Dubstar: Not Once Not Ever GDR Demo

Not Once Not Ever was one of only two new songs written for Disgraceful, the first album. Dubstar wasn’t signed to any record label at this stage, everything was up for grabs and making an album still felt like a dream. 

Unlike the last song to be written ‘Day I See You Again’, Not Once Not Ever started its life in my front room in Jesmond on guitar, a simple if melancholic chord sequence which Graeme Robinson said reminded him of Klezmer. You can hear the arpeggiated guitar picking being played by the harp sound on my Korg M3R. I think it sounds particularly nice in the middle 8 section…the lead melody is the Korg’s viola sound, and of course it’s my trusty Yamaha DX100 on bass.

Lyrically Not Once Not Ever was a reference to a relationship that had come to a difficult end some years earlier. I’d been talking to a friend one night in the Trent House Pub near St James Park in Newcastle about how couples have statuses that change over time and as a participant you might not realise. I told her I thought that cohabiting and marriage were essentially equivalent, then said off-handedly: 

“of course, living together is something you do, but being married is something you are”

The world famous Trent House Pub in the 1990s - image courtesy of welovewhq.com

Marriage was a status that defines you and your relationship, there’s not really an equivalent when you’re living together. And that a marriage had the effect of holding people together in a legal and financial environment, it was permanent commitment, even if that relationship may have died years previously. 

But the fact that it’s easier for a couple to stop living together and end their relationship without solicitors, courts and other assorted expenses that actually makes the bond stronger than marriage because it was almost entirely based on love and trust. That in a sense, being married was a lesser status for a relationship.

And on my fourth pint of 80’ it occurred to me that this would be a great line in the song I was writing, a moment where Sarah could address this ‘ex’ directly in spoken word. This felt like a bold move at the time, but we’d already had spoken word sections in Week In Week Out, and Unchained Monologue was entirely spoken word, so why not write another? We’d completed the 80s and were in the 90s after all, lots of songs could have spoken word sections.

The road in Darlington where we recorded the demos for the Disgraceful album

But there is something that irritates me to this day about Not Once Not Ever. The B-section line was originally ‘I remember, I didn’t trust you once, not ever’ but Graeme insisted we changed that line to ‘couldn’t trust you’, probably because it was a more common phrase. It didn’t seem significant to me but soon after Disgraceful’s release I realised that not only did it sound wrong to my ears, it fundamentally changed the tone of the song. The character in the song is a person of strength, reaching out to their ex partner with a touch of cynicism and guile. Someone who had always known that their partner might betray them, and so kept a distance from them throughout the relationship. This song isn’t an appeal for sympathy (“how could you do this to me?”) but a person realising that they always knew their ex was flawed.

The cover of the very first Dubstar promo from 1995 which included this demo of Not Once Not Ever

The word ‘couldn’t’ doesn’t convey that but implies that she had trusted the other and had been let down, repeatedly…and yet had stayed with them. That’s a position of weakness compared to my original lyrical intent and a very different tone. It might seem a trifling matter now but this was a very important point to me throughout the time the act was together. I’d embraced the fact that as I was going to write songs for someone else to sing, particularly someone female, I had the responsibility for that singer to come across as a strong, admirable, knowledgeable hero figure, a person of strength. Sure, someone who might be having a hard time, but she was never a victim. Instead, she had her head held high while valiantly striding into the valley of death.

And this tone wasn’t only present in my writing. You can hear the same sentiment in Just a Girl whose lyrics were written by Sarah. Even though it seems the woman has accepted her fate, in reality she’s transcended it and tells the man involved that ‘I know you’ll want to try’.

So it’s a small regret of mine with Not Once Not Ever, but I can live with it. Amazing how much of a difference one word can make though. 

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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