“You have your whole life to write your first album, and three months to write your second”

The pressure was on. Disgraceful had been certified gold and was well on the way to reaching platinum album status. Every single we’d released had made the charts, we’d even had two bona fide hits with Not So Manic and Stars. Now we had to do it all again, and that’s probably a harder task than doing it the first time. Any fool can write a hit album, but can he write two?

I rolled off the train at Newcastle Central station. It was the 30th of December 1996 and bitterly cold. No one was around, the platform was deserted but I had a mission: to write and record four hit singles in a month, then breakdown and clearout the studio at the Newcastle Arts Centre. I also had to move out of my flat in Jesmond and move to Brighton. I’d partied hard in Newcastle upon Tyne like a student who never attended a lecture, but after nine years it was clear that I’d learned everything this fantastic city could teach: it was time to graduate and head back south. Sarah had already moved to Manchester by this point, and although we didn’t know it at the time, the three members of Dubstar would never live in the same city again.

So I spent January 1997 in the freezing cold Arts Centre alone (there was still no heating) completing four new Dubstar songs:

But what had led me to accept this mission? It was the consequence of our first trip to the USA…

What happens in Woodstock…

Let’s Go and Inside were written at Bob Clearmountain’s house in Woodstock. We’d spent a couple of weeks in the USA working with Stephen Hague in his barn near the acclaimed Bearsville Studios. These were the first recordings for the second Dubstar album, provisionally entitled ‘Death Is The End’. I’d spent most of my time writing in one of Bob’s back rooms using an Atari ST computer and my Roland JV-1080.

It was an exciting time. In between recording sessions Chris, Paul (Wadsworth) and I would hang out in the enormous lounge listening to Depeche Mode’s Violator album. We had superb caterers from a restaurant in the neighbouring town who would deliver vegetarian food for us every night. Sometimes we wandered through the forest and down the hill in the snow to the Tinker Street Tavern where a selection of entertainers would perform. They weren’t Borsch-Belt comedians, but mad performance artists from New York City looking to capture the Woodstock spirit. Or maybe they were making the spirit themselves?

The bar itself was tiny, smaller than a typical British pub. I remember seeing a Native American country act one night, complete in Hollywood style head dresses. And there was this one guy, a solo act with a guitar who spent ages doing a preamble to his song. He then played the song (which was a bit odd, but nothing we couldn’t handle), after which he told us he would ‘now restring my guitar’. After fifteen minutes he walked off from the stage without saying another word.

I loved it.

Me in Woodstock with Goatee. It’s a different colour today

Later that trip we got stuck in a different bar with Stephen Hague, fellow producer Stephen Street and a new band called Travis who were recording at Bearsville. The police had closed both ends of the road out of Woodstock and were stopping and breathalysing everyone in their cars.

Of all the times we’d wandered into town, it was this night that I’d driven down the town to avoid getting caught in the blizzard. I thought driving would be fine as we’d need to keep a lid on our drinking…. this was our last night in Woodstock and were travelling to NYC and then Manchester the following day. Unfortunately I’d parked the car on the other side of the police cordon and had come out without my driving licence or any other kind of ID. That wasn’t going to go down well with the cops.

Another busy day watching Bond movies at Bob’s

This became the biggest night of our stay in Woodstock as we went for it in a big way. There no choice, we had to stay in the bar until either the police had gone to return to the car (not a good idea) or until the blizzard subsided so we could walk back up the hill to Bob’s place.

That’s what we did. At 3am.

And inevitably we missed our flight home. It was December the 23rd, the record company offices in London were closed, no one had booked us a car from Penn Station to JFK and we had no idea how to make our own way to the airport. We hailed a yellow taxi, got stuck in the tailbacks from Manhattan, had a couple of panic attacks and missed the flight to Manchester by half an hour. We were now stuck in the States. Damn.

I didn’t care though. I was just as happy to spend Christmas in New York City with my credit card than fight for a space on another flight. But that wasn’t what Paul and Chris had planned (Sarah was staying on in Woodstock with her boyfriend) so we soldiered on. We were lucky, there was another flight a couple of hours later to Heathrow and we could sit at the back next to the toilets.

This was perfect for me as I needed the toilet and was heading to my parents for Christmas in Orpington anyway. The boys had to make their own way back to Newcastle though, tired and hungover. And a little hysterical, as they told me later.

Graphical illustration of the trip home from NYC by Chris Wilkie aged 23

Back to Newcastle

Andy Ross from Food Records had told me that one of the great things about Disgraceful was that we were spoilt for choices for singles. I hadn’t liked the sound of that. At the time I was listening to 4AD artists like His Name Is Alive, Red House Painters and Tarnation, all of whom made sprawling albums that included songs of various styles and lengths. That’s what I wanted for Dubstar, an album that said ART! Sure, you had to have singles, I knew that. But why not also have songs that have no role other than to be on an album?

Consequently I’d written shorter songs like Polestar and Let’s Go that could be heard as vignettes between the bigger songs like Say The Worst Thing First and I Will Be Your Girlfriend. I was writing an album. At least that what I thought was happening. We’d resurrected a brace of old songs from The Joans era too for consideration (Can’t Tell Me, It’s Clear, Wearchest, Girlfriend)…In a sense, Death Is The End* was a ‘second pressing’ from the repertoire that had existed from The Joans and earlier.

But by 1997 I’d changed my mind, Andy was right. We needed more songs that sounded like singles, songs that could get on the radio. So I wrote Inside and resurrected a tune I’d written many years earlier…

NO MORE TALK

The main components of No More Talk were written in the late Spring of 1987 when I was at school. It was a hybrid of three different tunes, just like Week In Week Out. The verses and pre chorus were from one piece, the synth lead lines from another and the chorus from a different song that was written a few months later. They were combined as No More Talk a decade later at the arts Centre. As usual I wasn’t sure if the song worked until Sarah sang it, but when we heard the layered vocals in the chorus I was sure. This would be a single, no question.

And it was.

What about that sample at the beginning of the song, the one that sounds like it’s from Yes’s ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’? Nope. It was actually from a CD-ROM call Gigapack, a sample library by a German company called Best Service. It turned out that they’d sampled it from an entirely different library for the Fairlight CMI, which is how the same sample had ended up on both songs.

When I was asked about this in interviews I would say that it was part of the Dubstar plan to have a sample from a song with a sad title: ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ was ideal, especially as No More Talk was (yet another) melancholic song from the act. The truth was it was entirely an accident, like almost everything that happened in the Dubstar days.

Two months later the recordings were completed with No More talk as the lead single for the second album, now entitled ‘Goodbye’. It would reach number twenty in the UK. We appeared on Top of the Pops again, and when we left to get the night train to Glasgow we…well that’s another story for another time. Sorry.

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That chart position was a disappointment at the time but I every now and then I think about the seventeen year old me writing little songs on his parents’ piano.

He was dreaming of being in a tiny indie band on 4AD, or Factory, or Rough Trade. Or anyone really. If you had told him he was writing a song that would get him on Top of the Pops he’d say you were mad.

But secretly he would have been ecstatic.

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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Dubstar: No More Talk Demo

What happens in Woodstock…

Back to Newcastle

NO MORE TALK