Dubstar: I'M IN LOVE WITH A GERMAN FILM STAR

Last week, while putting up ‘Don’t Ask’, I realised there isn’t a high-quality upload of this Dubstar song anywhere on the web. So I’m putting that right today.

In many ways IILWAGF might be the most important song from the entire Dubstar archive, as it was our first bona-fide release in a decade, the first since the split after Make It Better. On the other hand, it was yet another Dubstar cover, and as Chris pointed out at the time, if the first song you hear from Dubstar in a decade is a cover then ‘Dubstar can fuck off’. It’s one or the other I suppose?

We were asked to contribute a song for Buffet Libre, a Spanish record label. They were putting together a compilation of their favourite artists performing covers for Amnesty International…how could we say no? As I’ve mentioned previously, Sarah wanted to record Kirsty MacColl’s ‘There’s a Guy Works Down The Chipshop Swears He’s Elvis’, but I wasn’t keen. Largely because I couldn’t see how Kirsty’s rock and roll pastiche could be transformed into a Dubstar song. And there are much better Kirsty songs. I suggested we did The Passions’ classic instead.

IILWAGF already sounds a lot like a Dubstar song to me, wish I’d written it! To speed up the process of recording I built the arrangement around The Passion’s original single in Apple Logic, including the tempo variations, which was a little naughty. But it was a cover.

Recordings happened at my place on Adelaide Crescent in Hove with Sarah and Gavin’s studio Base HQ behind Central Station in Newcastle with Chris. And South Central mixed it back in Brighton. And that was it, the first new Dubstar recording in a decade. A cover.

Thinking Back now

I think this was the right song to pick, it suited the compilation well and fitted nicely into the Dubstar story. But every now and then I hear a song and think ‘oh, that would have made a brilliant cover, I wish we could have done that instead’. And with that in mind, I’ve made a little Spotify playlist of songs that I think we could have done. See if you can imagine Dubstar versions of these.

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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