Stars - Demo at Graeme Robinson's house in Darlington June 1994

I wrote ‘Stars’ in early 1992 as a reflection of my concern of what to do when Walker’s Nightclub closed. It had been my home for three years, and suddenly it was gone. Three years later, on this day in 1995 it would be the first Dubstar release and the first time we made it into the UK Top 40. It would go on to be the most successful of all the Dubstar songs.

There were many versions of Stars, last time I counted there were over twenty remixes. And prior to our debut on Food Records there were half a dozen other versions too. On these cassettes next to me I have two live takes and a studio recording with me on vocals, a run-through from Jesmond and a live version with Sarah singing, and this…the demo that was taken to Camden Town in June 1994.

It was recorded in Graeme Robinson’s back room in his house in Darlington. He’d invited us to make some demos with him and his sidekick Jon Kirby having seen us play at the Riverside a few weeks earlier. There was some talk about taking these tunes being played to record companies…we knew he was the drummer in a Food Records signing called ‘Planet Claire’ (fronted by Claire Worrall who went on to play keyboards in Robbie Williams’ band and is now married to one of my musical heroes Stephen Duffy).

But we weren’t thinking anything much would come of this trip to County Durham. In the world of music, thing’s normally don’t.

So I took my Roland W-30 sampler down the A1M and laid the entirely programmed arrangement onto Graeme’s tape machine. Chris is playing on this demo somewhere but is mixed so low I can barely make him out, Sarah sings well though. 

In the earlier versions of the song there was no middle 8, so Graeme suggested I wrote something new to break up the choruses that repeat towards the end. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of anything. I have a problem revisiting old songs, something to do with a short attention span I suppose, and this one had been around for more than two years at this point. All I could think to do was pause, maybe take a break from the singing? It was supposed to be a ‘Dub’ song after all…consequently this became the defining structure for Stars.

We recorded three songs in that first session, I think they were Stars, Anywhere and Elevator Song. Jon drove Graeme down to London to meet Andy Ross at Food, and then back up to mine in Jesmond. He had some good news…

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Not So Manic Now - Rehearsal at Steve’s in Jesmond May 1994

The first release form the treasure trove of cassettes I found last month!

During the first half of 1994, and prior to singing to Food Records, Sarah, Chris and I were performing regularly across the North East of England and rehearsing in the lounge of my flat in Jesmond. I don’t recall why we stopped working in the local rehearsal rooms, but I know that on this occasion we needed to record the live set as demos for more gigs. The whole recording survives to this day on my cassette.

The gig was at Rumpoles in Middlesbrough the following Saturday. There were eight songs: we opened with ‘Joni’ (which two years later would become ‘I Will Be Your Girlfriend’, ‘Manic’ was number four and we closed with ‘St Swithins Day’. For some reason ‘Stars’ wasn’t in this set…


At the gig I was enjoying myself and thinking ‘we’ve actually got something here’. It was the first time that the act had really come together live since Sarah had joined eight months previously. The crowd seemed to love it, even the bar staff. Unfortunately, apart from one show at Newcastle’s Riverside later that month we wouldn’t play live again for well over another year. Damn.

This is the original arrangement for Manic that I discussed on dubstar.com. More upbeat than the version on Disgraceful, it’s way more fun but lacks the majesty of the single released eighteen months later. Despite this version obviously being a work in progress, you can clearly hear Sarah relishing the song.

My strongest memory of this time is the cognitive dissonance of believing we were finally getting somewhere, this act sounds good… and days later waking up on my 25th birthday thinking this act is doomed. I’m too old, it’s never going to happen. 

It was literally the next day that Graeme Robinson invited us to work with him in Darlington, which led directly to us being signed by Food Records with months.

There’s a lesson in that…

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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DUBSTAR Preludes Volume 2

Almost all of the early Dubstar songs began their lives in my home in Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne. I was lucky enough to share an entire Tyneside flat with just one other person which gave us both a huge amount of living space, a dream at only £120 a month each.

With this luxury I would write the song on the piano in the front room with the view of Jesmond Dene, then put together an arrangement on the Roland W-30 sampler in the back room later that day. This working process gave us Disgraceful, Song no.9, Stars, Day I See You Again, Anywhere…almost all the songs on Disgraceful.

Goodbye was slightly different. In 1995 I moved the equipment out of the flat and into our first studio in the Newcastle Arts Centre on Westgate Road, directly over the Star Inn pub. The following year when the time came to record the B-sides to Elevator Song, the studio moved to a much nicer room in the main quad of the centre (with heating!). Rental per week? £20. I maintain to this day that one of the best things Dubstar ever did was not move to London…

Consequently for the second Dubstar album there was a longer delay between the writing of the songs in Jesmond and demoing them in the studio. Whereas previously everything I had written had some sort of arrangement made the same day, in 1996 there were dozens of tunes that started their lives at home but were never completed. Not even demoed…

This is where Dubstar Preludes Volume Two comes in.

During the Covid-19 pandemic I’ve had the time to listen through the Minidiscs and DATs of tunes that I started writing for the act but ran out of time to complete. It’s amusing to reflect that even though Goodbye was way too long at fifteen tracks, there were still piles of other tunes waiting to be completed in the wings. As I said to the head of Food Records…”there are always more songs Andy, and some of them are good”.

So here are my favourite four of those compositions, each written twenty five years ago in the late Spring of 1996. I hope you enjoy them:

Infinite Summer

There was never a Dubstar instrumental. Sarah was the star, it wouldn’t make sense to have her missing from a Dubstar tune. But Infinite Summer was written with this destiny in mind, just to try something different. I had plenty of problems to write about but I was concerned that our audience might be getting tired of hearing Sarah singing my state of mind. Hmmm….

So Infinite Summer was written as a guitar instrumental, possibly as an opening song to the new album. The fact that it sounds nothing like anything that eventually made it onto Goodbye explains why we’re hearing for the first time now.

Forever

I included this tune in my GGGGHOST live sets in 2015-17. The original idea was to have one simple motif repeating throughout the song (the doo-deeeeee-dah melody) and then write a vocal to sit on top. But there wasn’t enough musical space to insert another melody, so I didn’t try. A rare case of harmonic restraint from me. Also, I was shying away from doing another spoken word piece like ‘Unchained Monologue’, so it was forgotten for twenty years.

On the original minidisk you can hear Lee and Herring’s “Fist of Fun” playing in the background. Can you get more 90s than that?

Pinklain

I had hoped that Dubstar would record a dance anthem (with words) for the second album. We’d gotten some of the way there with the Motiv8 version of ‘Stars’, but that song was really a slow, dubby ballad. This new song would be written from the get-go at a dance floor friendly 125BPM. It would also have an uplifting-rather-than-reflective-melody that would land us smack-bang into the front of the record boxes of the super star DJs. That didn’t happen of course, I was distracted by the Britpop activity around me so wrote more sad-anthems instead.

Sunset on a Family

This piano piece arrived on a cold early morning in Jesmond when things weren’t great, at least not for me. So I played a melody with an accompaniment that was straight 8th notes all the way through, something I’d been avoiding for years as it sounded too much like Shoegaze (which I love, but Dubstar couldn’t be shoegaze). No such restraint now.

Sunset on a Family is the sound of an unseen child moving through my victorian flat, a future ghost simultaneously sadder and older than its years.

Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for up to be the first to hear new releases and up to the minute news

DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland Volume 3

With the re-release of ‘Stars’, it was on 24th March in 1996 that Dubstar achieved our highest chart position in the UK Top 40.

And to commemorate, today sees the release of the last instalment in the DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland trilogy, an idea that began as a misunderstanding & blossomed into a suite of piano pieces… memories of the songs that I wrote & then recorded with Chris Wilkie & Sarah Blackwood when we were Dubstar.

It’s been a fascinating journey. Covers excepted, all of these songs started their lives alone with me in front of a piano…and went off into the world to have a life of their own. DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland has felt like I’ve called them home from a journey across time & space courting producers, engineers, band members, record companies, fans…

And now they’re home, sepia crystallisations of memories from a long, long time ago.

I didn’t return to or reference the Dubstar recordings to make this trilogy, these are how I recalled the tunes, and mainly without the words. Those were from another lifetime…reenacting them now would be reciting lines from a diary. No, not a diary… mimicking the sounds you made & thoughts you had as a younger & foolish person. Bon mots from a VHS of a birthday party, Christmas with the family, words that could only exist in their specific callow context, a land forever lost.

Then found again, as if you were climbing into your loft for the first time in decades.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these recordings, they’ve been an enjoyable obsession for me during this pandemic…the first occasion in thirty years that I’ve actually had the time to look back & assess how far we came. And as the pandemic feels like it’s subsiding there’s a new vista coming into view. New horizons and a new soundtrack, & all of it arriving very soon.

Thanks Dubstar.

Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for up to be the first to hear new releases and up to the minute news

DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland Volume 2

On this day in 1995 Food Records released Dubstar’s ‘Not So Manic Now’, the act’s breakthrough single. In those days you had a greater chance of a song landing high in the charts if you released your single in the few weeks after Christmas before the rest of the music industry returned from their Caribbean holidays. A song could sneak in while no-one was looking, and it worked.

Manic arrived at number nineteen in the UK Top Forty singles chart, our first of three visits to the Top Twenty. This was immensely exciting. We appeared on Top of the Pops, a crowning achievement for a new act. The record company threw us an infamous after-show party at Soho House in London too…quite a night. My hangover has just about worn off.

And so to celebrate this landmark anniversary, I’m releasing the second instalment of the DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland trilogy, a collection of piano reimaginings of another thirteen songs I wrote for the act plus a piano version of Brick Supply’s ‘Not So Manic Now’, the song that was our first bona fide hit.

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I discussed back in October how DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland began, a misunderstanding that led to a summer’s worth of piano playing and recording. As the days are so short, it feels fitting to release this collection on a Sunday at Christmastime, a cosy dose of memories for the season of nostalgia. I hope you enjoy it.

And a big thank you goes out to Roger Newbrook again for his fantastic photography.

Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for up to be the first to hear new releases and up to the minute news

DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland Volume 1

Dubstar’s first album ‘Disgraceful’ is twenty five today

To celebrate, I’m releasing a solo album ‘Dubstar: Lost & Foundland Volume 1', a collection of piano reimaginings of thirteen songs I wrote for the act plus a piano version of Billy Bragg’s ‘St Swithin’s Day’.

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Back in July, someone tweeted me that Dubstar’s Stars was twenty five years old that day. I’d forgotten, completely, thought I’d missed the opportunity to mark the anniversary. No one else was doing anything, maybe I should?


Over the years since its release, many have told me I should do a new version of the song, maybe as a Marks & Spencers’ style piano ballad. I’d shied away from this idea because, well, I’ve never been that good at spotting a musical opportunity. And yet it WAS twenty five years, I should do something. So I quickly recorded a piano version on my old Yamaha CP-70B electric grand piano and put it up on YouTube to mark the anniversary of the day the song made the UK Top 40.

Later that day, Claire said ‘oh, that’s good, you should do another twenty five’. She meant write another twenty five blog posts, the writing notes I’d included on www.dubstar.com. The explanation I’d given for Stars had caught the imagination of Dubstar fans on social media, so why not do some more?

But I thought she meant do piano versions of another twenty five songs I’d written for the act. Er…ok, that’s a huge amount of work, a crazy amount of work. By the time I’d realised my misunderstanding, I was too excited by the idea to turn back.

So everyday for twenty five days I spent an hour playing & recording an old Dubstar song, then immediately put it up on YouTube with writing notes, explaining the providence & inspiration being the song. It was an extraordinary experience…many of these songs I hadn’t played since they were written, some I’d not thought about in years, decades. And with every song I found a melody that I could fall in love with again. So I did. And when the ‘Dubstar 25’ project came to a close with Day I See You Again, I kept going…


Today fourteen of these recordings see their official worldwide release. From ‘The Gender We Lose’ that Chris & I included on our cassette album “Gear” as The Joans back in 1992, through to ‘So Say We All’, the song that should have closed our 4th (or 5th) album as Dubstar. I hope you enjoy them.



I must also give a big thank you once again to Roger Newbrook for his fantastic photography that accompanies this release.

Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com

And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for up to be the first to hear new releases and up to the minute news

Stars

Songwriter Stephen Hillier
Written February 1992
Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Released June 1995
Originally Sung By Stephen Hillier
Features Roland W-30, Yamaha DX100 
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“We’ll take out hearts outside, leave our lives behind and watch the stars go out”

Stars was written as Walkers Nightclub, an infamous haunt for students and gangsters and my first Tyneside nightclub was closed. A favourite with the more discerning Geordie clubber, I’d DJed at the permanently sold out Wednesday ‘Westworld’ since 1989…my first regular nightclub spot since arriving in Newcastle.

Walkers had numerous difficulties, from regular overcrowding to problems with the drug trade and a broken air conditioning system. It’s closer was a shock, the club had quickly come to define the mid-week music scene for me. While The Riverside was where you went for bands, in the late 80s and early 90s Walkers Nightclub was where you went to dance. And on a Wednesday and later Thursday night (at my indie club ‘Futureworld’) you came to dance to my choice of music. Walkers is where I met Chris, it’s where the Dubstar story began. When the news came in I walked down into Jesmond Dene in the rain to gather my thoughts, I had no idea what I would do. I decided to write Stars, one of the most important decisions in my career, maybe my life.

Walkers returned as Planet Earth in 1993, and regained the Walkers crown to become the late night drinking spot for many Dubstar sessions. It was just a five minute walk from The Forth Hotel and our studio ‘Stink Central’ at The Arts Centre. It was handy to know that when we got off the train from Kings Cross at one in the morning there was somewhere that would always let us in for the tenth drink of the night. Planet Earth was a terrific club, there’s nothing like it down here in Brighton. But I miss Walkers, it had an extra something. Danger?

The song came together on an old piano in my front room in Jesmond, with a lead melody that only features on the ‘acoustic version’ on the B-Side of No More Talk (and now this new piano version). Stars took on a life of its own when I completed the first draft using my Roland W-30 sampler and sequencer. In fact, almost the entire arrangement you hear on the Dubstar version is from the W-30. There’s also a lead ‘twinkle’ from the Yamaha DX100 I’d bought for £100 at Mckay Sounds on Westgate Road earlier that month…a pure sine wave, largely because it was the only sound I liked from the keyboard at the time. That opinion changed soon after. I now own three for some reason.

The arrangement to Stars was conceived with a nod to Massive Attack and the Dub Reggae tunes I grew up with in Lewisham, South London. Of course, being one of my songs, and having very little idea of how Dub Reggae actually works it had to have a strong melody and wistful lyric…a reflection of how I was feeling about the state of the club scene on Tyneside. And what on earth I was going to do next.

I didn’t understand why people liked Stars so much at first, I wasn’t that keen on recording it at all. But through my experiences working at Pinnacle Records, my first job after leaving school, and out of respect to Andy (the boss) Ross at Food Records, I knew that if there was any point in signing to his record label it would be to allow his expertise to guide the next stage for Dubstar. He wanted to release Stars first, so we did. It went on to be the most successful Dubstar song, and is still played on the radios across the world.

I know why people like it now. It’s grown on me too. 

INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:

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