Dubstar: ROUND & ROUND originally included on United States of Being album

Steve Hillier

Friday 16th December 2022

Round & Round, a song born of the coincidences that seemed to happen all the time in the 90s.

Dubstar started working together again way back in 2006. There was a clear sense that this was a different act to the one that had collapsed in London seven years earlier. I was living in Brighton, Sarah and Chris in London. This was not the act who used to come around to my flat in Jesmond and record demos. We were more than ten years older and had been around the world with our music, not just the Bigg Market.

But Round & Round, a song recorded in the dark days of the financial crash of 2008 has that Jesmond connection. For it was at Roger Newbrook’s party in Newcastle upon Tyne in December 2003 that I met Cat Goscovitch, the cowriter of this song.

But first, some background.

As I’ve said on many occasions, pick a topic and there’s a Dubstar story lurking, ready to be shared. We had parted company with our first manager Graeme Robinson in early 1996. So at the very height of our popularity, we were distracted and consumed by the search for someone new to steer our already chaotic ship. The timing couldn’t have been worse. At the point when we needed a knowledgeable business head to help us break Europe and the US, we had no one. This remains to this day why Dubstar only ever did well in the UK.

So we started the beauty parade, meeting every manager in London (and a couple in the North) who was interested in meeting us. This was not a fun experience. Each manager was great in their own way, and that was the problem. You need a manager to help you find a manager, a business adviser to help you find a business manager. We didn’t have that, we had no idea who to choose.

The other problem was that our label and our lawyer were loathe to advise us. Food Records did a superb job of putting us in the room with a variety of superb people (thanks once again to Jo Power, where would we have been without you?). But telling us what they thought of these people, almost nothing. At least nothing that would have made our minds up. There is a bond between the artist and manager, and labels and lawyers who interfere with that relationship get burned. Better to stand back…

So it was up to us to choose. We chose John Campbell who happened to be managing Cat Goscovitch. I discovered later that he’d done an amazing job looking after Cat in her act as Billy Rain and then as Nut.

But this was Dubstar, nothing ever ran smoothly. Through no fault of his we only stayed with John for about a month, and were back to being unmanaged. I'm personally sorry about that John, that was a mistake on our part. The next manager we chose was Stevø Pearce. And that…if ever there was… is another story.

So who is Cat? We had already met when she played a show at Middlesbrough Arena in her band ‘Billy Rain’. I loved it, was completely transfixed. I managed to keep the promo version of the band’s album ‘Salad Days’ and it became my soundtrack to the summer of 1994. We met again at another Billy Rain gig, this time at Newcastle University. And that was it for nearly a decade.

Then it was 2003.

Standing in Roger’s place in Jesmond I spotted Cat sitting talking to - would you believe it? - Sarah’s ex -boyfriend Danilo Moscardini. Danilo, who'd left his cassette round my flat in Jesmond in 1993. Danilo who'd put me in touch with Sarah a decade earlier. What the actual??? I introduced myself and we started talking about John Campbell, the man I knew we had in common. Turned out we both were hoping to do more music. So we did.

Cat and I wrote together through 2004 and 2006. I loved it. We got on well and laughed as often as I used to working with Chris. That's a good sign, maybe it’s a north-eastern thing (Cat’s from Northumberland).

The problem was that despite all this, the music we made never took off. Our working approach was very different, and although compatible, didn’t quite work. Plus, this wasn’t our first time getting something together, we weren’t teenagers. Both of us were at a point in our careers where we instinctively knew whether something was working or not. Our writing fizzled out. Thinking back now, that was a real shame…

ROUND & ROUND

But the songs survive, and Round & Round is one of them. There was a selection of Cat ’n Steve songs that I thought would be superb for Dubstar, so we recorded Round & Round at my place in Hove in the first few weeks of January 2008. The same problem persisted with this song even when Sarah sang it and Chris jangled on it. It needed some extra character.

The musical direction we had taken at that point had concerned me. We’d already recorded Talking in my Sleep with Stephen Hague and it wasn’t right. Not Stephen’s fault, we were so caught up in the excitement of doing more Dubstar that we'd lost sight of doing the right Dubstar. Round & Round was in danger of being simply another jangly early 90s indie pop song, exactly the thing we should not be doing if we were to have any chance of a comeback.

I left Round & Round on the shelf for a long time. Some three years later I revisited it when I completed the United States of Being mixing and transformed it into the song you can hear here. Listening now, I’m struck by how noughties it sounds. The vocals are bright, loud and clear, so much space in that mix, I rather like it.

I hope you do too. Cheers Cat, see you soon.

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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