I (Friday Night)
I (FRIDAY NIGHT)
Songwriter Stephen Hillier
Date Written June 1998
Place Written Hove, Sussex
Released When June 2000
Originally Sung By Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland S-760
Spotify Link
“The smell of the trees on nights like these”It was supposed to be a joke, releasing a single with a one letter title, and a reference to A R Kane’s album of the same name. Only the coolest would get the reference, so that’s brilliant! Obviously the record company wasn’t going to go for that, how would anyone find it, stock it, promote it? So ‘I’ became 'I (Friday Night)’, the only song I’d written that uses parentheses in the title.
Something went slightly wrong in the writing of I, from the attempt to rhyme the word ‘time’ with itself on three occasions to the whimsical feel of the verses. Twenty years later, I (Friday Night) on Make It Better feels like a first draft of a song that I should have returned to later, and now have done. The chorus is a real belter though and was more suited to a slower ballad-style arrangement. But we were on our third album, we’d already recorded enough of those for an entire career. Also, a slow piano ballad was something I was specifically trying to avoid. We were aiming to be as successful as The Cardigans, not the Red House Painters.
‘I’ is a reflection on Jesmond and the relationship I’d left behind. It was written while looking out of my studio window in Hove, this time staring at the Sussex Downs rolling off towards the west and to the sea. 1998 was a difficult time for me, the Tyneside era was over and I felt homeless. Writing ‘I’ was the first opportunity I’d had to reflect on all that had happened since Dubstar began. And so the final Dubstar single represents the bitter sweetness of the optimism of being back in the South, and the sadness of leaving the place I’d spent my adulthood. Some days I feel the same way, even twenty years later.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now: