Not So Manic Now
Written by Brick Supply
Place Written Wakefield, Yorkshire
Released When January 1996
Originally Sung By Brick Supply
Features EMU Proteus, Roland W-30
“I was making myself the usual cup of tea when the doorbell strangely rang”
Did the doorbell ring in a strange manner, or was the fact that the bell was ringing strange in itself? No one will ever know.
Graeme Robinson, who would later become Dubstar’s first manager, gave me a cassette when I was DJing at the Arena in Middlesbrough. It was a collection of artists he had recorded at his studio in Darlington under his Circulation Recordings label. The first song was Not So Manic Now by Brick Supply, total unknowns from Wakefield. I fell in love with the song driving home up the A19 in my Lada, the only Russian car on Tyneside without heating. It didn’t feel significant at the time, I fall in love with a lot of songs. But this was the moment that would transform The Joans into Dubstar.
I made an arrangement for Not So Manic Now on my Roland W-30 that weekend, Sarah popped round to Jesmond to sing it and Chris played some funky guitar. The original arrangement sounded a lot like Wear Your Love Like Heaven by Definition of Sound (who by total coincidence toured with us on the first Dubstar UK tour). This was a classic example of me trying to marry two ideas that should never have met, let alone wedded. It didn’t survive. I have a DAT of it around here somewhere.
A few weeks later Graeme was at a show we were playing at The Riverside in Newcastle, heard us perform this tune, and couldn’t believe his ears (or his luck). Later he approached us to make some demos in his house in Darlington. Between him and Jon Kirby, his musical partner, they changed much of my arrangement back towards the original Brick Supply version of Manic, which annoyed me enormously at the time. I can see now that this was the right approach, and a defining moment for Dubstar emerged. Funnily enough, Manic was not a contender as a single until the mixes came back from Stephen Hague, working at RAK. We heard them for the first time up at Chappel Studios in Lincolnshire where we were finishing off the Disgraceful album. We were excited, it sounded like a hit. It was.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
The Self Same Thing
Songwriter Steve Hillier
Date Written April 1998
Place Written Hove, Sussex
Released When June 2000
Originally Sung By Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland S-760
Spotify Link
“We’ve an equal stake in all we’ve planned”The Self Same Thing was the first song of the new Dubstar era in Hove, Sussex.
When Dubstar played our ‘we’re back!’ gig in 2013 at The Lexington in London, this was the song I most wanted to redo the arrangement for. Although the chunky guitar chords made sense when I thought we could be the English Cardigans, fifteen years later they felt dated, an ambition from another time. So I replaced the ‘ba ba ba ba’ vocals with synth bells and the bass line by a drone on a Moog Little Phatty. For the first time, it sounded like the song it should always have been.
The Self Same Thing was written in the early Spring of 1998 as an attempt to cheer up my girlfriend, now wife, who was hating her first job after leaving university. It’s an expression of solidarity between two people, between two sexes… and a musical way of stating my belief that men and women have more in common than separates us. We are the same, just about.
I left the act before this song was released as the title track on The Self Same Thing EP, the final Dubstar record. On returning from holiday in Mexico, I met Chris at a coffee shop in Belsize Park, just around the corner from where he and Sarah shared a flat. I’d spent a whole afternoon running into waves that were beating the shore at Cancun, trying to work out if Dubstar was still worth pursuing. For all the dramas over the past couple of years and the changes I could see coming in the music industry and my own life… I’d decided ‘no’. I told Chris I was off. Even though I knew I was doing the right thing, there was a gnawing sense of unfinished business, Dubstar had more to say. That feeling persisted for ten years and led to the writing of another fifty songs. So I was probably correct.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
No More Talk
Written by Steve Hillier
Date Written April 1987
Place Written Welling, South London
Released When July 1997
Originally Sung By Steve Hillier
FeatureS Roland S-760, Yamaha DX100, Novation Bass Station
Spotify Link
“Let the feelings out and take the pain away”it’s a funny thing, I have stronger memories of writing this song in the 80s as a teenager than completing it in the 90s as a published songwriter.
I hated education, which is ironic given how I’ve been a part time University lecturer since 2004. No More Talk was the result of yet another depressing day in the Sixth Form at Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School. After the 51 bus home I would come home and erase the stink in my mind by immediately playing the piano, the only way my parents would know I was in the house. Although I could read music, I was never that good at it, certainly not a sight reader and having little patience to improve I would improvise melodies and write tunes of my own so I had something to play. No More Talk was one of these melodies.
As the demo sessions for what would become Goodbye were being completed, I was getting concerned. Dubstar needed another obvious single (Girlfriend and Cathedral Park were clear contenders right from the start), something that felt like it could be as big, potentially bigger than Stars. So I pulled out this nine year old melody and wrote new words reflecting the sheer frustration I was feeling. it became the lead single for the second album.
The release of No More Talk also marks the moment when my fears that Dubstar’s rise was over were realised. We were waiting outside BBC television centre to be called in for our appearance on the National Lottery. Jo Power from Food Records came over with the news that No More Talk was number 20 in the midweek charts. That sounds terrific now, but I knew this was a disappointment for everyone, we needed to be in the top ten. We should have been in the top ten. I was gutted, so I distracted myself by shuffling and grinning like a lunatic all the way through the biggest TV performance of our careers.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
Cathedral Park
Written by Steve Hillier
Date Written January 1991, Refined in 1993
Place Written Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Released When August 1997
Originally Sung By Steve Hillier
Features Roland S-760
Spotify Link
“Her words are lame, like her life”It was a January day in Jesmond 1991, and I was listening to my grey promo CD of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’. There was a floppy disk on a tall pile next to the Roland W-30 sampler. On the label was written three words: ’potential number one’. I loaded it up, unsure what I would find. It was a simple melody, a chorus and I’d managed to include some text…’it feels like I’m living without you’. Could it be a number one? Would it?
My optimism was misplaced, Cathedral Park is the only Dubstar single, in fact the only Dubstar release* that failed to make the UK Top 40. Released on the week after Diana Princess of Wales died, there was simply no way the jolliest song we had recorded was going to be on the radio and TV. At any other time it might have, It did reach number 41 after all. Neneh Cherry and Youssou N'Dour took our place on the radio playlists with Seven Seconds. Now that’s a potential number one.
Cathedral Park was named after the Red House Painters song ‘Grace Cathedral Park’, and although that winning chorus melody was another written staring out of my window at the rain, the lyric was inspired by an afternoon I’d spent in Jesmond Dene years later, reflecting on the recent demise of my first serious relationship. And when I say reflecting, I mean being thoroughly miserable and trying to make sense of it all as Mark Kozelek sang about his own relationship woes. Red House Painters helped me through a difficult time. I’d like to think I paid them back by repeatedly playing their CDs to everyone I knew in 1993.
Sarah did a superb job of singing this song, especially as like so many on Goodbye the melody wasn’t written with a vocalist in mind, at least not a human vocalist. It sounds fabulous on a piano, and the huge leaps in pitch make sense when all you have to do is hit the right keys. But hitting the right note when you’re jumping nearly an octave in the middle of a phrase is asking too much. We never played this song live.
It was the experience of writing the songs for the Goodbye album that made me change my approach to vocal melody writing. Until this point, and simply by chance, writing melodies on piano had translated perfectly for mine and Sarah’s voices. But Cathedral Park sounded strange, strained, and definitely did not fit in with the ‘back to basics’ approach of melody writing that was being used by the Britpop pack. Consequently I sang all the melodies on Make It Better as I wrote them.
And as I’m writing this, I’m listening to Highasakite, and noticing they use huge leaps in pitch in their choruses. They also seem to use a lot of Melodyne to achieve this. Flamboyant melodies are back.
*that qualified for the charts
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
Anywhere
Songwriters Steve Hillier & Chris Wilkie
Date Written November 1990, Revised In January 1994
Place Written Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Released When October 1995
Originally Sung By Steve Hillier
Features Roland W-30 & JD-800, Casio CZ-101, Yamaha DX100
Spotify Link
“Even persistination couldn’t stay”
Pardon?
The sound of looking out of Jesmond windows at the rain. The song Anywhere began as an attempt at a ‘classical’ melody that I wrote on the Roland W-30 using string samples featured on the factory floppy disk. The original chord sequence was very different to the version that appeared on Disgraceful. You can hear it on the last moments of the remix album, and now on this piano version.
Like so many of the Dubstar songs, it was an idea that had been kicking around in my mind for years. It’s impossible to predict when inspiration will hit to complete an old idea, but when it appears I feel compelled to run with it, no matter what else I may be working on. What I was doing when Anywhere reappeared was DJing at Planet Earth nightclub in Newcastle. I wrote “I’ll be around…any time I’m free,” on a sheet of paper covered in song requests from drunken revellers. It was a cold Wednesday night in January, I wasn’t quite in the nightclub mood. So I wrote a sarcastic message to the crowd: “I’ll be around, any time I’m free” and felt rather smug. There’s a pervasive cattiness to the idea that you’re promising something and taking it away simultaneously. That was also the night I invented the word “persistination”, a portmanteau of ‘determination’ and ‘persistence’. I hope it sounds like it means something. So far only one person has noticed, I’m amazed I got away with it. And of course, persistination is now in common usage in my imagination.
The version of Anywhere on Disgraceful was influenced by One Dove and The Other Two, both of whom Stephen Hague had worked with (although we hadn’t met Stephen when I put the arrangement together). Not only was this the first song we completed after Sarah joined The Joans (the precursor to Dubstar), but it remains my favourite from the Disgraceful sessions. What a bass line! Thank you, the Roland JD-800.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
Window Pain
Songwriter Steve Hillier
Date Written February 2010
Place Written Hove, Sussex
Originally Sung By Sarah Blackwood
Features Yamaha CP-70B, Telemark, Moog Little Phatty
"You don't need to lay me down, I'm ok"The comeback single! That was the rest of the gang’s plan. And why not, it had a great chorus, a strong melody, meant something, you could dance to it, it had a minor Danish ending, and it sounded like Dubstar had woken up in the twenty first century. Finally.
And inevitably…
I’m not a big fan of Window Pain. I’ve had this feeling before. The one where you know something’s good but you’re not feeling it… your head says “yes” but your heart says “come back later”. This had happened with Stars, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. My inability to spot or even like a hit means I will never make an A&R person, and Andy Ross’s ability to spot one at a thousand paces is one of the reasons why he is one of the best. He came to the comeback show at The Lexington in 2013 and told me “that Window Pain song, the new one, sounds like a single”. Or he may have said hit. I’m not sure because I was too miserable by the end of that gig to listen to anyone. I know he was being positive, whatever he actually said.
And ultimately I think Andy was right. So did the others. Stephen Hague produced a version of this song and there was even a video made in a camp site in Dorset (in which I ended up being dressed as a gimp lying in a wood on a dark and cold November evening. Nope… me neither). But this piano version is the first time the song has been released in any form.
This original unreleased recording of the song features the debut of two modern analogue synths in my collection, Analogue Solutions Telemark and the Moog Little Phatty. I’d not bought synthesizer hardware in years, instead using software whenever I wanted something my collection couldn’t provide. Tom from Analogue Solutions had met Sarah at an event somewhere and given her the Telemark and Oberkorn sequencer to try out. She and Paul had not been able to make head nor tail of them, and that’s no surprise, you really need to know what you’re doing with modular gear. So I bought them off Tom and put them to work. The Moog was for the bass of course, but I sold it a few years later. I loved the look of the synth but never warmed to its sound. Sacrilege, but I did an A/B comparison with Native Instrument’s Monark and preferred the software Moog to the real thing.
I still use the Telemark though. It has a reputation for squeaks and squawks, but it also has a unique bottom end. It’s ideal for solid sub bass with a rounded edge, and it’s one of my three ‘go to’ synths for analogue bass (the others being the Korg MS-20 and Roland SE-02).
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
I (Friday Night)
I (FRIDAY NIGHT)
Songwriter Stephen Hillier
Date Written June 1998
Place Written Hove, Sussex
Released When June 2000
Originally Sung By Sarah Blackwood
Features Roland S-760
Spotify Link
“The smell of the trees on nights like these”It was supposed to be a joke, releasing a single with a one letter title, and a reference to A R Kane’s album of the same name. Only the coolest would get the reference, so that’s brilliant! Obviously the record company wasn’t going to go for that, how would anyone find it, stock it, promote it? So ‘I’ became 'I (Friday Night)’, the only song I’d written that uses parentheses in the title.
Something went slightly wrong in the writing of I, from the attempt to rhyme the word ‘time’ with itself on three occasions to the whimsical feel of the verses. Twenty years later, I (Friday Night) on Make It Better feels like a first draft of a song that I should have returned to later, and now have done. The chorus is a real belter though and was more suited to a slower ballad-style arrangement. But we were on our third album, we’d already recorded enough of those for an entire career. Also, a slow piano ballad was something I was specifically trying to avoid. We were aiming to be as successful as The Cardigans, not the Red House Painters.
‘I’ is a reflection on Jesmond and the relationship I’d left behind. It was written while looking out of my studio window in Hove, this time staring at the Sussex Downs rolling off towards the west and to the sea. 1998 was a difficult time for me, the Tyneside era was over and I felt homeless. Writing ‘I’ was the first opportunity I’d had to reflect on all that had happened since Dubstar began. And so the final Dubstar single represents the bitter sweetness of the optimism of being back in the South, and the sadness of leaving the place I’d spent my adulthood. Some days I feel the same way, even twenty years later.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now:
Stars
Songwriter Stephen Hillier
Written February 1992
Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Released June 1995
Originally Sung By Stephen Hillier
Features Roland W-30, Yamaha DX100
Spotify Link
“We’ll take out hearts outside, leave our lives behind and watch the stars go out”Stars was written as Walkers Nightclub, an infamous haunt for students and gangsters and my first Tyneside nightclub was closed. A favourite with the more discerning Geordie clubber, I’d DJed at the permanently sold out Wednesday ‘Westworld’ since 1989…my first regular nightclub spot since arriving in Newcastle.
Walkers had numerous difficulties, from regular overcrowding to problems with the drug trade and a broken air conditioning system. It’s closer was a shock, the club had quickly come to define the mid-week music scene for me. While The Riverside was where you went for bands, in the late 80s and early 90s Walkers Nightclub was where you went to dance. And on a Wednesday and later Thursday night (at my indie club ‘Futureworld’) you came to dance to my choice of music. Walkers is where I met Chris, it’s where the Dubstar story began. When the news came in I walked down into Jesmond Dene in the rain to gather my thoughts, I had no idea what I would do. I decided to write Stars, one of the most important decisions in my career, maybe my life.
Walkers returned as Planet Earth in 1993, and regained the Walkers crown to become the late night drinking spot for many Dubstar sessions. It was just a five minute walk from The Forth Hotel and our studio ‘Stink Central’ at The Arts Centre. It was handy to know that when we got off the train from Kings Cross at one in the morning there was somewhere that would always let us in for the tenth drink of the night. Planet Earth was a terrific club, there’s nothing like it down here in Brighton. But I miss Walkers, it had an extra something. Danger?
The song came together on an old piano in my front room in Jesmond, with a lead melody that only features on the ‘acoustic version’ on the B-Side of No More Talk (and now this new piano version). Stars took on a life of its own when I completed the first draft using my Roland W-30 sampler and sequencer. In fact, almost the entire arrangement you hear on the Dubstar version is from the W-30. There’s also a lead ‘twinkle’ from the Yamaha DX100 I’d bought for £100 at Mckay Sounds on Westgate Road earlier that month…a pure sine wave, largely because it was the only sound I liked from the keyboard at the time. That opinion changed soon after. I now own three for some reason.
The arrangement to Stars was conceived with a nod to Massive Attack and the Dub Reggae tunes I grew up with in Lewisham, South London. Of course, being one of my songs, and having very little idea of how Dub Reggae actually works it had to have a strong melody and wistful lyric…a reflection of how I was feeling about the state of the club scene on Tyneside. And what on earth I was going to do next.
I didn’t understand why people liked Stars so much at first, I wasn’t that keen on recording it at all. But through my experiences working at Pinnacle Records, my first job after leaving school, and out of respect to Andy (the boss) Ross at Food Records, I knew that if there was any point in signing to his record label it would be to allow his expertise to guide the next stage for Dubstar. He wanted to release Stars first, so we did. It went on to be the most successful Dubstar song, and is still played on the radios across the world.
I know why people like it now. It’s grown on me too.
INSIDE OUTLINES, the first collection of solo piano pieces by Stephen Hillier is out now: