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:

William Orbit

Andrew Weatherall

Rae and Christian

Ferry Corsten

Chemical Brothers

Lockdown 187

Boards of Canada

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?

Ashley and Simpson

A band whose name starts and ends with the letter ‘O’

Orlando

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.

A more relaxed version of The Perfect Smile from Stephen Hllier’s Dubstar: Lost & Foudland series of piano versions of Dubstar songs

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

Dubstar: MY LIFE

Those with long memories will recall that life was a little difficult all across the world in 2008. The financial crash, including the banking crisis, was turning assumptions about our wealth on their heads. We had experienced a period of sustained economic growth in the UK for well over a decade. This had characterised much of the late 90s and early to mid-00s as a boom time (dot com bubble excepted of course).

But by 2008 the wheels had fallen off. A generation who had grown up borrowing on credit cards and achieving 110% mortgages was facing a new financial reality, and it didn’t look good. We can examine the economics and politics of the situation another time (ideally in the pub) but you’ll find some superb analysis of the banking crisis here, here and here.

On a personal level, things were getting awkward. Friends of mine were landing in real trouble for the first time since the housing slump of the late Thatcher and John Major era. Bankruptcy was a serious option for some, a lifeline, and the situation was so stressful for one that I was commanded to never bring up the subject again.

I didn’t.

I was very fortunate to escape the 1990s without debt and had managed to buy a flat in Hove before the UK housing market went mad. But I did live in a world where I would meet other 90s veterans who had a look of pure fear in their eyes. This was not nice. The party, finally, was over. Now for the life-changing hangover.

This perilous situation inspired me to write the song you can hear for the first time today. My Life is a late Trip-Hop inspired slab of vintage Dubstar. The dub basslines are back (that’s my Roland Juno-106 wobbling along down there). The rolling breakbeats have returned and, for the first time we have the piano and guitar ‘wall of sound’. This shoegaze effect would appear on several other tunes, including this Parralox remix I completed in the same session.

The Roland Juno-106 as featured on dozens of Dubstar songs

On a more technical, songwriting level, I reused an old trick. The verses of the song would sit on one chord throughout, and then I'd break into the chord sequence for the chorus. This creates an enjoyable harmonic contrast between the sections, especially with the bass riff remaining unchanged in the first two choruses. The chorus then takes off in a very Dubstar way.

My Life, like so many of the United States of Being songs, had various incarnations along the way including a mix by famous music engineer and old friend Phil Bodger. I completed the version presented here a little later, where I carved away chunks of the wall of sound to let the vocal shine through. And after long last I wrote something that hit Sarah’s vocal sweet spot and stayed there without jumping around in pitch.

THINKING BACK NOW

I can imagine My Life as the opening song to the first version of United States of Being, much like Stars opened Disgraceful. As songs, they have a lot in common. I also think they serve the same function. What seems melodic and approachable eventually reveals a darker side with Sarah imploring you to ‘hear my prayer’ and to ‘take you on a journey through my life’. Gosh.

I like the way My Life nods its head to Depeche Mode, with more than a passing resemblance to their late career classic ‘Walking in My Shoes’. This is accidental of course, but Depeche Mode was the only act that all three of us liked. United in our admiration, I suppose their influence was bound to poke its head through at points.

Also, I find it fascinating to reflect on how far the world has changed politically and economically since that day. It was one thing to write a little song reflecting on how hard it is to be in debt. But…imagine if we’d known that not only would the UK economy not grow at all between 2010 and 2024, but that the country would eventually be worse off per capita than it was in 2008?

And a final thought... part of the inspiration for My Life was the idea of 1990s pop stars struggling to cope with the reality of the 2000s. Have you noticed how the very idea of pop stars being rich is now reserved for Taylor Swift and a handful of her friends?

I suppose we never had it so good.

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: SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW

Here’s a Dubstar song from the very end of the act’s existence. Something You Should Know (SYSK) was recorded in 2010, developed in 2012, and yet it’s path started a few years earlier.

As with You & Me, SYSK was written by myself and Emma Kirby in South Wales in 2008. In fact, this is the first of a dozen songs that we wrote together. I remember being terribly excited at this result, although I think Emma wasn’t quite so keen. Maybe it was a bit more Steve than Em? I’m not sure, Emma inhabits a very different musical world now and is probably much better off for it. There’s a version we recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios somewhere around here too…

Quick story: while Emma and I were eating lunch in the Real World dining room, I overheard a conversation between the drummer of a successful British band (no names, sorry, but they were big in the early to mid-00s and aren’t now) and his producer. You could see that the producer couldn’t believe what he was hearing: they’d been recording this album for nearly two months and needed to go home but the drummer wanted to replace all his drum parts. Every single hit, because they didn’t sound right to him. Maybe do them again, this time in a different room? Was that going to be a problem?

Well, if you’ve ever produced a band, you’ll know that the entire record is built on the drum playing and sound. You can’t simply replace the drums without ruining the feel of everything else. And here he was, asking to scrap it all and start again. I felt for the producer and remembered with relief why I hadn’t been in a band for fifteen years. When the record came out it was panned by the critics too…the drums sounded great though.

The Dubstar version of SYSK was originally similar to the sketch I’d put together for Emma and myself. Pianos and guitars were everywhere, but it was a bit trad…fine, but nothing special. It reminded me of Keane, which is normally a good thing but not in this case, the song never took off. I was quite disappointed with the results and forgot about the song for a year or so.

But as I was putting together the music for Circle Turns (the first new self-penned and released Dubstar song in over a decade), I took another look at the arrangement for SYSK, had a flash of inspiration and updated it for the album. The two songs have a lot in common, there’s the Roland CR-78 drum machine, the Robin Guthrie shimmering guitars, the deep bass notes from my Roland SH-101 and Korg MS-20 and a general sense of floating around in space.

The big difference was that, unlike Circle Turns, SYSK was a proper song written in advance in an actual writing session between two songwriters. Not being a fan of piecing tunes together in the studio (something you can easily hear), I think that writing moment, a singular moment of creation rather than cobbling together ideas makes a big difference to a song. I wonder what you think?

This drum machine has featured on many of my favourite records

Thinking Back now

SYSK works well but I’m not sure it would have made it onto the finished album. Hearing it now it feels like a B-Side, or maybe a bonus track? That chorus is great though, I still get a shiver of excitement whenever I hear it.

And it fascinates me to revisit the sound of those writing sessions from the 00s. There was something vibrant about that decade, a sense of ‘nothing to lose, so we can do anything we want!’ that I’d missed in the 90s. I’m reminded of these lines from the fabulous Kitchens of Distinction’s song Sand on Fire:

We are so alive, so inspired

When we were young we were careful and prudish

Now we are creased we're trivial and foolish

When we were young we were prayerful and prudish

Now we are wise we're waltzing on fire!

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'M IN LOVE WITH A GERMAN FILM STAR

Last week, while putting up ‘Don’t Ask’, I realised there isn’t a high-quality upload of this Dubstar song anywhere on the web. So I’m putting that right today.

In many ways IILWAGF might be the most important song from the entire Dubstar archive, as it was our first bona-fide release in a decade, the first since the split after Make It Better. On the other hand, it was yet another Dubstar cover, and as Chris pointed out at the time, if the first song you hear from Dubstar in a decade is a cover then ‘Dubstar can fuck off’. It’s one or the other I suppose?

We were asked to contribute a song for Buffet Libre, a Spanish record label. They were putting together a compilation of their favourite artists performing covers for Amnesty International…how could we say no? As I’ve mentioned previously, Sarah wanted to record Kirsty MacColl’s ‘There’s a Guy Works Down The Chipshop Swears He’s Elvis’, but I wasn’t keen. Largely because I couldn’t see how Kirsty’s rock and roll pastiche could be transformed into a Dubstar song. And there are much better Kirsty songs. I suggested we did The Passions’ classic instead.

IILWAGF already sounds a lot like a Dubstar song to me, wish I’d written it! To speed up the process of recording I built the arrangement around The Passion’s original single in Apple Logic, including the tempo variations, which was a little naughty. But it was a cover.

Recordings happened at my place on Adelaide Crescent in Hove with Sarah and Gavin’s studio Base HQ behind Central Station in Newcastle with Chris. And South Central mixed it back in Brighton. And that was it, the first new Dubstar recording in a decade. A cover.

Thinking Back now

I think this was the right song to pick, it suited the compilation well and fitted nicely into the Dubstar story. But every now and then I hear a song and think ‘oh, that would have made a brilliant cover, I wish we could have done that instead’. And with that in mind, I’ve made a little Spotify playlist of songs that I think we could have done. See if you can imagine Dubstar versions of these.

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: DON'T ASK

By the end of 2010 a few things about the Dubstar comeback were becoming obvious:

1. We had too many new songs

2. I hadn't finished enough of them

3. We needed to play live. A lot, as soon as possible. And…

4. We needed to introduce fresh youthful blood into the process

Why was playing live so important? It was and remains fundamental for the success of an act. You can tell when you hear an album has been assembled in the studio. The songs often sound incomplete and half-baked.

So playing a new song to an audience is a crucial step in its writing. There’s a feedback loop between you the writer, you the performer and the audience. You take your new creation out to the world, and how it unfolds in a live setting enables you to return to the song and improve it. It’s not about the response of the audience per se, but how YOU feel about the material now that it's 'alive'.

This is why comedians do warm-up tours, DJs test-run their new tunes in the clubs. It’s also why bands include new songs in their live set before recording them.

But if you don’t play live in many ways your song is incomplete, lifeless. Anyone can put tunes up on the internet or get some vinyl pressed. But if you’re not out there playing your work live ‘you’re not serious people’ as the late Logan Roy would put it.

So we had to do it. And we did, but that wouldn't solve the fresh blood problem. That fell upon the shoulders of my old friend Dex Lush. He'd already put us in touch with South Central (who mixed I’m In Love WIth A German Film Star). This time it was one of their friends, Maltese producer Daren Taliana.

Tim Mason, Daren’s alter-ego

Going SOUTH

Daren would add some pizzaz to my existing production and avoid the new Dubstar material sounding like it was made on a laptop.

We’d had sessions at Gavin’s BASE HQ studio in Newcastle and plenty in my place in Hove. But it had been four years, and I’d already written and produced dozens of songs for the Dubstar comeback. We needed to exceed our previous sonic limitations. What we needed now was a refresh and collaboration with a third party. Like we’d had with Graeme Robinson all the way back in the Disgraceful era.

Daren Taliana pre-swim

So Daren spiced the sound up by adding a contemporary, dancefloor-friendly shine to the existing arrangements. The results from his work in Brighton sounded great. The plan was to finish the sessions in Temple Studios, Malta in the late summer of 2011.

Chris and Sarah were absent from the production process as had been the case for the previous three albums, but this time I made the mistake of being absent too. I’d been gigging and wasn’t able to fly down to Malta until Sunday night. By the time I arrived, we only had a couple of days left in the studio to complete the mixes. Rookie mistake!

Despite this the results were great. Daren had mixed like a true professional, his hard work shines a very different and bright light on the songs that were proposed for the second attempt at United States of Being. Grazzzi!

Thinking Back now

And yet these mixes weren’t released. Collaborating with Daren was a terrific move, the problem was Dubstar wasn't moving. Somehow even at this late stage there was still no agreed plan to relaunch the act, only to get some recordings finished. And still no plans for playing live. I’ve written this before, but I can’t overstate how difficult it is to be in an act where the three members live in different cities hundreds of miles away from each other.

So despite all this great work, the lack of a plan meant momentum was lost again. Later that year I holed up and completed the work on the United States of Being songs alone.

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: So Say We All

Steve Hillier in Prague, July 2023

“All that I was meant to be

Every way that time has changed me

All that I was meant to do

Every word I said that was not true

And all that we leave behind, all we resign

Like a child in my arms

All that we leave behind

Falls to dust

And sand in my hands and drifts away

But it stays while you learn to pull through

All that’s owed to me

Everything I wanted, haunted by

Fights that I regret

To all the ways I’ve grown, I’m now in debt

To all that we leave behind, all we resign

Like a child in my arms is

All that we leave behind

Crumbles to dust

And sand in my hands never goes away

It stays while you learn to live again”

I’ve written here about how SSWA was written in Christianhavn in Copenhagen.

It’s notable how many songs I wrote for Sarah deal with loss, and this is another. But So Say We All is not a sad song. It’s learning to live in the presence of what was. To accept and celebrate what we can’t change. All that we’ve done has value.

SO SAY WE ALL?

So why did I call the song So Say We All, when it’s not mentioned in the lyric at all? In the TV show Battlestar Galactica, the phrase ‘so say we all’ is used repeatedly. It’s an affirmation, an agreement, much like the word ‘amen’, but more emphatic and usually (but not always) said by a collective. There are plenty of science-fiction references throughout Dubstar, our first release was a song called Stars. It felt right that the last song would reference something else you might find in outer space…and what better way to end an album than with the sound of collective agreement?

DANISH ENDING

At the end of SSWA you can hear the ghosts of other tunes that were to be included on United States of Being. Here’s a handy list of the songs whose vocals are featured. See if you can spot them all.

Yours truly, returning to Christianhavn’s best known district in 2022

The Future

Is There Anyway Back From Here?

My Life

It’s You, It’s Me

Gemini

Interpretation

Window Pain

You & Me

Interpretation

Hit

From the Front to the Back

This article include excerpt 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: UNDER MY THUMB

It wouldn’t be a Dubstar recording session without a cover song.

DJing at the Villa in Puerto Banús 2019

Sarah was back in contact wanting to reform Dubstar again after the debacle of 2008. As I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t keen but, in the spirit of never saying never, I started writing and recording. The sessions were productive, and include some of the best Dubstar songs ever. Yet we never recovered the same positive vibe, the team we’d assembled for the relaunch had drifted away and there was a latent sense of anxiety about the process. This dread lasted for years.

Despite this, it did feel as if we could start again, without the legacy commitments getting in the way. Hmmm...

UNDER MY THUMB

It’s an odd song for Dubstar to record though. I’m not much of a fan of The Rolling Stones, and there was something in the lyric that felt…, a bit dodgy? So the main reason we recorded Under My Thumb will remain lost to the ages. Sorry about that, but I can give my side of the story.

With the end of Dubstar in 2000, I started travelling abroad for work. A lot. This coincided with us having a family villa in Puerto Banús, where I kept many of the hard drives of the Dubstar Archive. I loved it there and spent the best part of nineteen years commuting between Spain and Brighton. I even picked up some Spanish. Te extraño, Puerto Banús.

There are many stories to share about this time, some of which are legendary. The weekend our next-door neighbour was arrested on the tarmac at Malaga airport and the entire Spanish media descended on us, complete with TV crews and microlights.

It was one of those situations where you quickly realise it's better not to get involved.

By way of contrast, one of my favourite stories is from 2015. Twelve (no exaggeration) Estonian soldiers arrived for a party weekend in the villa next door. They were as loud as a squad of squaddies could be. They were, to put it politely, having a bloody good time. I’ve not heard as much Reggaeton before or since.

So on morning number two at something like 4am, I went round to demand them to stop with the music, for pity's sake STOP. I was expecting some kind of standoff, one middle-aged Brit versus Estonia’s finest on leave from the Russian border. What I received was a polite apology and an instant cessation of hostilities. Silence. I didn’t hear from them again. The following day there were smiles and hellos in the street too.

I reflected and checked my prejudices after that incident. No problems with Estonians, I’ve had some great times with our Baltic neighbours. No problems with soldiers, I’d grown up around RAF staff. It was just…I was expecting a mouthful of abuse from a bunch of twenty-somethings. The kind of response I would anticipate getting in Brighton. Turned out the young adults of the 2010s could be perfectly civil…all you had to do was ask.

My ex-neighbour in Brighton: Take note.

We spent many nights in La Sala and in Puerto Banús marina (which British immigrants call ‘the port’, much to my annoyance) at the Atlas Bar. Around 2004 there was a trend for the bars to move from Ibiza House and play much more Latin-influenced music. This intrigued me.

I have a long-held theory: you can record any song in a reggae style and it will work. Living in Puerto Banús I developed an additional theory: you can also do any song in a Bossanova style. Check this out next time you’re in southern Europe. You’re bound to find a bar playing a modern Bossanova playlist where every song is a cover. Usually of a pop hit, often from the 1980s. I’ve even heard a Bossanova cover of A Flock of Seagulls’ I Ran. It’s not the worst A Flock of Seagulls cover I've heard.

I loved this development, at least when it was a novelty. Might there be something in it for Dubstar? I was a fan of Nouvelle Vague, and as Dubstar we’d already covered Stan Getz’s Bossanova classic ‘A Certain Sadness’. Latin covers are cool, why not revisit the idea? And there was something about Sarah’s voice and demeanour that reminded me of Astrud Gilberto. That was a good thing.

So we recorded Under Your Thumb. Not specifically for the upcoming album but as an experiment, a bit of fun. For use as a bonus track or something that would go up on the internet one day. And now it has.

THINKING BACK NOW

I didn’t notice the nasty lyrics in this song until we called them up to do the vocal. Had no idea of its role in the infamous film Gimmee Shelter and Altamont incident… it didn't stop us.

This is not the kind of lyric I would write. But it is the kind of song that Dubstar would record and not grasp its intent, much like Not So Manic Now.

Still, there’s a real charm to this version of Under My Thumb. It’s not really a Dubstar track. It’s more of a homage to someone else’s idea of a cover version. But it's a sign of where our heads were in the early stages of this, the second Dubstar reformation.

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: TALKING IN MY SLEEP DEMO

My Yamaha CP-70B Electric Grand Piano. Previous owner not pictured.

Here it is, the first song we completed as Dubstar after reforming in late 2006.

I wrote Talking in My Sleep in Stockholm, January 2003. The idea of getting Dubstar back together was fanciful at this point.  Chris and Sarah were still living together in Belsize Park, but there was no discussion of more music from the three of us. Sarah had taken over the singing in Kate Holme’s Technique from Xan Tyler, which rebranded as Client soon after. I was busy writing and producing new acts…there wasn’t a pressing need to redo the 1990s. After all, we’d only been separated for a couple of years.

So Talking in My Sleep was a ‘songwriter’s song’, a tune that was available for others to use. But as so often happens, it wasn’t used. No one had rejected the song, but the music world was changing fast, or at least my understanding of it. I thought I would simply carry on as before, I didn't realise I had a new job and what that would entail.

Being a pro-songwriter is very different from being the songwriter in a band. If you want to have a chance of your song being ‘cut’ by an established artist, the artist has to co-write the song with you. Or at least have a co-writing credit. That wasn’t the case with Talking in My Sleep, no celebrities had been involved at all so…it remained unused with my repertoire at my publishers Kobalt.

But the song existed, even if no one was singing it, and was ready to be recorded on the day we agreed to get back together in late 2006. It felt good, as if it belonged somewhere between Disgraceful and Goodbye. And after that first session, we had musical confirmation that there was a point to reforming the act. Plenty of reasons to be hopeful.

WE’RE GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER…

As I mentioned on Dubstar.com, we recorded a version of Talking in My Sleep with legendary producer and friend of the band Stephen Hague. That was a great experience, the old team back together. We had Kobalt excited about the new material, we were speaking to our lawyer Paul Lennon. We even had Andy Ross helping us out as our manager (in a sense Andy and especially Jo at Food Records had always been our managers). All we needed next was a label and an agent. Hmmm…

There were labels sniffing around, but nothing from the majors. I didn’t expect there to be any interest and wasn’t disappointed. But I was shocked at how little money there was left in the record industry. Negligible compared to where we were ten years earlier. I knew it was much more attractive to invest in a bright young act fresh out of the blocks than a bunch of thirty-somethings from a different decade. But I wasn’t expecting to be discussing record deals with no advances whatsoever. I couldn’t see the point of signing a deal of that nature when we could license the new material instead and retain all the rights. This meant the new Dubstar recordings would have to be self-financed. Not a problem, I had a studio and was earning, we could do this. But what about everyone else? Would it be fair to ask everyone else to do us a favour, promising a payout when we were back on the road and in the charts?

In the end that wouldn’t matter, the reformation came to a shuddering halt in 2008. Turned out there were other problems to contend with.

THINKING BACK NOW

I remember that I didn’t think Talking In My Sleep was right for Dubstar. It was too ‘normal’, not a large enough statement of intent from yet another reforming 90s act. Was I wrong?

The Electric Grand in Talking In My Sleep is featured in this recording from 1980. Amazing

What you can hear is an early demo of the song, with vocals and guitar recorded in what I think is the first session after we reformed. I’m listening to this song the first time in seventeen years and frankly, I’m surprised how much I like it. I love the fact there’s no top kit on this version, no crashes, hi hats, nothing. I’d bought Gary Numan’s Electric Grand piano earlier in the year, and here it is. This is the first time it had featured on any record since 1980. And that’s a killer chorus…very VERY 90s. And in a good way. Well done everyone seventeen years ago.

But to be fair, sounding old-fashioned was precisely what I didn’t want at the time. Twenty-three years later, why not? With the 90s revival going strong, I can imagine Talking in My Sleep sounding great on BBC Radio 1. Or 2. Or 3. Dunno, I stopped listening to music radio years ago.

And imagine if Talking in My Sleep had been the single before No More Talk, not included on any album! That might have been very cool indeed.

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 for up to be the first to hear new releases and up to the minute news