Dubstar: The last hit: I (Friday Night)

It’s Friday morning, my second favourite time. And thinking back, on this day in 2000 Dubstar returned to the UK Top 40 for the last time after a more than two years absence with ‘I (Friday Night)’. IFN, the final Dubstar single, landed at number thirty seven and would be the last time the act would make the charts.

All three members of Dubstar have visited the UK Top 40 since (I had a career high with my highest placing ever last summer and I didn’t know anything about it until Christmas, a funny story…), but May 27th 2000 was the curtain call for Dubstar and hit records.

Until 2011 chart placings were released on a Sunday, and often the first time an artist would know their number was when it was announced on BBC Radio 1’s Chart Show, ‘the only chart that counts’.

I clearly remember receiving the chart news for IFN. Another sunny day in Hove, I was in my kitchen overlooking the Victorian Square where we lived with a sweeping view of the sea. Thirty seven was not a high charting, one of our lowest, but my dominant feeling was one of relief. It had been more than a year since completing Make It Better and Dubstar was a distant memory by this point. But being back in the charts, if only just, meant we were still in the game, there was still something to play for.

We went out to our local pub The Cooper’s Cask and had a couple of pints. I reminisced of other times a song I had worked on had hit the charts. The very first was in 1987, when True Faith by New Order reached number four. This was a huge result for the band and an amazing result for Pinnacle Records where I worked on the sales team. My role was to sell in new releases to retailers including True Faith, although I joined right at the end of the campaign and to be honest this record was selling itself. Factory Records was the focus for Pinnacle at that point having recently lost Beggars Group, so breaking the top five was an amazing moment for everyone. My first week of my first job after ‘leaving’ school and my first experience of a hit.

The second time was when Kylie Minogue hit number one with ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. We’d worked this song at Pinnacle from the then unknown Kylie Min-ogg-oo (no one knew how to pronounce her name) for weeks. I’d played a particularly good hand getting this PWL single into the shops in the west country, my sales area, by telling the buyers that Kylie was the stripper in the popular soap opera Neighbours. She was actually the car mechanic, but the singles buyer at HMV Bristol had asked me if she was the stripper…I didn’t know, so I said ‘yes’ sheepishly hoping I was correct. They were well pleased, so I used that guess in every other shop. Sorry Kylie, but it worked.

I heard the news that I Should Be So Lucky had charted at my girlfriend’s parent house in Northumberland, but rather than return to London to get to work on the biggest record Pinnacle ever had, I stayed up north for an extra day.

When I returned to Orpington I was firmly marched into the sales director’s office and sacked, one of the most important moments of my career. I was shocked and gutted and nineteen. Next stop was working the tills at Our Price in Bexleyheath. Not quite the same…

Then Stars charted in 1995. My (then different) girlfriend and I took a bottle of champagne into our backyard in Jesmond and toasted this fantastic success. It was a grey day on Tyneside, but there was a real sense of sunshine for Dubstar. This was important. there was everything to play for.

Funnily enough, I don’t have strong memories of Stars, Manic or No More Talk hitting the Top twenty but I remember Cathedral Park. Gregg, one of my flatmates on Waterloo Street in Hove came into my room early on the Sunday before Cathedral Park was released. Diana Princess of Wales was dead, killed in a car crash in Paris, it was all over the news, come downstairs and watch. So I did. I was shocked.

But my biggest fear was Cathedral Park would be taken off the playlists. It was the jolliest song Dubstar had released and had no place on the radio when the country was in mourning. I remembered how during the Iraq War how songs by Massive Attack and Bomb the Bass had been cancelled (I actually have a copy of Blue Lines where the band name is simply ‘Massive’). Would Cathedral Park meet the same fate? Answer: Yes.

The chart show was on, another grey Sunday. As the countdown counted through the lower placings I had a temporary sense of relief, maybe Cathedral Park would be ok after all? Maybe, somehow, it had made the top thirty? Top twenty? Er…top ten? By the time we reached number fifteen I rang Andy Ross who I knew would have the magic number. Forty one. The only Dubstar release to miss the UK Top 40.

Twenty Two Years later…

I’ve never been happy with the Dubstar version of I (Friday Night), it felt like the formula hadn’t worked on this occasion. What formula? Almost every Dubstar record was a slow or mid tempo song that was sped up for the dance floor. You can hear this clearly on Anywhere, Elevator, Stars, Manic, St Swithins, No More Talk, Cathedral Park…all the Dubstar singles.

With IFN the formula didn’t work. The arrangement feels self conscious to my ears, the vocal wasn’t right. There’s no real middle eight, it sounds to me like I stopped writing the lyric half way through.

And in a tiny echo of Cathedral Park, last night I heard the tragic news of the death of Andrew ‘Fletch’ Fletcher from Depeche Mode. It reminded me that life is short, it’s later than you think. So I returned from the pub and recorded this new instrumental version of IFN, in some small way to complete the job I started way back in 1998. I think it turned out well, I hope you enjoy it.

More from the Dubstar archive on my return from Distortion

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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