Dubstar: Not So Fast

Not So Fast is a song that Dubstar recorded for Volume Magazine at the height of our chart success. It was originally included on The Joan’s cassette album Gear and forgotten, but we were pushed for time between tours. So I took a weekend off to re-record NSF and upgrade the arrangement for an international release. It was raining.

Volume was a superb publication. Each edition came as two components, a full-colour magazine in the shape of a CD insert and the CD itself, packed with exclusive material from the latest and greatest alternative music acts. I was a big fan before Dubstar’s appearance in the July 1996 edition and I think we were all very pleased to be included, I know I was.

Sarah gave an interview for the Copulation Explosion edition from the tour bus in Italy. This was our first pan-European tour in the spring of 1996. I think it’s clear that we were struggling with the travelling and the journalist was struggling with what to make of us. Still, Sarah’s jovial demeanour comes over well, so I’ve reproduced the whole piece here.

A detail from this tour: These were the early days of mobile international calls, we discovered after a few days that when anyone rang our cellphones it would be us who would be charged for the call! The deal was that because the dialler wouldn’t know they were calling a number abroad in Italy, Germany, France or wherever, the contract holder would pay for the international component of the call. This was incredibly expensive.

Also, there was a limit to how much you could spend on your phone before you were cut off! By this point I was known as ‘The Bank of Hillier’ as I wasn’t particularly troubled by international travel, was taking everything in my stride and always seemed to have enough money on me for any eventuality (plus ça change eh?!). I was the only person on this tour with a working credit card and smiling. But Chris and Sarah were taking long consolatory phone calls from home every day, racking up enormous bills…and then were cut off with weeks of the tour left! This happened doubly quickly for Sarah as she was also doing interviews.

There was panic on the streets of Torino, Reggio Emilia, Milano…

DUBSTAR: THEY HAVEN’T A CLUE WHERE THEY ARE

The telephone number l've just dialled is very long. When I ask the woman on the other end of the line which country the code belongs to, she answers, surreally, "I've got no idea where we are”

(Dub) star date mid-1996. Vocalist Sarah Blackwood is on the other end of the line, somewhere in the middle of Dubstar's first European tour. And the answer to my first enquiry hasn't elicited the expected response. "It's a bit disorientating, all this travelling round on a bus. Oh, I've just been told we're in Turin. We're just about to soundcheck."

How, for a band who six months ago were terrified of playing live, has the tour gone so far?

"It's been cool," she replies in a thick West Yorkshire accent. "Last night we had some guy doing backflips around the venue for the whole of our set, so I think he enjoyed it. Munich was a bit weird though, we made the mistake of going to the beer festival before we played. We enjoyed the gig, but God knows how it sounded.” [It was terrible]

"No idea where we are," is a neat metaphor for the meteoric and head-spinning rise of Dubstar. It

was early 1994 when Sarah joined up with two Newcastle musicians, Steve Hillier and Chris Wilkie who'd spent three years traversing planet nowhere under the moniker The Joans. By November that year the newly christened Dubstar had signed to EMI subsidiary Food, also the home of Blur. The debut album Disgraceful was recorded in January '95. The first single, 'Stars' (later re-released, was unleashed on an unsuspecting but receptive public in June last year.

Swigging beer in front of a wild Turin audience is pretty far removed from serving beer at a bar in downtown Newcastle, as Sarah had been doing the day Dubstar signed their contract.

"I haven't had time to stand back and think about it properly," she says. "I guess we might have time to reflect on it all when this tour is over."

Do the band now get hassled as a result of their new-found fame when they head off down their local for a quiet pint? "To be honest we've been working so much that none of us have been at home for more than a couple of days this year. Last time I had a day off I went to the supermarket with my boyfriend and we popped into the pub on the way home, you know, just for a quick pint.

“Ten pints later I had three bags of no longer frozen shopping and some guy sidling up asking if we were playing in town that night. He was quite sweet about it, but to be honest most people don’t recognise me without me false eyelashes on”

Much has been made of the contradiction at work in Dubstar songs. On the one hand they produce glorious, sweeping pop symphonies that bring a smile to your face, invoking images of walks in the park on summer afternoons. On the other, you feel guilty for being so happy when the lyrical content of most of their numbers is, well, pretty serious. It’s something that sets Dubstar apart from most of their hedonistic, Thatcher’s children contemporaries.

“It’s nice to be different” says Sarah. “It’s a bit of a waste of time if you don’t say something interesting and thought provoking when you’ve go tthe opportunity. A lot of pop music has happy, happy lyrics with no substance, and it’s so bland.”

With a such a well-documented conscience, are Dubstar going to get behind any party in the lead up to a General Election?

"I wouldn't do that personally… I'm not interested in politics at the minute and I don't think I could align myself to anyone who's around right now. The world is so crap, it's pathetic - politicians never get anything done. I think Rock The Vote its a good thing. But at the same time no one really wants to be told how to vote by Martin Rossiter, do they...?"

Dubstar's short but bright career seems to have been plagued by comparisons and pigeon-holing. It's an occupational hazard. They seem to be making the best of both worlds, being either an antidote to, or part of, the Britpop scene, depending on who's asking. Perhaps as a way of distancing themselves from genres, they always release dance mixes.

"I really like the ‘Stars' mixes,” says Sarah.

"Steve loves remixes, Chris hates them. I just like trying something different, but it does depend on who does them. We'd all love William Orbit to play around with some of our stuff, but sadly we haven't been able to get that together yet." Some people are of the opinion that you're part of the trip-hop scene?

"Nah, that's crap. The only comparison I can see between us and Portishead is that we've both got a girl sounding miserable. That's it.”

This summer Dubstar might have the time and space to reflect on their helter-skelter year,

'Elevator Song' (Food supremo Andy Ross said it would be a worldwide number one when he first heard it) is the fourth single from the album. In another year's time Sarah and her fellow Dubstars should know exactly where they are - being mobbed in supermarkets for being the brightest lights in the galaxy probably.

Dubstar - Disgraceful call out

Sparkling debut that whipped up a bit of controversy due to the vagina-like pencil case on the sleeve (it was later changed). Stephen Hague's hallmark pop beauty production marries

Blackwood's sublime vocals and the guitar-synth axis of Hillier and Wilkie. 'Not So Manic Now', which gave the band their Top Of The Pops debut was typical Dubstar (even though it's a cover) - a mainstream pop toon, juxtaposed with the story of a pensioner being mugged in her own high-rise flat. Stupendous.

THINKING BACK NOW

I wish I’d had a chance to write and include a better song for Volume. However, Not So Fast was chosen because it seemed to fit the stoner aesthetic that Volume was projecting. And NSF is a decent enough song, a significant nod to our Shoegaze roots and certainly added something to the Dubstar legacy.

More interesting for me is listening to The Joans version and recalling the thought processes behind it. Originally Not So Fast sounded like a traditional song, but the DAT cassette that it was recorded onto broke, so we were left with this rather mangled sound you can hear in the video above. Rather than abandon the song, I tried to rescue it. This strange dub version owes a huge amount to His Name is Alive, Warren Defever’s act that I was obsessed with in the early 1990s. I’m not sure NSF is entirely successful, but that wasn’t the point. Gear was a means of promoting The Joans, getting us local media coverage (it did, no one liked it) and more gigs. The fact that Gear was a mad combination of beats, ambient pieces and what would later become classic Dubstar songs is a testament to the ‘anything goes’ music scene in Newcastle in the early 1990s.

More successful is The Gender We Lose, a piano piece I wrote as an Easter Egg for anyone who’d persevered through the rest of the cassette and needed some melody. I wrote TGWL on my piano in Jesmond but couldn’t record it with microphones. Instead, what you can hear is my Roland W-30 sampler recorded live onto my Tascam Four Track cassette recorder with one overdub. It’s pleasant enough, and I revisited it nearly thirty years later on the first Dubstar: Lost and Foundland album in the pandemic.

I’m fond of Not So Fast for nostalgia. This is the sound of the early 1990s for me, a snapshot of a specific time. The rainy streets of Jesmond, the many stoned nights in Manor House Road (the Dubstar style heavy drinking, as referenced in the interview would come later), and the first wave of Shoegaze. A style I adore to this day.

One last thing: Andy Ross, the man who signed Dubstar and ran Food Records, was also the man who invented the term Shoegaze. True story.

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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