Dubstar: Front to Back

Front to Back is one of those occasions where the sheer fun of being in Dubstar shone through in the music. Sure, fun? It’s not obvious in most of our music. But beyond the reflective lyrics, anxiety and compulsive drinking, the excitement of making music together and living in a world of enticing possibilities was intoxicating. I’ve long said this, and I mean it: music keeps you young.

As a songwriter you’re constantly accessing your memories of your younger self, putting that naivety into the heart of your work. This is why I think writing in middle-age is tricky, you lose track of what’s interesting. How many middle-aged people do you know who spend their days complaining about things that only ten years earlier they would have overlooked? You can lose perspective, become cynical, defeated. You have to work at keeping the inner child alive. Writing about your divorce in your forties requires skill, intelligence and wit, otherwise your song will be stale, grey and boring. On the other hand, writing about being dumped by your first girlfriend is elating, moving, funny even. You’re fourteen again, you’re a songwriting hero!

Anyway, Front to Back is a song recorded by people with a strong connection to their inner child. It’s great fun, I hope you agree.

As for its genesis…

The writing process for most Dubstar songs was the same. A lyrical idea, quickly followed by a musical idea. Then, with a bit of luck, the entire song is written in about twenty minutes. That’s the words, the melody, the chords, the structure. It’s all about capturing the moment of inspiration and getting as much completed before that energy dies off.

And the first rule in songwriting? Don’t censor yourself! If you’re wondering if this mad idea will be acceptable (to whom exactly?) or if you’re waiting for someone to tell you what to do next, you’ve failed. Just go for it! And the golden rule: if a song has taken more than two hours to write, something has gone wrong.

Front to Back was a simple idea:

How would Dubstar sound if we recorded a ‘call and response’ dancefloor song that sounded like peak-era New Order?

You know the kind of thing: ‘all the people at the back, put your hands in the air! Now the people in the front!’. This kind of thing.

It seemed daft, which is what compelled me to write. We’d recorded enough songs about losing people, being sad. Now we were in our forties, for pity’s sake let’s put a smile on our faces! Return to the sense of amusement we had with Anywhere?

So I wrote Front to Back, mapped out the arrangement, Chris came down from Jesmond to record some guitars, Sarah sang…but there was a problem. That peak-era New Order reference? It meant the song landed in a major key, and I ended up going down a Hi N-R-G rabbit hole (you can still hear the sticks and claps in this finished version), leading Chris to say that Front to Back was the campest record I’d ever made. And not in a good way.

Great songs are written quickly…

…but mature slowly.

Running with a song idea without stopping is great, but the downside of this approach is the sunk-cost fallacy. You do so much work on the wrong approach that it becomes difficult to abandon the bad ideas.

Sure, you can’t destroy a good song completely. But there’s an issue with writing and recording entirely in the studio. For a song to succeed it has to have been played or trialled in the wild and adjusted based on the feedback from the experience. This is why bands play their new songs live, DJs play their mixes out, and comedians do warm-up shows before hitting the Edinburgh Fringe. Unless you’ve heard what your music sounds like in front of a room of disinterested humans and absorbed that intangible feedback, the work you release will be incomplete. It will feel unfinished, like a teabag in lukewarm water.

As for Front to Back the original arrangement made it through the demo stage into the hands of Daren Taliana who completed it as part of the Malta sessions. Once again, the mix was great but the music was wrong. It occurred to me, if I was interested in Dubstar, would I be waiting on my sofa hoping they’d serve me up some day-glo Disco? It might pique my interest for a few seconds, but then…that was weird! I played Front To Back to a nightclub crowd at The Escape in Brighton. Oh dear…

So I reworked Front to Back as part of the completion of United States of Being V.2 changing the key and removing almost all the New Order references (except one, see if you can spot it). With one ear on the work emerging from the London club scene and the new generation of software synths that Daren had shown me, Front to Back came alive.

Speaking of synths, the bass line is my Roland JUNO-106 with offbeat hits from my Yamaha TX81z, the same one found on Just a Girl. Sylenth provides the pad sounds, and my venerable Korg Mono/Poly and MS20 provide the risers. There’s also a Yamaha DX100 in the middle 8, backing up Chris’s guitar arpeggios. The huge Fade To Grey drum hits are from the Roland System 100m.

Oh, and my Casio CZ101 makes an appearance, the first time since Anywhere.

THINKING BACK NOW

Front to Back could have been a single. Hearing the finished mixes after the second visit to The Escape, it reminded me of how we all felt when we first heard Stephen Hague’s mix of Not So Manic Now. It hadn’t been a single contender, suddenly it was.

Same with Front to Back.

And it has that uniquely Dubstar thing going on in the lyric…what is she getting at, does she mean…?

Yes, she does. She always does.