Dubstar: Joni, the song that became 'I Will Be Your Girlfriend'

Joni, the instrumental that two years would become ‘I Will Be Your Girlfriend’ was conceived as an opening tune for the newly revamped The Joans in 1994, now for the first time with Sarah on vocals. I’d written the house piano vamp years earlier, a funky lovechild of the kind of piano parts I loved on Alison Limerick and TransGlobal Underground records. But what made the song come together was the Joni Mitchell sample. 

Except it wasn’t a Joni Mitchell sample. I didn’t realise it was a reinterpretation of Big Yellow Taxi until a couple of years later. I was never much of a fan of the 70s, embarassingly for a DJ my musical general knowledge really on began in 1978. If you need someone for your pop quiz who is ‘good at the 80s’ I’m your man, but Beatles trivia? Sorry… prior to the arrival of punk I knew basically nothing. So with a smaple of this nature I was flying blind. An act calling themselves Aquarius had resung Big Yellow Taxi and put it into their own proto trip-hop song Hey Babe…I thought it soudned terrific so I sampled the hook line on my Roland W-30 and strung it together with this modified hip hop break, a bass line from my DX100 and the piano vamp played on a Korg M3R that also added some mad percussion. Chris made some superb guitar shapes and bingo, Joni sounded amazing as a set opener…plus no one else was doing stuff like that on Tyneside in 1994. Dubstar had arrived!

There were plenty of acts in other parts of the country who were making music like this though, and it was these who were the biggest inspirations for the Dubstar sound. I’ve linked to a selection in this blog post…

When Sarah joined us in 1993 it was clear that we would have to refocus our act. Chris and I had spent the largest part of 1993 becoming ever more obscure, noisy and, frankly…unlikeable, musically speaking. And yet there I was writing all these catchy tunes that were trying to escape from oblivion, potential chart gold but framed in noise. Was it my love of My Bloody Valentine and the entire 4AD Records rosta that was holding us back?

I’m not sure, but it became obvious that the best way to incorporate Sarah and do something that might be successful was to move away from the walls of sound and into a world where other people could enjoy these songs for once. In other words, get a grip.

So the shoegaze records were put away and I let the tunes I’d been DJing take over. This was the musical decision that defined the move from ‘The Joans’ to ‘Dubstar’. After ending my ambitions to be a singer, this was probably the most important career decision I’d made.

And in Joni you can hear some of the attributes of the music that would appear on Disgraceful. There’s the tiny vocal sample idea that would open Anywhere, the rolling break beats found in St Swithin’s Day and Stars…not forgetting the huge dub basslines that feature throughout the Dubstar cannon.

Listening to this humble cassette recording, it’s amazing to think it was made on a simple portastudio on the floor in my front room in just one take. You can clearly hear that we were having A LOT of fun… I miss those days a lot too. And sometimes I wonder if Goodbye would have sounded better if we’d added Joni to Goodbye rather than Girlfriend. But that was twenty five years ago, we’ll never know. Maybe Girlfriend could have been the opener to Make It Better? I suppose it’s true, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…

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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