Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son, a cover of the tune France Gall had won Eurovision with in 1965, was the last song from Dubstar’s Goodbye era, and the final time that the act performed on national UK TV. I’ve documented elsewhere it’s to my ongoing annoyance that I submitted the wrong mix to the producer for broadcast on Channel 4. But good news! After twenty four years in the wilderness I found the correct one on the hard drives that came back from Puerto Bañus.

I’ve covered some of the story behind our appearance on Eurotrash here, but as with everything Dubstar there’s always more to the story. So exactly what happened here?

In the spring of 1997 I moved from Jesmond in Newcastle upon Tyne to Waterloo Street in Hove, into a house formally known as the Peach House Hotel. It had been a brothel, three of the five bedrooms had baths with mirrors strategically positioned so you could see everything that might be going on inside. It was beside one of these that I setup up the studio that had previously been resident at the Arts Centre in Newcastle. Returning to the South East of England after nearly a decade, I was unaware of how expensive it would be to setup the studio like we had in Newcastle. Also, there simply was no space to rent, even in a seaside town.

Tom Cruise saved the world with one of these believe it or not

So I persevered with this ridiculous situation and a ridiculous combination of then state of the art equipment, such as the Mac PowerBook 5300 and the totally archaic…my monitors were a pair of hifi speakers I’d inherited when I was at school in the 80s. Perched on the lip of the bath.

Obviously this was not sustainable. Mixing was impossible, I had to complete the writing and recording in my bedroom then take the parts up to recording studios in London to finish them, into rooms and onto desks I was entirely unfamiliar with.

Also, the ADAT recorders we’d bought just eighteen months earlier (and recorded all the B-Sides for Disgraceful and most of the demos for Goodbye) had already failed. What had been a technological godsend in 1995 were now obsolete. So Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son was recorded on the Roland VS-880. A self contained hard drive recorder and mixer, it had solved many problems in Newcastle but even that had begun falling apart within a year.

And then I had to complete the music for Channel 4. Within forty eight hours.

So after bouncing a rushed mix for Sacha Distel’s management, the VS-880 broke, losing all the recorded data. There was no way to recreate the vocals and guitars in time either….Chris was living in Gateshead, Sarah in Manchester. Geographically speaking, the band was no longer together.

So I bounced down a version to DAT, but the version Sacha would sing to had no bassline. I’d accidentally muted the Korg Monopoly that chugged away in the bottom end and hadn’t noticed in my panic because this was all put together in a fucking bathroom. I rushed up to the post office at the top of Little Western Street and off it went to Paris…no possibility of transferring it by internet, all I had was a dial-up connection and mp3s weren’t a thing in 1997.

I didn’t notice until the very day we did the TV recording for Eurotrash that the baseline had disappeared. It was with horror that I realised my mistake as the tune blasted out of the TV studio monitors.

But now it’s back. I discovered an earlier mix of Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son with the Sacha bits left out so he could add them later in Paris. I found Sacha’s original vocal acapella too so I recombined them over a glass of Côtes du Rhône in my proper studio… so here, twenty four years later we finally have the bathroom mix with vocals, replete with a bassline you can actually hear. I notice the sound overall is a bit more vibey and hotter than the broadcast version. That’s the gritty digital compressors I used on the Yamaha 03D mixing desk that were also all over Make It Better…I think that accounts for the similarity in tone. You can certainly hear the beginnings of the new Dubstar sound here.

A final thought: I haven’t heard this song in decades. I’m surprised at how much I’ve enjoyed spending time with it again. I’d previously considered it a bit of an embarrassment …now I think it’s the maddest song Dubstar ever recorded BY MILES. The incessant breakbeats, the guitar samples, the guitar screams, the crazy pizzicato arpeggios (from my Roland JV-1080), Sarah singing in the worst French accent the world has ever known next to Sacha Distel (Sacha Distel!) singing in the creamiest French accent I’ve ever heard. And all for a TV program celebrating the Eurovision Song Contest, something we’d never dreamed of doing…we were Smiths fans, it simply was not on our radar in any way. But there we were.

Oh yeah… and then we went to France to record the show. What happened in Paris stays in Paris of course, at least until I publish my memoir…but I think you can tell from the looks on our faces that something, or even a selection of things had happened the previous night <gulp>.

Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son is an audio post card from an act that had collectively lost its mind. I love it.

Dubstar: Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son Non-Broadcast Mix