Dubstar: The very first run-through of ‘Day I See You Again’

Day I See You Again was written during the first recording session for Disgraceful at RAK Studios in London. As with so many Dubstar songs, the melody had been jogging around my head for years before the events detailed in the lyric. It took the real day-I-saw-you-again for the words to appear…and become one of the most celebrated Dubstar songs. The lyric appeared in about ten minutes, which is the optimum length of time to write a song. The best work always comes quickly.

Day I See You Again throws a spotlight on a philosophical and artistic consideration I’ve wrestled with since school days: you want to write great songs, so should you be portraying yourself, how you feel, what you’ve done… or should you invent a separate character to be your hero? Can you do both? And if you were to do both, would that compromise the audience’s sense of the singer? Who is that person?

This was an issue for me in the Dubstar days: it wasn’t going to be me singing my words but Sarah, not simply a different person but a different gender too…so should I write from my perspective, or a female character I’ve invented… or what I imagine is Sarah’s perspective?

This troubled me deeply at the time, so I made a policy decision in 1995 that I’ve stuck with it ever since: I would not invent characters in my songs. I would write sincerely in my own voice. Inspired by my musical heroes like Billy Bragg, I realised that in order for my songs to work it’s crucial that the listener believes what the singer is singing is true, whoever that singer is. That truth could only come from personal experience, so I’ll write about that.

But that puts Day I See You Again in a peculiar middle ground. In order for the song to make sense, I wrote it from a straight woman’s perspective fantasising about a man, not a straight man fantasising about a woman. But how can you do that without inherently compromising the song, losing the inner truth? Wouldn’t the gender swap spoil the whole thing?

The solution was to take inspiration from Morrissey, who even gets his name checked in the lyric.

In Morrissey’s work, particularly in The Smiths, he rarely if ever mentions the gender of the person he’s singing about. This leaves a large aspect of the context of the song and the situation open to the interpretation of the listener…is this song about a man, a woman, a forbidden homosexual encounter, a hidden longing? The writer creates these gaps that the listener fills with their own concerns.

It is for this reason that every Dubstar song I wrote after Day I See You Again, there are occasional gender specific references that Sarah makes about herself but almost none about the other person in the song. The story and characters the listener creates will always be stronger than anything I could write, so I left that aspect out.

Jesmond Dene 2021, the park in the valley of the Ouseburn in Newcastle Upon Tyne. This recording was made just above the park in my old flat on Grosvenor Avenue

So how to complete Day I See You Again? Keep the sentiment as if it were me singing about ‘the day I see you again’, but just swap the genders signifiers (“if the man/woman you’ve grown to be…”). This also seemed to contribute to the sense of ‘kitchen sink realism’ that journalists would discuss when the album came out. Perfect for the Britpop era, and completely unintentional.

This recording, found on an old cassette in a cupboard in Hove remained unseen or heard since 1999. It’s the first time Sarah sang the song, you’re hearing the very first run through. We were in the front room in my flat in Jesmond…as usual I’d kept writing songs for inclusion on our first album even though the track listing was pretty much confirmed at this point. It was composed on my piano in the front room but I’d made this faux Russian orchestral arrangement on the Roland S-760 sampler so it might round off the album with a contrasting and sophisticated mood.

One rainy Tyneside afternoon I sang it to Sarah and she sang it back to me. That’s what you can hear here. I left the tape running after Sarah finished and sang it again so we could firm up the rhythm of the words and have a recording she could take home. This is the last recording I made of my own voice singing a new Dubstar song for more than a decade. The next time was for the sessions that would become the first unreleased album United States of Being in 2006.

The room where Day I See You Again was composed, it’s now a students’ flat this picture being from the estate agent’s website 2021

A few interesting things in this recording:

This version of Day I See You Again includes the full third verse, half of which was edited out by Graeme Robinson. At the time it seemed that the last verse no longer made sense…now I’m sure it was the right decision.
It also includes the original instrumental Middle 8 section which we replaced with a double chorus. It’s quite clever, the same vocal melody and words but entirely different accompaniment. I talk about this in my songwriting lectures….
Both Sarah and I struggled to get the words to flow and spent ages fitting them to this slow 3:4 arrangement. This explains the slightly wonky performance on Disgraceful where the song has been straightened out to 4:4. It has a certain charm though, who wants perfection in art?
The key was a bit high for Sarah, so when I demonstrate how to sing the song it’s WAY too high for me. Hence my exclamation at 6’39” of ‘fucking hell, no wonder you’re the singer’ with Sarah laughing in the background. What I meant was ‘no surprise I’ve stopped singing and you’ve taken over, I can’t do this and you’re way better at this than me’. I’m not sure that comes across on this recording. Glad I can clarify it now, better late than never.

It’s amazing to have found this among the dozens of cassettes-in-the-cupboard, the first run through of a pivotal Dubstar song…sixteen months later Sarah would sing it as an a cappella encore headlining the NME tent at the Reading festival. The roar of that crowd, the sheer power in the affirmation of that moment is a memory I treasure nearly twenty five years later.

The official poster for Reading Festival 1996

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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