Dubstar: You’re Mine DEMO
You're Mine was one of the earliest songs written and recorded for Dubstar's third album.
Third albums are often moments of reinvention. Maybe you're trying to break through to fame and fortune (Gary Numan with The Pleasure Principle), experimenting with new technology (the industrial samples on Depeche Mode's Construction Time Again), or trying to recover from a wrong turn (insert name of every band who’s second album was a bit rubbish). For Dubstar, it was simpler than that: we were trying to stay relevant.
Every single from Goodbye had charted, but only No More Talk had really stuck with the wider public, and nothing had caught fire internationally the way Stars had three years earlier. Part of the problem was the public and media’s perception of the act. Dubstar had always been easier to define by what we weren't: not Britpop, despite emerging at the same time; not Electro-Pop or dance despite being an electronic act; not authentically Geordie, despite being signed as a Newcastle band. You could see how that made us a headache. What’s the marketing hook? <as a quick aside, I think this answers the question as to why the record company replaced Rob Steele’s photos for images of Sarah for the cover of Make It Better>
That kind of ambiguity is less of a problem when you're new and your songs are big enough to carry you to the big time. But this was our third album, and after two albums and a couple of dozen B-sides, my songbook was empty. Time to rethink.
Confidence becomes hubris?
I didn’t doubt my ability to write hits in the summer of 1998. The problem I had, and to some extent still have, is an inability to get over myself. Like so many artists, the biggest hurdle between the work and success is the person between the keyboard and the screen, interfering with annoyances like ‘creative control’ and ‘dignity’.
Most things I’ve written have been created with an urge to explain something for myself, to amuse me, to produce more of the music I like and can't find elsewhere. It's what I've always done, from doodling on a piano as a kid to cheering myself up when it's raining. That approach works fine when you have unlimited time, a fanbase with identical taste to yourself, and a 100% strike rate. It can seem ego-centric, the living embodiment of the cliche “we make music for ourselves, and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus” but so be it. When I moved into the world of professional writing I discovered a deep truth: it’s not possible to write good music you don’t enjoy. More to say about this another day…
I also have a set of self-imposed rules that help and hinder in equal measure. The most important one: don't censor yourself. If you have an idea, run with it no matter how mad it seems, work on it, almost always finish it. You're Mine is a perfect example of this approach, an idea that probably should have been discarded immediately but felt so good I went ahead anyway.
Dubstar had done a whole selection of mad things by this point and consequently had plenty of the time to work out next steps. And we also a reasonable amount of money, but I wasn't clear about what our audience actually wanted. Three hundred thousand people had bought Disgraceful in the UK alone. If we wanted to keep them onside it might have been useful to have some sense of what might go down badly with them.
THINKING BACK NOW
You're Mine is unique within the Dubstar canon. It's entirely heavy guitars and breakbeats, an approach we’d never used before. It's a clear homage to basically a copy of Blur’s Song 2, which was so out of character for us that... I'm not sure what word fits here. Sometimes you have to row all the way out to discover how to get back.
We did eventually make it back to the boathouse and start again, which is probably why You're Mine has been forgotten, just a mad song that happened one afternoon before heading down to VATs Bar.
And as a direct consequence of sounding like copyingSong 2, it's very short. It might have made a decent indie dancefloor hit in 1998, but there was no way the record company could release a song sounding exactly like their biggest act. Food Records would have looked ridiculous, and no one wants to work with a ridiculous record company.
Listening back to it for the first time in decades, I like it. I like it a lot. Sarah sounds completely disassociated in the verses, then becomes a screeching vampire for the You're Mine shouts. Chris delivers a wide variety of wails, bleeps and polyrhythmic arpeggios that owe as much to Techno as to Indie. And the lyric is one of the strangest of my career. I’m pleased I managed to work a sly blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to DUNE in the first line though .
This is Dubstar from the mirror universe where we never heard The Smiths.
Turn it up please.
