Dubstar: Leaving in the Morning DEMO
Leaving in the Morning was the last song Dubstar recorded in the Food/EMI era. The act was dropped from the roster a few weeks later.
Which leaves the song as an intriguing place holder: Does it point towards what we might have done next, a bright new future in the new DIY millennium? Or is it the sound of an act finally relaxing after seven years of madness knowing that there’s nothing left to play for?
With hindsight we know it’s the latter, the three of us would not work together as Dubstar again for six years, Sarah went off to front Client and I went off to write songs in Scandinavia. But I do attribute my enthusiasm for reforming the act to the sonic success of this song. I felt it showed that there was more for Dubstar to say, there could be a role for the act in the 2000s. A strong role too. And of course this nagging thought led to the recording of two complete (and as yet unreleased) albums worth of material.
Like many of the songs of the late Dubstar era, I didn’t actually write Leaving in the Morning for the act and I think you can tell. Instead it was written for a superb singer from Croydon called Jo Morgan who I’d been working with over the summer. Firstly, the subject of the lyric is a character, a third party (‘She’) and not a first hand account (‘I’) which is something you won’t find in any other Dubstar song.
Secondly, it’s written to be danced to unlike most other Dubstar songs and thirdly there’s no real chorus, which was pretty bold in 2000.
Despite this Leaving in the Morning clearly has attributes of classic Dubstar songs. There’s that sense of loss… the lyrical point of the song is that the man won’t ever ‘have’ the woman or even see her again, she’ll be leaving in the morning. She’s her own person, a reference that goes right back to where we began.
Curiously there’s another version of Leaving in the Morning that escaped into the wild twenty years ago. I can’t find it here but I seem to remember I put up a ‘work in progress’ version of the song on the original Dubstar Myspace I set up as a monument to the act, and of course it proliferated from there.
This is the version that was submitted to Food/EMI. It’s a bit ragged round the edges but it sounds pretty good turned up loud, something for the weekend. I think it’s great, I hope you enjoy it too.
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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