Window Pain
Songwriter Steve Hillier
Date Written February 2010
Place Written Hove, Sussex
Originally Sung By Sarah Blackwood
Features Yamaha CP-70B, Telemark, Moog Little Phatty
"You don't need to lay me down, I'm ok"The comeback single! That was the rest of the gang’s plan. And why not, it had a great chorus, a strong melody, meant something, you could dance to it, it had a minor Danish ending, and it sounded like Dubstar had woken up in the twenty first century. Finally.
And inevitably…
I’m not a big fan of Window Pain. I’ve had this feeling before. The one where you know something’s good but you’re not feeling it… your head says “yes” but your heart says “come back later”. This had happened with Stars, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. My inability to spot or even like a hit means I will never make an A&R person, and Andy Ross’s ability to spot one at a thousand paces is one of the reasons why he is one of the best. He came to the comeback show at The Lexington in 2013 and told me “that Window Pain song, the new one, sounds like a single”. Or he may have said hit. I’m not sure because I was too miserable by the end of that gig to listen to anyone. I know he was being positive, whatever he actually said.
And ultimately I think Andy was right. So did the others. Stephen Hague produced a version of this song and there was even a video made in a camp site in Dorset (in which I ended up being dressed as a gimp lying in a wood on a dark and cold November evening. Nope… me neither). But this piano version is the first time the song has been released in any form.
This original unreleased recording of the song features the debut of two modern analogue synths in my collection, Analogue Solutions Telemark and the Moog Little Phatty. I’d not bought synthesizer hardware in years, instead using software whenever I wanted something my collection couldn’t provide. Tom from Analogue Solutions had met Sarah at an event somewhere and given her the Telemark and Oberkorn sequencer to try out. She and Paul had not been able to make head nor tail of them, and that’s no surprise, you really need to know what you’re doing with modular gear. So I bought them off Tom and put them to work. The Moog was for the bass of course, but I sold it a few years later. I loved the look of the synth but never warmed to its sound. Sacrilege, but I did an A/B comparison with Native Instrument’s Monark and preferred the software Moog to the real thing.
I still use the Telemark though. It has a reputation for squeaks and squawks, but it also has a unique bottom end. It’s ideal for solid sub bass with a rounded edge, and it’s one of my three ‘go to’ synths for analogue bass (the others being the Korg MS-20 and Roland SE-02).
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now: