Dubstar: GEMINI

I found a man, he told a tale

Set in a town I know so well

He’d lost a prize, a girl, a twin

She’d bathed his feet and said to him

I’ll keep you close I’ll calm your fears

I’ll show you everything is here

These castle walls were built for you

Built for you

He made a home, she made a plan

That he would be a stronger man

She forged a throne, a crown of tin

And as he slept she said to him

I’ve kept you close I’ve calmed your fears

I’ve shown all you need is near

These castle walls were built to last, enchant

You shan’t escape from here

You can’t avoid your future yet these days we know you won’t forget

These castle walls were built for you

Built for you

And so this man his fate foretold

Became a captive held controlled

His pride disguised as solitude,

His every friend once held withdrew

But he remained behind these walls

Obscure alone unreachable

She left him bound, her words were true

And he begged me to tell you

He keeps you close, he holds you dear

He knows there’s nothing left to fear

Those castle walls, Newcastle stone

Within them lives this man alone

And you who made this sad outcast

This ghost, this prisoner of the past

A hundred years, he’ll wait for you

After releasing an album where we hadn’t said very much and then split, by the end of 2000 I filed Dubstar under the heading of Opportunities Missed. We’d had hits and tours and royalties, we’d gone further than most acts. But Dubstar had evolved out of the ashes of The Joans to have hit records, that’s what signing to a record company was all about in the 1990s. We were plucked from the Newcastle scene and inserted into a world where survival wasn’t based on art or credibility. We were in the music industry, built on cash.

The hits dried up and the act ended, yet I was haunted with unfulfilled ambitions for the act, all the words unwritten, songs unsung. So when the opportunity came in 2006 to do Dubstar it all again I knew we had to say some things, tell some stories… and have a reason to exist beyond money. There was nothing to lose, we could do anything.

Gemini is a song that escapes from deep within this sense of freedom. It’s a love letter to the Newcastle upon Tyne of my early adulthood, the Northern English city of the 1980s.

Before I arrived in 1988, Northerners were characters I’d only met on TV, and Geordies I’d only heard in sitcoms. Students, people like me, packed the city centre, but I ventured a couple of stops out of town on the Metro. This is where the underbelly of the city revealed itself, and it was here I lived and worked.

I felt like an adult for the first time although in reality, I was not even close. Some assume that I lived in the North East for University (that’s why Sarah moved there from Halifax), but I moved from London to Newcastle for love, to live with my girlfriend. The relationship had existed for nine months and all was well, but we were only meeting up every few weekends, often commuting across the entire country by train. We didn't have the money to keep doing that, so...we had a choice, she would move to London or I would move to Newcastle. We chose Jesmond and moved in together in the late Summer of 1988. These were my formative years.

Newcastle upon Tyne

There was a feel to the North East that was unique in the eighties. The closure of the pits and the miner’s strike was over but their effects could be felt and seen everywhere. This region wasn't London, it was poor, like nothing I’d seen before. But it was cheap to live in for a nineteen-year-old and if you knew what you were doing you could live pretty well. I enrolled on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme which allowed me to legitmise my Nightclub DJing, I’ve been self-employed ever since. I discovered recently that Happy Mondays and Stewart Lee were also on this scheme (although not in Newcastle, obviously).

And there was the environment. The smell of the air was a rich combination of the Northumbrian wilderness, the North Sea and diesel buses. The dark winter nights were cosy and inviting with open fires and candles. Biting rain and wind would blow me home to our Tyneside flat on the Metro or Number 33 Bus.. The long summer nights weren’t particularly warm but it was light well beyond ten. And in the midsummer, the sky wouldn’t ever be completely dark.

Today I’ve lived in Brighton for more than half of my life but I still return to Newcastle regularly. The city evolves, and yet Newcastle feels… old. Not decrepit, it’s packed with students and the economic vibrancy that attracts.

It’s more that the city feels like it was built for a different industry, a different era. The brutalist architecture in the city centre is from a different time. The newer buildings on the Quayside, such as Gateshead’s Glasshouse, give you a superb view of…Newcastle’s old buildings. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts is fabulous and no matter how well the internals of the building have been rebuilt, you’re always aware you’re in a flour mill. It’s the building that was on the side of tin cans my father had growing up in the post-war period in London. Look across from the Baltic. You’ll see the Tyne Bridge, a marvel of interwar engineering and the signature building of Tyneside, now rusting away. Beyond that, the Red House and the Cooperage, both ancient buildings. Even the flats in Jesmond where Dubstar formed were a hundred years old by the time I arrived.

Frankly, I love Newcastle and how its past coexists within its living and vibrant present. It’s this love and the passing of time that informs Gemini.

Thinking Back now

Gemini has some interesting musical moments. That's me playing chords on my bass guitar, a direct reference to the Cocteau Twins of the 1980s. The drums are a combination of samples of my old Drumulator and a Roland TR-707, both superb drum machines used by the Cocteaus. There’s a sample of machinery from Midge Ure’s first solo album rolling along. I’m particularly fond of this reference: Gemini is an homage to my spiritual home of Newcastle, so it’s fitting to include a slice from Midge’s homage to his own home town of Glasgow.

Steve playing Gemini on the pub piano in The Cumberland Arms, Byker, Newcastle 2010. Video taken by Chris Wilkie.

Earlier versions of Gemini had a different drum part that moved at double the pace you hear here. I struggled to get the instrumental parts to work with this beat. There was no sense of movement, so I slowed the drums to half-time which improved the feel a lot. When Daren Taliana did his mix of Gemini he was initially alarmed by how the tempo in the song is constantly changing. I was trying to achieve the ebb and flow of a live band and drummer where variations would occur naturally. That’s not how dance producers work, they need a strict and consistent beat, no wonder he was concerned. His mix is great and features the original drum beat, I’ll put it up on the archive soon.

Also, this song includes the Blackwood Choir which you can hear as the song begins. This was created by Sarah singing every note in a chromatic scale and layering takes on top of each other, much like 10CC’s ‘I’m Not In Love’. The result was excellent, I must find the rest of the recordings one day.

And Gemini is one of a series of Dubstar songs that doesn’t have a chorus. What are the others? Elevator Song, popDorian, Song No.9, Not So Manic Now, Swansong, In My Defence, The Thought of You…

I love writing in this style. Who needs a chorus when you’re not expecting anyone to sing along?

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

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