Dubstar: Touching Inside DEMO
Touching Inside was a song we recorded as part of the second demo session for the third Dubstar album, Make It Better. It’s a tiny little thing and ticks all the boxes of classic Dubstar tropes from that era:
Upbeat and eager to please
Contains a sampled breakbeat (in this case, Champ by The Mohawks*)
Loud guitars and...
Lyrically odd
Actually, the lyrics are more than odd. They were essentially dummy lyrics that somehow survived the demo process and were sent off to the record company, where they sat on a shelf until today’s release.
DUMMY LYRICS
These are words that act as placeholders in a song until the writer can think of something better to replace them with. They’re often phonetic sounds that provide a guide for the meaningful words that will take their place, sometimes they’re funny or simply nonsensical. The most famous example is Paul McCartney’s Yesterday, whose dummy lyrics were: “Scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs.”
I’m not quite as interested in food as Paul, so I returned to topics often explored in Dubstar: playful innuendo and in-jokes. Normally, words of this nature don’t survive to face scrutiny by the outside world, but with Touching Inside I think they lasted because they made us laugh—particularly me and Chris.
“My hands can tell my brain that I’m touching inside.”
It was pointed out to me that this is a perfect Steve phrase: exactly the sort of thing I’d say that would be met with a bemused “what?”, “qué?” or “Hva' for noget???”. In this case, though, it’s a Steve line written by a thirteen-year-old. There’s the comical image of some hands somehow speaking to a brain, followed by the twin questions: “Why are my hands telling my brain that I’m touching inside?” and “inside what?”
And, like so many Dubstar songs, the implication is, er...
Anyway, the writing of the rest of the song was unusual too. I was chopping up breakbeats in Logic Audio and looking for inspiration. I’d always loved the Champ breakbeat and had read on “the internet” that The Mohawks had been a band put together by Alan Hawkshaw, Kirsty Hawkshaw’s father. I was in love with her album On Ultimate Things, we’d already covered Mercury, and somewhere in the back of my mind it felt like time for more Hawkshaw.
In this case, more Hawkshaw meant sampling a couple of highly recognisable Hammond Organ notes from Champ and rearranging them over a different break. I can’t remember what that was now: I have a feeling it might have come from a CD-ROM of a copyright-cleared drumming. The vocal melody was improvised over the “duh, dee-duh-duh” motif and, before you know it, we have another song for the third album.
Take the rest of the hour off.
THINKING BACK NOW
Touching Inside didn’t make it onto the album, and I think the reasons are obvious. It’s a bit of a joke song with a peculiar lyric and a famously borrowed sampled organ riff. Even the Auto-Tune on Sarah’s vocal was dialled in so tightly, tight even for 1998, that I think the overall impression was that we weren’t taking ourselves entirely seriously.
But I like it. I think it’s one of the catchiest Dubstar tunes I’ve ever written. It would have made a great B-side for the second Make It Better single, had that happened.
I can also imagine it being played in Quadrophenia, perhaps during that famous scene where Sting dances along to Green Onions.
So come on everyone, sing along. You know the words...
“Our clothes are in the corner
The play is getting shorter
My hands can tell my brain that I’m touching inside!”
