Dubstar: IN MY DEFENCE 2013 VERSION

In My Defence would have been a bonus track to go with the release of the second attempt at United States of Being. But why include (what was then) a seventeen-year-old song on a comeback album? So many questions, let’s start here…

At what point can a songwriter be satisfied that a song is fully realised? At what point can she walk away from the computer and throw off the remaining expectations for a song to magically come to life?

I don’t know, I haven’t worked it out. Some of my students never do. These are the most passionate new minds in the world of music, first-year undergraduate students. They’ve jumped through all sorts of hoops because music is the life for them, they aced their A levels to fulfil their dream: to become successful musicians. But they quickly discover that the biggest barrier to success isn’t experience, study, practice or even talent, it’s completion:

nothing happens until you finish the song

If you don’t work in the creative world seems mad to spend days, even weeks working on a piece of music only to abandon it. Yet this happens all the time. Years back, I assumed that whenever a tune was released, that would be it, we’d all relax and move on. The reality is that if a song is any good you never let go. In Dubstar, we often joked on the tour bus about the number of remixes Food Records would commission for every single. ‘So what do we sound like this week?’. We were amused but there was also a sense of never being able to escape.

Maybe Paul Valéry was right, a work of art is never completed, merely abandoned. Or given a Speed Garage makeover.

A walk in the park?

I’ll save you from the details as I’ve written about this before, but the B-sides to Cathedral Park were written and recorded in a period of extreme flux. On the one hand, I was excited about landing in a new city. There were parties, there was money and theoretically I was having the time of my life. But the experience of leaving Newcastle had left an indelible scar, I was deeply in mourning for the life I’d left behind. This was not an easy time to be writing, and a very difficult time to be recording. And in the middle of the maddest time of my life, the songs for Cathedral Park were written in a week in May 1997 and recorded in a couple of afternoons. They would be released a few months later. Job done? Maybe…There would be no new B-sides from Dubstar for three years.

My first laptop, the Apple Mac PowerBook 5300cs. Still works today, but you wouldn’t bother

By 2013, my world was very different. Brighton was my home, I was married, settled and I’d moved on from those troubled times, both personally and musically. But a nagging itch remained: some of our releases were obviously undercooked and deserved another look. Despite having produced dozens of songs in the 1990s, by the 2010s it was clear to me that I had been under-experienced in the skill. Where I’d dedicated my focus to writing and performing, many of my contemporaries had studied the art of audio engineering, production and mixing. In my arrogance I assumed I could equal their prowess simply by being the first person in Jesmond to own a laptop. I’m pretty sure the VIZ boys had one before me too.

2013

When Circle Turns was released on Record Store Day 2013 and USOB was completed, I grasped the opportunity to revisit some of the songs I felt needed more time in the oven. In My Defence was the first ( but this wasn’t the first time I’d taken a second look at old songs. My frustration at how the Make It Better album had turned out led me to rearrange a handful of the songs that hadn’t made it onto the album (I Lost A Friend being a prime example)).

The connection between the two songs was clear to me. Circle Turns had a very dreamy, ambient feel to it, mainly because there wasn’t much of a song to work with beyond Sarah’s poem… this left a lot of space to fill. In My Defence had also started as a poem. The original version had a large amount of space in it too, probably more than any other fully arranged Dubstar song. I’d removed my original chord sequence and wrote a Jacquard weave of looping string lines that had created an intriguingly dour mood that suited the song. But in the cold light of day, wow… did it feel bleak! Sad and bleak are not the same, melancholic and depressing are not the same. The skill is knowing which is which, and which is best.

I thought I’d be lucky and find a DAT cassette of the parts from the Roland VS-880 hard disk recorder that had been used on the original B-side recording. No such luck, but I did find some bits and pieces of those sessions on a Minidisk which I reassembled in Logic. And so sixteen years after its initial release and a further eleven since the update, this is the definitive version of In My Defence.

THINKING BACK NOW

In My Defence is another in the long-established tradition of Dubstar songs, where the period between writing and completing is years and years and years. Too many songs, too many options or too lazy? Only you can decide.

But the more interesting question is not ‘why return to these songs?’, but ‘what took you so long?!’.

Well, for me it only made sense to take another look when I thought that the results would get out into the world. The gestation of the two USOB albums had taken so long, seven years, but we were finally (finally!) playing live regularly and there was a good chance these songs would arrive with their intended audience.

Also, by 2013 it had become difficult for the three of us to get into the same room to record or even discuss what was going on with the act. There was no appetite among the other two to record more music, so that meant I had an opportunity to revisit songs instead (much like when we recorded the acoustic versions of Stars, Elevator Song and Not Once Not Ever twenty years earlier). It felt like a bit of a letdown to me to revisit songs from the 1990s in the 2010s, but now we’re almost halfway through the 2020s I’m glad I did it. Very glad.

Hang on though, what’s this chunk of Robert Miles’ ‘Children’ doing in the middle of In My Defence? When I wrote IMD in my bedroom with a bath in it on Waterloo Street, I realised that the piano line from Children could be played over the arrangement and fit very well, much like St Swithin’s Day sounded great over the Dub Hip-Hop groove I’d put together four years earlier. Wow, why not include that piano line, how bold would that be?

But sadly I decided not to because I didn’t want to distract from the core message of the song with a reference to a different, much bigger international hit. I don’t think my publisher would have liked it either! Roberto Concina (Robert Miles) sadly died in 2017, and in some minor way, I like to think of this song as a tribute to him and his fantastic music.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news