Dubstar Preludes Volume 3 Preview: Make It Better
Dubstar at 25+1: Dubstar Preludes Volume 3
Over thirty demo recordings were completed for the third Dubstar album ‘Make It Better’. With Chris living in Gateshead, Sarah in Manchester, and me down in Hove we were as far apart as you can be while still in England*.
All three members of Dubstar in one place
There was another problem too:
My songwriting portfolio was empty… Disgraceful and Goodbye included many songs that were up to ten years old, in fact only two songs on Disgraceful were written for the album, ‘Not Once Not Ever’ and ‘Day I See You Again’. It was a similar story for Goodbye. This meant all of the songs for Make It Better had to be brand new compositions** .
So after I abandoned our ‘challenging’ writing trip to the mill in Oxfordshire (Dubstar never wrote together, what were we thinking?), I sat down in my new flat in The Brunswick development in Hove. I wrote fifty seven new tunes for the album including a collection of instrumentals that I would write words for at a later stage. That’s not so many for a professional writer, but writing as a recording artist requires a different mindset to someone who writes for money. For me, great music depends on a connection to something personal, something real, something true…after all, songwriting is an art. Art takes time, patience, and a space to indulge yourself.
Whereas a pro-writer must come up with golden ideas every time she’s in a writing session, to somehow be more general yet simultaneously edgy, commercial but not cheesy. This is not an easy task. I lived in that world for a while and it was the hardest I’ve ever worked.
The writing setup for United States of Being, the follow up to Make It Better. Note the return of the piano.
But back to Dubstar… In some ways constant writing is a reflection of a lack of confidence, you think that eventually you will write the next Winner Takes It All, the next I’m Not In Love, the follow up to Stars. You know you can do it, you just haven’t managed it… yet. It will be the next song, next song. But as any writer knows, you get to a point where you can’t trust your own quality control. And if you’ve not hit your best work after fifty songs it’s probably not coming. There comes a point when you simply can’t make it any better, you have to demo together, you have to commit to the songs you have.
Steve and Chris rehearsing in Brighton. Photo taken by Sarah of course
To complicate things further, my writing process had changed since Newcastle. I’d left my piano back in Jesmond, so I was writing on synthesisers and guitars for the first time. This was exciting but brought challenges. The record company had bought us a brand new Apple Mac G3 which was incredible. The previous two albums had been put together using ADATs, Cubase on my Atari ST and of course the Roland W-30. This was the modern world, this was Logic Audio V3. This was…a lot to get my head round.
Single artwork for Make It Better, the preview single for DUBSTAR Preludes volume 3
There was no rehearsing of the songs on Make It Better. Essentially I would create the whole arrangement alone, Chris would make trips down to play on what were effectively finished instrumentals. Sarah would arrive another day where I would sing the melodies to her…and that would be the very first time the song would be heard, not just for Sarah but for me too. Madness really, I wouldn’t countenance working like that today. But we were geographically separated, the situation required a compromise to work at all.
After thirty two songs were demoed, I think we were all at the end our tethers. I wanted to keep writing but the time had come to start recordings proper. So I stopped.
My Fender Rhodes, as featured on Make It Better
What this meant was there was a huge backlog of unfinished and undemoed songs written in this period that were never heard. That’s where DUBSTAR Preludes Volume 3 comes in. These are the best five of the twenty five (!) unrecorded songs from the Make It Better era.
Make It Better, the song itself, is a preview from the prelude, a direct update of the original recording from 1999. You can hear my bass and guitar parts recorded at the time, while the melody is played out in 2021 on my Fender Rhodes with extra supporting parts added to complete the sound. It’s a little scratchy, but those initial recordings were never intended to appear in this form. I think it has a certain charm, I hope you agree.
*Unless one of us was in Cornwall. Or Devon.
** (except ‘Your Words’, which wasn’t a particularly strong song anyway)
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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