Steve Hillier

News, information and music from the composer Steve Hillier, founder and songwriter of Dubstar, the 1990s dreampop act from Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne.

Here you will find everything you need to know about Steve Hillier

Dubstar and Human League at Tynemouth - The Final Gig

July 12, 2021  /  steve hillier

Dubstar at 25+1: The Final Gig

…and a heatwave on Tyneside

We played our last gig of the twentieth century on Wednesday 12th February 1998 at the Norwich Waterfront. The tour to promote ‘I Will Be Your Girlfriend’ had not been a happy excursion. For an act that was more a studio creation than a live experience we’d played a remarkable amount of shows in short succession. By my reckoning we’d completed nine tours in three years. This outing was the last time that we played with the extended line-up of Rochelle Vincente on backing vocals and Sleeper’s Diid Osman on bass (not forgetting the amazing Paul Wadsworth on drums of course). And on that final show in Norwich it was Diid’s birthday, the band sang ‘happy birthday’ to him on stage while the audience gazed on, baffled.

That was it until we shared a stage for Miles Jacobson’s Birthday (erstwhile of Food Records, now Managing Director of Championship Manager) in November 2011. A long thirteen year hiatus for Dubstar, but we’d taken a breather and now we were back. Next we headlined the Riverside fundraiser at the Cluny in Newcastle on August 29th 2012, then the big comeback show at the Lexington Pub in London on 15th April 2013 and finally ‘The Mouth of the Tyne’ festival at The Priory at Tynemouth with the Human League. We didn’t know it at the time but it was to be the farewell…

Dubstar at the Riverside Fundraiser, Cluny, Newcastle 2012

Dubstar at the Riverside Fundraiser, Cluny, Newcastle 2012

After the abandonment of the act and first United States of Being album in 2008, the coterie of advisors we’d grown around us evaporated, but I’d kept on nodding terms with Simon Watson, the Human League’s manager. A fellow resident of Hove, our paths had crossed on a handful of occasions, I think Sarah knew him from her days singing for Client too. He had a proposition:

“The Human League are playing in Tynemouth, would Dubstar be available to support?”

dubstar-humanleague.jpg

It was an intriguing idea. As an act we’d already begun to drift apart again, Chris was up north, Sarah in London and me settled in Brighton… but we said ‘yes’, why not? And playing home turf again (Chris was living literally across the road from the venue) would be great.

So on July 10th 2013 I travelled to Newcastle by train, Sarah and Paul B brought up my equipment by car. That evening I met some old friends from the Newcastle music scene at the Cluny and made a presentation at a music conference nearby. The following day, slightly bleary-eyed we completed one sweltering and very quick rehearsal at Gavin’s studio Base HQ in the Armstrong Industrial Park, just as we had the previous year for the Riverside show. We were hot and bothered and ready.

The day of the gig was even hotter.

The dressing room was in the disused Coastguard Station and was enormous, with the most incredible views of the North Sea and the Tyne river. We had the back rooms, the Human League the main observatory which was even bigger. Our vegetarian curry was delivered after soundcheck, and as I sat there eating alone I had to laugh at the very Dubstar nature of the situation. We were playing in Tyneside, but not Newcastle, opening for an act I’d adored as a child but had lost track of. We had an incredible view, but through someone else’s dressing room. I was sure I’d been here before….

Waiting to go onstage…the view from the Coastguard building at Tynemoth (Chris, Sarah and Paul B)

Waiting to go onstage…the view from the Coastguard building at Tynemoth (Chris, Sarah and Paul B)

The show went well, everything was smooth, I only played half a dozen wrong notes. It was a short ‘greatest hits’ set plus Window Pain, an unreleased song from our second completed United States of Being album.

Using the venerable Prophet 600 for bass was a bold move, it felt like the earth was moving for the closer Stars. I looked down at the crowd, literally, who were mainly families picnicking in the fading sun, kids running around with their parents occasionally nodding their heads. This was how we’d started all those years ago and it somehow seemed to be the future for Dubstar too, playing old songs to fans of other bands. Hmmm…

Inevitably Human League were amazing, you can’t argue with Being Boiled, Empire State Human or Love Action. And why would you want to? I was a little irritated they included ‘Together In Electric Dreams’…I’m an original fan, I bought Reproduction on vinyl in 1979 and that’s not a League song! The crowd loved it of course, no one cared no matter how hard I frowned. Phil thanked us from the stage which was a thrill, and from deep in my memory a voice was telling me ‘one day all records will be made this way’.

The show was over by 21.00, remarkably early. We’d nearly finished the rider and were simply hanging around as I watched the League pull out of Tynemouth. Jo and Susanne were walking the grounds of the Priory with multiple champagne bottles under their arms, Susanne calling out ‘Phil, are you coming back in our car?’ The luckiest women in pop indeed…

I strolled out into the evening heat to sample the delights of Tynemouth, a place I knew well but had never explored at night. The town was heaving with League fans in t-shirts in the sweltering heat, the atmosphere electric. Normally I loved the post gig banter with fans, but tonight I wasn’t inclined, because…

Tynemouth Priory in a heatwave

Tynemouth Priory in a heatwave

…Dubstar had just completed a circle with a circumference of decades. We started on Tyneside twenty two years earlier, left Newcastle, travelled the world and now we were back where it all began. And yes, It was great to play with the Human League, an honour, but I couldn’t shake the nagging thought that I’d already done this years ago. An entire generation ago.

So I went out to the benches on the promenade with the final beer from the rider and listened to the music I had on my phone. The songs Emma and I had been working on, the Dog in the Snow productions, the Hockeysmith songs, my own new material, ghost writes I’d completed…

And although I’d realised this the previous year, now I could feel it and I could see the evidence all around me. There was no angle to grow Dubstar from here, at least not in a way that would work for me. The circle could keep turning but would only ever be a border, an impassable frontier defined by all we’d accomplished decades earlier. That was the exact opposite of what Dubstar was supposed to be.

tynemouth2.jpg

I looked out through the haze to the sea and the ships queuing to enter the ‘Port of Tyne’… this wasn’t a sad moment. It was elating, the dramas were complete, the struggle was over and the journey had been great. I finished the beer, put my headphones on and slipped away… 

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

categories / Dubstar
tags / Dubstar

Disgraceful, the beginnings

October 08, 2020  /  steve hillier

The original artwork for the Dubstar album ‘Disgraceful’

The original artwork for the Dubstar album ‘Disgraceful’

“The most exciting moment for me was discovering that Food Records wanted a Dubstar album, not just singles.

I’d heard stories of how acts would be signed for a couple of releases… then record an album if their singles had done well. They’d only be taken seriously or invested in properly once they’d proven themselves in the market. I’d seen in my days at Pinnacle Records that this absence of money was the kiss of death for most new acts.

Even worse would be if an act was put into a ‘development’ phase. This meant the record company thought the act was promising, but not promising enough to actually release any music. So they’d sign them, hold on to them for years, release nothing, drop them…and through this process the artists couldn’t sign with anyone else. Another kiss of death. And I won’t even mention ‘production deals’ <shudder>.

But that wasn’t the situation with Food Records. Andy Ross wanted an album. That meant a proper advance, a proper publishing deal with a bit of luck, proper time in a recording studio with a real producer (for a change). This was the real thing.

And when the news broke on Tyneside, there was a tangible reaction of ‘what the fuck?’ among the bands we hung out with. Although we’d been familiar faces on the Newcastle scene, especially through my club nights, Dubstar had transformed from The Joans in secret. We had all this great material but had stopped playing live, no one outside of the three of us, our management and Food Records knew about it. That ‘The Joans’ would be signed out of all the hopefuls on Tyneside was…a surprise. To put it mildly.“

”I realised we were a ‘priority act’ when EMI was ferrying us to meetings around London in Black Cabs. I’d grown up in South London, regularly visited Camden Town and the West End as a teenager with nothing but a fiver in my pocket… the idea of jumping into taxis was alien to me. Why spend all that money to sit in traffic when you could use your Red Bus Rover or a Capitalcard to get around for free? Seemed like incredible profligacy.

Yet this was how the music industry worked in 1990s, cash was thrown around in a way that I would observe but not understand for years. There was money, it had to be spent…and in the 1990s it was being spent on us.

Being based in Newcastle was a stroke of financial good luck for Dubstar. It meant that the record company would pay for our meals, drinks and accommodation every time we came down South for a marketing meeting. If we’d had made the classic mistake of moving to London, like so many bands in the 90s, that wouldn’t have happened. We would have been expected to pay our own rent, transport, to feed and water ourselves at huge personal expense. And be broke as a consequence.

EMI must have paid well over £100,000 just putting us up in superb hotels across the land. A priority indeed, and a luxury too. To say I’m grateful for the experience is an understatement.”

”The recording studios were superb too. Disgraceful had begun its life in my humble Tyneside flat in Jesmond. Most of my programming was completed there almost a year before finishing the work in London. I’d already completed the writing**, programmed the drums, keys and bass to all of the songs in the early days of 1994: the next step was making demos with our new manager Graeme Robinson. He’d run a studio in Darlington, but this had closed for some reason, so he’d setup equipment in his back room.

We spent a month or so down there making the recordings that enabled us to be signed. They also formed the basis of the Disgraceful sessions.

Then in 1994 we met Stephen Hague at RAK studios and saw how proper records were made: slowly, carefully, diligently, with a budget and a lot of money spent on food and, yes, accommodation. Chris, Sarah and I lived in the house next door to the studio for the best part of a month in the winter of 1995 in platonic wedded bliss, broken only by the regular appearance of our management. The RAK studio house had the biggest TV I’d ever seen, a bath the size of a small swimming pool (which took nearly an hour to fill) and a sauna on the top floor, ideal for hangover days.

And what did we do in this house? I’d like to say we partied, but we weren’t really sure how to. RAK is in St John’s Wood next to Regents Park..it’s not a party kind of place. So we spent the first few nights commuting to Camden Town in the rain trying to find the party over there. Funnily enough, even at the height of Britpop there wasn’t that much going at the Good Mixer on a Sunday night.

So inevitably we spent a lot of nights in the house, entertaining visitors and basically having a hell of a time in between long bouts of hanging around, waiting to be called in to record our parts next door. We became regulars at the Duke of York, we never did find out what went on beyond the closed doors of the Lyndhurst Club…

The three completed songs were Stars, Anywhere and Disgraceful. I was stunned hearing Anywhere for the first time. It was our song, but… it felt like I was hearing a hit record pouring out of the radio. That was a new feeling. Wow!”

**except Day I See You Again, which was written as Disgraceful was being recorded

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 Preludes Volume 1

September 25, 2020  /  steve hillier

There are demos of songs. There are live recordings. There are ‘works in progress’ and first drafts of songs that appear on collectors’ editions of classic albums.

But what do you call it when you complete a song, forget about it…then it re-emerges somehow, years later when you think you’re writing something new? That’s what you’ll find in the Dubstar preludes, the precursors. The original songs that were the unconscious starting points for new, often completely different songs.

Most of these tunes didn’t have titles, there wasn’t time. They only survive on cassettes, scraps of notebooks, sometimes even Minidisks (I LOVED Minidisks). Luckily, what I lack in photos and diaries I can more than make up for with a huge archive of my writing that stretches back to the 1970s, covers the entire Dubstar era and much more. There are a lot of these tunes.

So the Dubstar Preludes are a curio, a minor release, a glimpse at a different road that a songwriter could have pursued.

I often visualise writing as a spider’s web of possibilities, many of which can lead to a positive outcome, a good song. But no matter how much you practice, study, how often you write, you simply have to pick a creative thread and hope for the best. That’s how songwriting works.

Many of the completed Dubstar tunes are what happens when you get a second chance to pick a thread. The preludes are the original silk. I hope you enjoy them.

It’s Raining in my Mind

Prelude to ‘Disgraceful’

This melody and the lyrics that accompany it were a precursor to Disgraceful, as I think you can hear clearly in the chorus section. Disgraceful had a rather sad birth in a house on Windsor Terrace, South Gosforth. This precursor was the last song I wrote on my piano back in Jesmond before temporarily moving out. It was hugely influenced by Franz Liszt, I think that’s clear. It’s funny, but hearing it in this form, it seems obvious to me that this isn’t a Dubstar song at all. Little did I know that a rewrite would be the title track of the act I’d formed with Chris earlier that year and go on to be an international success.

The title is a something Chris said to me as we were driving over the Tyne Bridge during one of the United States of Being sessions…

After the Valentines

Prelude to ‘Everything’s Alright’

I’ve been a Shoegaze fan since before the term was invented (By Andy Ross who singed Dubstar…I don’t think it was supposed to be a compliment). So it was an incredible treat to see the reformed My Bloody Valentine play at the Roundhouse in Camden, sixteen years since I’d seen them at Whitley Bay Ice Rink. And they haven’t mellowed, that’s for sure. The gig was so loud that despite my aviation quality ear protectors I had to put my fingers in my ears lest they bleed. And when I took them out, it was like someone had smacked me on the side of the head. Or what I imagine it would be like to accidentally open the door of a submarine on the sea bed.

Anyway, this tune was written a couple of days after on the train back from meeting Stephen Hague in Hastings. I was still shaking, actually physically shaking from the gig, it was more of an experience than a joy really. I’d had the chord sequence in the back of my mind since a very young age. My grandfather had bought me an organ with single keys for chords on the left hand and I loved playing a succession of majors or of minors, no regard to key, I was too young. I think these early experiences with harmony have hugely influenced my writing.

I used the tune as the basis of ‘Everything’s Alright’, the song I wrote with Cat.

Just a Woman

Prelude to ‘Just a Girl She Said’

I’ve mentioned before that ‘Just a Girl’ was a combination of my composition submission for my O’ Level music and one of Sarah’s poems. It was the discovery of this piece, one of the easy drafts of that work that was the inspiration of this entire prelude series. I was looking through my scrapbook in my loft down here in Brighton when I came across a piece of manuscript that I must have put in the encyclopaedia of music that my parents had given me for my studies for O’ level. It was very rough, my manuscript writing has never been that great frankly. My reading’s not much better, but I played it on the CP-70B and remembered from way back that this was the original doodle for Just A Girl. It might be a bit of a stretch but I think you can just about hear the Dubstar themes, especially towards the end.

A Stranger to Everyone

Prelude to ‘When You Say Goodbye’

This is the only piece on this volume that had a title before its inclusion. Again, it had a rather sad origin, written in the days before Dubstar’s headline appearance at the NME tent at Reading 1996, when my relationship was ending. I enjoyed the way the music is very simple, cheerful, it could be an exercise by J. S. Bach…but the mood in my head was one of utter bleakness. Isn’t it curious how sometimes the most cheerful of compositions arrive in the midst of serious upset?

As the final writing sessions for Goodbye got underway in late 1996 and early 1997, this was the perfect starting point for another Dubstar tune in 6:8, the best time signature. After 5:4 of course.

Oh, and I played this piece as part of the GGGGHOST sets in 2015/16. It was always one of my faves, and sounds gorgeous on a Yamaha DX7.

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

categories / Dubstar Unreleased
tags / Dubstar, Dreampop, Britpop, Piano, Synthesisers, 1990s, Sequentialcircuits, Electric Grand, Indie