Dubstar: THE FUTURE

Steve Hillier

Friday 16th December 2022

The Future was one of the earliest songs written for the relaunch of Dubstar in 2007. The lyric concerned rebirth, renewal, being present in the moment. And turning to the future together.

There were a variety of versions of the song, all influenced by the Scandinavian music I’d immersed myself in. I was, and remain, a huge fan of Röyksopp, which you can hear in this arrangement, especially towards the end. I’ve said this before: if Dubstar were to reform again (AGAIN!) then I imagine we’d sound a lot like this:

Maybe mixed with this:

With a touch of this:

This version of The Future, completed in the closing months of 2011, is my favourite by far. It has a distinctive structure, a long intro that would crossfade with the preceding song on the album ( I don’t think we ever decided which that would be). And then a long build-up to the ‘Danish ending’ where everything steps up in energy.

There were other versions too. The original had a bassline played on my Fender Rhodes piano, an experiment that sounded better on paper than in my speakers. In fact it was that version that was on the computer screen for my interview with Future Music in early 2008. Then there was another which had a rolling breakbeat running underneath, much like St Swithins Day. Some of the percussion from that version survives into this version, the 'baa-boh' sound in the choruses and outro for example.

THINKING BACK NOW

And then twelve years passed in the blink of an eyelash. One of the things I enjoy about The Future is how the lyric encapsulates what we were doing back in the 00s. Namely escaping and emerging from the mental health problems that had plagued our previous efforts. Not denying they had existed like before but facing them, accepting them and moving on to something new.

And that was key, because whatever came next for Dubstar it had to be new, a beginning. A fresh start from scratch, if you’ll pardon the portmanteau.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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: I AM THE CRIME demo

Steve Hillier

Friday 16th December 2022

Someone on Twitter asked me to put this song up, it’s one of his favourites. I didn't know it had already escaped into the wild, I thought it had sat lonely and obscure on my hard drives for twenty-five years. Apparewntly not, so OK, here we go.

'I Am The Crime' (IATC) is unusual for a Dubstar song. It may be unique in that it features both me and Chris on guitar for the first time since the end of The Joans in 1994. You can hear Chris’s playing through the song, but that’s me playing the Thin Lizzy lead parts. The lyrics are unusual for a Dubstar song too., there’s no clear direction for where we're heading. The lyric is a collection of phrases that expresses the frustration I was feeling in 1998. And there's some swearing. That must have been a difficult afternoon in the Hillier household.

IATC also has a special place in my heart as it’s one of the first tunes I produced using Logic Audio. This software enabled me to record audio into the new G3 Mac, not the ADATs we'd used for years. The two prior Dubstar albums were made using an ATARI ST, a platform I knew like the back of my hand. But with Logic Audio I was feeling my way. This is why you can hear so many ‘loops’ in this arrangement and many other songs on Make It Better. Also, this was the first time I experimented with building audio ‘blocks’. You can hear them in IATC, layers upon layers of takes of Sarah singing ‘I Am The Crime’. It sounds awesome! Twenty-five years of technological developments later it all feels rather quaint. But that’s how we made the music of the late 90s and early 00s.

Speaking of tech, I wonder what Steve of 1998 would have made of AI?

All of the image below Sarah’s right hand was generated by AI. It didn’t exist until this morning.

I NEED SOME FINE WINE, AND YOU NEED TO BE NICER

So it's 1998, in the middle of the first demo recording session for Dubstar’s final released album ‘Make It Better’. This was a difficult period for the act, not least because each of us were living in different cities. Hence I completed so much of the development for that album in total isolation in my flat in Hove. IATC grew from those sessions.

There were three compositional seeds to IATC. First, the whole song grew from that bass line, the first component I wrote. As was typical at the time, that’s not me playing my Fender Jazz bass but my Korg Prophecy. The synth provided a passable bass guitar sound, particularly for a demo, but it's not great. Hearing it now, it feels 'spongy', but you know? The Prophecy was sitting there waiting to be used. I did my best.

Secondly, I wrote IATC in the period when I thought Dubstar should make the kind of music The Cardigans were putting out. This explains why the lead guitar part sounds like something that could have featured on their seminal hit ‘Lovefool’. I later discovered that Tore Johansson, the Cardigans producer, was living in Sussex at the time. Should have invited him round to rescue me.

The third seed is that amazing title, which sadly is not my own work. I spent my teenage years growing up in London in the 1980s. I was able to see all of the featured bands from the weekly pages of Melody Maker…including pretty much every act signed to my favourite label 4AD. So that’s Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, AR Kane, Xymox, Dif Juz…and Wolfgang Press. Repeatedly. I was a Wolfgang Press fan, although I found some of their music difficult I always loved the lyrics and song titles. Mick Allen is an amazing writer. So when I read their third album would include another duet with Elizabeth Fraser I was excited beyond words (obscure pun intended).

And not disappointed. ‘I Am The Crime’ blew me away.

So, twelve years later and writing my own third album, I took their title and wrote a new song with it. Thinking back this seems a little bold, cheeky even? But when you’re in that writing space anything goes. You grab your inspiration from any and everywhere you can. And Tthere’s a good chance that your writing process will obscure and eclipse the source material by the time you release the song.

But I Am The Crime was never released. And in all the many ways Make It Better could have been made better, the inclusion of this song is top of the list.

Sucker by The Wolfgang Press. Simply because it’s awesome.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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: ROUND & ROUND originally included on United States of Being album

Steve Hillier

Friday 16th December 2022

Round & Round, a song born of the coincidences that seemed to happen all the time in the 90s.

Dubstar started working together again way back in 2006. There was a clear sense that this was a different act to the one that had collapsed in London seven years earlier. I was living in Brighton, Sarah and Chris in London. This was not the act who used to come around to my flat in Jesmond and record demos. We were more than ten years older and had been around the world with our music, not just the Bigg Market.

But Round & Round, a song recorded in the dark days of the financial crash of 2008 has that Jesmond connection. For it was at Roger Newbrook’s party in Newcastle upon Tyne in December 2003 that I met Cat Goscovitch, the cowriter of this song.

But first, some background.

As I’ve said on many occasions, pick a topic and there’s a Dubstar story lurking, ready to be shared. We had parted company with our first manager Graeme Robinson in early 1996. So at the very height of our popularity, we were distracted and consumed by the search for someone new to steer our already chaotic ship. The timing couldn’t have been worse. At the point when we needed a knowledgeable business head to help us break Europe and the US, we had no one. This remains to this day why Dubstar only ever did well in the UK.

So we started the beauty parade, meeting every manager in London (and a couple in the North) who was interested in meeting us. This was not a fun experience. Each manager was great in their own way, and that was the problem. You need a manager to help you find a manager, a business adviser to help you find a business manager. We didn’t have that, we had no idea who to choose.

The other problem was that our label and our lawyer were loathe to advise us. Food Records did a superb job of putting us in the room with a variety of superb people (thanks once again to Jo Power, where would we have been without you?). But telling us what they thought of these people, almost nothing. At least nothing that would have made our minds up. There is a bond between the artist and manager, and labels and lawyers who interfere with that relationship get burned. Better to stand back…

So it was up to us to choose. We chose John Campbell who happened to be managing Cat Goscovitch. I discovered later that he’d done an amazing job looking after Cat in her act as Billy Rain and then as Nut.

But this was Dubstar, nothing ever ran smoothly. Through no fault of his we only stayed with John for about a month, and were back to being unmanaged. I'm personally sorry about that John, that was a mistake on our part. The next manager we chose was Stevø Pearce. And that…if ever there was… is another story.

So who is Cat? We had already met when she played a show at Middlesbrough Arena in her band ‘Billy Rain’. I loved it, was completely transfixed. I managed to keep the promo version of the band’s album ‘Salad Days’ and it became my soundtrack to the summer of 1994. We met again at another Billy Rain gig, this time at Newcastle University. And that was it for nearly a decade.

Then it was 2003.

Standing in Roger’s place in Jesmond I spotted Cat sitting talking to - would you believe it? - Sarah’s ex -boyfriend Danilo Moscardini. Danilo, who'd left his cassette round my flat in Jesmond in 1993. Danilo who'd put me in touch with Sarah a decade earlier. What the actual??? I introduced myself and we started talking about John Campbell, the man I knew we had in common. Turned out we both were hoping to do more music. So we did.

Cat and I wrote together through 2004 and 2006. I loved it. We got on well and laughed as often as I used to working with Chris. That's a good sign, maybe it’s a north-eastern thing (Cat’s from Northumberland).

The problem was that despite all this, the music we made never took off. Our working approach was very different, and although compatible, didn’t quite work. Plus, this wasn’t our first time getting something together, we weren’t teenagers. Both of us were at a point in our careers where we instinctively knew whether something was working or not. Our writing fizzled out. Thinking back now, that was a real shame…

ROUND & ROUND

But the songs survive, and Round & Round is one of them. There was a selection of Cat ’n Steve songs that I thought would be superb for Dubstar, so we recorded Round & Round at my place in Hove in the first few weeks of January 2008. The same problem persisted with this song even when Sarah sang it and Chris jangled on it. It needed some extra character.

The musical direction we had taken at that point had concerned me. We’d already recorded Talking in my Sleep with Stephen Hague and it wasn’t right. Not Stephen’s fault, we were so caught up in the excitement of doing more Dubstar that we'd lost sight of doing the right Dubstar. Round & Round was in danger of being simply another jangly early 90s indie pop song, exactly the thing we should not be doing if we were to have any chance of a comeback.

I left Round & Round on the shelf for a long time. Some three years later I revisited it when I completed the United States of Being mixing and transformed it into the song you can hear here. Listening now, I’m struck by how noughties it sounds. The vocals are bright, loud and clear, so much space in that mix, I rather like it.

I hope you do too. Cheers Cat, see you soon.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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: IS THERE ANYWAY BACK FROM HERE? originally included on United States of Being album

This is the song that convinced me that Dubstar should reform, all the way back in 2003. It would take three years for this to happen of course, but I had this inescapable feeling that Is There Anyway Back from Here could put us right back on the map. It was the Not So Manic Now for the 2000s. How could we resist?

Is There Anyway Back From Here (ITABFH), much like Not So Manic Now, started life as a different song called ‘No Place To Go’ by a band from Leicester called Dizzy Valise. I’d been introduced to them by my manager Sharon Tapper (funny, as I’m writing this I’m discovering more and more similarities in the story of this song and the story behind Not So Manic Now). She’d been sent some music and thought we’d be a good fit. She was right, we got on well, I produced some of their songs (All These Things being a firm favourite) and remain in contact to this day.

One late summer afternoon in the early 00s I was driving on the A7 in Andalusia Spain with Dizzy Valise’s demos on the stereo. As we pulled into our turning for Puerto Banus ‘No Place To Go’ came on. Naim was on the vocals of course, John providing most of the arrangement…it was the standout song of a strong set and reminded me of Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, in a good way.

‘This is a hit, I need to do something with this’

Steve Hillier

Friday 16th December 2022

I don’t remember why we didn’t make a version of this song for Dizzy Valise, I have a feeling that our paths were diverging at that point, I was spending most of my time in Spain and then songwriting across Scandinavia and the USA.

But I couldn’t forget this song, there really was something important going on in ‘No Place To Go’. So I rewrote the lyric, changed the structure around a fair bit (again, much like Graeme Robinson and Jon Kirby had done with Not So Manic Now) and we landed with Is There Anyway Back From Here. Next question…I had no band at this point, who was going to sing this? I’m not going to find anyone in Spain. Could this be a Dubstar song? Oh, hang on, yeah… there is no Dubstar…

I’d already worked with a fantastic singer from Bristol called Lily Fraser, I thought she’d be ideal. I’d put together a backing track, Chris had already played guitar, this could be great. Lily was up for it so came round to my apartment in Hove and sang the song perfectly. Couldn’t have been easier.

But…it didn’t work. Not Lily’s fault, it was mine. The arrangement wasn’t right, the feel was way too 1990s. In the cold winter sunlight of 2023 that’s not so much of a problem but back in 2003 it was exactly how you shouldn’t be sounding. In fact, the problems with the arrangement would persist for the next eight years. And a few years later, with Dubstar back together and with Sarah singing, ITABFH would go through incarnation to incarnation, each time getting bigger and more bombastic. The Dubstar version rolled along like Ace of Base on steroids, with all the bombast that implies, and yet never really took off. Tim Mason did a mix out in Malta, it didn’t quite work. Paul Tipler did a mix at his place in Peckham, didn’t quite work. There are three complete sets of vocals sitting here on my hard drive, a testament to the tortuous journey the song went on. My fault, sorry guys. You can’t mix a faulty arrangement into a hit.

And then…

As I was completing all the mixes for United States of Being in late 2011, I threw the dice one last time for ITABFH. What would it sound like if I rolled the song the other way, stripped it back, like on the alternative version of I Lost A Friend? I went back to the vocals and played along on my Yamaha CP-70B electric grand piano. Finally, and as if by magic there was the song again, removed from the layers and layers of production. This is the result, the definitive version of a song that had more makeovers than…er…I dunno, my metaphor ran away with me me there.

The real hero on this song is my trusty (and sadly no longer with us) Roland Juno-106. She provides all the bass and pad sounds…in fact apart from some Yamaha DX100 here and there, all the synthesiser arrangements on the USOB sessions were 100% analogue.

Thinking back now

It’s a sanguine experience listening to ITABFH today. In many ways the making of this song is the story of keeping faith, persisting with a tune that no matter how many mistakes simply wouldn’t die. I think the results speak for themselves.

On the other hand, sitting here listening to ITABFH gives me a sense of what the Portuguese call saudade. This is the sound of the past, there really is No Way Back to those times, there can be no more Dubstar. This lyric describes the last days of a relationship, and although I wasn’t thinking of this at the time, it also reflects the demise of Dubstar. There are multiple lines that chime with the end of that act, not just in 2000 but in 2008 and 2014.

I’m frozen fantasising of a lifetime next to you

And you hate romanticising but I thought we’d always win,

so tell me is there anyway back from here?

The answer was no, even though we were making the best music we’d ever made. There simply was No Way Back to the 90s and no place to go in the 2010s.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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: YOU & ME originally included on United States of Being album

You & Me is one of the earliest recordings made for what would later become the United States of Being album version 1. It was written all the way back in 2007 with Emma Kirby, now touring the world as Elkka. Emma and I had performed together at a selection of acoustic shows in Sussex and You & Me had repeatedly gone down as the best song in the set. I have a version with Emma singing somewhere, I must get it out one day.

DUBSTAR version

Steve Hillier

Friday 16th December 2022

My enduring memories of recording You & Me was the exciting experience of working with Sarah again after a six year break. We were back in my studio room in Adelaide Crescent, Hove. We hadn’t worked together in this room since recording the vocals for the ill-fated Dubstar EP all the way back in 2000 and in some ways it was a familiar situation, in others quite new. Part of the familiarity was the back room in the flat was just as cold as the old studio in Newcastle Art Centre, again something I think you can hear in Sarah’s vocal. And in a very real sense Dubstar was a family… no matter how long or how far you’re separated, as our song goes ‘we still belong’.

Part of the new feeling was that it was clear that so much had changed since we’d done this last. Sarah was in Client, I’d been travelling the world as a songwriter and getting involved in all sorts of projects. But doing Dubstar again without a record company and almost no expectations meant we could do whatever we wanted (to be fair Food Records had let us do whatever we wanted as well). This was one of the first songs we tried after the false start of recording ‘Talking in My Sleep’ with Stephen Hague. Not his fault, it just wasn’t the right song or musical approach.

Backstage at Distortion festival, Copenhagen 2022. Emma is second from right.

So back at mine all the vocals for You & Me were recorded with Cat Goscovitch’s amazing Neumann U57 mic. Most of the keyboard parts were from my Yamaha CP-70B electric piano grand piano (recently purchased from Gary Numan). There are almost no synthesisers on this track apart from some Korg MS20 bass at the end, all the textures come from the piano treated through guitar pedals. There’s even some Rhodes Piano playing the theme at the end. A new beginning indeed.

Maybe because You & Me is a cowritten song, it does have an unusual feel for a Dubstar record. The full DNA of the act is present, but there’s another creative in there too, and in this case someone much younger than the three of us. It adds something intriguing. You & Me is not a cover like Manic or St Swithin’s, it’s more of a hybrid. I suppose it’s that feeling when an act introduces a new member to their already established lineup, if only for one song.

Anyway, I love You & Me, it’s a memento of a time when anything seemed possible. Looking back, it’s reassuring to revisit and wonder at how far both Emma and I have travelled in the fifteen years since that sunny day in Cardiff.

That’s a long friendship. We should see each other more often, right Em?

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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: WE STILL BELONG originally included on United States of Being album

Beginnings…

Dubstar was dropped by EMI in November of 2000. The sales of Make It Better had been anemic, the promotion for the album non-existent. It was the end for Dubstar.

Chris and I kept in contact and occasionally worked on projects together, but it would be six years later in 2006 that Sarah, who was now the vocalist in Client, agreed that the time was right for more. Incredibly the ensuing drama around this decision grew over seven years …until the entire reformation of Dubstar was abandoned in early 2014.

Steve Hillier

Friday 16th December 2022

But not before nearly forty new Dubstar songs had been recorded, more than two albums worth. Although there was never an official title, they became known as United Status of Being after someone (and we still don’t know who) leaked to Wikipedia that we were working on an album of that name. That revelation caused some significant difficulties.

Consequently, the United States of Being songs came in two distinct volumes and by the start of 2012 the recording and mixing for dozens of the songs was completed, sometimes with outside help (Phil Bodger, Stephen Hague, Tim Mason et al) but mainly at my studios in Hove. We were ready to launch.

The delays in releasing the tunes were never about the quality of the music, but what we were going to do with them. It was a perplexing issue for all involved with some extraordinary twists and turns. More of the incredible USOB story another time…

We Still Belong

Human League!

I wrote We Still Belong in 2007, and despite us not working together for years at that point I’d always intended Sarah to sing it. We Still Belong was my vision for how the next Dubstar album should sound. It made sense to return to the essence of the act: Hip Hop Breakbeats, Dub Bass, soaring melodies and emotive words. And this time with an added Electric Grand Piano! That’s where We Still Belong came in.

As a child, I had been mesmerised by Human League’s song ‘Dreams of Leaving’. Way back in 1980 they seemed to be an act at the pinnacle of their art boldly discussing a terrible social injustice. We Still Belong is born of the same spirit: a refugee’s tale but told in the only way Dubstar could…how it feels to live with the loss of your home. Its writing was inspired by the classic episode of the sitcom Thick Of It called ‘The Rise of the Nutters’ and by the political weaponisation of the fear of immigration, how refugees had been dehumanised and transformed into a threat, an enemy. Looking back from the carnage of 2022 it’s extraordinary to trace how deeply this attitude has affected the UK and how much has changed since 2007. From Brexit to Rwanda, from Nigel Farage to Boris Johnson, the British population is being distracted daily from local political problems by tales of imminent national destruction from people who are sometimes just seconds away from drowning.

But back in 2007, the result was one of my all-time favourite Dubstar songs, and one I return to regularly. I hope you enjoy it.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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: GOODBYE TO YOU originally included on Disgraceful

I have a habit of reading contracts. I remember asking our lawyer Paul Lennon to go through every line of our recording deal with Food Records to explain what each term meant, which of course he was happy to do. I needed to understand what we were about to get into, and I wanted to learn how the music industry worked from a legal perspective, an artist’s perspective.

I discovered that although the music industry, just like every other industry, is ultimately run by lawyers, that’s not how it operates on a day to day basis. It might state something in bold terms in your contract, but in reality your experience in a band will be quite different. For example, you… [redacted on legal advice!].

Anyway, we had this song kicking around called ‘Goodbye To You’ which was a hangover from the early days of The Joans. It was a rolling psychedelic poem, and like Stars and St Swithins, it was built around a looping break beat. But unlike Stars and Swithins, the beat on Goodbye to You was instantly recognisable to anyone who was paying attention. It was Bow Wow Wow by Funkdoobiest.

As I’ve mentioned before, I listened to a lot of rap in the late 80s and early 90s. On the day we signed with Food records the anthems we played in the car on the way to London were alternating between Tricky’s Ponderosa and Gravediggaz Bang Your Head…oh, and we were transfixed with the new Stone Roses songs, although not in a good way. It was a long journey….

Funkdoobiest from the 90s

So with all this sampling going on around us I didn’t think a two beat steal from a lesser known LA rap act was a big deal. Consequently the song had been demoed at Graeme Robinson’s house in Darlington, and to my surprise was rerecorded for inclusion on Disgraceful.

But…I was concerned. It said in our recording contract that we weren’t allowed to include samples without letting the record company know. The agreement was clear. I had no idea how much it would cost to clear this sample or whether we would get in trouble, it hadn’t occurred to me that Funkdoobiest had sampled someone else for their loop either (to this day I don’t know who). Months later, and well after the song had been recorded, mastered and was ready to go to manufacture, I had an attack of the conscience. I told the label about the sample. I even faxed through a letter so it was all official. and I did all this without mentioning it to the rest of the act, management or even Andy at Food. There was no going back. Being from a respectable family, an honourable man with a catholic upbringing and someone who understood his contract I thought I was doing the right thing, I was owning up.

This was a mistake.

The original master DAT for Disgraceful. Note ‘Day I see You Again’ was called ‘The Day I See You Again’ albeit with a ‘Y’ for some reason.

The consequence was Goodbye To You was removed from Disgraceful where it would have been the last song and, crucially, an opportunity to get in the press by getting in trouble with a fashionable west coast rap act was lost.

You see, no matter how much it would have cost to clear the sample, it would have been cheaper than the cost of press coverage we could have received from getting into trouble. We would have been notorious (pun intended). That would have been EXACTLY the kind of company we should have been keeping. Instead the song disappeared.

I learned an important lesson from Goodbye To You. Business is exceptionally straight-forward except when it isn’t. If you want to survive, the key is knowing which is which and when to keep your mouth shut. To be fair to myself, musicians are fed a diet of stories about how bad the music industry is, how much trouble acts get into, how awful it is to be sued. No wonder most acts are so paranoid.

And so this (and a few other reasons) is why acts need management…so the artists can wonder around with their heads in the clouds doing arty things and the managers deal with the commerce. On the other hand the idea that a paranoid artist would grass himself directly to the label is a testament to the strength of our relationship with Andy Ross. And how ‘going official’ can be the exact wrong thing to do.

Anyway, Disgraceful is stronger album without Goodbye To You. Eventually we rerecorded it as the B-side for No More Talk and it lived a new life with a whole bunch of new samples in it. I have to say I much prefer that version…totally mad, full of breaks, which was exactly how we were feeling in 1997.

PS: So why did we name our second album after this song and then not include it? Basically Goodbye had a working title of ‘Death is the End’ and although it was amusing and reflected our gallows humour, it probably wasn’t the best for an act more associated with pink and blue bunnies than mortality. Plus there was something powerful about naming the follow up to Disgraceful ‘Goodbye’. These were the late Britpop days, and while every act around us was shouting and screaming to be heard we were leaving the stage. At least that’s how it seemed.

And it seemed very cool indeed to have the title track of the album included as a B-Side, not on the record. All of this was acceptable in the 90s, as Calvin almost said.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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: Goodbye at 25

It was twenty five years ago today that Goodbye was released, an anniversary that’s taken me by surprise (I was just finishing off the mixing of an album due out in November). So from the top of my head, here are some of the strongest memories I have of the recording of ‘Death is the End’, the second Dubstar album.

The album itself was essentially a ‘second pressing’ of songs from our repertoire from Disgraceful and our previous incarnation as The Joans plus a handful of new songs I’d written in late 1996 and early 1997.

1. I Will Be Your Girlfriend - Originally a The Joans song called Joni

2. Inside - New song written in Woodstock for Goodbye

3. No More Talk - the oldest Dubstar song, written when I was at school

4. Polestar - written in Newcastle for Goodbye

5. Say The Worst Thing First - written in Newcastle for Goodbye

6. Cathedral Park - written in Jesmond back in 1991

7. It’s Over - written in Newcastle for Goodbye

8. The View From Here - written during the Disgraceful era as a B-side to Elevator Song

9. My Start In Wallsend - written in Newcastle for Goodbye

10. It’s Clear - originally Brownmouth, a song from The Joans

11. Ghost - written at Real World studios for Goodbye

12. Can’t Tell Me - a song we played live in the Disgraceful era

13. Wearchest - a song from The Joans, written for a radio appearance eon Wear FM

14. When You Say Goodbye - written in Newcastle for Goodbye

15. Let’s Go - written in Woodstock for Goodbye

Goodbye was demoed and completed in five recording studios:

Dubstar’s studio at the Arts Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne

It was so bloody cold in there! But the Forth Hotel pub was just around the corner so it was easy to warm up at night. This was where almost all the songs from Goodbye began, sketched out on an old Atari ST and a copy of Cubase on a floppy disk.

Ancient tech but the tightest MIDI sequencer I’ve ever used

Jacobs Studio, Surrey

I put it to the record company that we record some demos in a proper studio down south, so we spent three or four days in Jacob’s studio in Surrey. To be honest, this request was more to do with me wanting to get out of my flat in Newcastle than actually needing a 24 track recording facility. We did a fairly good job down there though, and put together early versions of It’s Clear, My Start in Wallsend and a couple of others. My mum and dad visited us one day, they were terribly excited by the whole thing, and this was also the first time I had a chance to fully explore the novel excitement of the internet. There was a website that a fan had put together called the Dubstar Webgarden which I loved. We also started to get fan mail from across Europe, which was amazing.

And everything we recorded was on ADAT, an archaic format briefly popular in the 1990s but as reliable as any VHS cassette ever was. We even had a BRC which literally meant ‘Big Remote Control’ to run the four cassette recorders. My enduring thanks to Claire, the engineer, who made it all work.

It was during this period that our new manager Stevø was negotiating our USA record deal, and we met Nick Gatfield for the first time (who six years later would go on to sign Keane to Island Records, small world). I remember a very strong feeling of excitement and extreme apprehension, which would accompany me on every escapade Stevø would lead us into.

Steve, the man who brought you Soft Cell and The The

Stephen Hague’s shack in Woodstock

Our first trip to the USA, and to the magical woodlands in upstate New York. We stayed in Bob Clearmountain’s house and recorded at Stephen’s newly built studio, where the groundwork for I Will Be Your Girlfriend, It’s Clear and You Can’t Tell Me were recorded.

It snowed, maybe not every day but there was snow everywhere.

My most enduring memory of this time was the day the me and Paul Wadsworth, our drummer, were so bored hanging around in the woods that we decided to drive to New York City for the day, a journey of about two and half hours. On arriving we couldn’t find anywhere to park in the entire midtown area (I hadn’t watched Seinfeld at this point) and by the time we managed to pull over we’d kind of given up on the trip anyway.

Getting ready for our big day out

Actual photo taken of me trying to find the way back to Woodstock

Then began the journey home. I immediately got lost leaving NYC with no map, no mobile phone, no internet of course and no record of the phone numbers for Clearmountain’s house, Stephen’s place or even the record company back in London. We left Manhattan and ended up in New Jersey. I pulled into a gas station just the other side of the Hudson River, pointed at the skyscrapers and asked the attendant ‘how do we get back there?’.

He said he didn’t know.

I said ‘but it’s just there, look!’

That didn’t help.

So instead of heading north and back the way we came, we headed west for at least an hour, into the dark, into the cold, and eventually into the snow. Oh, and did I mention that we didn’t have any money on us either…?

Real World Studios, Bath

We’d recorded much of Disgraceful at Real World, so it was a real privilege to be back. While the rest of the crew were in the main building I was staying in the producer’s cottage again (Chris was upstairs in the eaves) with it’s own bath and kitchen area. My girlfriend, now wife stayed with us for a week too. She was in the process of finishing her masters degree, and so Peter Gabriel and some of the staff set her up in a studio of her own in the main barn complex in order to complete the mountain of paperwork she was lumbered with. She passed of course.

RAK Studios, London

And then back to St John’s Wood to complete the record. We stayed in the artist accommodation, basically a house next door to the studio and frankly I loved it there. I remember playing the completed mix for Cathedral Park on my own at full blast in the lounge and being blown away, this was going to be massive. Later that night I met up with the rest of the act and our friends from Food Records at the Good Mixer in Camden. Someone asked me what I’d been doing, why was I so late? ‘Listening to Dubstar’ I replied, looking rather smug…I was gently berated for playing my own records and told that wasn’t cool. It was a friendly put down, as I often endured, but at that point I didn’t care. At all.

It was during this stage that I recorded and finished the B-sides for No More Talk in a studio live room that wasn’t in use. It was just my Apple Powerbook 5300cs and a Roland VS880, mad really looking back.

The aftermath…

It was a baking hot June day. I was listening back to the completed album at Stevø’s office in central London and thinking we’d gone too far on this one. I felt that by the end of the album the mood we’d created was actually a bit depressing, and the album was WAY TOO FUCKING LONG! If I recall correctly Stevø agreed. I was crest fallen, as was often the case in 1997, and made a running order on the train back to Brighton of how I thought the album should have gone:

1. I Will Be Your girlfriend

2. No More Talk

3. Inside

4. Polestar

5. Say The Worst Thing First

6. Cathedral Park

7. View From Here

8. My Start In Wallsend

9. Ghost

10. When You Say Goodbye

11. Let’s Go

And looking at Goodbye again today I still think this would have made for a far better album, a proper follow up to Disgraceful. But by then it was too late, and it’s certainly too late now. Oh well.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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: BROWNMOUTH aka IT'S CLEAR

Brownmouth is the last song that we recorded in my front room in Jesmond with me singing. Shortly after this recording was made I met Sarah for the first time in the Barley Mow pub in Newcastle and the story of The Joans became the story of Dubstar.

This song, like Wearchest before it, was written and recorded specifically for an appearance on the radio. It was a big deal, we’d managed to get a prime time interview with Metro FM legend Nicky Brown (as was usual around this time I’d blagged this for us because I knew Nicky’s producer Jim Brown).

Unfortunately I don’t have recording of our interview but I can’t believe we actually told him the song was named Brownmouth in his honour.

Metro FM lineup from 1989, but which one’s Nicky? Clue: who does your eye linger on most in this pic…?

So how did Brownmouth end up on Goodbye as It’s Clear? As I’ve mentioned before, Goodbye was essentially a second pressing from the repertoire we had as The Joans plus a few new songs I’d written specially. Consequently we recorded a demo of Brownmouth with Sarah singing at Jacob’s studio in Surrey, and as everything we put forward for the second Dubstar album was released, it ended up on the album.

I’m not sure it should be on the album though, it’s very clearly a song from a different time with a mood that jars significantly between My Start In Wallsend and Ghost. But in this age of playlists and streaming you can skip right over it, so it’s no longer problem.

A couple of thoughts: I’m struck by how strongly my accent comes over in this recording, I have a feeling I might have been putting it on a little. It was clear (!) to me that when we came to record it with Sarah the lyric would have be adjusted for her accent. Plain sounds fine when the ‘a’ sound is stressed and open, like we do in the South. But with Sarah’s West Yorkshire accent the word sounds quite different, the ‘a’ becomes more like a longer version of the Swedish ‘ä’ and sounds like ‘air’ rather than ‘ay’. If you try it you’ll find a whole world of Northern England accents open up to you.

So I reworked the lyric and renamed the song. And inevitably I prefer Brownmouth, no act other than Dubstar can have song entitled Brownmouth.

And of all the piano versions of the Dubstar songs I recorded for Lost & Foundland, It’s Clear has a special place in my heart. I think this version throws a different light on an old friend, I love it.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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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BEBEL GILBERTO: Close to You - Steve Hillier version

Dubstar disintegrated twenty two years ago, way back in November of 2000.

There were ongoing problems, many personal, many professional, but the truth was the act never operated on all cylinders again after the completion of Goodbye. And as I’ve reflected previously, I do think the main contributor to this collapse was not living in the same city. It’s not just the physical place, although Newcastle upon Tyne is a very physical place. It’s the constant stream of shared experiences that brings any group of people together. It’s a family thing, whatever you do, you’re never going to be as close as when you all lived in the same house.

So by November 2000 Dubstar had no money, no label, no publisher, no producer, no songwriter and no future. It was over.

I’d unofficially left the act in the summer as I couldn’t stand the constant dramas anymore, but I’d retained the confidence of my publisher and, crucially, the management team were still with me. And so I began a decade’s worth of international work with the Umbrella Group mainly as a songwriter but also a producer and in this case, remixer.

Bebel Gilberto is the daughter of João Gilberto and stepdaughter of Astrud Gilberto, whose classic ‘A Certain Sadness’ we had covered for the Not So Manic Now single. Knowing I was a huge fan, Tommy Manzi put me in the frame for reworking her song Close To You for her new remix collection. It was originally an album closer, clearly not for the dance floor. But gentle remixes can be exactly my kind of thing, so I took the original vocal and replaced the entire arrangement with guitars (Martin acoustics which I’d got in for the Landon Pigg sessions) played through an incredible Neumann mic I borrowed from Cat Goscovitch. My friend Phil Bodger completed the mix (see you at Adrian Sherwood’s Phil!).

This remix is the result, not on YouTube until now. I think it works rather well, I particularly like the treated vocal created with automated pitch shifting effect I made in Apple’s Logic. It’s a sound I would return to on the United States of Being sessions that began a couple of years later. Have a great Friday!

Dubstar: SAY THE WORST THING FIRST demo

The first environment where I heard live music was at our local church, St Thomas More in Bexleyheath. I wasn’t much of a fan of church but I did enjoy the ‘folk Masses’, where enthusiasts would sing worship songs on acoustic guitars with unbridled enthusiasm. And beards, this was the 1970s.

Being Roman Catholic, many of these were Irish songs whose lyrics had been amended to fit the requirements of inclusion in a service. Naive and rarely pious, they had a melodic quality that I loved; they would come to have a huge impact on my songwriting.

In 1977 we moved from Abbey Wood to Welling, where I would spend the next twelve years. The local church was St Stephen’s… and in my teens I joined the folk group on bass and would plod along once a month, it was the first ever band I played in (I’ll talk about Stiletto Nightmare another time). There was one particular song that caught my ear…

I Watch The Sunrise was a favourite at St Stephen’s and St Thomas More’s in Eltham where my cousins went to school. The melody is extraordinary, ebbs and flows perfectly and the lyric is simple and sincere unlike those dreadful Victorian hymns we sung at school (To Be a Pilgrim? Do you mind if I don’t?). It turned out I Watch The Sunrise wasn’t a traditional song but a modern composition. I discovered it was written by local priest Father John Glynn, a dark-haired and rather quiet man, the youngest we would see onstage every a Sunday. He was the first songwriter I’d ever met; I’d watched him play the guitar at Mass and thought nothing much of it, man playing guitar is not that interesting after all. But he writes songs, and he wrote THIS song? That blew my mind. I wanted to do that. A few years later I would.

St Stephen’s Parish Church in Welling, South London sometime in the 1970s

So what does this have to do Dubstar? I accidentally incorporated I Watch The Sunrise into the Dubstar song Say the Worst Thing First. I didn’t realise this until a friend John C Scott, who’d also had a Catholic upbringing, spotted it and asked if this was intentional. It wasn’t, I was a little stunned and a touch embarrassed. Was this going to be a problem?

On reflection, the two songs are not that close, but the melodic leap in the choruses are very similar, as is the overall vibe. I suppose the songs you’re exposed to as a child never leave you, and if you write music they can’t help but surface in your work from time to time. Thanks Father John, hope you’re doing ok.

Meanwhile in 1996…

I broke up with my girlfriend after Dubstar headlined the NME tent at Reading Festival in 1996. I spent the next day wandering around Pink Lane, alternating between the The Forth Hotel bar and our studio in the Arts Centre trying to work out what on earth I was going to do next (a familiar feeling). On that long day drinking Guinness in the Forth Hotel I made a decision. Inspired by Ewan McGregor’s monologue in Trainspotting, I decided I would choose life… I chose to be happy rather than be a suffering artist. I chose that I wouldn’t feel this bereft, that I wouldn’t be such a failure at relationships ever again. Next time would be the right time, next time would be the last time.

Forth Hotel 1995, image from Newcastle City Council Library

But like St Augustine before me, I had to do a little more suffering first.

I hadn’t appreciated until many years later how privileged I’d been in this moment. A broken hearted songwriter splits from long term partner and gets to metaphorically open his heart in songs that will be heard by thousands of people across the world. There are worse ways to recover from the end of a relationship, but few more self indulgent. I don’t regret writing this song, but I know I couldn’t write something like this now. It’s profoundly unfair. It overlooks the other person’s position in the situation in order to express your own pain.

So I wouldn’t be comfortable doing this in 2020, but I am torn. Isn’t this self indulgence exactly how artists have behaved thorugh the ages, landing themselves in the middle of a situation involving loved ones…and then telling their own audience how they feel about it? I suppose a writer has to decide what’s more important, their art or their life. I chose the latter.

I love everything about this song except the version on Goodbye. I had too many things going on in the arrangement, like a collision of a hundred ideas for what should have been a stripped back ‘dagger through the heart’ Dubstar song. Hopefully the piano version addresses this. Still, the bridge with the instrumental mandolins, a reference to For Ever and Ever by Demis Roussos, is my favourite moment on the whole album.

This article includes excerpts from DUBSTAR.COM. 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

BRIGHTON CASSETTE CLUB - The Remix Tapes - DUBSTAR's 'Elevator Song'

On this day twenty six years ago, Elevator Song, a song I wrote in 1987 while still at school, became Dubstar’s fifth UK Top 40 hit in a row.

To mark the anniversary of the event, I’m excited to announce the second instalment of the BRIGHTON CASSETTE CLUB Remix Tapes, a collection of reworkings of some of our favourite songs.

So here is Elevator Song from an alternative reality, the same song but as if it had somehow been written and recorded in 2022. It’s a privilege to be able to breath new life into work from so very long ago. I hope you enjoy it.

Dubstar: REDIRECTED MALE - Sarah Vocal

Redirected Male was one of the last songs written during the long and drawn out writing phase for Make It Better. I’d been living in Brighton (Hove actually) for nearly two years at this point, and although I’d settled in I still felt like I was living in self imposed exile from Newcastle Upon Tyne. Brighton was my home, yet I was constantly pulled back to my previous life in the North by remaining in regular contact with everyone I knew up there. It was difficult to move on, to say the least.

And that difficulty was the inspiration for Redirected Male. The feeling of having left everyone you know behind and existing in the halfway space between new and old lives.

That feeling of being stuck in sadness was not a new thing for me. I remember as a teenager dealing with the break up of a school romance and telling a good friend that it would be easier for me if ‘she’ had died rather than kept living without me. Our attempts to stay friends meant my heartbreak was drawn out over months, eventually a whole year. Eventually I arrived at the point where we had to break up a second time, this time ending the friendship too. Teenage romances are so intense aren’t they?

And so…Redirected Male is that moment when you know that you actually can’t be in touch with your ex, you can’t do this anymore.

So it’s Dubstar and heartbreak again, this time from the perspective of someone who’s moved out of their marital home. You’ve lost your relationship, your home, maybe your children too. How long until you lose your mind?

This song was written for Sarah as usual, you can hear her singing the entire song in this demo. But the wider public first heard Gary Numan duet with Sarah on the Self Same Thing EP, although they were never in the same room. Chris and I journeyed alone to Gary’s house in Essex in the freezing cold January of 2000 to make the vocal recordings. Gary is a very genial man as has been recorded in many other places, and when you’re with him there’s a strong sense of simply hanging out with a terrific chap from West London. But when he sings Gary Numan is in the room.

That was quite a moment, I made a note to send the ten year old Steve Hillier a message from the future. Steve Malins (Gary’s manager at the time) told me he’d never heard Gary sound like that before. I couldn’t have been prouder.

Of all the B-sides of this era, for me this one is the most successful. Things that sounded odd back in 2000 now sound awesome, like the incredible glassy sound of the Roland VG-8 on the guitar creating that faux 12 string guitar sound. It’s clearly artificial, it’s gorgeous.

Also, the half-time drum programming precedes the arrival of Dubstep by some years. I’m not saying the ‘steppers copied my drums on this song. That’s for others to say…

And by the way, the correct spelling of this song is Redirected Male, not Mail. It was a reference to the subject of the song being an estranged man, a rather obvious play on words but at this late stage in the Dubstar story I think I got away with it.

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

BRIGHTON CASSETTE CLUB - The Remix Tapes

I’m excited and proud to announce the first instalment of the BRIGHTON CASSETTE CLUB Remix Tapes, a collection of reworkings of some of our favourite songs.

These are not remixes made for the dance floor, but re-imaginings of beautiful songs in a new frame. They answer the question ‘how would it have sounded if that singer had sung that song with us?’.

The first instalment is AURORA’s sublime Exist For Love, reclaimed from the lockdowns of 2020 and placed in a new alluring dream pop context. We hope you enjoy it.

Aurora Aksnes

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

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: Leaving in the Morning DEMO

Leaving in the Morning was the last song Dubstar recorded in the Food/EMI era. The act was dropped from the roster a few weeks later.

Which leaves the song as an intriguing place holder: Does it point towards what we might have done next, a bright new future in the new DIY millennium? Or is it the sound of an act finally relaxing after seven years of madness knowing that there’s nothing left to play for?

With hindsight we know it’s the latter, the three of us would not work together as Dubstar again for six years, Sarah went off to front Client and I went off to write songs in Scandinavia. But I do attribute my enthusiasm for reforming the act to the sonic success of this song. I felt it showed that there was more for Dubstar to say, there could be a role for the act in the 2000s. A strong role too. And of course this nagging thought led to the recording of two complete (and as yet unreleased) albums worth of material.

Like many of the songs of the late Dubstar era, I didn’t actually write Leaving in the Morning for the act and I think you can tell. Instead it was written for a superb singer from Croydon called Jo Morgan who I’d been working with over the summer. Firstly, the subject of the lyric is a character, a third party (‘She’) and not a first hand account (‘I’) which is something you won’t find in any other Dubstar song.

Secondly, it’s written to be danced to unlike most other Dubstar songs and thirdly there’s no real chorus, which was pretty bold in 2000.

Despite this Leaving in the Morning clearly has attributes of classic Dubstar songs. There’s that sense of loss… the lyrical point of the song is that the man won’t ever ‘have’ the woman or even see her again, she’ll be leaving in the morning. She’s her own person, a reference that goes right back to where we began.

Curiously there’s another version of Leaving in the Morning that escaped into the wild twenty years ago. I can’t find it here but I seem to remember I put up a ‘work in progress’ version of the song on the original Dubstar Myspace I set up as a monument to the act, and of course it proliferated from there.

This is the version that was submitted to Food/EMI. It’s a bit ragged round the edges but it sounds pretty good turned up loud, something for the weekend. I think it’s great, I hope you enjoy it too.

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: The last hit: I (Friday Night)

It’s Friday morning, my second favourite time. And thinking back, on this day in 2000 Dubstar returned to the UK Top 40 for the last time after a more than two years absence with ‘I (Friday Night)’. IFN, the final Dubstar single, landed at number thirty seven and would be the last time the act would make the charts.

All three members of Dubstar have visited the UK Top 40 since (I had a career high with my highest placing ever last summer and I didn’t know anything about it until Christmas, a funny story…), but May 27th 2000 was the curtain call for Dubstar and hit records.

Until 2011 chart placings were released on a Sunday, and often the first time an artist would know their number was when it was announced on BBC Radio 1’s Chart Show, ‘the only chart that counts’.

I clearly remember receiving the chart news for IFN. Another sunny day in Hove, I was in my kitchen overlooking the Victorian Square where we lived with a sweeping view of the sea. Thirty seven was not a high charting, one of our lowest, but my dominant feeling was one of relief. It had been more than a year since completing Make It Better and Dubstar was a distant memory by this point. But being back in the charts, if only just, meant we were still in the game, there was still something to play for.

We went out to our local pub The Cooper’s Cask and had a couple of pints. I reminisced of other times a song I had worked on had hit the charts. The very first was in 1987, when True Faith by New Order reached number four. This was a huge result for the band and an amazing result for Pinnacle Records where I worked on the sales team. My role was to sell in new releases to retailers including True Faith, although I joined right at the end of the campaign and to be honest this record was selling itself. Factory Records was the focus for Pinnacle at that point having recently lost Beggars Group, so breaking the top five was an amazing moment for everyone. My first week of my first job after ‘leaving’ school and my first experience of a hit.

The second time was when Kylie Minogue hit number one with ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. We’d worked this song at Pinnacle from the then unknown Kylie Min-ogg-oo (no one knew how to pronounce her name) for weeks. I’d played a particularly good hand getting this PWL single into the shops in the west country, my sales area, by telling the buyers that Kylie was the stripper in the popular soap opera Neighbours. She was actually the car mechanic, but the singles buyer at HMV Bristol had asked me if she was the stripper…I didn’t know, so I said ‘yes’ sheepishly hoping I was correct. They were well pleased, so I used that guess in every other shop. Sorry Kylie, but it worked.

I heard the news that I Should Be So Lucky had charted at my girlfriend’s parent house in Northumberland, but rather than return to London to get to work on the biggest record Pinnacle ever had, I stayed up north for an extra day.

When I returned to Orpington I was firmly marched into the sales director’s office and sacked, one of the most important moments of my career. I was shocked and gutted and nineteen. Next stop was working the tills at Our Price in Bexleyheath. Not quite the same…

Then Stars charted in 1995. My (then different) girlfriend and I took a bottle of champagne into our backyard in Jesmond and toasted this fantastic success. It was a grey day on Tyneside, but there was a real sense of sunshine for Dubstar. This was important. there was everything to play for.

Funnily enough, I don’t have strong memories of Stars, Manic or No More Talk hitting the Top twenty but I remember Cathedral Park. Gregg, one of my flatmates on Waterloo Street in Hove came into my room early on the Sunday before Cathedral Park was released. Diana Princess of Wales was dead, killed in a car crash in Paris, it was all over the news, come downstairs and watch. So I did. I was shocked.

But my biggest fear was Cathedral Park would be taken off the playlists. It was the jolliest song Dubstar had released and had no place on the radio when the country was in mourning. I remembered how during the Iraq War how songs by Massive Attack and Bomb the Bass had been cancelled (I actually have a copy of Blue Lines where the band name is simply ‘Massive’). Would Cathedral Park meet the same fate? Answer: Yes.

The chart show was on, another grey Sunday. As the countdown counted through the lower placings I had a temporary sense of relief, maybe Cathedral Park would be ok after all? Maybe, somehow, it had made the top thirty? Top twenty? Er…top ten? By the time we reached number fifteen I rang Andy Ross who I knew would have the magic number. Forty one. The only Dubstar release to miss the UK Top 40.

Twenty Two Years later…

I’ve never been happy with the Dubstar version of I (Friday Night), it felt like the formula hadn’t worked on this occasion. What formula? Almost every Dubstar record was a slow or mid tempo song that was sped up for the dance floor. You can hear this clearly on Anywhere, Elevator, Stars, Manic, St Swithins, No More Talk, Cathedral Park…all the Dubstar singles.

With IFN the formula didn’t work. The arrangement feels self conscious to my ears, the vocal wasn’t right. There’s no real middle eight, it sounds to me like I stopped writing the lyric half way through.

And in a tiny echo of Cathedral Park, last night I heard the tragic news of the death of Andrew ‘Fletch’ Fletcher from Depeche Mode. It reminded me that life is short, it’s later than you think. So I returned from the pub and recorded this new instrumental version of IFN, in some small way to complete the job I started way back in 1998. I think it turned out well, I hope you enjoy it.

More from the Dubstar archive on my return from Distortion

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: The first new Dubstar song in more than a decade!

By the Spring of 2012 the second version of United States of Being was complete. I’d finished the mixes at my place in Brighton and with the help of renowned mix engineer Phil Bodger at his room at The Levellers’ studio Metway. Musically we were set. What was required now was a ‘route to market’, a way of reigniting the Dubstar brand after more than a decade of slumber. 

We had an opportunity to put out a new tune in limited release format for Record Store Day 2012. It was clear that we shouldn’t release any of the United States of Being material until we had a real marketing plan in place, but maybe this would be alright? It had to be completed quickly, and unusually Sarah had a lyric that she could send me, a new song called Innsbruck.

CIRCLE TURNS

She sent me a vocal take recorded on an old phone, and it was rather good. It had been eighteen years since we’d last collaborated like this on Just A Girl She Said, and again Innsbruck was more of a poem than a song lyric. But there was certainly enough there to work with. And although I really-really-really didn’t want to prejudice the impact of the new Dubstar material, the opportunity hit me exactly in my sweet spot: write a new song and get it out there immediately. My songwriter head took over and it told me to ‘say yes to everything’.

So I sat down at the Yamaha CP-70B and busked out a chord sequence to Sarah’s voicemail. It was the usual approach, unusual parallel modes mixed with plaintive harmony, the signature Dubstar sound. This tune wasn’t going to be a pop smash, it struck me it was more of a slow Tone Poem, so using dreamy sounds and an ambient approach made sense. 

My old top-floor writing room in Brighton 2012

As usual I was completely alone making Circle Turns. I reused a whole load of the choir sounds that I’d made with Sarah’s voice during the recording of Gemini, these could be the bedrock of the earlier section of the song. 

Chris was up on Tyneside, so I reused his playing from an entirely different song from the United States of Being sessions. The guitars you can hear on the finished Circle Turns are all slowed and pitched down from their original tempo, again adding to the dreamy feel of the piece. 

I had this idea to make the poor quality of the vocal recording sound intentional, like an astronaut’s voice from the Apollo mission beaming in from outer space. I put a Quindar bleep at the end of each space phrase to signify its out of the world nature (I discovered later that year that Spiritualized had beaten me to that idea, damn). Then I mixed it up with some unaffected vocal samples for contrast and an extra psychedelic feel. You can hear the raw phone vocal right at the end of the tune, like an astronaut finally exiting the return module.

Finally the bass is my Roland SH-101, then my Fender Precision Bass for the latter bass part. And there’s a nice Analogue Solutions Telemark playing the lead melody. Love that synth.

ON REFLECTION

So Circle Turns was released, sold out its thirty copies and disappeared exactly as I expected. It was the first new Dubstar song in over a decade, and then it was gone. 

But a few months later Youtuber Tokyoskyline made a superb video out of old Dubstar TV appearances…it worked brilliantly and has given the song a nice life on Youtube. Twelve thousand plays isn’t bad at all, maybe there is life in the old girl after all?

Circle Turns has the United States of Being widescreen drama and sound. And there’s that unique detachedness of Sarah’s vocals that we hadn’t heard since Just A Girl. There’s a clear connection between the two songs despite nearly a generation passing between them. Both are Sarah’s words and melody with one of my florid chord sequences retro-fitted underneath, and both are in 6:8, the best time signature of them all. 

It was a rather magical combination.

So how do I feel about the Circle Turns release now? On the one hand the concerns I had about relaunching the act without a plan still feel well founded. On the other hand, you could argue that with the sheer volume of new music released everyday it hardly mattered if you didn’t make a splash, it was almost impossible. No act can create one, musicians simply aren’t as famous now. 

Maybe the lesson of Circle Turns is that we all should simply do what we want and enjoy ourselves? The music sounds better that way after all.

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: Stars by The Joans - the original demo

The Joans: Chris Wilkie, Steve Hillier and Gavin Lee

So in 1993 The Joans became me and Chris again. I’d put together an album called Gear (with artwork by the amazing Adrian Nitsch) which was intended to be a promotional item on the North East gig circuit. I was told you weren’t taken seriously unless you put out an album, so this was ours. It had early versions of Disgraceful, popDorian, Not once Not Ever and Not So Fast On It (plus The Gender We Lose which I revived for the Lost and Foundland series). We had few reviews, with one slating us: ‘The Joans have no idea of who they are what they want to be…’ Devastating, largely because it was correct. Truth hurts.

Gear had included a few terrific pop songs and long weird electronic vignettes, not dissimilar to those I made for the Disgraceful Remix album, just nowhere near as good. I think these had confused everyone, time for a rethink. This sincere crushing blow actually kick-started the process of getting the act together again.

STARS Parts 1-2-3

It was 1993 and I was loving the work of Andrew Weatherall. I’d played out Loaded every Wednesday night for a couple of years, it was a Walkers Nightclub anthem and his mix of My Bloody Valentine’s Soon was already one of my favourite records. But he put out two records in 1993 that blew me away: One Dove’s Morning Dove White* and the Sabres of Paradise mix of Conquistador by Espiritu**. These two records were like a spotlight being shone on a previously unseen path, a way out of the forest. 

I decided we should make a demo of Stars Go Out, one of the songs that didn’t make it onto Gear. We should do it in a proper recording studio too, and make a long dub version of it, Weatherall style, somewhere between Morning Dove White and Conquistador. That was the future!

So one Saturday morning in April 1993 I drove us down to Middlesbrough in my Yugo to record in a studio whose name is now lost to time. We would be there all day with one objective: record and mix a fourteen minute version of Stars, where the first three minutes was exactly as we played it live so I could edit the rest out to send to venues to get gigs. One recording, two uses. Clever stuff.

The result is what you hear on this video. There are three big samples that couldn’t make it onto the Dubstar version of Stars. There’s a big chunk of the end of Pepper Tree by Cocteau Twins that ends every chorus, the drum solo from Time to get Ill by Beastie Boys playing backwards…and the Waiting for The Night synthesizer riff by Depeche Mode which rolls all the way through the last four minutes. That Depeche Mode snippet in particular does sound fine…but too expensive to include on a commercial release and not strictly necessary. Thanks Graeme. 

And thinking about it this morning, those three samples summarise rather well what The Joans was about to become. DUBSTAR: the textures of Cocteau’s infused Dreampop, Hip Hop beats with melancholy electronic instrumentation and lyrics. Nice.

What happened next?

Stars worked, Chris and I got a lot more gigs, there was talk of co-headling on a national tour with two other local bands. I was doing a fair amount of radio presenting too. And thinking back now, we probably could have continued like this for years, doing a lot on the North Eastern music scene, always being on the cusp of something but never quite taking off. It happens to a lot of acts, and my attitude wasn’t helping.

The Joans at The Free Trade Inn, Newcastle upon Tyne

I tend to get distracted easily. Oh yes, I was passionate about getting on with music, but I also took every radio show going, every gig going, every journalist commision, every DJ residency (which continued even after the act was signed, I made more money from DJing in the first couple of years of Dubstar than I did from Dubstar itself!). I also have a habit of falling deeply in love with new records and going off at tangents musically. That reviewer was right, The Joans didn’t know who they were or where they going, and it was my fault. We had so much potential, some exceptional songs, but we were flailing around like a Catherine Wheel that’s come off its pole. 

SUMMERTIME IN JESMOND

It was a sunny Monday afternoon in July 1993. Danilo Moscardini had popped round to my flat in Jesmond. We had known each other for years, not well, but well enough for him to come over. I think I knew his sister first…

He was telling me about a singer he’d been working with, I would later discover she was also his girlfriend. He was pretty excited, I think he was intending to stop singing (he’d had a band called The Songs who’d done the rounds in Newcastle for a while) and have her take over. Or maybe start something new, I’m not sure. Danilo was a little older than me, maybe being an unknown singer in your mid twenties in Newcastle maybe felt a little..like a dead end?  We had the usual cup of tea and then he went off to meet his friend Roger Newbrook at the Carlton Hotel bar at the top of my road.

Next came the most important moment in my entire music career. 

Danilo had been gone for about ten minutes before I realised he’d left the cassette he’d been intending to give to Roger on the table in my lounge. I played it.

There were two songs, ‘She’s Still Sad’ and ‘Dreaming of Going Away’. Both were good but I wasn’t interested in the songs, I was focussing on the singer. She sounded amazing, the purest voice I’d ever heard and with a distinct indie-folk vibe. Like one of those amazing vocalists on the This Mortal Coil albums I adored. And she sang with no vibrato. None, like a female Julian Cope. She sounded amazing. I was blown away, again.

I rang Chris and played She’s Still Sad down the phone to him and I told him that I wanted this person to join The Joans and that I was going off to the pub get her number. I wasn’t thinking of stopping singing, more a kind of extra vocalist, like in the Pixies or something. Chris didn’t seem into this at all, and to be fair I don’t blame him. I was saying I wanted to scrap everything we’d done for nearly two years and start again, this time with a girl, on the strength of a cassette I’d just heard and a person I’d never met. 

But at that moment I was extremely excited. I would have been ecstatic if I’d have known that in nine months time and as a direct consequence of this accident Food Records would want to sign The Joans. In the very same room that Danilo had left his cassette. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I still had to meet this singer, and before that I had to convince Danilo he should give me her phone number.

To the pub!

NEXT TIME:

How many versions of Elevator Song can anyone need? Does it matter if you get your nose pierced hours before your debut appearance? And why can’t we stop drinking?

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: Stars - The Missing Video UPDATE

Following my blogpost yesterday I’ve had half a dozen Dubstar fans contact me to let me know that the missing Stars video is not in fact missing, but alive and well on Vimeo.

So I’m ecstatically happy to provide it here and eternally grateful to the ongoing help from everyone to locate items in the internet that I can’t find. Please have a Negroni on me this weekend. Or a pint, it’s up to you.

Dubstar - Stars from tegrovi on Vimeo.

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