The Self Same Thing
Songwriter Steve Hillier
Date Written April 1998
Place Written Hove, Sussex
Released When June 2000
Originally Sung By Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland S-760
Spotify Link
“We’ve an equal stake in all we’ve planned”The Self Same Thing was the first song of the new Dubstar era in Hove, Sussex.
When Dubstar played our ‘we’re back!’ gig in 2013 at The Lexington in London, this was the song I most wanted to redo the arrangement for. Although the chunky guitar chords made sense when I thought we could be the English Cardigans, fifteen years later they felt dated, an ambition from another time. So I replaced the ‘ba ba ba ba’ vocals with synth bells and the bass line by a drone on a Moog Little Phatty. For the first time, it sounded like the song it should always have been.
The Self Same Thing was written in the early Spring of 1998 as an attempt to cheer up my girlfriend, now wife, who was hating her first job after leaving university. It’s an expression of solidarity between two people, between two sexes… and a musical way of stating my belief that men and women have more in common than separates us. We are the same, just about.
I left the act before this song was released as the title track on The Self Same Thing EP, the final Dubstar record. On returning from holiday in Mexico, I met Chris at a coffee shop in Belsize Park, just around the corner from where he and Sarah shared a flat. I’d spent a whole afternoon running into waves that were beating the shore at Cancun, trying to work out if Dubstar was still worth pursuing. For all the dramas over the past couple of years and the changes I could see coming in the music industry and my own life… I’d decided ‘no’. I told Chris I was off. Even though I knew I was doing the right thing, there was a gnawing sense of unfinished business, Dubstar had more to say. That feeling persisted for ten years and led to the writing of another fifty songs. So I was probably correct.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now: