Dubstar: SHE'S STILL SAD cassette demo

A sunny afternoon in July 1993 would include the most important moment of my musical career. Fellow Jesmond resident Danilo Moscardini accidentally left a tape of his new girlfriend singing his songs in my flat. I played it and in that instant fell in love with the sound of the singer.

On the cassette was Sarah Blackwood singing this song, She’s Still Sad.

Sarah joined The Joans in late 1993, took over my role as vocalist and in early 1994 we recorded a whole bunch of songs onto a four track cassette recorder in my Tyneside flat. This version of She’s Still Sad was one of them, a dark and troubled semi-classical reworking. I think Danilo was bemused as to why I’d turned his acoustic guitar tune into something reminiscent of Dead Can Dance’s ‘Within the Realm of a Dying Sun’.

We proposed to record this song in the first set of demos we recorded with Graeme Robinson in Darlington in 1994, but I don’t think it was that popular with him or Andy Ross at Food Records. There were many other songs in my repertoire taking precedence so there was never an official Dubstar version of She’s Still Sad beyond this demo.

But there was another excellent song on Danilo’s cassette entitled ‘Dreaming of Going Away’, even now I can remember all of the words without having heard it for nearly thirty years. Danilo, if you’re reading this, I know there are thousands of people who would love to hear the songs you recorded with Sarah. Stick them up on YouTube, they were great!

Nice to see Dubstar sited at our geographically correct Metro stop, West Jesmond!

Some thoughts on 1993

Hearing She’s Still Sad again after so long got me reminiscing…

By the summer of 1993 Chris and I had been performing as The Joans for a year and a half. My DJing connections on the North Eastern music scene had provided plenty of activity for us, yet it was becoming difficult to see a route forward. There are only so many times you can play The Dog and Parrot or The Broken Doll.

It don’t think it held us back exactly, but the problem was that we didn’t fit in. We were active on the local scene, but we weren’t really part of the local scene. The Joans and latterly Dubstar had grown from the Newcastle student club scene, and the student and local nightlife rarely mixed. Instead yhey worked in parallel: students were out all week, the locals took over at the weekend. You could have the biggest Wednesday club night but it would mean nothing at the weekend. The club scene was detonated by students, the music scene by locals.

In 2015 BBC 6music made a North Eastern Musical family tree infographic that demonstrated this; Dubstar is there all alone, disconnected from any other act. And this was entirely accurate, the two (and then three) of us were ambling along oblivious to what was around us, much like we would as a signed act. Not sure why it has Chris down as our singer though….

I realise this morning that looking at this infographic that many of the acts from the North East were doing their own thing on their own. Funny, it’s not like that down here in Brighton.

Geordie bands would complain that A&R men (they were always referred to as men) would never venture to the north so no one ever got signed, but that wasn’t true, as Dubstar demonstrated. The North East in the early 90s was a bubble. We were well connected to each other but remote from the rest of the world, and not just geographically. For such a friendly part of the country, rivalries between bands were strong and enduring, I suppose we all kept to our own silos. International bands would play every week at The Riverside, even huge stars would show up at the Mayfair but on a day to day basis, the North East just did what the North East did.

Yet I noticed an important change that occurred around 1991…imaginations were inflamed by the Madchester scene, when indie guitar bands started dancing and the house and rave cultures began to dominate the Manchester music scene. And despite being well over a hundred miles away, there was a real sense that Manchester was a kindred spirit, so Newcastle should be able to do its own version of Madchester. That didn’t happen of course, but I think it was that spirit of ‘we can do this too!’ that propelled Dubstar and other acts of the time forward into the mid 90s.

And so by 1993 on Tyneside there were no shortages of young men with guitars chiming out indie tunes with Hip Hop beats behind them. The Joans were one, and as a nascent front person I thought it wouldn’t matter that I wasn’t much of a looker or a powerful singer. All the male vocalists I liked were just like me. I didn’t know it at the time but that wasn’t good enough, it was by a stroke of incredible good luck that attitude and approach changed.

That luck was hearing Sarah Blackwood singing She’s Still Sad

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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