Jesmond as The Joans: heartfelt songs with electronic beats and jangly guitar. You can hear this on Talking in my Sleep and We Still Belong. These are fine songs, but were musically and culturally irrelevant before they’d even been released. And I was bothered by what felt like a lack of progression and boldness in what we were doing. So…
I tried something Dubstar had never done before: write and record a song that only used one chord throughout. As usual, this was a nod towards the dance music I was listening to at the time, being ever so slightly obsessed with Swedish act The Field. It’s You It’s Me (IYIM) is the result…it’s not strictly one chord all the way through as the bridge section uses a florid selection of Hillier chords. You could argue the chorus section moves around a bit too. But it’s pretty close to one, and certainly not something we’d tried before.
IYIM opens with a stack of samples of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memorian Benjamin Britten, the last chord in the piece if I remember correctly. I think there are seven here, all different recordings of the same part of the same piece. I had been an admirer of his work for a long time, Spiegel Im Spiegel being a favourite. And there’s a deep spirituality in his work that appeals to me, how he can find artistic transcendence through simplicity, something I’ve struggled with my entire career. Maybe a dash of Estonian minimalism could help Dubstar toughen up?
Lyrically IYIM is from a very different place to most Dubstar songs. This isn’t an elegy to a lost relationship, this is a limerent fantasy, two mystical figures living in a world entire of themselves. But IYIM isn’t a love song, it’s an exploration of how it is to be excluded from this mystical world, as the protagonist is spending as much time explaining what we are missing as observers as describing what they’re experiencing:
There’s a light that shines behind you, see it turns your face
From a shimmer to an outline to a state of grace
I turn to gaze and find the one I’ve been preparing for
You’re everything, I’m anything
And there is silence in this room now there is no-one else
Through the bass drum beats our cavities we lose ourselves
There’s a presence here that captures us as old as time
It’s ours, it’s mine
It’s you, it’s me
Much more to be
It’s you, it’s me
So much to be
And if anybody knew the way we felt inside
They took a moment to explore the things we pushed aside
And if they’d gazed and glimpsed the mystery in our souls and minds they’d see
They’d know
But then no one seems to notice all the things we do
The way that we don’t really care about the rest of you
We take the pleasures in the fleeting joys that mortals find
It’s ours, it’s mine
It’s you, it’s me
So take a moment to examine how you view this world
Take a moment to reflect on what your boys and girls
Could be doing in your gardens when your backs are turned
You’ll be surprised how we turn out to be
Don’t go looking don’t be thinking that you’ll catch us there
We’ve got something better happening and we’ve time to spare
Now there’s someone else to occupy us far from you
Away, it’s true
It’s you, it’s me
Much more to be
It’s you, it’s me
So much to be
This lyric is a reflection of the gaze of an outsider, forever excluded from a magical world.
So what can we hear on this recording? First of all, there's not much of a bassline. Originally there was an offbeat pumping thud like you would find on so many of the Trance records of the late 90s. That felt dated by 2011, so I replaced it with a very electronic sounding bleep from my Casio CZ101. You can hear Chris's guitars splanging away…these were recorded at Gavin’s Base HQ studios behind Central Station in Newcastle, and a whole bunch of layered pads from my Jupiter 6 and various other keyboards. There's also a cheeky sample from New Musik, a boh that takes the place of a crash symbol. It's that sonar sound that you can hear at the very end of IYIT and this classic. I've long been obsessed with the New Musik album entitled Anywhere, and happily included references to it throughout the Dubstar canon. Thanks Tony.
There are other samples in this tune beyond the Arvo Pärt quotation mentioned earlier. There was also a version by Darren Taliana which I can't locate. If I find it, I'll stick it up.
WINDOWS PAINS
It’s You It’s Me was originally entitled You/Me but this caused me MAJOR problems. Firstly, we’d already recorded a song called ‘You & Me’, so it was difficult to search for one and not find the other. But more importantly, when I moved all the audio files to the DUBSTAR archive, having a slash in the title broke the file connections in the database rendering it a massive pain to locate the data (anyone who’s maintained a Windows server that houses Mac files will know exactly what I’m talking about. Macs allow you to use characters in file names that Windows reserves for system purposes, and a slash is one of them.)
THINKING BACK NOW
In writing this piece I searched through the email correspondence between myself, Sarah and Chris to find the words to the song. I’m surprised and quite chuffed to be reminded that IYIM was a big hit between the three of use, particularly with Sarah who loved the song.
Hearing IYIM after all this time, I think it would have made for a belter of an opening song at a Dubstar gig. Five minutes of beats and a wall of samples…then jump straight into The View From Here, then Manic. Wow, that would have been great. Oh well, maybe for the next Dubstar comeback?
Dubstar: Window Pain 2025
Window Pain was to be the comeback single for Dubstar, but never saw a release. By the time the song had been produced by Stephen Hague in 2013 and even a video shot in a camp site in South West England, the act had fallen apart.
Until this morning I intended to publish a long explanation for why Dubstar ended, I even wrote a two thousand word essay on the topic. But I had a change of heart, in the end, it’s important to celebrate what remains, the music. The long stories can wait for another blog post.
2025
I’ve wanted to release Window Pain on the Dubstar Archive for a long time but haven’t felt there was a version that did the song justice. By December 2024 I chose to do something about that. The version you hear today is an update to a song that was written nearly two decades ago. These are the original vocal, guitar, piano and synth parts recorded in my flat in Hove, but with a new rhythm part devised in my current studio in Brighton. I’m hoping it’s true to its 2000s roots, I certainly tried to capture that in the mix. I even recreated the Lately Bass sound that was all over the dance floor in the 90s using my Hydrasynth.
THINKING BACK NOW
Window Pain is a great song, and although it’s easy to categorise it as an opportunity missed, that’s not the case. It wasn’t going to put Dubstar back on the map because there was no plan for how to relaunch the act, or even agreement on where the map was. But it might have been a curio for the fans, a testament to how a reformed Dubstar could have sounded. That would have been nice.
Do I regret not releasing it? Not really, but… imagine if we’d followed up No More Talk with Window Pain rather than Cathedral Park? The story of Dubstar could have been fundamentally different.?
And anyway, maybe Sophie would like to cover it…?
Dubstar: New Friends VERSION
The writing process for Dubstar ’s Third album Make It Better had been fraught with difficulties. But by the time the recording was complete, sometime around May in 1999, there was an opportunity to return to some of the songs that hadn’t fulfilled their potential. Maybe update them for use as bonus tracks? My Friday is a perfect example of this process, where a demo that had been rushed and then rejected by the record label blossomed into one of the best tunes from that era.
Make It Better Japanese import version
New Friends had a similar fate. I’d written the song using this rather odd chord sequence, a bit of a nod to the chromaticism I’d employed in the Disgraceful era, with songs like Just A Girl and Disgraceful itself. But when it came to recording the demo for the new album, for some reason I decided to remove all that exotic harmony and record something simpler, a style that resembled a 1960s American ballad. The thing is, when you know the song’s melody was written for a different chord sequence, you can’t un-hear the join, if you know what I mean. So…
I revisited New Friends in 2000, turned back the clock to the song’s original harmony. This is the result. Is it better than the version on the Japanese edition of Make it Better? I’m not sure; it’s certainly odd. You can hear me going into full sci-fi synthesiser mode in the second verse… I’m not sure why I did that, I’ve never been sure. I don’t like much from Make It Better but I do like this version, so the answer is yes, probably.
THINKING BACK NOW
I like the lyric to New Friends though. It depicts a situation that actually happened in real life, on a sunny day outside Lloyds Bank by Grey’s Monument in Newcastle. It’s an exploration of how you haven’t moved on as much as you’re pretending. And how you feel a tinge of guilt that in reality you’re longing to return to a time when neither of us needed our new friends.
It’s another example of a song I couldn’t write I’m in my sixth decade. It’s an entry from a diary of a much younger man, struggling with the stresses of relationships in his mid-twenties.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be single now, in this era and at this time of life. And what the songs I might write would be like. I suspect they might be the key to brand new duster material. But… I’m a lucky man. We might never find out.
Dubstar: Remix MEGAMIX!
Dubstar ’s first album Disgraceful will be thirty years’ old next year. And in 1996, we released a different version of the album, a compilation of the best remixes commissioned for the singles from that album. It was a strange release, a combination of my fave remixes, two brand new ones I’d put together in our studio in the Newcastle Arts Centre and peculiar vignette peaces that I’d made to link the tunes together.
Much like KLF’s classic Chill Out album, the Disgraceful Remixed album was compiled live in one take, recorded straight to DAT, with each piece ‘flown in’ from ADAT digital cassette players. Yes it was completed in one take, but it took half a dozen attempts to get right. As usual I was under significant pressure to get it finished and couriered down to Food Records…so it was only after I’d returned from the post office that I noticed something disturbing: the panning settings on the Yamaha Promix 1 mixing desk were wrong. I don’t mean sub-optimal, I mean ‘wrong’, an unacceptable mistake that meant the master I’d sent off was unusable. And the compressor was set wrongly too. Gulp.
I don’t remember why I didn’t mention this to the label, it might have been something to do with the Goodbye To You sample debacle, but I decided to keep quiet. Maybe no one would notice?
Twenty eight years later it seems no one has noticed, so I’ll say no more about it. Except that if you listen to the remix album with headphones on, you might notice that… [redacted].
Dubstar’s Disgraceful Remixed album. It was acceptable in the 90s.
RISE TO THE TOP!
The remix album was sequenced for listening, like the Artificial Intelligence albums I obsessed over in the mid 90s. Maybe I should update the album and include mixes that were made for the later singles? And sequence it for dancing?
So here we have the Dubstar Remix MEGAMIX. This is a mixtape performed live by way of a tribute to the first remix album using TRAKTOR 4 in my studio in Brighton. I can assure you I checked the settings on the virtual mixing desk carefully.
This project gave me an opportunity to listen to remixes which I haven’t heard since the day they arrived in the offices of Food Records. A few things strike me. Firstly, my gosh do these remixes sound 90s! And I don’t just mean in style, I mean the actual sound. They reek of early digital audio systems, crunchy, grainy and grey. There is some charm to them, but it’s not like listening to old tape recordings. They don’t compete with modern productions, they really don’t.
My studio in Brighton, yesterday
The quality of the mixes varies widely too, both in terms of fidelity and musical impact. Mother and Way Out West supplied excellent mixes on both of the occasions they were employed, Jamie Myerson was at the top of his game. By way of contrast the D’Stilled mix of Elevator Song is barking mad and was hardly mixed at all.
And you can hear the records we were listening to permeating the mixes. DJ Shadow surely had a big influence on the Girlfriend remix, everyone was listening to Chemical Brothers, and Plump DJs had a big influence on my remix of Rise To The Top.
I pondered writing a review of each mix but I realised that wouldn’t be fair to the producers, to the readers or to myself. So instead I’ve included some notes here. Please bear in mind that the MEGAMIX only includes the mixes that I thought were good or interesting. So if your fave isn’t included, sorry about that. A big shout out must go to Steve Rodway and his Motiv8 mix of Stars. I would have included it but I couldn’t find my DAT with the extended mix. Next time…
STARS Way Out West remix
The king of all the Dubstar remixes, still played out to this day. Much admired, I would draw your attention to the similarities between this mix and Adam Ricket’s ‘ I Feel For You’ which was a minor hit four years later in 1999. Hmmm….
I (Friday Night) - Agent Sumo Remix
Very fond of this one, the groove is infectious. But its the sound of Sarah singin ‘It’s Friday night, go out for a good time’ with all the enthusiasm of a granny being dragged to a Slipknot gig that makes me laugh every time.
Elevator Song - Remix by Dillon and Dickens
I remember when we first heard this thinking ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I’m lost’. But it has such a dreamy vibe, the spoken word samples in Italian are terrific too.
No More Talk - Jamie Myerson Remix
This mix seems to have been forgotten over the years but I think it’s ace. The big pop chorus struggling to get out in the Dubstar version comes alive in Jamie’s version.
The Bad
I Friday Night - DJ Jurgen’s Remix
I mean, come on!? This chap had a massive hit as Alice Deejay the year before and THIS is what he turns out for us? Probably the worst of all the Dubstar remixes, and was such a disappointment as this was the only time my request for a remixer was followed.
THINKING BACK NOW
Remixes are mad aren’t they? We had so many in the 1990s, and pretty much everybody got paid too (that changed in the 2000s). There was a moment on the tour bus when we received a new remix package from Food and our tour manager Simon Griffin, sensing the mood in the vehicle and with his own level of sceptiscim set to eleven simply asked us ‘so, I wonder what you sound like today?’. Whatever we sounded like we didn’t like it.
Dubstar weren’t keen on remixes, although as a DJ I knew they were a necessary marketing tool and occasionally something great could happen. I’d requested a whole bunch of remixes but was ignored. I’m ok about it now (honestly, I am!) but if I could return to 1995 and have another go, here is the list of the people I’d insist that we get remixes done by:
But until I invent that Time Machine and address every mistake I’ve ever made, I hope you enjoy this updated Dubstar Remix MEGAMIX. PLAY LOUD!
Dubstar: My Friday MORE DUB VERSION
More than thirty songs were completed in demo form for Dubstar’s third album Make It Better, another dozen were left incomplete. My Friday was recorded in the first marathon demo session of 1998 and was promptly forgotten. Passed on by the record label and consequently omitted from the final record, I hadn’t played it in decades until opening the Dubstar Archive back in 2021. I remember being rather fond of it though, it had a great groove and was as catchy as, well…Anywhere? The lyrics weren’t up to much, and some of the production choices were very 1998, and not in a good way. No wonder it had been gathering dust for so long.
Then earlier this week I heard the sad news that Future Music magazine was printing its final issue. And it came to me in a flash…didn’t I make a Dub Version of My Friday for inclusion on a cover mount CD all the way back in 2000? Yes.
FUTURE MUSIC
The final edition
Future Music was a music technology magazine who had been supportive of Dubstar throughout our time together. Following the demise of the act I would go on to write for them throughout the 2000s and develop a great relationship with editors Andy Jones and Oz Owen. So when it came to promoting Make It Better I was keen to give an interview, especially as all the promotion for I (Friday Night) had been cancelled. Could they have an exclusive Dubstar song for the front cover? I didn’t have the heart to mention we’d already split, there hadn't been an official announcement and there were no plans to make one either. But of course they could. Er…
There was nothing new we could supply (the work for the Dubstar EP would commence later that year), unless…maybe a remix of a song from the album? I could knock one of those out quickly. And after all, with so much down time between recording Make It Better and its release, I’d already started reworking some of the songs that weren’t on the album. Maybe a more electronic version of one of those?
There were alternative versions of I Lost a Friend, New Friends (what is about me writing songs with the word ‘friend’ in the title?), and a few others including My Friday, which had morphed into a kind of Boys Own - Sabres of Paradise workout. So I got to work completing My Friday and applied my ‘nothing left to lose’ and ‘everything but the kitchen sink, no let’s have the sink too’ approach to the song. It landed here with this ‘More Dub Version’, a huge departure from the demo we supplied to Food Records. And a vast improvement. Where the original demo had been worked up very quickly and featured a mass of chopped up Break Beats, samples and peculiar sound effects, the new version was a lot more unified sonically speaking. It also flowed better, largely because by 2000 I’d learned how to use Logic Audio properly.
On a roll, I turned my attention to Rise To The Top, another first-demo-session song that I loved, at least in its early form. Rather than make that all dubby, I removed most of the guitars and threw my newly acquired Nord Modular all over it. It was this remix that made it onto the CD.
THINKING BACK NOW
Despite preferring the My Friday remix, I submitted the Rise To The Top remix instead. It made more sense to me to submit a song from the album, if the readers liked it they would buy Make It Better. Hopefully.
It’s also what I thought the record label would want. And I was obsessed with a new act called Plump DJs who had just released two of my all time favourite Break Beat tunes. Unfortunately my remix sounded a lot like someone who had used tracing paper to copy a Plump’s tune but forgot to colour it in.
Today I love this version of My Friday, and I wish we had more material like this in our repertoire. It’s Dubstar living up to the name while still being the act that brought you Manic and Stars. Do I regret that it didn’t see the light of day? Not really, I don’t think it would have made a difference to our fate as the act was finished by that point anyway. I do regret submitting the Rise remix though, it’s really not that good.
And what about My Friday being left off Make It Better? I suppose it didn’t fit with the rest of the record. Lyrically it’s as sophisticated as a Noel Gallagher song and only barely makes more sense. Musically it was a reference to the days when I’d dreamed of Andrew Weatheral producing Dubstar, and opportunities like that were long gone by 2000.
But I’m so happy that this version exists. A memento of the start of the new century.
Dubstar: Wide Awake DEMO
This is a Dubstar song I’ve been meaning to share for a long time.
I’d set up my new Apple Mac G3 computer in the basement of The Mill, a beautiful house in Wantage, Oxfordshire and started writing the third Dubstar album. But the songs weren’t coming. I’ve explained why this is the case before, but here it is again: after we’d released I Will Be Your Girlfriend in February 1998, the record company picked up the option for a third Dubstar album and suggested we go on a writing retreat. An opportunity to relax, regroup and write some hits together.
The problem was that Dubstar never wrote together, that’s not how the magic worked. So putting the three of us, who had been living in each other’s pockets for years, into an isolated but beautiful building in the Cotswolds was a recipe for…initially nothing, latterly disaster. I would suggest that writing trip was the catalyst that led to the break up of the act sometime later.
However, it wasn’t a total waste of time, we did get two songs from the session. This one, and ‘You’re Better Off Without Me’, both feature toplines (lyrics and vocal melody) from Sarah. This is a rarity in the Dubstar canon, in fact I think there are only those two, Just A Girl and Circle Turns where that is the case.
Wide Awake came together on that trip and features interesting musical moments we only occasionally hear in a Dubstar song. Firstly, there’s no bassline, and that feels great. So much space for the vocals and guitar to shine. I think that sustained note in the chorus is a sample of Films by Gary Numan pitched down in Logic, but I’m not sure. Secondly, I was in my very brief Speed Garage phase so the drum part features a cut-up and pitched-up Amen Break, very much in the style of Lockdown 187’s Kung-Fu. Finally, there’s a dash of anger in Sarah’s voice which we hadn’t heard before. A sign of vocals to come?
EXTRA PRODUCTION IN 2024?
There was a whole load of shoutingIn the demo that was submitted to Food Records later that year. This sounded great at the time, and even listening to it now, it’s quite fun and clearly an expression of the very particular sense of humour that we had, particularly between Chris and myself. It didn’t fit with the music though, was in marginally poor taste and relegated the song to the cutting room floor, a fate that befell a handful of songs from this time for the same reason.
Normally I wouldn’t think twice about showing the workings of music from the dim and distant past, but it’s possible for behaviour to be misunderstood, misinterpreted. This is a demo recording, an intimate moment where ideas are being worked out and ‘appropriateness’ is a lesser consideration. I mainly work with much younger musicians who have grown up in a very different cultural environment of what’s funny, what’s a bi old-fashioned and what’s unacceptable. Conseqeuntly I’m aware that what could be interpreted thirty years ago as naughty and weird in a surreal way, like VIZ comic humour, today could be entirely misinterpreted.
And most importantly, humour without context is always tricky. So, with the miracle of modern production tools I’ve been able to remove all that stuff while retaining the sonic and musical integrity of the original demo. I must point out that there was nothing horrible in the shouting, nothing racist, sexist, homophobic or anything like that. It was just a bit silly in a Graham Chapman way, jokes that I know we wouldn’t want to be out in the wild today. It was 1998, a different time in every sense.
THINKING BACK NOW
Should Wide Awake have made it on to Make It Better? I think so. It sounds to me like a bridge between Goodbye and Make It Better. Again, I think you can hear the beginnings of the character Sarah would become on the Technique and Client records. I think you can hear the production moving away from the Boys Own influenced Dubstar sound to the much more angular late 1990s sound. But is it a good song? I don’t know, I always enjoy the choruses. Wide Awake actually grooves, in a way that few Dubstar songs ever do. So that’s nice.
This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news
Dubstar: I Don't Want to Die on a Tuesday DEMO
It was a wet Wednesday night at Waterloo Street in 1997, no Dubstar activity. Andy, Collie, Bill, Greg and myself sitting around in the lounge. We’d just watched Deep Space Nine, we were in a good mood. And like all good blokes, when there’s nothing to do and no women around, we made lists:
A band with the word Simpson in its name?
A band whose name starts and ends with the letter ‘O’
An album with more than ten words in its title?
Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)
A singer better known for his real name than his stage name?
David Bowie (easy one that, but got a steward’s enquiry because his surname was Jones)
A song with the word Tuesday in the title?
Er…
No one could think of a song title that includes the word Tuesday. Even now I can’t think of one. There must be one and a quick search on Spotify would surely reveal it, but we barely had dial-up in the late 1990s so as far as we were concerned there were no songs with the word Tuesday in the title. So I wrote one.
DON’T CENSOR YOURSELF
I Don’t Want to Die on a Tuesday (IDWTDOAT) was recorded during the first demos for the third Dubstar album Make It Better in the summer of 1998. I’d established some ground rules for myself for the album, the first of which was:
Live by the hit, die by the hit
We needed them for Dubstar to survive, but I can’t intentionally write them. Consider this: Dubstar had eight UK Top 40 singles, five of which were written before Sarah had even joined the act! One was a cover of a song that was two songs put together, one was an adaptation of an instrumental with a huge sample in it (later removed). Only the final one was written under the live by the hit, die by the hit regime. It peaked at number thirty-seven.
Every song we had recorded that had done well had done well by accident. So with this third album I decided to write and write and write, and finish every idea that emerged. The idea was that hit songs would emerge eventually, it was inevitable. With Worf in my mind I looked through the window in my new flat in Hove at the Sussex Downes through the rain, and thought ‘fuck me, what a dreadful day to die’*.
And there it was, a song fantasising about dying, and how it would be such a letdown to let go on a grey rainy day. And what day of the week is the worst? Tuesday*.
The song’s subject was preposterous but better to be preposterous than pretentious right? So to counter the melancholy subject matter, I thought it would be amusing to write the arrangement in the style of a 1970s TV theme tune. I completed the song in a flash, not expecting it to work, or even survive. But Chris came down from Gateshead to play on his guitar, Sarah sang the song with relish, and it became one of my favourites from this session. It’s not a hit, it’s a comic song that’s certainly not taking itself seriously. And yet musically I think it’s a nice moment.
THINKING BACK NOW
Maybe IDWTDOAT is a songwriter’s indulgence. And yet I can’t help but like it a lot. In some ways, it is the perfect Dubstar song. The melody is maddeningly catchy, the lyrics close to black and yet somehow life-affirming. I was explaining it to my mother last week and pointed out that the song is not about dying, it’s a list of things which are important to the singer: Avoiding embarrassment, hating grey days, hating rain, the endless torment of seeking approval, missing your favourite TV show, partying with your partner, having a bath.
As I say, the perfect Dubstar song.
Jim Corr came round to my flat to hear the new Dubstar songs. There was talk of The Corrs covering Stars, which would have been nice. They were looking for songs for their next album so I played him IDWTDOAT.
Sometimes, late at night when I’m struggling to stay awake, I replay that moment in my mind repeatedly.
*This wasn’t entirely true. We’d gotten into a habit of going to VATs bar underneath the Star of Brunswick pub, where BIMM is now, most Tuesday nights. Liz, Paul Wadsworth’s girlfriend, had given the habit its name: ‘take a Tuesday’. This meant staying out until 1.00am on a Tuesday night drinking…then phoning in sick for work the following morning. Luckily I hadn’t had a proper job in over a decade and could do whatever I wanted, so I took a lot of Tuesdays.
This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news
Dubstar: Anywhere THE FIRST DEMO
Gear, the cassette album by The Joans
Dubstar, who at this point was known as The Joans, had already made an album that was released to the local press. Yet despite the efforts that Chris and I had made to boost our profile, we were essentially unknown on the Newcastle music scene. Most, if they knew us at all, knew us through the profile of my club nights, and that felt like a dead end to me. Jesmond wasn’t Bristol, we couldn’t launch an alternative act off the back of a DJ’s reputation, especially as my nights focussed on either the student culture or Indie Rock. They were incredible fun, but neither style was particularly cool in 1994, and neither were we.
Flyer for Westworld, Steve Hillier’s club night at Planet Earth, formerly Walkers nightclub
But it wasn’t a dead end. Four months earlier Sarah Blackwood had joined us through those same club-scene connections. Her singing was a leap above my own. Where I sounded like the 1980s, Sarah sounded exactly like 1994, with a voice that hit you differently from the other singers on the Newcastle scene. Something important was changing for The Joans.
‘Gear’ didn’t have a hit single, but it had early versions of Disgraceful, popDorian, If It Isn’t You and Not So Fast. The rest of the cassette was strange twisted vignettes similar to the interludes on the Disgraceful Remixed album. Weird stuff, and this was not helping us. As one reviewer put it: ‘The Joans don’t know who they are or what they want to be’. He was more accurate than we realised.
But in January 1994 it all changed, and this is the recording that made that change. Anywhere was the first song The Joans recorded with Sarah on vocals, and in that moment Dubstar was born. We sounded fundamentally different from Gear, another big leap forward. I didn’t fully appreciate this until I played this demo to my friend Graham Ramsay, the promoter at the Arena in Middlesbrough. Where previously he’d been politely supportive of us if not much of a fan, now there was a look on his face of ‘hmmm….’. That meant a lot.
DUBSTAR’s original studio at Steve’s in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1994
The first Anywhere demo sounded like the beginning stages of an actual record, maybe a hit? Underneath the indie-guitar noodlings that Chris and I had been making, there lurked some big songs. And now that we were working with a singer who sounded and looked the part, we might have a chance of getting somewhere. Other tunes followed in quick succession. With Anywhere, St Swithin’s Day and Week In Week Out on one demo cassette it was much easier to get gigs. Mission accomplished, next stop Darlington.
ANYTIME I’M FREE
Anywhere began life in my studio bedroom at Manor House Road, Jesmond in the early months of 1991. It was a simple melody (“I’ll be around Anywhere, any place you want me…”) played over a very different chord sequence that you can hear at the end of the Disgraceful Remixed album. And there it stayed, running around in my head for years. I wrote the lyric while DJing at Planet Earth at the Westworld club night, and I changed the chord sequence to fit a new beat that owed a lot to our musical heroes: William Ørbit, Andrew Weatherall and One Dove. Chris added his guitar riff and we were set.
All the drums were samples I’d recorded into my Roland W-30 sampler, including the classic Amen Break (and a secret sample from Howard Jones!). The kick and snare were made in my Korg Mono/Poly, as was the bass line. The two other stars of the show were the Yamaha DX100 which played the off-beat chords, and the Casio CZ101 which plays the distinctive riff just before the first chorus.
Sarah came round to my flat on Grosvenor Avenue to record her vocals. The whole backing track was first recorded to cassette, bounced down to DAT, recorded back onto the cassette with Sarah adding her two vocal lines on the remaining free tracks. It felt a bit amateur, but we got some good results.
THINKING BACK NOW
Sarah Blackwood, March 1994
The number one thing we learned from this period, and something that I keep returning to, is that you can’t make successful music alone, rarely can you do it all by yourself. Chris and I were becoming insular in 1993, a little detached from the Newcastle scene. But meeting Sarah threw the doors open again.
Sarah was known on that scene but was an unknown quantity. Hanging out with the singers of other acts, she held the position of ‘friend of the bands’, and that was about it. But Sarah had that rarest of qualities, incredible undiscovered talent. When she joined Chris and me, The Joans became Dubstar. We would go on to be the first band from Newcastle to be signed to a major record company since…well, I’m not sure. Maybe it was since the Kitchenware acts like Prefab Sprout and The Kane Gang, but they were both from County Durham. Lighthouse Family (which featured Paul Tucker, the pianist from Walkers Nightclub!) were signed quickly after us, but that was about it from Newcastle for a long while. If I have that wrong please let me know. One thing I noticed writing this blog, between Dubstar and The Lighthouse Family, Prefab Sprout and The Kane Gang there are no band members from Newcastle. To be fair, Chris is from Gateshead so that’s as close as damn it, but still…
Anywhere was, in my opinion, the first Dubstar song. More than a hundred tunes later, it wasn’t the last.
Dubstar: Stars on BBC TOP OF THE POPS
And then Dubstar did Top of the Pops for the second time!
I’ll be honest, I don’t have much recollection of this appearance. There was so much going on at this point of the act’s career, everything blurs together.
We were far more comfortable appearing on TV by April 1996 than for the Not So Manic Now promo slots just two months earlier. I think the improvements here are clear. We’d rehearsed for the show, Stars was looking like it would be our biggest song so far. It would go on to be the biggest by far.
I’ve written so much about Stars, rather than struggle to find something new to say, instead I’d like to point you towards this brand new page on Dubstar.com. It brings together all the many videos and articles about the song, and an expanded ‘story behind the song’. I hope you enjoy it.
Stars on dubstar.com
Dubstar: Front to Back
Front to Back is one of those occasions where the sheer fun of being in Dubstar shone through in the music. Sure, fun? It’s not obvious in most of our music. But beyond the reflective lyrics, anxiety and compulsive drinking, the excitement of making music together and living in a world of enticing possibilities was intoxicating. I’ve long said this, and I mean it: music keeps you young.
As a songwriter you’re constantly accessing your memories of your younger self, putting that naivety into the heart of your work. This is why I think writing in middle-age is tricky, you lose track of what’s interesting. How many middle-aged people do you know who spend their days complaining about things that only ten years earlier they would have overlooked? You can lose perspective, become cynical, defeated. You have to work at keeping the inner child alive. Writing about your divorce in your forties requires skill, intelligence and wit, otherwise your song will be stale, grey and boring. On the other hand, writing about being dumped by your first girlfriend is elating, moving, funny even. You’re fourteen again, you’re a songwriting hero!
Anyway, Front to Back is a song recorded by people with a strong connection to their inner child. It’s great fun, I hope you agree.
As for its genesis…
The writing process for most Dubstar songs was the same. A lyrical idea, quickly followed by a musical idea. Then, with a bit of luck, the entire song is written in about twenty minutes. That’s the words, the melody, the chords, the structure. It’s all about capturing the moment of inspiration and getting as much completed before that energy dies off.
And the first rule in songwriting? Don’t censor yourself! If you’re wondering if this mad idea will be acceptable (to whom exactly?) or if you’re waiting for someone to tell you what to do next, you’ve failed. Just go for it! And the golden rule: if a song has taken more than two hours to write, something has gone wrong.
Front to Back was a simple idea:
How would Dubstar sound if we recorded a ‘call and response’ dancefloor song that sounded like peak-era New Order?
You know the kind of thing: ‘all the people at the back, put your hands in the air! Now the people in the front!’. This kind of thing.
It seemed daft, which is what compelled me to write. We’d recorded enough songs about losing people, being sad. Now we were in our forties, for pity’s sake let’s put a smile on our faces! Return to the sense of amusement we had with Anywhere?
So I wrote Front to Back, mapped out the arrangement, Chris came down from Jesmond to record some guitars, Sarah sang…but there was a problem. That peak-era New Order reference? It meant the song landed in a major key, and I ended up going down a Hi N-R-G rabbit hole (you can still hear the sticks and claps in this finished version), leading Chris to say that Front to Back was the campest record I’d ever made. And not in a good way.
Great songs are written quickly…
…but mature slowly.
Running with a song idea without stopping is great, but the downside of this approach is the sunk-cost fallacy. You do so much work on the wrong approach that it becomes difficult to abandon the bad ideas.
Sure, you can’t destroy a good song completely. But there’s an issue with writing and recording entirely in the studio. For a song to succeed it has to have been played or trialled in the wild and adjusted based on the feedback from the experience. This is why bands play their new songs live, DJs play their mixes out, and comedians do warm-up shows before hitting the Edinburgh Fringe. Unless you’ve heard what your music sounds like in front of a room of disinterested humans and absorbed that intangible feedback, the work you release will be incomplete. It will feel unfinished, like a teabag in lukewarm water.
As for Front to Back the original arrangement made it through the demo stage into the hands of Daren Taliana who completed it as part of the Malta sessions. Once again, the mix was great but the music was wrong. It occurred to me, if I was interested in Dubstar, would I be waiting on my sofa hoping they’d serve me up some day-glo Disco? It might pique my interest for a few seconds, but then…that was weird! I played Front To Back to a nightclub crowd at The Escape in Brighton. Oh dear…
So I reworked Front to Back as part of the completion of United States of Being V.2 changing the key and removing almost all the New Order references (except one, see if you can spot it). With one ear on the work emerging from the London club scene and the new generation of software synths that Daren had shown me, Front to Back came alive.
Speaking of synths, the bass line is my Roland JUNO-106 with offbeat hits from my Yamaha TX81z, the same one found on Just a Girl. Sylenth provides the pad sounds, and my venerable Korg Mono/Poly and MS20 provide the risers. There’s also a Yamaha DX100 in the middle 8, backing up Chris’s guitar arpeggios. The huge Fade To Grey drum hits are from the Roland System 100m.
Oh, and my Casio CZ101 makes an appearance, the first time since Anywhere.
THINKING BACK NOW
Front to Back could have been a single. Hearing the finished mixes after the second visit to The Escape, it reminded me of how we all felt when we first heard Stephen Hague’s mix of Not So Manic Now. It hadn’t been a single contender, suddenly it was.
Same with Front to Back.
And it has that uniquely Dubstar thing going on in the lyric…what is she getting at, does she mean…?
Yes, she does. She always does.
Dubstar: Not So Manic Now on BBC TOP OF THE POPS
And that’s when you knew your time had come.
Top of the Pops wasn’t just a TV show, not just a national institution, it wasn’t The Tube or The Big Breakfast, when you appeared on Top of the Pops you were playing into the history books.
Dubstar appeared three times.
They may have denied it, but every serious act in the 1990s wanted to appear on Top of the Pops. Credibility concerns were over, this wasn’t the 1980s. We’d lived through that decade and learned from MTV that television was the key to success, and Top of the Pops was the most important opportunity. It was the king of the music shows, the Christmas Dinner of Sunday roasts.
Because everyone watched Top of the Pops. The industry, your family, your fans, millions who didn’t know you. And when you appeared in everyone’s front room on a Friday night, the context was unique. We forgot about your struggles, the years of hard work in obscurity. You appeared on Top of the Pops and what you received was…
Recognition!
That’s what you noticed immediately, for the first time people knew who you were. This must seem strange if all you’ve experienced is the music industry of the twenty-first century, where only the profoundly famous have any recognition factor at all. And even then not much…quick, how many Taylor Swift songs can you list?
Yes, Dubstar weren’t that different from all the other indie kids rolling around in stale beer on the dance floor at The Riverside or The Dublin Castle, but we’d made it down the train tracks from Newcastle to the bright lights. And to the cameras.
So we appeared on Top of the Pops and immediately people knew who we were. We had a reputation to protect, to dress better, at least I did, but not like influencers, not like the Britpop crowd, we were more…normal. Or was that Northern? No matter, there was a newfound sense of responsibility to the music. Keep the magic alive, we all benefitted.
Yes, appearing on Top of the Pops did mean something.
I’d wanted to be on it since, I don’t know, since I was ten years old? I was convinced I would manage it one day. It didn’t occur to me that I would have to do it as myself, and not as one of my heroes. I’m not Gary Numan, I’m not magical, am I?
In reality, Top of the Pops wasn’t magic, there were no stars in that studio, it was not about posturing and throwing your weight around as an icon. You didn’t come to Top of the Pops alone, you came with your entourage, your posse, all of whom brought their own contribution to the magic. And you came to reach into the homes of everyone in the country. Maybe the whole world one day?
I don’t remember details about the show itself, I was watching the monitor screens, the stagehands and engineers and taking far more interest in how the TV show was made than in the sense of occasion. This was typical. Dubstar was about to be visible all the way to the Outer Hebrides. You don’t get a buzz that big anywhere else, yet I was emotionally absent, thinking about the next move as usual. On stage it was all human, just one take. We had no dance steps, no perfection, no rehearsals, we appeared just as we had at countless gigs across the land. We mimed of course, but Sarah sang live! It was us as people standing there for all to enjoy and appraise. It was magical.
The format of the show hadn’t changed since the sixties. Some personalities introducing the acts that you may have heard before but hadn’t seen. It answered the question of ‘who are these people you idolise?’. In other words, Top of the Pops was the antithesis of the music world we have today. And it was ubiquitous.
For example:
The biggest recording act in the UK in January 1996 was Oasis and everyone knew it.
Today, er….?
LATER AT THE AFTER-SHOW
I was listening to Keith Allen on the settee at the Soho House, he was going on and on about ecstasy, the drug, asking where we could find some because he’d heard the kids love it. I think he was being funny. To his left, Alex James from Blur, to his right Damien Hirst, the artist.
I couldn’t help him. I’d just been on Top of the Pops.
And I had nothing further to contribute because I’d had a headful of whiskey, a drink that I didn’t normally touch. I was struggling to stand, let alone speak. But hey, it was a Dubstar party and the drinks were free! Were they ever not free?
It’s funny, as big as Blur, Oasis, Primal Scream and [insert your favourite band from the 1990s here, we’d met them all by this point], none drank as hard as Dubstar. Everybody in the Soho House that night was out of it, and so was I.
I stole Alex James’ pint of Guinness as some attempt at retribution for his gatecrashing of our party with his famous mates. That was the last thing I remember, maybe a vague recollection of many being surprised at how drunk I was? Probably because it wasn’t normally me from the Dubstar gang rolling around on the floor. My sister, who had travelled down from Cambridge for the show, had to leave to get the last train home but didn’t make it, and was stranded at Kings Cross station. Sadly, like so many older brothers, I was no use.
Somehow I made it back to the White House Hotel in Regents Park. And was sick. That was the last time in my life I vomited from alcohol.
But that’s Rock and Roll. I woke up twelve hours later dying, and contemplating that this must be how it feels to be successful.
THINKING BACK NOW
Now it’s 2024, you can’t get an audience to watch entertainment they don’t choose. Entertainment is abundant and on demand, so why watch something you might not like? But in 1996 music could draw millions of viewers to watch artists simply out of curiosity…was it because Top of the Pops was the only window into that magical world? Hmmm….
Whatever, Top of the Pops was a show that set you up with your musical choices, the artists came into your home to set you on the way to somewhere else. To go to the record shops, to the gigs, to read the music press, you watched the show as an active participant! Every act on Top of the Pops was there to engage YOU. And we, the performers, dreamed that the audience would light a fire for US.
I miss this feeling, the musical world I grew up in. And if you don’t remember it…
You weren’t there.
Dubstar: Not So Fast
Not So Fast is a song that Dubstar recorded for Volume Magazine at the height of our chart success. It was originally included on The Joan’s cassette album Gear and forgotten, but we were pushed for time between tours. So I took a weekend off to re-record NSF and upgrade the arrangement for an international release. It was raining.
Volume was a superb publication. Each edition came as two components, a full-colour magazine in the shape of a CD insert and the CD itself, packed with exclusive material from the latest and greatest alternative music acts. I was a big fan before Dubstar’s appearance in the July 1996 edition and I think we were all very pleased to be included, I know I was.
Sarah gave an interview for the Copulation Explosion edition from the tour bus in Italy. This was our first pan-European tour in the spring of 1996. I think it’s clear that we were struggling with the travelling and the journalist was struggling with what to make of us. Still, Sarah’s jovial demeanour comes over well, so I’ve reproduced the whole piece here.
A detail from this tour: These were the early days of mobile international calls, we discovered after a few days that when anyone rang our cellphones it would be us who would be charged for the call! The deal was that because the dialler wouldn’t know they were calling a number abroad in Italy, Germany, France or wherever, the contract holder would pay for the international component of the call. This was incredibly expensive.
Also, there was a limit to how much you could spend on your phone before you were cut off! By this point I was known as ‘The Bank of Hillier’ as I wasn’t particularly troubled by international travel, was taking everything in my stride and always seemed to have enough money on me for any eventuality (plus ça change eh?!). I was the only person on this tour with a working credit card and smiling. But Chris and Sarah were taking long consolatory phone calls from home every day, racking up enormous bills…and then were cut off with weeks of the tour left! This happened doubly quickly for Sarah as she was also doing interviews.
There was panic on the streets of Torino, Reggio Emilia, Milano…
DUBSTAR: THEY HAVEN’T A CLUE WHERE THEY ARE
The telephone number l've just dialled is very long. When I ask the woman on the other end of the line which country the code belongs to, she answers, surreally, "I've got no idea where we are”
(Dub) star date mid-1996. Vocalist Sarah Blackwood is on the other end of the line, somewhere in the middle of Dubstar's first European tour. And the answer to my first enquiry hasn't elicited the expected response. "It's a bit disorientating, all this travelling round on a bus. Oh, I've just been told we're in Turin. We're just about to soundcheck."
How, for a band who six months ago were terrified of playing live, has the tour gone so far?
"It's been cool," she replies in a thick West Yorkshire accent. "Last night we had some guy doing backflips around the venue for the whole of our set, so I think he enjoyed it. Munich was a bit weird though, we made the mistake of going to the beer festival before we played. We enjoyed the gig, but God knows how it sounded.” [It was terrible]
"No idea where we are," is a neat metaphor for the meteoric and head-spinning rise of Dubstar. It
was early 1994 when Sarah joined up with two Newcastle musicians, Steve Hillier and Chris Wilkie who'd spent three years traversing planet nowhere under the moniker The Joans. By November that year the newly christened Dubstar had signed to EMI subsidiary Food, also the home of Blur. The debut album Disgraceful was recorded in January '95. The first single, 'Stars' (later re-released, was unleashed on an unsuspecting but receptive public in June last year.
Swigging beer in front of a wild Turin audience is pretty far removed from serving beer at a bar in downtown Newcastle, as Sarah had been doing the day Dubstar signed their contract.
"I haven't had time to stand back and think about it properly," she says. "I guess we might have time to reflect on it all when this tour is over."
Do the band now get hassled as a result of their new-found fame when they head off down their local for a quiet pint? "To be honest we've been working so much that none of us have been at home for more than a couple of days this year. Last time I had a day off I went to the supermarket with my boyfriend and we popped into the pub on the way home, you know, just for a quick pint.
“Ten pints later I had three bags of no longer frozen shopping and some guy sidling up asking if we were playing in town that night. He was quite sweet about it, but to be honest most people don’t recognise me without me false eyelashes on”
Much has been made of the contradiction at work in Dubstar songs. On the one hand they produce glorious, sweeping pop symphonies that bring a smile to your face, invoking images of walks in the park on summer afternoons. On the other, you feel guilty for being so happy when the lyrical content of most of their numbers is, well, pretty serious. It’s something that sets Dubstar apart from most of their hedonistic, Thatcher’s children contemporaries.
“It’s nice to be different” says Sarah. “It’s a bit of a waste of time if you don’t say something interesting and thought provoking when you’ve go tthe opportunity. A lot of pop music has happy, happy lyrics with no substance, and it’s so bland.”
With a such a well-documented conscience, are Dubstar going to get behind any party in the lead up to a General Election?
"I wouldn't do that personally… I'm not interested in politics at the minute and I don't think I could align myself to anyone who's around right now. The world is so crap, it's pathetic - politicians never get anything done. I think Rock The Vote its a good thing. But at the same time no one really wants to be told how to vote by Martin Rossiter, do they...?"
Dubstar's short but bright career seems to have been plagued by comparisons and pigeon-holing. It's an occupational hazard. They seem to be making the best of both worlds, being either an antidote to, or part of, the Britpop scene, depending on who's asking. Perhaps as a way of distancing themselves from genres, they always release dance mixes.
"I really like the ‘Stars' mixes,” says Sarah.
"Steve loves remixes, Chris hates them. I just like trying something different, but it does depend on who does them. We'd all love William Orbit to play around with some of our stuff, but sadly we haven't been able to get that together yet." Some people are of the opinion that you're part of the trip-hop scene?
"Nah, that's crap. The only comparison I can see between us and Portishead is that we've both got a girl sounding miserable. That's it.”
This summer Dubstar might have the time and space to reflect on their helter-skelter year,
'Elevator Song' (Food supremo Andy Ross said it would be a worldwide number one when he first heard it) is the fourth single from the album. In another year's time Sarah and her fellow Dubstars should know exactly where they are - being mobbed in supermarkets for being the brightest lights in the galaxy probably.
Dubstar - Disgraceful call out
Sparkling debut that whipped up a bit of controversy due to the vagina-like pencil case on the sleeve (it was later changed). Stephen Hague's hallmark pop beauty production marries
Blackwood's sublime vocals and the guitar-synth axis of Hillier and Wilkie. 'Not So Manic Now', which gave the band their Top Of The Pops debut was typical Dubstar (even though it's a cover) - a mainstream pop toon, juxtaposed with the story of a pensioner being mugged in her own high-rise flat. Stupendous.
THINKING BACK NOW
I wish I’d had a chance to write and include a better song for Volume. However, Not So Fast was chosen because it seemed to fit the stoner aesthetic that Volume was projecting. And NSF is a decent enough song, a significant nod to our Shoegaze roots and certainly added something to the Dubstar legacy.
More interesting for me is listening to The Joans version and recalling the thought processes behind it. Originally Not So Fast sounded like a traditional song, but the DAT cassette that it was recorded onto broke, so we were left with this rather mangled sound you can hear in the video above. Rather than abandon the song, I tried to rescue it. This strange dub version owes a huge amount to His Name is Alive, Warren Defever’s act that I was obsessed with in the early 1990s. I’m not sure NSF is entirely successful, but that wasn’t the point. Gear was a means of promoting The Joans, getting us local media coverage (it did, no one liked it) and more gigs. The fact that Gear was a mad combination of beats, ambient pieces and what would later become classic Dubstar songs is a testament to the ‘anything goes’ music scene in Newcastle in the early 1990s.
More successful is The Gender We Lose, a piano piece I wrote as an Easter Egg for anyone who’d persevered through the rest of the cassette and needed some melody. I wrote TGWL on my piano in Jesmond but couldn’t record it with microphones. Instead, what you can hear is my Roland W-30 sampler recorded live onto my Tascam Four Track cassette recorder with one overdub. It’s pleasant enough, and I revisited it nearly thirty years later on the first Dubstar: Lost and Foundland album in the pandemic.
I’m fond of Not So Fast for nostalgia. This is the sound of the early 1990s for me, a snapshot of a specific time. The rainy streets of Jesmond, the many stoned nights in Manor House Road (the Dubstar style heavy drinking, as referenced in the interview would come later), and the first wave of Shoegaze. A style I adore to this day.
One last thing: Andy Ross, the man who signed Dubstar and ran Food Records, was also the man who invented the term Shoegaze. True story.
This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news
Dubstar: IN MY DEFENCE 2013 VERSION
In My Defence would have been a bonus track to go with the release of the second attempt at United States of Being. But why include (what was then) a seventeen-year-old song on a comeback album? So many questions, let’s start here…
At what point can a songwriter be satisfied that a song is fully realised? At what point can she walk away from the computer and throw off the remaining expectations for a song to magically come to life?
I don’t know, I haven’t worked it out. Some of my students never do. These are the most passionate new minds in the world of music, first-year undergraduate students. They’ve jumped through all sorts of hoops because music is the life for them, they aced their A levels to fulfil their dream: to become successful musicians. But they quickly discover that the biggest barrier to success isn’t experience, study, practice or even talent, it’s completion:
nothing happens until you finish the song
If you don’t work in the creative world seems mad to spend days, even weeks working on a piece of music only to abandon it. Yet this happens all the time. Years back, I assumed that whenever a tune was released, that would be it, we’d all relax and move on. The reality is that if a song is any good you never let go. In Dubstar, we often joked on the tour bus about the number of remixes Food Records would commission for every single. ‘So what do we sound like this week?’. We were amused but there was also a sense of never being able to escape.
Maybe Paul Valéry was right, a work of art is never completed, merely abandoned. Or given a Speed Garage makeover.
A walk in the park?
I’ll save you from the details as I’ve written about this before, but the B-sides to Cathedral Park were written and recorded in a period of extreme flux. On the one hand, I was excited about landing in a new city. There were parties, there was money and theoretically I was having the time of my life. But the experience of leaving Newcastle had left an indelible scar, I was deeply in mourning for the life I’d left behind. This was not an easy time to be writing, and a very difficult time to be recording. And in the middle of the maddest time of my life, the songs for Cathedral Park were written in a week in May 1997 and recorded in a couple of afternoons. They would be released a few months later. Job done? Maybe…There would be no new B-sides from Dubstar for three years.
My first laptop, the Apple Mac PowerBook 5300cs. Still works today, but you wouldn’t bother
By 2013, my world was very different. Brighton was my home, I was married, settled and I’d moved on from those troubled times, both personally and musically. But a nagging itch remained: some of our releases were obviously undercooked and deserved another look. Despite having produced dozens of songs in the 1990s, by the 2010s it was clear to me that I had been under-experienced in the skill. Where I’d dedicated my focus to writing and performing, many of my contemporaries had studied the art of audio engineering, production and mixing. In my arrogance I assumed I could equal their prowess simply by being the first person in Jesmond to own a laptop. I’m pretty sure the VIZ boys had one before me too.
2013
When Circle Turns was released on Record Store Day 2013 and USOB was completed, I grasped the opportunity to revisit some of the songs I felt needed more time in the oven. In My Defence was the first ( but this wasn’t the first time I’d taken a second look at old songs. My frustration at how the Make It Better album had turned out led me to rearrange a handful of the songs that hadn’t made it onto the album (I Lost A Friend being a prime example)).
The connection between the two songs was clear to me. Circle Turns had a very dreamy, ambient feel to it, mainly because there wasn’t much of a song to work with beyond Sarah’s poem… this left a lot of space to fill. In My Defence had also started as a poem. The original version had a large amount of space in it too, probably more than any other fully arranged Dubstar song. I’d removed my original chord sequence and wrote a Jacquard weave of looping string lines that had created an intriguingly dour mood that suited the song. But in the cold light of day, wow… did it feel bleak! Sad and bleak are not the same, melancholic and depressing are not the same. The skill is knowing which is which, and which is best.
I thought I’d be lucky and find a DAT cassette of the parts from the Roland VS-880 hard disk recorder that had been used on the original B-side recording. No such luck, but I did find some bits and pieces of those sessions on a Minidisk which I reassembled in Logic. And so sixteen years after its initial release and a further eleven since the update, this is the definitive version of In My Defence.
THINKING BACK NOW
In My Defence is another in the long-established tradition of Dubstar songs, where the period between writing and completing is years and years and years. Too many songs, too many options or too lazy? Only you can decide.
But the more interesting question is not ‘why return to these songs?’, but ‘what took you so long?!’.
Well, for me it only made sense to take another look when I thought that the results would get out into the world. The gestation of the two USOB albums had taken so long, seven years, but we were finally (finally!) playing live regularly and there was a good chance these songs would arrive with their intended audience.
Also, by 2013 it had become difficult for the three of us to get into the same room to record or even discuss what was going on with the act. There was no appetite among the other two to record more music, so that meant I had an opportunity to revisit songs instead (much like when we recorded the acoustic versions of Stars, Elevator Song and Not Once Not Ever twenty years earlier). It felt like a bit of a letdown to me to revisit songs from the 1990s in the 2010s, but now we’re almost halfway through the 2020s I’m glad I did it. Very glad.
Hang on though, what’s this chunk of Robert Miles’ ‘Children’ doing in the middle of In My Defence? When I wrote IMD in my bedroom with a bath in it on Waterloo Street, I realised that the piano line from Children could be played over the arrangement and fit very well, much like St Swithin’s Day sounded great over the Dub Hip-Hop groove I’d put together four years earlier. Wow, why not include that piano line, how bold would that be?
But sadly I decided not to because I didn’t want to distract from the core message of the song with a reference to a different, much bigger international hit. I don’t think my publisher would have liked it either! Roberto Concina (Robert Miles) sadly died in 2017, and in some minor way, I like to think of this song as a tribute to him and his fantastic music.
This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news
Dubstar: THE PERFECT SMILE
In the Dubstar Archive I’ve been focussing on releasing new songs and have shied away from sharing the many different versions of songs you’ve already heard. We had enough remixes in the 1990s after all, so… we’ll get to the alternative versions another time, maybe 2026? Right now I’m concentrating on previously unheard songs that I think will be interesting to listeners. Sometimes I’ll put up a song to highlight something that might not already be known about Dubstar, such as there were two cover versions we put forward for Amnesty International. This is why we’ve had a dozen songs from United States of Being recently, but The Perfect Smile is different. It's a song that spans two unreleased recording eras: The Dubstar Ep from 2000 and the United States of Being sessions. So what's the story?
One of the keyboard racks in my music room in Hove, September 2000
THE PERFECT SMILE
I wrote The Perfect Smile as a song that might help Dubstar to remain signed to EMI in 2000. I've discussed this situation before, it was so strange. Much like today, although I’d already stopped working with Chris and Sarah, effectively bringing Dubstar to an end, I was still getting calls from the music industry for updates on the act and more material. So… I wrote and recorded a handful of new songs and threw in a cover, much like on Disgraceful, Goodbye and Make It Better. The typical Dubstar situation.
Despite this and after the meagre sales of Make It Better, Dubstar was dropped in November 2000. We would never have a record deal again and the six Dubstar EP songs were forgotten. Until…
Ten years later. Dubstar had reformed in 2006 and fallen apart in 2008 when it emerged that Sarah hadn’t told her musical partners in Client that she was working with Chris and me. That seemed like it was the definitive end to the act, but a year later there was a change of heart. We resumed work as Dubstar at Sarah’s behest (I’ll expand on what Chris and I got up to in the downtime another time). By late 2009 I’d already moved on musically from the songs I’d written and recorded for our first comeback; a change of pace was afoot, let’s go faster! You can already hear this mood change on Don’t Ask. My approach had become much more upbeat, even dance-floor-orientated for once. it could put Dubstar back on the map.
I learned Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator during the many days waiting around during the recording of Goodbye. Here’s an idea I had for a new Dubstar logo to accompany the proposed release of the Dubstar EP.
This also led to the recording of one of my faves from this era. Sister was a departure from the sound we’d had two years earlier, much faster, even rockier…it sounded a lot like electro New Wave, somehow a hybrid of Ultravox, The Cardigans and Dubstar. It worked, brilliantly.
Following its sonic success I decided to revisit some older unreleased songs to see if any other gems could be rekindled in the same way. The answer was yes…The Perfect Smile had a half-time RnB feel (and was called In Your Smile), very millennial in style. I’d always liked the song but the recording and arrangement were wrong. My contributions were pretty weak, but Chris played some excellent Wilkie-style arpeggios and Sarah sang the song with more passion than it deserved. It was submitted to EMI and then…forgotten.
But you can’t keep a good tune down. In the throws of completing the USOB songs at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, I reworked The Perfect Smile in the style of Sister. This is the result. But this new musical avenue would not be explored any further. It emerged soon after Sister was mixed in Malta that Chris had significant problems with the song: we’d have to ditch it. And then, as you know, we ended up ditching dozens more songs as the act fell apart for the final time in early 2014. Damn.
My beloved Yamaha DX7 in September 2000. Note two (!) minidisk players on top of the filing cabinet.
THINKING BACK NOW
We’ll never know if going upbeat would revive Dubstar’s fortunes. I still contend it was worth a try. Speeding things up, grooving in straight-8s rather than funky way? Yeah, a terrific fit. Oh well…
I remained excited by this sonic approach though, and returned to it in 2015 when I put together this remix for Brighton-heroes The Propolis. The Ultravox is strong in this one. And one day I’ll put up the original In Your Smile as a 'compare and contrast' for the curious.
There are only two unreleased songs left from the Dubstar EP. They're so weak I’m tempted to leave them exactly where they are on my hard drive. But you never know, maybe I’m misreading them (and of course, there are alternative versions of both which I’ve yet to find, maybe they’re not so bad after all?).
This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news
Dubstar: GEMINI
I found a man, he told a tale
Set in a town I know so well
He’d lost a prize, a girl, a twin
She’d bathed his feet and said to him
I’ll keep you close I’ll calm your fears
I’ll show you everything is here
These castle walls were built for you
Built for you
He made a home, she made a plan
That he would be a stronger man
She forged a throne, a crown of tin
And as he slept she said to him
I’ve kept you close I’ve calmed your fears
I’ve shown all you need is near
These castle walls were built to last, enchant
You shan’t escape from here
You can’t avoid your future yet these days we know you won’t forget
These castle walls were built for you
Built for you
And so this man his fate foretold
Became a captive held controlled
His pride disguised as solitude,
His every friend once held withdrew
But he remained behind these walls
Obscure alone unreachable
She left him bound, her words were true
And he begged me to tell you
He keeps you close, he holds you dear
He knows there’s nothing left to fear
Those castle walls, Newcastle stone
Within them lives this man alone
And you who made this sad outcast
This ghost, this prisoner of the past
A hundred years, he’ll wait for you
After releasing an album where we hadn’t said very much and then split, by the end of 2000 I filed Dubstar under the heading of Opportunities Missed. We’d had hits and tours and royalties, we’d gone further than most acts. But Dubstar had evolved out of the ashes of The Joans to have hit records, that’s what signing to a record company was all about in the 1990s. We were plucked from the Newcastle scene and inserted into a world where survival wasn’t based on art or credibility. We were in the music industry, built on cash.
The hits dried up and the act ended, yet I was haunted with unfulfilled ambitions for the act, all the words unwritten, songs unsung. So when the opportunity came in 2006 to do Dubstar it all again I knew we had to say some things, tell some stories… and have a reason to exist beyond money. There was nothing to lose, we could do anything.
Gemini is a song that escapes from deep within this sense of freedom. It’s a love letter to the Newcastle upon Tyne of my early adulthood, the Northern English city of the 1980s.
Before I arrived in 1988, Northerners were characters I’d only met on TV, and Geordies I’d only heard in sitcoms. Students, people like me, packed the city centre, but I ventured a couple of stops out of town on the Metro. This is where the underbelly of the city revealed itself, and it was here I lived and worked.
I felt like an adult for the first time although in reality, I was not even close. Some assume that I lived in the North East for University (that’s why Sarah moved there from Halifax), but I moved from London to Newcastle for love, to live with my girlfriend. The relationship had existed for nine months and all was well, but we were only meeting up every few weekends, often commuting across the entire country by train. We didn't have the money to keep doing that, so...we had a choice, she would move to London or I would move to Newcastle. We chose Jesmond and moved in together in the late Summer of 1988. These were my formative years.
Newcastle upon Tyne
There was a feel to the North East that was unique in the eighties. The closure of the pits and the miner’s strike was over but their effects could be felt and seen everywhere. This region wasn't London, it was poor, like nothing I’d seen before. But it was cheap to live in for a nineteen-year-old and if you knew what you were doing you could live pretty well. I enrolled on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme which allowed me to legitmise my Nightclub DJing, I’ve been self-employed ever since. I discovered recently that Happy Mondays and Stewart Lee were also on this scheme (although not in Newcastle, obviously).
And there was the environment. The smell of the air was a rich combination of the Northumbrian wilderness, the North Sea and diesel buses. The dark winter nights were cosy and inviting with open fires and candles. Biting rain and wind would blow me home to our Tyneside flat on the Metro or Number 33 Bus.. The long summer nights weren’t particularly warm but it was light well beyond ten. And in the midsummer, the sky wouldn’t ever be completely dark.
Today I’ve lived in Brighton for more than half of my life but I still return to Newcastle regularly. The city evolves, and yet Newcastle feels… old. Not decrepit, it’s packed with students and the economic vibrancy that attracts.
It’s more that the city feels like it was built for a different industry, a different era. The brutalist architecture in the city centre is from a different time. The newer buildings on the Quayside, such as Gateshead’s Glasshouse, give you a superb view of…Newcastle’s old buildings. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts is fabulous and no matter how well the internals of the building have been rebuilt, you’re always aware you’re in a flour mill. It’s the building that was on the side of tin cans my father had growing up in the post-war period in London. Look across from the Baltic. You’ll see the Tyne Bridge, a marvel of interwar engineering and the signature building of Tyneside, now rusting away. Beyond that, the Red House and the Cooperage, both ancient buildings. Even the flats in Jesmond where Dubstar formed were a hundred years old by the time I arrived.
Frankly, I love Newcastle and how its past coexists within its living and vibrant present. It’s this love and the passing of time that informs Gemini.
Thinking Back now
Gemini has some interesting musical moments. That's me playing chords on my bass guitar, a direct reference to the Cocteau Twins of the 1980s. The drums are a combination of samples of my old Drumulator and a Roland TR-707, both superb drum machines used by the Cocteaus. There’s a sample of machinery from Midge Ure’s first solo album rolling along. I’m particularly fond of this reference: Gemini is an homage to my spiritual home of Newcastle, so it’s fitting to include a slice from Midge’s homage to his own home town of Glasgow.
Steve playing Gemini on the pub piano in The Cumberland Arms, Byker, Newcastle 2010. Video taken by Chris Wilkie.
Earlier versions of Gemini had a different drum part that moved at double the pace you hear here. I struggled to get the instrumental parts to work with this beat. There was no sense of movement, so I slowed the drums to half-time which improved the feel a lot. When Daren Taliana did his mix of Gemini he was initially alarmed by how the tempo in the song is constantly changing. I was trying to achieve the ebb and flow of a live band and drummer where variations would occur naturally. That’s not how dance producers work, they need a strict and consistent beat, no wonder he was concerned. His mix is great and features the original drum beat, I’ll put it up on the archive soon.
Also, this song includes the Blackwood Choir which you can hear as the song begins. This was created by Sarah singing every note in a chromatic scale and layering takes on top of each other, much like 10CC’s ‘I’m Not In Love’. The result was excellent, I must find the rest of the recordings one day.
And Gemini is one of a series of Dubstar songs that doesn’t have a chorus. What are the others? Elevator Song, popDorian, Song No.9, Not So Manic Now, Swansong, In My Defence, The Thought of You…
I love writing in this style. Who needs a chorus when you’re not expecting anyone to sing along?
This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news