DUBSTAR Preludes Volume 2
Almost all of the early Dubstar songs began their lives in my home in Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne. I was lucky enough to share an entire Tyneside flat with just one other person which gave us both a huge amount of living space, a dream at only £120 a month each.
With this luxury I would write the song on the piano in the front room with the view of Jesmond Dene, then put together an arrangement on the Roland W-30 sampler in the back room later that day. This working process gave us Disgraceful, Song no.9, Stars, Day I See You Again, Anywhere…almost all the songs on Disgraceful.
Goodbye was slightly different. In 1995 I moved the equipment out of the flat and into our first studio in the Newcastle Arts Centre on Westgate Road, directly over the Star Inn pub. The following year when the time came to record the B-sides to Elevator Song, the studio moved to a much nicer room in the main quad of the centre (with heating!). Rental per week? £20. I maintain to this day that one of the best things Dubstar ever did was not move to London…
Consequently for the second Dubstar album there was a longer delay between the writing of the songs in Jesmond and demoing them in the studio. Whereas previously everything I had written had some sort of arrangement made the same day, in 1996 there were dozens of tunes that started their lives at home but were never completed. Not even demoed…
This is where Dubstar Preludes Volume Two comes in.
During the Covid-19 pandemic I’ve had the time to listen through the Minidiscs and DATs of tunes that I started writing for the act but ran out of time to complete. It’s amusing to reflect that even though Goodbye was way too long at fifteen tracks, there were still piles of other tunes waiting to be completed in the wings. As I said to the head of Food Records…”there are always more songs Andy, and some of them are good”.
So here are my favourite four of those compositions, each written twenty five years ago in the late Spring of 1996. I hope you enjoy them:
There was never a Dubstar instrumental. Sarah was the star, it wouldn’t make sense to have her missing from a Dubstar tune. But Infinite Summer was written with this destiny in mind, just to try something different. I had plenty of problems to write about but I was concerned that our audience might be getting tired of hearing Sarah singing my state of mind. Hmmm….
So Infinite Summer was written as a guitar instrumental, possibly as an opening song to the new album. The fact that it sounds nothing like anything that eventually made it onto Goodbye explains why we’re hearing for the first time now.
I included this tune in my GGGGHOST live sets in 2015-17. The original idea was to have one simple motif repeating throughout the song (the doo-deeeeee-dah melody) and then write a vocal to sit on top. But there wasn’t enough musical space to insert another melody, so I didn’t try. A rare case of harmonic restraint from me. Also, I was shying away from doing another spoken word piece like ‘Unchained Monologue’, so it was forgotten for twenty years.
On the original minidisk you can hear Lee and Herring’s “Fist of Fun” playing in the background. Can you get more 90s than that?
I had hoped that Dubstar would record a dance anthem (with words) for the second album. We’d gotten some of the way there with the Motiv8 version of ‘Stars’, but that song was really a slow, dubby ballad. This new song would be written from the get-go at a dance floor friendly 125BPM. It would also have an uplifting-rather-than-reflective-melody that would land us smack-bang into the front of the record boxes of the super star DJs. That didn’t happen of course, I was distracted by the Britpop activity around me so wrote more sad-anthems instead.
This piano piece arrived on a cold early morning in Jesmond when things weren’t great, at least not for me. So I played a melody with an accompaniment that was straight 8th notes all the way through, something I’d been avoiding for years as it sounded too much like Shoegaze (which I love, but Dubstar couldn’t be shoegaze). No such restraint now.
Sunset on a Family is the sound of an unseen child moving through my victorian flat, a future ghost simultaneously sadder and older than its years.
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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