Dubstar: Not So Fast

May 03, 2024 / steve hillier

Not So Fast is a song that Dubstar recorded for Volume Magazine at the height of our chart success. It was originally included on The Joan’s cassette album Gear and forgotten, but we were pushed for time between tours. So I took a weekend off to re-record NSF and upgrade the arrangement for an international release. It was raining.

Volume was a superb publication. Each edition came as two components, a full-colour magazine in the shape of a CD insert and the CD itself, packed with exclusive material from the latest and greatest alternative music acts. I was a big fan before Dubstar’s appearance in the July 1996 edition and I think we were all very pleased to be included, I know I was.

Sarah gave an interview for the Copulation Explosion edition from the tour bus in Italy. This was our first pan-European tour in the spring of 1996. I think it’s clear that we were struggling with the travelling and the journalist was struggling with what to make of us. Still, Sarah’s jovial demeanour comes over well, so I’ve reproduced the whole piece here.

A detail from this tour: This was the early days of mobile international calls, we discovered after a few days that when anyone rang our cellphones it would be us who would be charged for the call! The deal was that because the dialler wouldn’t know they were calling a number abroad in Italy, Germany, France or wherever, the contract holder would pay for the international component of the call. Which was incredibly expensive.

Also, there was a limit to how much you could spend on your phone before you were cutoff! By this point I was known as ‘The Bank of Hillier’ as I wasn’t particularly troubled by international travel, was taking everything in my stride and always seemed to have enough money on me for any eventuality (plus ça change eh?!). I was the only person on this tour with a working credit card and smiling. But Chris and Sarah were taking long consolatory phone calls from home every day, racking up enormous bills…and then were cut off with weeks of the tour left! This happened doubly quickly for Sarah as she was also doing interviews.

There was panic on the streets of Torino, Reggio Emilia, Milano…

DUBSTAR: THEY HAVEN’T A CLUE WHERE THEY ARE

The telephone number l've just dialled is very long. When I ask the woman on the other end of the line which country the code belongs to, she answers, surreally, "I've got no idea where we are”

(Dub) star date mid-1996. Vocalist Sarah Blackwood is on the other end of the line, somewhere in the middle of Dubstar's first European tour. And the answer to my first enquiry hasn't elicited the expected response. "It's a bit disorientating, all this travelling round on a bus. Oh, I've just been told we're in Turin. We're just about to soundcheck."

How, for a band who six months ago were terrified of playing live, has the tour gone so far?

"It's been cool," she replies in a thick West Yorkshire accent. "Last night we had some guy doing backflips around the venue for the whole of our set, so I think he enjoyed it. Munich was a bit weird though, we made the mistake of going to the beer festival before we played. We enjoyed the gig, but God knows how it sounded.” [It was terrible]

"No idea where we are," is a neat metaphor for the meteoric and head-spinning rise of Dubstar. It

was early 1994 when Sarah joined up with two Newcastle musicians, Steve Hillier and Chris Wilkie who'd spent three years traversing planet nowhere under the moniker The Joans. By November that year the newly christened Dubstar had signed to EMI subsidiary Food, also the home of Blur. The debut album Disgraceful was recorded in January '95. The first single, 'Stars' (later re-released, was unleashed on an unsuspecting but receptive public in June last year.

Swigging beer in front of a wild Turin audience is pretty far removed from serving beer at a bar in downtown Newcastle, as Sarah had been doing the day Dubstar signed their contract.

"I haven't had time to stand back and think about it properly," she says. "I guess we might have time to reflect on it all when this tour is over."

Do the band now get hassled as a result of their new-found fame when they head off down their local for a quiet pint? "To be honest we've been working so much that none of us have been at home for more than a couple of days this year. Last time I had a day off I went to the supermarket with my boyfriend and we popped into the pub on the way home, you know, just for a quick pint.

“Ten pints later I had three bags of no longer frozen shopping and some guy sidling up asking if we were playing in town that night. He was quite sweet about it, but to be honest most people don’t recognise me without me false eyelashes on”

Much has been made of the contradiction at work in Dubstar songs. On the one hand they produce glorious, sweeping pop symphonies that bring a smile to your face, invoking images of walks in the park on summer afternoons. On the other, you feel guilty for being so happy when the lyrical content of most of their numbers is, well, pretty serious. It’s something that sets Dubstar apart from most of their hedonistic, Thatcher’s children contemporaries.

“It’s nice to be different” says Sarah. “It’s a bit of a waste of time if you don’t say something interesting and thought provoking when you’ve go tthe opportunity. A lot of pop music has happy, happy lyrics with no substance, and it’s so bland.”

With a such a well-documented conscience, are Dubstar going to get behind any party in the lead up to a General Election?

"I wouldn't do that personally… I'm not interested in politics at the minute and I don't think I could align myself to anyone who's around right now. The world is so crap, it's pathetic - politicians never get anything done. I think Rock The Vote its a good thing. But at the same time no one really wants to be told how to vote by Martin Rossiter, do they...?"

Dubstar's short but bright career seems to have been plagued by comparisons and pigeon-holing. It's an occupational hazard. They seem to be making the best of both worlds, being either an antidote to, or part of, the Britpop scene, depending on who's asking. Perhaps as a way of distancing themselves from genres, they always release dance mixes.

"I really like the ‘Stars' mixes,” says Sarah.

"Steve loves remixes, Chris hates them. I just like trying something different, but it does depend on who does them. We'd all love William Orbit to play around with some of our stuff, but sadly we haven't been able to get that together yet." Some people are of the opinion that you're part of the trip-hop scene?

"Nah, that's crap. The only comparison I can see between us and Portishead is that we've both got a girl sounding miserable. That's it.”

This summer Dubstar might have the time and space to reflect on their helter-skelter year,

'Elevator Song' (Food supremo Andy Ross said it would be a worldwide number one when he first heard it) is the fourth single from the album. In another year's time Sarah and her fellow Dubstars should know exactly where they are - being mobbed in supermarkets for being the brightest lights in the galaxy probably.

Dubstar - Disgraceful call out

Sparkling debut that whipped up a bit of controversy due to the vagina-like pencil case on the sleeve (it was later changed). Stephen Hague's hallmark pop beauty production marries

Blackwood's sublime vocals and the guitar-synth axis of Hillier and Wilkie. 'Not So Manic Now', which gave the band their Top Of The Pops debut was typical Dubstar (even though it's a cover) - a mainstream pop toon, juxtaposed with the story of a pensioner being mugged in her own high-rise flat. Stupendous.

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THINKING BACK NOW

I wish I’d had a chance to write and include a better song for Volume. However, Not So Fast was chosen because it seemed to fit the stoner aesthetic that Volume was projecting. And NSF is a decent enough song, a significant nod to our Shoegaze roots and certainly added something to the Dubstar legacy.

More interesting for me is listening to The Joans version and recalling the thought processes behind it. Originally Not So Fast sounded like a traditional song, but the DAT cassette that it was recorded onto broke, so we were left with this rather mangled sound you can hear in the video above. Rather than abandon the song, I tried to rescue it. This strange dub version owes a huge amount to His Name is Alive, Warren Defever’s act that I was obsessed with in the early 1990s. I’m not sure NSF is entirely successful, but that wasn’t the point. Gear was a means of promoting The Joans, getting us local media coverage (it did, no one liked it) and more gigs. The fact that Gear was a mad combination of beats, ambient pieces and what would later become classic Dubstar songs is a testament to the ‘anything goes’ music scene in Newcastle in the early 1990s.

More successful is The Gender We Lose, a piano piece I wrote as an Easter Egg for anyone who’d persevered through the rest of the cassette and needed some melody. I wrote TGWL on my piano in Jesmond but couldn’t record it with microphones. Instead, what you can hear is my Roland W-30 sampler recorded live onto my Tascam Four Track cassette recorder with one overdub. It’s pleasant enough, and I revisited it nearly thirty years later on the first Dubstar: Lost and Foundland album in the pandemic.

I’m fond of Not So Fast for nostalgia. This is the sound of the early 1990s for me, a snapshot of a specific time. The rainy streets of Jesmond, the many stoned nights in Manor House Road (the Dubstar style heavy drinking, as referenced in the interview would come later), and the first wave of Shoegaze. A style I adore to this day.

One last thing: Andy Ross, the man who signed Dubstar and ran Food Records, was also the man who invented the term Shoegaze. True story.

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: IN MY DEFENCE 2013 VERSION

April 05, 2024 / steve hillier

In My Defence would have been a bonus track to go with the release of the second attempt at United States of Being. But why include (what was then) a seventeen-year-old song on a comeback album? So many questions, let’s start here…

At what point can a songwriter be satisfied that a song is fully realised? At what point can she walk away from the computer and throw off the remaining expectations for a song to magically come to life?

I don’t know, I haven’t worked it out. Some of my students never do. These are the most passionate new minds in the world of music, first-year undergraduate students. They’ve jumped through all sorts of hoops because music is the life for them, they aced their A levels to fulfil their dream: to become successful musicians. But they quickly discover that the biggest barrier to success isn’t experience, study, practice or even talent, it’s completion:

nothing happens until you finish the song

If you don’t work in the creative world seems mad to spend days, even weeks working on a piece of music only to abandon it. Yet this happens all the time. Years back, I assumed that whenever a tune was released, that would be it, we’d all relax and move on. The reality is that if a song is any good you never let go. In Dubstar, we often joked on the tour bus about the number of remixes Food Records would commission for every single. ‘So what do we sound like this week?’. We were amused but there was also a sense of never being able to escape.

Maybe Paul Valéry was right, a work of art is never completed, merely abandoned. Or given a Speed Garage makeover.

A walk in the park?

I’ll save you from the details as I’ve written about this before, but the B-sides to Cathedral Park were written and recorded in a period of extreme flux. On the one hand, I was excited about landing in a new city. There were parties, there was money and theoretically I was having the time of my life. But the experience of leaving Newcastle had left an indelible scar, I was deeply in mourning for the life I’d left behind. This was not an easy time to be writing, and a very difficult time to be recording. And in the middle of the maddest time of my life, the songs for Cathedral Park were written in a week in May 1997 and recorded in a couple of afternoons. They would be released a few months later. Job done? Maybe…There would be no new B-sides from Dubstar for three years.

My first laptop, the Apple Mac PowerBook 5300cs. Still works today, but you wouldn’t bother

By 2013, my world was very different. Brighton was my home, I was married, settled and I’d moved on from those troubled times, both personally and musically. But a nagging itch remained: some of our releases were obviously undercooked and deserved another look. Despite having produced dozens of songs in the 1990s, by the 2010s it was clear to me that I had been under-experienced in the skill. Where I’d dedicated my focus to writing and performing, many of my contemporaries had studied the art of audio engineering, production and mixing. In my arrogance I assumed I could equal their prowess simply by being the first person in Jesmond to own a laptop. I’m pretty sure the VIZ boys had one before me too.

2013

When Circle Turns was released on Record Store Day 2013 and USOB was completed, I grasped the opportunity to revisit some of the songs I felt needed more time in the oven. In My Defence was the first ( but this wasn’t the first time I’d taken a second look at old songs. My frustration at how the Make It Better album had turned out led me to rearrange a handful of the songs that hadn’t made it onto the album (I Lost A Friend being a prime example)).

The connection between the two songs was clear to me. Circle Turns had a very dreamy, ambient feel to it, mainly because there wasn’t much of a song to work with beyond Sarah’s poem… this left a lot of space to fill. In My Defence had also started as a poem. The original version had a large amount of space in it too, probably more than any other fully arranged Dubstar song. I’d removed my original chord sequence and wrote a Jacquard weave of looping string lines that had created an intriguingly dour mood that suited the song. But in the cold light of day, wow… did it feel bleak! Sad and bleak are not the same, melancholic and depressing are not the same. The skill is knowing which is which, and which is best.

I thought I’d be lucky and find a DAT cassette of the parts from the Roland VS-880 hard disk recorder that had been used on the original B-side recording. No such luck, but I did find some bits and pieces of those sessions on a Minidisk which I reassembled in Logic. And so sixteen years after its initial release and a further eleven since the update, this is the definitive version of In My Defence.

THINKING BACK NOW

In My Defence is another in the long-established tradition of Dubstar songs, where the period between writing and completing is years and years and years. Too many songs, too many options or too lazy? Only you can decide.

But the more interesting question is not ‘why return to these songs?’, but ‘what took you so long?!’.

Well, for me it only made sense to take another look when I thought that the results would get out into the world. The gestation of the two USOB albums had taken so long, seven years, but we were finally (finally!) playing live regularly and there was a good chance these songs would arrive with their intended audience.

Also, by 2013 it had become difficult for the three of us to get into the same room to record or even discuss what was going on with the act. There was no appetite among the other two to record more music, so that meant I had an opportunity to revisit songs instead (much like when we recorded the acoustic versions of Stars, Elevator Song and Not Once Not Ever twenty years earlier). It felt like a bit of a letdown to me to revisit songs from the 1990s in the 2010s, but now we’re almost halfway through the 2020s I’m glad I did it. Very glad.

Hang on though, what’s this chunk of Robert Miles’ ‘Children’ doing in the middle of In My Defence? When I wrote IMD in my bedroom with a bath in it on Waterloo Street, I realised that the piano line from Children could be played over the arrangement and fit very well, much like St Swithin’s Day sounded great over the Dub Hip-Hop groove I’d put together four years earlier. Wow, why not include that piano line, how bold would that be?

But sadly I decided not to because I didn’t want to distract from the core message of the song with a reference to a different, much bigger international hit. I don’t think my publisher would have liked it either! Roberto Concina (Robert Miles) sadly died in 2017, and in some minor way, I like to think of this song as a tribute to him and his fantastic music.

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: THE PERFECT SMILE

March 01, 2024 / steve hillier

In the Dubstar Archive I’ve been focussing on releasing new songs and have shied away from sharing the many different versions of songs you’ve already heard. We had enough remixes in the 1990s after all, so… we’ll get to the alternative versions another time, maybe 2026? Right now I’m concentrating on previously unheard songs that I think will be interesting to listeners. Sometimes I’ll put up a song to highlight something that might not already be known about Dubstar, such as there were two cover versions we put forward for Amnesty International. This is why we’ve had a dozen songs from United States of Being recently, but The Perfect Smile is different. It's a song that spans two unreleased recording eras: The Dubstar Ep from 2000 and the United States of Being sessions. So what's the story?

One of the keyboard racks in my music room in Hove, September 2000

THE PERFECT SMILE

I wrote The Perfect Smile as a song that might help Dubstar to remain signed to EMI in 2000. I've discussed this situation before, it was so strange. Much like today, although I’d already stopped working with Chris and Sarah, effectively bringing Dubstar to an end, I was still getting calls from the music industry for updates on the act and more material. So… I wrote and recorded a handful of new songs and threw in a cover, much like on Disgraceful, Goodbye and Make It Better. The typical Dubstar situation.

Despite this and after the meagre sales of Make It Better, Dubstar was dropped in November 2000. We would never have a record deal again and the six Dubstar EP songs were forgotten. Until…

Ten years later. Dubstar had reformed in 2006 and fallen apart in 2008 when it emerged that Sarah hadn’t told her musical partners in Client that she was working with Chris and me. That seemed like it was the definitive end to the act, but a year later there was a change of heart. We resumed work as Dubstar at Sarah’s behest (I’ll expand on what Chris and I got up to in the downtime another time). By late 2009 I’d already moved on musically from the songs I’d written and recorded for our first comeback; a change of pace was afoot, let’s go faster! You can already hear this mood change on Don’t Ask. My approach had become much more upbeat, even dance-floor-orientated for once. it could put Dubstar back on the map.

I learned Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator during the many days waiting around during the recording of Goodbye. Here’s an idea I had for a new Dubstar logo to accompany the proposed release of the Dubstar EP.

This also led to the recording of one of my faves from this era. Sister was a departure from the sound we’d had two years earlier, much faster, even rockier…it sounded a lot like electro New Wave, somehow a hybrid of Ultravox, The Cardigans and Dubstar. It worked, brilliantly.

Following its sonic success I decided to revisit some older unreleased songs to see if any other gems could be rekindled in the same way. The answer was yes…The Perfect Smile had a half-time RnB feel (and was called In Your Smile), very millennial in style. I’d always liked the song but the recording and arrangement were wrong. My contributions were pretty weak, but Chris played some excellent Wilkie-style arpeggios and Sarah sang the song with more passion than it deserved. It was submitted to EMI and then…forgotten.

A more relaxed version of The Perfect Smile from Stephen Hllier’s Dubstar: Lost & Foudland series of piano versions of Dubstar songs

But you can’t keep a good tune down. In the throws of completing the USOB songs at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, I reworked The Perfect Smile in the style of Sister. This is the result. But this new musical avenue would not be explored any further. It emerged soon after Sister was mixed in Malta that Chris had significant problems with the song: we’d have to ditch it. And then, as you know, we ended up ditching dozens more songs as the act fell apart for the final time in early 2014. Damn.

My beloved Yamaha DX7 in September 2000. Note two (!) minidisk players on top of the filing cabinet.

THINKING BACK NOW

We’ll never know if going upbeat would revive Dubstar’s fortunes. I still contend it was worth a try. Speeding things up, grooving in straight-8s rather than funky way? Yeah, a terrific fit. Oh well…

I remained excited by this sonic approach though, and returned to it in 2015 when I put together this remix for Brighton-heroes The Propolis. The Ultravox is strong in this one. And one day I’ll put up the original In Your Smile as a 'compare and contrast' for the curious.

There are only two unreleased songs left from the Dubstar EP. They're so weak I’m tempted to leave them exactly where they are on my hard drive. But you never know, maybe I’m misreading them (and of course, there are alternative versions of both which I’ve yet to find, maybe they’re not so bad after all?).

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: GEMINI

February 02, 2024 / steve hillier

I found a man, he told a tale

Set in a town I know so well

He’d lost a prize, a girl, a twin

She’d bathed his feet and said to him

I’ll keep you close I’ll calm your fears

I’ll show you everything is here

These castle walls were built for you

Built for you

He made a home, she made a plan

That he would be a stronger man

She forged a throne, a crown of tin

And as he slept she said to him

I’ve kept you close I’ve calmed your fears

I’ve shown all you need is near

These castle walls were built to last, enchant

You shan’t escape from here

You can’t avoid your future yet these days we know you won’t forget

These castle walls were built for you

Built for you

And so this man his fate foretold

Became a captive held controlled

His pride disguised as solitude,

His every friend once held withdrew

But he remained behind these walls

Obscure alone unreachable

She left him bound, her words were true

And he begged me to tell you

He keeps you close, he holds you dear

He knows there’s nothing left to fear

Those castle walls, Newcastle stone

Within them lives this man alone

And you who made this sad outcast

This ghost, this prisoner of the past

A hundred years, he’ll wait for you

After releasing an album where we hadn’t said very much and then split, by the end of 2000 I filed Dubstar under the heading of Opportunities Missed. We’d had hits and tours and royalties, we’d gone further than most acts. But Dubstar had evolved out of the ashes of The Joans to have hit records, that’s what signing to a record company was all about in the 1990s. We were plucked from the Newcastle scene and inserted into a world where survival wasn’t based on art or credibility. We were in the music industry, built on cash.

The hits dried up and the act ended, yet I was haunted with unfulfilled ambitions for the act, all the words unwritten, songs unsung. So when the opportunity came in 2006 to do Dubstar it all again I knew we had to say some things, tell some stories… and have a reason to exist beyond money. There was nothing to lose, we could do anything.

Gemini is a song that escapes from deep within this sense of freedom. It’s a love letter to the Newcastle upon Tyne of my early adulthood, the Northern English city of the 1980s.

Before I arrived in 1988, Northerners were characters I’d only met on TV, and Geordies I’d only heard in sitcoms. Students, people like me, packed the city centre, but I ventured a couple of stops out of town on the Metro. This is where the underbelly of the city revealed itself, and it was here I lived and worked.

I felt like an adult for the first time although in reality, I was not even close. Some assume that I lived in the North East for University (that’s why Sarah moved there from Halifax), but I moved from London to Newcastle for love, to live with my girlfriend. The relationship had existed for nine months and all was well, but we were only meeting up every few weekends, often commuting across the entire country by train. We didn't have the money to keep doing that, so...we had a choice, she would move to London or I would move to Newcastle. We chose Jesmond and moved in together in the late Summer of 1988. These were my formative years.

Newcastle upon Tyne

There was a feel to the North East that was unique in the eighties. The closure of the pits and the miner’s strike was over but their effects could be felt and seen everywhere. This region wasn't London, it was poor, like nothing I’d seen before. But it was cheap to live in for a nineteen-year-old and if you knew what you were doing you could live pretty well. I enrolled on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme which allowed me to legitmise my Nightclub DJing, I’ve been self-employed ever since. I discovered recently that Happy Mondays and Stewart Lee were also on this scheme (although not in Newcastle, obviously).

And there was the environment. The smell of the air was a rich combination of the Northumbrian wilderness, the North Sea and diesel buses. The dark winter nights were cosy and inviting with open fires and candles. Biting rain and wind would blow me home to our Tyneside flat on the Metro or Number 33 Bus.. The long summer nights weren’t particularly warm but it was light well beyond ten. And in the midsummer, the sky wouldn’t ever be completely dark.

Today I’ve lived in Brighton for more than half of my life but I still return to Newcastle regularly. The city evolves, and yet Newcastle feels… old. Not decrepit, it’s packed with students and the economic vibrancy that attracts.

It’s more that the city feels like it was built for a different industry, a different era. The brutalist architecture in the city centre is from a different time. The newer buildings on the Quayside, such as Gateshead’s Glasshouse, give you a superb view of…Newcastle’s old buildings. The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts is fabulous and no matter how well the internals of the building have been rebuilt, you’re always aware you’re in a flour mill. It’s the building that was on the side of tin cans my father had growing up in the post-war period in London. Look across from the Baltic. You’ll see the Tyne Bridge, a marvel of interwar engineering and the signature building of Tyneside, now rusting away. Beyond that, the Red House and the Cooperage, both ancient buildings. Even the flats in Jesmond where Dubstar formed were a hundred years old by the time I arrived.

Frankly, I love Newcastle and how its past coexists within its living and vibrant present. It’s this love and the passing of time that informs Gemini.

Thinking Back now

Gemini has some interesting musical moments. That's me playing chords on my bass guitar, a direct reference to the Cocteau Twins of the 1980s. The drums are a combination of samples of my old Drumulator and a Roland TR-707, both superb drum machines used by the Cocteaus. There’s a sample of machinery from Midge Ure’s first solo album rolling along. I’m particularly fond of this reference: Gemini is an homage to my spiritual home of Newcastle, so it’s fitting to include a slice from Midge’s homage to his own home town of Glasgow.

Steve playing Gemini on the pub piano in The Cumberland Arms, Byker, Newcastle 2010. Video taken by Chris Wilkie.

Earlier versions of Gemini had a different drum part that moved at double the pace you hear here. I struggled to get the instrumental parts to work with this beat. There was no sense of movement, so I slowed the drums to half-time which improved the feel a lot. When Daren Taliana did his mix of Gemini he was initially alarmed by how the tempo in the song is constantly changing. I was trying to achieve the ebb and flow of a live band and drummer where variations would occur naturally. That’s not how dance producers work, they need a strict and consistent beat, no wonder he was concerned. His mix is great and features the original drum beat, I’ll put it up on the archive soon.

Also, this song includes the Blackwood Choir which you can hear as the song begins. This was created by Sarah singing every note in a chromatic scale and layering takes on top of each other, much like 10CC’s ‘I’m Not In Love’. The result was excellent, I must find the rest of the recordings one day.

And Gemini is one of a series of Dubstar songs that doesn’t have a chorus. What are the others? Elevator Song, popDorian, Song No.9, Not So Manic Now, Swansong, In My Defence, The Thought of You…

I love writing in this style. Who needs a chorus when you’re not expecting anyone to sing along?

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: MY LIFE

January 05, 2024 / steve hillier

Those with long memories will recall that life was a little difficult all across the world in 2008. The financial crash, including the banking crisis, was turning assumptions about our wealth on their heads. We had experienced a period of sustained economic growth in the UK for well over a decade. This had characterised much of the late 90s and early to mid-00s as a boom time (dot com bubble excepted of course).

But by 2008 the wheels had fallen off. A generation who had grown up borrowing on credit cards and achieving 110% mortgages was facing a new financial reality, and it didn’t look good. We can examine the economics and politics of the situation another time (ideally in the pub) but you’ll find some superb analysis of the banking crisis here, here and here.

On a personal level, things were getting awkward. Friends of mine were landing in real trouble for the first time since the housing slump of the late Thatcher and John Major era. Bankruptcy was a serious option for some, a lifeline, and the situation was so stressful for one that I was commanded to never bring up the subject again.

I didn’t.

I was very fortunate to escape the 1990s without debt and had managed to buy a flat in Hove before the UK housing market went mad. But I did live in a world where I would meet other 90s veterans who had a look of pure fear in their eyes. This was not nice. The party, finally, was over. Now for the life-changing hangover.

This perilous situation inspired me to write the song you can hear for the first time today. My Life is a late Trip-Hop inspired slab of vintage Dubstar. The dub basslines are back (that’s my Roland Juno-106 wobbling along down there). The rolling breakbeats have returned and, for the first time we have the piano and guitar ‘wall of sound’. This shoegaze effect would appear on several other tunes, including this Parralox remix I completed in the same session.

The Roland Juno-106 as featured on dozens of Dubstar songs

On a more technical, songwriting level, I reused an old trick. The verses of the song would sit on one chord throughout, and then I'd break into the chord sequence for the chorus. This creates an enjoyable harmonic contrast between the sections, especially with the bass riff remaining unchanged in the first two choruses. The chorus then takes off in a very Dubstar way.

My Life, like so many of the United States of Being songs, had various incarnations along the way including a mix by famous music engineer and old friend Phil Bodger. I completed the version presented here a little later, where I carved away chunks of the wall of sound to let the vocal shine through. And after long last I wrote something that hit Sarah’s vocal sweet spot and stayed there without jumping around in pitch.

THINKING BACK NOW

I can imagine My Life as the opening song to the first version of United States of Being, much like Stars opened Disgraceful. As songs, they have a lot in common. I also think they serve the same function. What seems melodic and approachable eventually reveals a darker side with Sarah imploring you to ‘hear my prayer’ and to ‘take you on a journey through my life’. Gosh.

I like the way My Life nods its head to Depeche Mode, with more than a passing resemblance to their late career classic ‘Walking in My Shoes’. This is accidental of course, but Depeche Mode was the only act that all three of us liked. United in our admiration, I suppose their influence was bound to poke its head through at points.

Also, I find it fascinating to reflect on how far the world has changed politically and economically since that day. It was one thing to write a little song reflecting on how hard it is to be in debt. But…imagine if we’d known that not only would the UK economy not grow at all between 2010 and 2024, but that the country would eventually be worse off per capita than it was in 2008?

And a final thought... part of the inspiration for My Life was the idea of 1990s pop stars struggling to cope with the reality of the 2000s. Have you noticed how the very idea of pop stars being rich is now reserved for Taylor Swift and a handful of her friends?

I suppose we never had it so good.

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW

October 27, 2023 / steve hillier

Here’s a Dubstar song from the very end of the act’s existence. Something You Should Know (SYSK) was recorded in 2010, developed in 2012, and yet it’s path started a few years earlier.

As with You & Me, SYSK was written by myself and Emma Kirby in South Wales in 2008. In fact, this is the first of a dozen songs that we wrote together. I remember being terribly excited at this result, although I think Emma wasn’t quite so keen. Maybe it was a bit more Steve than Em? I’m not sure, Emma inhabits a very different musical world now and is probably much better off for it. There’s a version we recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios somewhere around here too…

Quick story: while Emma and I were eating lunch in the Real World dining room, I overheard a conversation between the drummer of a successful British band (no names, sorry, but they were big in the early to mid-00s and aren’t now) and his producer. You could see that the producer couldn’t believe what he was hearing: they’d been recording this album for nearly two months and needed to go home but the drummer wanted to replace all his drum parts. Every single hit, because they didn’t sound right to him. Maybe do them again, this time in a different room? Was that going to be a problem?

Well, if you’ve ever produced a band, you’ll know that the entire record is built on the drum playing and sound. You can’t simply replace the drums without ruining the feel of everything else. And here he was, asking to scrap it all and start again. I felt for the producer and remembered with relief why I hadn’t been in a band for fifteen years. When the record came out it was panned by the critics too…the drums sounded great though.

The Dubstar version of SYSK was originally similar to the sketch I’d put together for Emma and myself. Pianos and guitars were everywhere, but it was a bit trad…fine, but nothing special. It reminded me of Keane, which is normally a good thing but not in this case, the song never took off. I was quite disappointed with the results and forgot about the song for a year or so.

But as I was putting together the music for Circle Turns (the first new self-penned and released Dubstar song in over a decade), I took another look at the arrangement for SYSK, had a flash of inspiration and updated it for the album. The two songs have a lot in common, there’s the Roland CR-78 drum machine, the Robin Guthrie shimmering guitars, the deep bass notes from my Roland SH-101 and Korg MS-20 and a general sense of floating around in space.

The big difference was that, unlike Circle Turns, SYSK was a proper song written in advance in an actual writing session between two songwriters. Not being a fan of piecing tunes together in the studio (something you can easily hear), I think that writing moment, a singular moment of creation rather than cobbling together ideas makes a big difference to a song. I wonder what you think?

This drum machine has featured on many of my favourite records

Thinking Back now

SYSK works well but I’m not sure it would have made it onto the finished album. Hearing it now it feels like a B-Side, or maybe a bonus track? That chorus is great though, I still get a shiver of excitement whenever I hear it.

And it fascinates me to revisit the sound of those writing sessions from the 00s. There was something vibrant about that decade, a sense of ‘nothing to lose, so we can do anything we want!’ that I’d missed in the 90s. I’m reminded of these lines from the fabulous Kitchens of Distinction’s song Sand on Fire:

We are so alive, so inspired

When we were young we were careful and prudish

Now we are creased we're trivial and foolish

When we were young we were prayerful and prudish

Now we are wise we're waltzing on fire!

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: I'M IN LOVE WITH A GERMAN FILM STAR

September 29, 2023 / steve hillier

Last week, while putting up ‘Don’t Ask’, I realised there isn’t a high-quality upload of this Dubstar song anywhere on the web. So I’m putting that right today.

In many ways IILWAGF might be the most important song from the entire Dubstar archive, as it was our first bona-fide release in a decade, the first since the split after Make It Better. On the other hand, it was yet another Dubstar cover, and as Chris pointed out at the time, if the first song you hear from Dubstar in a decade is a cover then ‘Dubstar can fuck off’. It’s one or the other I suppose?

We were asked to contribute a song for Buffet Libre, a Spanish record label. They were putting together a compilation of their favourite artists performing covers for Amnesty International…how could we say no? As I’ve mentioned previously, Sarah wanted to record Kirsty MacColl’s ‘There’s a Guy Works Down The Chipshop Swears He’s Elvis’, but I wasn’t keen. Largely because I couldn’t see how Kirsty’s rock and roll pastiche could be transformed into a Dubstar song. And there are much better Kirsty songs. I suggested we did The Passions’ classic instead.

IILWAGF already sounds a lot like a Dubstar song to me, wish I’d written it! To speed up the process of recording I built the arrangement around The Passion’s original single in Apple Logic, including the tempo variations, which was a little naughty. But it was a cover.

Recordings happened at my place on Adelaide Crescent in Hove with Sarah and Gavin’s studio Base HQ behind Central Station in Newcastle with Chris. And South Central mixed it back in Brighton. And that was it, the first new Dubstar recording in a decade. A cover.

Thinking Back now

I think this was the right song to pick, it suited the compilation well and fitted nicely into the Dubstar story. But every now and then I hear a song and think ‘oh, that would have made a brilliant cover, I wish we could have done that instead’. And with that in mind, I’ve made a little Spotify playlist of songs that I think we could have done. See if you can imagine Dubstar versions of these.

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: DON'T ASK

September 15, 2023 / steve hillier

By the end of 2010 a few things about the Dubstar comeback were becoming obvious:

We had too many new songs
I hadn't finished enough of them
We needed to play live. A lot, as soon as possible. And…
We needed to introduce fresh youthful blood into the process

Why was playing live so important? It was and remains fundamental for the success of an act. You can tell when you hear an album has been assembled in the studio. The songs often sound incomplete and half-baked.

So playing a new song to an audience is a crucial step in its writing. There’s a feedback loop between you the writer, you the performer and the audience. You take your new creation out to the world, and how it unfolds in a live setting enables you to return to the song and improve it. It’s not about the response of the audience per se, but how YOU feel about the material now that it's 'alive'.

This is why comedians do warm-up tours, DJs test-run their new tunes in the clubs. It’s also why bands include new songs in their live set before recording them.

But if you don’t play live in many ways your song is incomplete, lifeless. Anyone can put tunes up on the internet or get some vinyl pressed. But if you’re not out there playing your work live ‘you’re not serious people’ as the late Logan Roy would put it.

So we had to do it. And we did, but that wouldn't solve the fresh blood problem. That fell upon the shoulders of my old friend Dex Lush. He'd already put us in touch with South Central (who mixed I’m In Love WIth A German Film Star). This time it was one of their friends, Maltese producer Daren Taliana.

Tim Mason, Daren’s alter-ego

Going SOUTH

Daren would add some pizzaz to my existing production and avoid the new Dubstar material sounding like it was made on a laptop.

We’d had sessions at Gavin’s BASE HQ studio in Newcastle and plenty in my place in Hove. But it had been four years, and I’d already written and produced dozens of songs for the Dubstar comeback. We needed to exceed our previous sonic limitations. What we needed now was a refresh and collaboration with a third party. Like we’d had with Graeme Robinson all the way back in the Disgraceful era.

So Daren spiced the sound up by adding a contemporary, dancefloor-friendly shine to the existing arrangements. The results from his work in Brighton sounded great. The plan was to finish the sessions in Temple Studios, Malta in the late summer of 2011.

Chris and Sarah were absent from the production process as had been the case for the previous three albums, but this time I made the mistake of being absent too. I’d been gigging and wasn’t able to fly down to Malta until Sunday night. By the time I arrived, we only had a couple of days left in the studio to complete the mixes. Rookie mistake!

Despite this the results were great. Daren had mixed like a true professional, his hard work shines a very different and bright light on the songs that were proposed for the second attempt at United States of Being. Grazzzi!

Thinking Back now

And yet these mixes weren’t released. Collaborating with Daren was a terrific move, the problem was Dubstar wasn't moving. Somehow even at this late stage there was still no agreed plan to relaunch the act, only to get some recordings finished. And still no plans for playing live. I’ve written this before, but I can’t overstate how difficult it is to be in an act where the three members live in different cities hundreds of miles away from each other.

So despite all this great work, the lack of a plan meant momentum was lost again. Later that year I holed up and completed the work on the United States of Being songs alone.

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: So Say We All

July 12, 2023 / steve hillier

“All that I was meant to be

Every way that time has changed me

All that I was meant to do

Every word I said that was not true

And all that we leave behind, all we resign

Like a child in my arms

All that we leave behind

Falls to dust

And sand in my hands and drifts away

But it stays while you learn to pull through

All that’s owed to me

Everything I wanted, haunted by

Fights that I regret

To all the ways I’ve grown, I’m now in debt

To all that we leave behind, all we resign

Like a child in my arms is

All that we leave behind

Crumbles to dust

And sand in my hands never goes away

It stays while you learn to live again”

I’ve written here about how SSWA was written in Christianhavn in Copenhagen.

It’s notable how many songs I wrote for Sarah deal with loss, and this is another. But So Say We All is not a sad song. It’s learning to live in the presence of what was. To accept and celebrate what we can’t change. All that we’ve done has value.

SO SAY WE ALL?

So why did I call the song So Say We All, when it’s not mentioned in the lyric at all? In the TV show Battlestar Galactica, the phrase ‘so say we all’ is used repeatedly. It’s an affirmation, an agreement, much like the word ‘amen’, but more emphatic and usually (but not always) said by a collective. There are plenty of science-fiction references throughout Dubstar, our first release was a song called Stars. It felt right that the last song would reference something else you might find in outer space…and what better way to end an album than with the sound of collective agreement?

DANISH ENDING

At the end of SSWA you can hear the ghosts of other tunes that were to be included on United States of Being. Here’s a handy list of the songs whose vocals are featured. See if you can spot them all.

Yours truly, returning to Christianhavn’s best known district in 2022

The Future

Is There Anyway Back From Here?

My Life

It’s You, It’s Me

Gemini

Interpretation

Window Pain

You & Me

Interpretation

Hit

From the Front to the Back

This article include excerpt 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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: UNDER MY THUMB

May 26, 2023 / steve hillier

It wouldn’t be a Dubstar recording session without a cover song.

Sarah was back in contact wanting to reform Dubstar again after the debacle of 2008. As I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t keen but, in the spirit of never saying never, I started writing and recording. The sessions were productive, and include some of the best Dubstar songs ever. Yet we never recovered the same positive vibe, the team we’d assembled for the relaunch had drifted away and there was a latent sense of anxiety about the process. This dread lasted for years.

Despite this, it did feel as if we could start again, without the legacy commitments getting in the way. Hmmm...

UNDER MY THUMB

It’s an odd song for Dubstar to record though. I’m not much of a fan of The Rolling Stones, and there was something in the lyric that felt…, a bit dodgy? So the main reason we recorded Under My Thumb will remain lost to the ages. Sorry about that, but I can give my side of the story.

With the end of Dubstar in 2000, I started travelling abroad for work. A lot. This coincided with us having a family villa in Puerto Banús, where I kept many of the hard drives of the Dubstar Archive. I loved it there and spent the best part of nineteen years commuting between Spain and Brighton. I even picked up some Spanish. Te extraño, Puerto Banús.

There are many stories to share about this time, some of which are legendary. The weekend our next-door neighbour was arrested on the tarmac at Malaga airport and the entire Spanish media descended on us, complete with TV crews and microlights.

It was one of those situations where you quickly realise it's better not to get involved.

By way of contrast, one of my favourite stories is from 2015. Twelve (no exaggeration) Estonian soldiers arrived for a party weekend in the villa next door. They were as loud as a squad of squaddies could be. They were, to put it politely, having a bloody good time. I’ve not heard as much Reggaeton before or since.

So on morning number two at something like 4am, I went round to demand them to stop with the music, for pity's sake STOP. I was expecting some kind of standoff, one middle-aged Brit versus Estonia’s finest on leave from the Russian border. What I received was a polite apology and an instant cessation of hostilities. Silence. I didn’t hear from them again. The following day there were smiles and hellos in the street too.

I reflected and checked my prejudices after that incident. No problems with Estonians, I’ve had some great times with our Baltic neighbours. No problems with soldiers, I’d grown up around RAF staff. It was just…I was expecting a mouthful of abuse from a bunch of twenty-somethings. The kind of response I would anticipate getting in Brighton. Turned out the young adults of the 2010s could be perfectly civil…all you had to do was ask.

My ex-neighbour in Brighton: Take note.

We spent many nights in La Sala and in Puerto Banús marina (which British immigrants call ‘the port’, much to my annoyance) at the Atlas Bar. Around 2004 there was a trend for the bars to move from Ibiza House and play much more Latin-influenced music. This intrigued me.

I have a long-held theory: you can record any song in a reggae style and it will work. Living in Puerto Banús I developed an additional theory: you can also do any song in a Bossanova style. Check this out next time you’re in southern Europe. You’re bound to find a bar playing a modern Bossanova playlist where every song is a cover. Usually of a pop hit, often from the 1980s. I’ve even heard a Bossanova cover of A Flock of Seagulls’ I Ran. It’s not the worst A Flock of Seagulls cover I've heard.

I loved this development, at least when it was a novelty. Might there be something in it for Dubstar? I was a fan of Nouvelle Vague, and as Dubstar we’d already covered Stan Getz’s Bossanova classic ‘A Certain Sadness’. Latin covers are cool, why not revisit the idea? And there was something about Sarah’s voice and demeanour that reminded me of Astrud Gilberto. That was a good thing.

So we recorded Under Your Thumb. Not specifically for the upcoming album but as an experiment, a bit of fun. For use as a bonus track or something that would go up on the internet one day. And now it has.

THINKING BACK NOW

I didn’t notice the nasty lyrics in this song until we called them up to do the vocal. Had no idea of its role in the infamous film Gimmee Shelter and Altamont incident… it didn't stop us.

This is not the kind of lyric I would write. But it is the kind of song that Dubstar would record and not grasp its intent, much like Not So Manic Now.

Still, there’s a real charm to this version of Under My Thumb. It’s not really a Dubstar track. It’s more of a homage to someone else’s idea of a cover version. But it's a sign of where our heads were in the early stages of this, the second Dubstar reformation.

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 to be the first to hear new releases and up-to-the-minute news

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Dubstar: TALKING IN MY SLEEP DEMO

May 19, 2023 / steve hillier

My Yamaha CP-70B Electric Grand Piano. Previous owner not pictured.

Here it is, the first song we completed as Dubstar after reforming in late 2006.

I wrote Talking in My Sleep in Stockholm, January 2003. The idea of getting Dubstar back together was fanciful at this point. Chris and Sarah were still living together in Belsize Park, but there was no discussion of more music from the three of us. Sarah had taken over the singing in Kate Holme’s Technique from Xan Tyler, which rebranded as Client soon after. I was busy writing and producing new acts…there wasn’t a pressing need to redo the 1990s. After all, we’d only been separated for a couple of years.

So Talking in My Sleep was a ‘songwriter’s song’, a tune that was available for others to use. But as so often happens, it wasn’t used. No one had rejected the song, but the music world was changing fast, or at least my understanding of it. I thought I would simply carry on as before, I didn't realise I had a new job and what that would entail.

Being a pro-songwriter is very different from being the songwriter in a band. If you want to have a chance of your song being ‘cut’ by an established artist, the artist has to co-write the song with you. Or at least have a co-writing credit. That wasn’t the case with Talking in My Sleep, no celebrities had been involved at all so…it remained unused with my repertoire at my publishers Kobalt.

But the song existed, even if no one was singing it, and was ready to be recorded on the day we agreed to get back together in late 2006. It felt good, as if it belonged somewhere between Disgraceful and Goodbye. And after that first session, we had musical confirmation that there was a point to reforming the act. Plenty of reasons to be hopeful.

WE’RE GETTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER…

As I mentioned on Dubstar.com, we recorded a version of Talking in My Sleep with legendary producer and friend of the band Stephen Hague. That was a great experience, the old team back together. We had Kobalt excited about the new material, we were speaking to our lawyer Paul Lennon. We even had Andy Ross helping us out as our manager (in a sense Andy and especially Jo at Food Records had always been our managers). All we needed next was a label and an agent. Hmmm…

There were labels sniffing around, but nothing from the majors. I didn’t expect there to be any interest and wasn’t disappointed. But I was shocked at how little money there was left in the record industry. Negligible compared to where we were ten years earlier. I knew it was much more attractive to invest in a bright young act fresh out of the blocks than a bunch of thirty-somethings from a different decade. But I wasn’t expecting to be discussing record deals with no advances whatsoever. I couldn’t see the point of signing a deal of that nature when we could license the new material instead and retain all the rights. This meant the new Dubstar recordings would have to be self-financed. Not a problem, I had a studio and was earning, we could do this. But what about everyone else? Would it be fair to ask everyone else to do us a favour, promising a payout when we were back on the road and in the charts?

In the end that wouldn’t matter, the reformation came to a shuddering halt in 2008. Turned out there were other problems to contend with.

THINKING BACK NOW

I remember that I didn’t think Talking In My Sleep was right for Dubstar. It was too ‘normal’, not a large enough statement of intent from yet another reforming 90s act. Was I wrong?

The Electric Grand in Talking In My Sleep is featured in this recording from 1980. Amazing

What you can hear is an early demo of the song, with vocals and guitar recorded in what I think is the first session after we reformed. I’m listening to this song the first time in seventeen years and frankly, I’m surprised how much I like it. I love the fact there’s no top kit on this version, no crashes, hi hats, nothing. I’d bought Gary Numan’s Electric Grand piano earlier in the year, and here it is. This is the first time it had featured on any record since 1980. And that’s a killer chorus…very VERY 90s. And in a good way. Well done everyone seventeen years ago.

But to be fair, sounding old-fashioned was precisely what I didn’t want at the time. Twenty-three years later, why not? With the 90s revival going strong, I can imagine Talking in My Sleep sounding great on BBC Radio 1. Or 2. Or 3. Dunno, I stopped listening to music radio years ago.

And imagine if Talking in My Sleep had been the single before No More Talk, not included on any album! That might have been very cool indeed.

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

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Dubstar: A WORLD WITHOUT ME

May 12, 2023 / steve hillier

Steve Hillier

Friday 16th December 2022

A World Without Me was a song that sounded great at the time but was forgotten in all the Dubstar drama of 2008. This ‘dropping a song’ can easily happen when you’re writing and reforming an act where no one lives in the same city.

AWWM was well-liked by the three of us but didn’t get the same attention as the potential singles Window Pain, In The End and Hit. Inevitably a songwriter’s focus turns to the songs you like most, even more so to the songs others like most. And in an existential crisis, well… you stick to what you know will go down best.

AWWM was recorded at my place at Adelaide Crescent, Hove in the first sessions for United States of Being, and then dumped. It probably wouldn't have been included on any Dubstar album.

Until the mixing session with Daren Baxen aka Tim Mason.

His approach to the band’s sound was to beef everything up. Drums that had been samples I’d been using since the early 90s were now updated to include kicks and snares from the fantastic Vengeance library. If there was a defining sound for the 00s it came from Vengeance and their amazing drum collection.

But AWWM wasn’t included in that mixing session. I had another look after returning from Malta. I hadn’t thought about it as a song in years, it was never mentioned in our sporadic band meetings. Still, it’s a good song, why not give it another go? So I spent a couple of afternoons with my strict machines…

And this is the result. File this song with the other ‘bangers’ from the two unreleased albums, such as Sister, You/Me, Front To Back and Don’t Ask.

Every synth sound you hear on a USOB song is from an analogue source (apart from the occasional Yamaha DX sound). I love that, it gave the songs a really strident sheen. Consequently, all the bass sounds in this song come from my Korg MS20. The embellishments were from my Korg Mono/Poly. Thanks boys!

My Korg MS20, vintage 1979. The bass monster!

This analogue approach was very different to the previous Dubstar albums, which were built around samples. Call me a synthesizer anorak, but there is something you get from these instruments that’s simply not available from plugins. Don’t get me wrong, I love software synths, use them every day. But they’re not the same as a hardware synthesizers. Something nice happens when you twist a dial and turn a switch. Something visceral when you know you’re adjusting a living breathing circuit. Yum.

And A World Without Me is full of analogue sounds. It’s pretty clear there’s a Goldfrapp influence going on here, or is it Suzi Quatro? Of course we were fans of Goldfrapp, how could you not be in 2007? I particularly loved the Felt Mountain album, which had been my soundtrack to a couple of superb writing trips in Stockholm. And it was great to see an electronic act doing well in a decade that was dominated by Electroclash (in the early years) and singer-songwriters (in the latter).

THINKING BACK NOW

The writing process behind A World Without Me is a little hazy. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this song was the result of a Friday night in with a nasty virus, a coal fire and a fever-dream about Echobelly.

Listening back nearly a dozen years later, the mix is a little over-cooked, but then I suppose it was just one song among many that featured in the mammoth task of finishing USOB in late 2011. Still, A World Without Me sounds great loud. and so I bet it would have been a superb song to play live.

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

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Dubstar: THE FUTURE

May 05, 2023 / steve hillier

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

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Dubstar: I AM THE CRIME demo

January 27, 2023 / steve hillier

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

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Dubstar: ROUND & ROUND originally included on United States of Being album

January 20, 2023 / steve hillier

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

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Dubstar: IS THERE ANYWAY BACK FROM HERE? originally included on United States of Being album

January 13, 2023 / steve hillier

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’

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

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Dubstar: YOU & ME originally included on United States of Being album

December 23, 2022 / steve hillier

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

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

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Dubstar: WE STILL BELONG originally included on United States of Being album

December 16, 2022 / steve hillier

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.

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

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

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Dubstar: GOODBYE TO YOU originally included on Disgraceful

October 07, 2022 / steve hillier

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….

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

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Dubstar: Goodbye at 25

September 22, 2022 / steve hillier

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.

I Will Be Your Girlfriend - Originally a The Joans song called Joni
Inside - New song written in Woodstock for Goodbye
No More Talk - the oldest Dubstar song, written when I was at school
Polestar - written in Newcastle for Goodbye
Say The Worst Thing First - written in Newcastle for Goodbye
Cathedral Park - written in Jesmond back in 1991
It’s Over - written in Newcastle for Goodbye
The View From Here - written during the Disgraceful era as a B-side to Elevator Song
My Start In Wallsend - written in Newcastle for Goodbye
It’s Clear - originally Brownmouth, a song from The Joans
Ghost - written at Real World studios for Goodbye
Can’t Tell Me - a song we played live in the Disgraceful era
Wearchest - a song from The Joans, written for a radio appearance eon Wear FM
When You Say Goodbye - written in Newcastle for Goodbye
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.

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:

I Will Be Your girlfriend
No More Talk
Inside
Polestar
Say The Worst Thing First
Cathedral Park
View From Here
My Start In Wallsend
Ghost
When You Say Goodbye
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

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