Dubstar: My Friday MORE DUB VERSION

More than thirty songs were completed in demo form for Dubstar’s third album Make It Better, another dozen were left incomplete. My Friday was recorded in the first marathon demo session of 1998 and was promptly forgotten. Passed on by the record label and consequently omitted from the final record, I hadn’t played it in decades until opening the Dubstar Archive back in 2021. I remember being rather fond of it though, it had a great groove and was as catchy as, well…Anywhere? The lyrics weren’t up to much, and some of the production choices were very 1998, and not in a good way. No wonder it had been gathering dust for so long.

Then earlier this week I heard the sad news that Future Music magazine was printing its final issue. And it came to me in a flash…didn’t I make a Dub Version of My Friday for inclusion on a cover mount CD all the way back in 2000? Yes.

FUTURE MUSIC

The final edition

Future Music was a music technology magazine who had been supportive of Dubstar throughout our time together. Following the demise of the act I would go on to write for them throughout the 2000s and develop a great relationship with editors Andy Jones and Oz Owen. So when it came to promoting Make It Better I was keen to give an interview, especially as all the promotion for I (Friday Night) had been cancelled. Could they have an exclusive Dubstar song for the front cover? I didn’t have the heart to mention we’d already split, there hadn't been an official announcement and there were no plans to make one either. But of course they could. Er…

There was nothing new we could supply (the work for the Dubstar EP would commence later that year), unless…maybe a remix of a song from the album? I could knock one of those out quickly. And after all, with so much down time between recording Make It Better and its release, I’d already started reworking some of the songs that weren’t on the album. Maybe a more electronic version of one of those?

There were alternative versions of I Lost a Friend, New Friends (what is about me writing songs with the word ‘friend’ in the title?), and a few others including My Friday, which had morphed into a kind of Boys Own - Sabres of Paradise workout. So I got to work completing My Friday and applied my ‘nothing left to lose’ and ‘everything but the kitchen sink, no let’s have the sink too’ approach to the song. It landed here with this ‘More Dub Version’, a huge departure from the demo we supplied to Food Records. And a vast improvement. Where the original demo had been worked up very quickly and featured a mass of chopped up Break Beats, samples and peculiar sound effects, the new version was a lot more unified sonically speaking. It also flowed better, largely because by 2000 I’d learned how to use Logic Audio properly.

On a roll, I turned my attention to Rise To The Top, another first-demo-session song that I loved, at least in its early form. Rather than make that all dubby, I removed most of the guitars and threw my newly acquired Nord Modular all over it. It was this remix that made it onto the CD.

THINKING BACK NOW

Despite preferring the My Friday remix, I submitted the Rise To The Top remix instead. It made more sense to me to submit a song from the album, if the readers liked it they would buy Make It Better. Hopefully.

It’s also what I thought the record label would want. And I was obsessed with a new act called Plump DJs who had just released two of my all time favourite Break Beat tunes. Unfortunately my remix sounded a lot like someone who had used tracing paper to copy a Plump’s tune but forgot to colour it in.

Today I love this version of My Friday, and I wish we had more material like this in our repertoire. It’s Dubstar living up to the name while still being the act that brought you Manic and Stars. Do I regret that it didn’t see the light of day? Not really, I don’t think it would have made a difference to our fate as the act was finished by that point anyway. I do regret submitting the Rise remix though, it’s really not that good.

And what about My Friday being left off Make It Better? I suppose it didn’t fit with the rest of the record. Lyrically it’s as sophisticated as a Noel Gallagher song and only barely makes more sense. Musically it was a reference to the days when I’d dreamed of Andrew Weatheral producing Dubstar, and opportunities like that were long gone by 2000.

But I’m so happy that this version exists. A memento of the start of the new century.