Dubstar: Blake's Jerusalem GDR Demo

It seemed like a great idea at the time…

One aspect of the early Dubstar years that’s suprisngly undocumented is how keen we were to perform songs in a stripped-back format. There was even a period when Sarah would sing entirely unaccompanied, which is amazing given how nervous she was onstage. On our very first UK tour in 1995 Sarah would sing Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ in the vocal sound check, it even made an appearance once or twice as an encore. And of course Dubstar completed the NME tent headlining gig at the Reading Festival with an acapella of Day I See You Again…

Three years earlier we had performed a set of Christmas songs at the Middlesbrough Arena (including this version of Silent Night) and so were quite comfortable performing songs with little else than a low drone from the Kawai K1m and the occasional strum on the guitar from Chris. It seemed to work well…so with that festive gig under our belt, what next?

Somehow I’d arrived at the age of twenty without hearing the classic English hymn ‘Jerusalem’ and I still haven’t seen Chariot’s of Fire. My school’s song was the comparatively dry ‘To Be A Pilgrim’ which didn’t have much of a lyric and featured one of Vaughan Williams’ most dreary melodies. This gap in my education was filled when I discovered Blake’s Jerusalem on Billy Bragg’s The Internationale album, released in 1990. Consequently my first experience of Jerusalem was as a proto-socialist anthem and paen to the universality of humanity, totally free of the atavistic pomp of the last night of the proms. Hubert Parry’s melody and arrangement are extraordinary, the words awe inspiring. I loved it.

So thinking it might be nice to do another hymn we recorded a version of it round at mine in Jesmond in early 1994. This original cassette is lost to time, but we rerecorded it with Graeme Robinson and his partner Jon Kirby (who added an extensive keyboard arrangement) some months later. It was this that was submitted to Food records, but was never released.

I liked this version and thought it would a brilliant song to perform onstage as an encore or even record as a B-side. But with the benefit of twenty seven years of hindsight I’m relieved we didn’t. I don’t know whether the sentiment would have been conveyed properly and almost certainly would have been misinterpreted. Despite my occasional lashing out at the John Major government, we weren’t an overtly political act, so the socialist and humanitarian context would have been lost. Instead we would have been seen as a northern pop act singing a song that almost everyone associates with English patriotism. 

Patriotism has its time and place but it was definitely not what Dubstar was about. These were the Britpop days: there was much discussion about the song and Blake’s original poem, so we would certainly have had to answer questions and not have a clue what to say:

Journalist: Is Dubstar a patriotically English band? 

Dubstar: Not particularly…

Have you been to Jerusalem?

Not yet…

Do you go to church? 

Sometimes…

Will you sing other hymns? 

Probably not….

Are you Christians? 

There’s one confirmed Christian in Dubstar, there might be at least another…

At best it would have been a distraction from everything else we wanted to talk about and risked us being caught in the same controversy that Morrissey had stoked a few years earlier (and ever since). But none of these concerns take away from the majesty of this unreleased recording, once again showcasing the beautiful pure tones of Sarah’s vocals from the earliest of Dubstar days.

And yes, I do prefer Jerusalem over God Save The Queen. Who doesn’t?

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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