Dubstar: St. Swithin's Day original demo recorded at Steve's in Jesmond

On a Saturday night in August 1996 at around 22.00, Billy Bragg joined Dubstar onstage to sing St Swithin’s Day at the Reading Festival. We were headlining the NME tent, it was the biggest crowd the act would ever play. It was also the culmination of a long journey…

I was introduced to the music of Billy Bragg by my dear school friend David Sullivan in the summer of 1984. He’d come round to my parent’s house in Welling on a Friday night with a vinyl copy of Life’s a Riot With Spy versus Spy. We loved it, played it repeatedly into the small hours. The music was different to the other acts we had in common: we were Gary Numan fans, Cocteau Twins fans, Durutti Column fans but Billy was nothing like these acts other than being an independent artist. A bold London accent that reminded me of Paul Weller, nothing but a guitar to accompany him… not the sort of thing we usually went for but there was something else that caught our imagination and set him apart. 

It’s well documented that Billy’s vocal style can be as challenging as it is endearing, it’s fair to say he has a character voice. But there was one thing you couldn’t debate: he meant each word he sung. Every word meant something to him, therefore every word said something to us. And being fourteen, knee deep in teenage angst and about to dive headfirst into our first proper relationships, when Billy sang we listened. He was telling us about his life, so he was telling us about ours.

It also helped that he seemed to be playing somewhere in London every other weekend in the mid 80s. These were the days of the GLC (Greater London Council, not these guys) who would put on free concerts in parks from Peckham to Wimbledon and even as far afield as Hackney. We went to them all, Billy was a regular fixture, as was Smiley Culture. And that dentist bloke with the violinist. These were great times where my love of live music was born.

So we were proper fans, and here began a run of six exceptional and life-affirming Billy Bragg albums that soundtracked my teens and twenties (you’ll find a playlist of my faves here). I was entranced. I wanted to write songs like him, and form an act that sounded like the Cocteau Twins to sing them. Somehow. Looking back now, if you throw in some Charles Aznavour, Smiths, Depeche Mode and a massive slab of Boys Own and you’ll have the perfect Dubstar influences Venn diagram…

Fast forward to 1994. Sarah had replaced me on vocals in The Joans and we were recording demos for gigs in and around Tyneside. The starting point for St Swithin’s Day was the breakbeat and bass line…I’d been lent a Kawai K1m by Sharon Wilson, singer in the other band I was in at the time. I wasn’t much of a fan of the synth, but discovered that if you stripped everything back you could access the built in samples and play them straight from the ROM. I liked the string sample, and was inspired to write a bassline to a break beat from my collection of Ultimate Beats and Breaks albums. It was days later when I was humming along forgetfully that I realised you could sing Billy’s St. Swithin’s Day to it… then it hit me, imagine a dance version of a Bragg ballad, how cool would that be?

Sarah sang it perfectly, and a defining trope of Dubstar was born: woman dispassionately sings the emotionally charged words written by a man. Of course we didn’t know that would be important to the act, we were simply doing what we did…it’s only now after all these years that it’s clear this was a defining aspect of Dubstar.

Later that year Andy Ross of Food Records played the GDR demo of St Swithin’s Day to Steve Lamacq, who in turn played it out on his BBC Radio 1 evening show (I loved the fact that Andy affectionally referred to on air us as coming from ‘oop north’). This was our first play on national radio. It would not be our last.

Two years later and with five Top 40 singles under out belt we were rehearsing to headline the NME stage at the Reading Festival at NOMIS studios in Kensington. Billy Bragg came round to work out how we could have him join us onstage to play the encore of St Swithin’s Day. He strolled in and was charm itself and self deprecating too (“I only sing in two keys, sharp and flat”). Inevitably I said something stupid in response and wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I don’t think he noticed…

It was immediately clear there was going to be a problem for Billy as we’d changed the key of the song. St. Swithin’s Day was now in that sweet spot that was both too hard to sing an octave lower than normal and impossible to sing an octave higher. He had a simple compromise though. Billy would join in on the B sections (“and the fact that you don’t understand”, “the times we all hoped would last”, “the polaroids that hold us together”) which just about fit within both singers’ ranges. Perfect.

I don’t normally get nervous on stage at all, been living there since the age of fourteen. But standing behind my Roland JD-800 onstage in front of six thousand people at the Reading gig I noticed there wasn’t a microphone setup for Billy. I freaked, I couldn’t believe it, he would come on and have nothing to sing into. So during Manic, which we always played early in the set I ran off stage to tell the crew they’d forgotten about Billy…but I couldn’t find them! Aaaggghhh! So for the rest of the set, the most important gig of my life, I was running offstage during each song to find someone, anyone who could sort this out. Of course when I did eventually find the tour manager he reminded me that you wouldn’t have a mic setup for an entire set without a singer, obviously. And that the roadies would set Billy’s mic up for the encore when we were offstage. Obviously.

PS: we recorded another Billy Bragg song on that day back in 1994, something I’d completely forgotten about until rediscovering these cassettes a few months back…

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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