Dubstar: Window Pain 2025

Window Pain was to be the comeback single for Dubstar, but never saw a release. By the time the song had been produced by Stephen Hague in 2013 and even a video shot in a camp site in South West England, the act had fallen apart.

Until this morning I intended to publish a long explanation for why Dubstar ended, I even wrote a two thousand word essay on the topic. But I had a change of heart, in the end, it’s important to celebrate what remains, the music. The stories can wait for another blog post.

2025

I’ve wanted to release Window Pain on the Dubstar Archive for a long time but haven’t felt there was a version that did the song justice. By December 2024 I decided to do something about that. The version you hear today is an update to a song that was written nearly two decades ago. These are the original vocal, guitar, piano and synth parts recorded in my flat in Hove, but with a new rhythm part devised in my current studio in Brighton. I’m hoping it’s true to its 2000s roots, I certainly tried to capture that in the mix. I even recreated the Lately Bass sound that was all over the dance floor in the 90s using my Hydrasynth.

THINKING BACK NOW

Window Pain is a great song, and although it’s easy to categorise it as an opportunity missed, that’s not the case. It wasn’t going to put Dubstar back on the map because there was no plan for how to relaunch the act, or even agreement on where the map was. But it might have been a curio for the fans, a testament to what a reformed Dubstar could have been. That would have been nice.

Do I regret not releasing it? Not really, but… imagine if we’d followed up No More Talk with Window Pain rather than Cathedral Park? The story of Dubstar could have been fundamentally different. Maybe there’s still time?

And anyway, maybe Sophie would like to cover it…?