Dubstar: The first new Dubstar song in more than a decade!

By the Spring of 2012 the second version of United States of Being was complete. I’d finished the mixes at my place in Brighton and with the help of renowned mix engineer Phil Bodger at his room at The Levellers’ studio Metway. Musically we were set. What was required now was a ‘route to market’, a way of reigniting the Dubstar brand after more than a decade of slumber. 

We had an opportunity to put out a new tune in limited release format for Record Store Day 2012. It was clear that we shouldn’t release any of the United States of Being material until we had a real marketing plan in place, but maybe this would be alright? It had to be completed quickly, and unusually Sarah had a lyric that she could send me, a new song called Innsbruck.

CIRCLE TURNS

She sent me a vocal take recorded on an old phone, and it was rather good. It had been eighteen years since we’d last collaborated like this on Just A Girl She Said, and again Innsbruck was more of a poem than a song lyric. But there was certainly enough there to work with. And although I really-really-really didn’t want to prejudice the impact of the new Dubstar material, the opportunity hit me exactly in my sweet spot: write a new song and get it out there immediately. My songwriter head took over and it told me to ‘say yes to everything’.

So I sat down at the Yamaha CP-70B and busked out a chord sequence to Sarah’s voicemail. It was the usual approach, unusual parallel modes mixed with plaintive harmony, the signature Dubstar sound. This tune wasn’t going to be a pop smash, it struck me it was more of a slow Tone Poem, so using dreamy sounds and an ambient approach made sense. 

My old top-floor writing room in Brighton 2012

As usual I was completely alone making Circle Turns. I reused a whole load of the choir sounds that I’d made with Sarah’s voice during the recording of Gemini, these could be the bedrock of the earlier section of the song. 

Chris was up on Tyneside, so I reused his playing from an entirely different song from the United States of Being sessions. The guitars you can hear on the finished Circle Turns are all slowed and pitched down from their original tempo, again adding to the dreamy feel of the piece. 

I had this idea to make the poor quality of the vocal recording sound intentional, like an astronaut’s voice from the Apollo mission beaming in from outer space. I put a Quindar bleep at the end of each space phrase to signify its out of the world nature (I discovered later that year that Spiritualized had beaten me to that idea, damn). Then I mixed it up with some unaffected vocal samples for contrast and an extra psychedelic feel. You can hear the raw phone vocal right at the end of the tune, like an astronaut finally exiting the return module.

Finally the bass is my Roland SH-101, then my Fender Precision Bass for the latter bass part. And there’s a nice Analogue Solutions Telemark playing the lead melody. Love that synth.

ON REFLECTION

So Circle Turns was released, sold out its thirty copies and disappeared exactly as I expected. It was the first new Dubstar song in over a decade, and then it was gone. 

But a few months later Youtuber Tokyoskyline made a superb video out of old Dubstar TV appearances…it worked brilliantly and has given the song a nice life on Youtube. Twelve thousand plays isn’t bad at all, maybe there is life in the old girl after all?

Circle Turns has the United States of Being widescreen drama and sound. And there’s that unique detachedness of Sarah’s vocals that we hadn’t heard since Just A Girl. There’s a clear connection between the two songs despite nearly a generation passing between them. Both are Sarah’s words and melody with one of my florid chord sequences retro-fitted underneath, and both are in 6:8, the best time signature of them all. 

It was a rather magical combination.

So how do I feel about the Circle Turns release now? On the one hand the concerns I had about relaunching the act without a plan still feel well founded. On the other hand, you could argue that with the sheer volume of new music released everyday it hardly mattered if you didn’t make a splash, it was almost impossible. No act can create one, musicians simply aren’t as famous now. 

Maybe the lesson of Circle Turns is that we all should simply do what we want and enjoy ourselves? The music sounds better that way after all.

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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