Not So Manic Now - Rehearsal at Steve’s in Jesmond May 1994
The first release form the treasure trove of cassettes I found last month!
During the first half of 1994, and prior to singing to Food Records, Sarah, Chris and I were performing regularly across the North East of England and rehearsing in the lounge of my flat in Jesmond. I don’t recall why we stopped working in the local rehearsal rooms, but I know that on this occasion we needed to record the live set as demos for more gigs. The whole recording survives to this day on my cassette.
The gig was at Rumpoles in Middlesbrough the following Saturday. There were eight songs: we opened with ‘Joni’ (which two years later would become ‘I Will Be Your Girlfriend’, ‘Manic’ was number four and we closed with ‘St Swithins Day’. For some reason ‘Stars’ wasn’t in this set…
At the gig I was enjoying myself and thinking ‘we’ve actually got something here’. It was the first time that the act had really come together live since Sarah had joined eight months previously. The crowd seemed to love it, even the bar staff. Unfortunately, apart from one show at Newcastle’s Riverside later that month we wouldn’t play live again for well over another year. Damn.
This is the original arrangement for Manic that I discussed on dubstar.com. More upbeat than the version on Disgraceful, it’s way more fun but lacks the majesty of the single released eighteen months later. Despite this version obviously being a work in progress, you can clearly hear Sarah relishing the song.
My strongest memory of this time is the cognitive dissonance of believing we were finally getting somewhere, this act sounds good… and days later waking up on my 25th birthday thinking this act is doomed. I’m too old, it’s never going to happen. It was literally the next day that Graeme Robinson invited us to work with him in Darlington, which led directly to us being signed by Food Records with months.
There’s a lesson in that…
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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