Dubstar: Not Once Not Ever GDR Demo
Not Once Not Ever was one of only two new songs written for Disgraceful, the first album. Dubstar wasn’t signed to any record label at this stage, everything was up for grabs and making an album still felt like a dream.
Unlike the last song to be written ‘Day I See You Again’, Not Once Not Ever started its life in my front room in Jesmond on guitar, a simple if melancholic chord sequence which Graeme Robinson said reminded him of Klezmer. You can hear the arpeggiated guitar picking being played by the harp sound on my Korg M3R. I think it sounds particularly nice in the middle 8 section…the lead melody is the Korg’s viola sound, and of course it’s my trusty Yamaha DX100 on bass.
Lyrically Not Once Not Ever was a reference to a relationship that had come to a difficult end some years earlier. I’d been talking to a friend one night in the Trent House Pub near St James Park in Newcastle about how couples have statuses that change over time and as a participant you might not realise. I told her I thought that cohabiting and marriage were essentially equivalent, then said off-handedly:
“of course, living together is something you do, but being married is something you are”
The world famous Trent House Pub in the 1990s - image courtesy of welovewhq.com
Marriage was a status that defines you and your relationship, there’s not really an equivalent when you’re living together. And that a marriage had the effect of holding people together in a legal and financial environment, it was permanent commitment, even if that relationship may have died years previously.
But the fact that it’s easier for a couple to stop living together and end their relationship without solicitors, courts and other assorted expenses that actually makes the bond stronger than marriage because it was almost entirely based on love and trust. That in a sense, being married was a lesser status for a relationship.
And on my fourth pint of 80’ it occurred to me that this would be a great line in the song I was writing, a moment where Sarah could address this ‘ex’ directly in spoken word. This felt like a bold move at the time, but we’d already had spoken word sections in Week In Week Out, and Unchained Monologue was entirely spoken word, so why not write another? We’d completed the 80s and were in the 90s after all, lots of songs could have spoken word sections.
The road in Darlington where we recorded the demos for the Disgraceful album
But there is something that irritates me to this day about Not Once Not Ever. The B-section line was originally ‘I remember, I didn’t trust you once, not ever’ but Graeme insisted we changed that line to ‘couldn’t trust you’, probably because it was a more common phrase. It didn’t seem significant to me but soon after Disgraceful’s release I realised that not only did it sound wrong to my ears, it fundamentally changed the tone of the song. The character in the song is a person of strength, reaching out to their ex partner with a touch of cynicism and guile. Someone who had always known that their partner might betray them, and so kept a distance from them throughout the relationship. This song isn’t an appeal for sympathy (“how could you do this to me?”) but a person realising that they always knew their ex was flawed.
The cover of the very first Dubstar promo from 1995 which included this demo of Not Once Not Ever
The word ‘couldn’t’ doesn’t convey that but implies that she had trusted the other and had been let down, repeatedly…and yet had stayed with them. That’s a position of weakness compared to my original lyrical intent and a very different tone. It might seem a trifling matter now but this was a very important point to me throughout the time the act was together. I’d embraced the fact that as I was going to write songs for someone else to sing, particularly someone female, I had the responsibility for that singer to come across as a strong, admirable, knowledgeable hero figure, a person of strength. Sure, someone who might be having a hard time, but she was never a victim. Instead, she had her head held high while valiantly striding into the valley of death.
And this tone wasn’t only present in my writing. You can hear the same sentiment in Just a Girl whose lyrics were written by Sarah. Even though it seems the woman has accepted her fate, in reality she’s transcended it and tells the man involved that ‘I know you’ll want to try’.
So it’s a small regret of mine with Not Once Not Ever, but I can live with it. Amazing how much of a difference one word can make though.
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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Dubstar: Blake's Jerusalem GDR Demo
It seemed like a great idea at the time…
One aspect of the early Dubstar years that’s suprisngly undocumented is how keen we were to perform songs in a stripped-back format. There was even a period when Sarah would sing entirely unaccompanied, which is amazing given how nervous she was onstage. On our very first UK tour in 1995 Sarah would sing Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ in the vocal sound check, it even made an appearance once or twice as an encore. And of course Dubstar completed the NME tent headlining gig at the Reading Festival with an acapella of Day I See You Again…
Three years earlier we had performed a set of Christmas songs at the Middlesbrough Arena (including this version of Silent Night) and so were quite comfortable performing songs with little else than a low drone from the Kawai K1m and the occasional strum on the guitar from Chris. It seemed to work well…so with that festive gig under our belt, what next?
Somehow I’d arrived at the age of twenty without hearing the classic English hymn ‘Jerusalem’ and I still haven’t seen Chariot’s of Fire. My school’s song was the comparatively dry ‘To Be A Pilgrim’ which didn’t have much of a lyric and featured one of Vaughan Williams’ most dreary melodies. This gap in my education was filled when I discovered Blake’s Jerusalem on Billy Bragg’s The Internationale album, released in 1990. Consequently my first experience of Jerusalem was as a proto-socialist anthem and paen to the universality of humanity, totally free of the atavistic pomp of the last night of the proms. Hubert Parry’s melody and arrangement are extraordinary, the words awe inspiring. I loved it.
So thinking it might be nice to do another hymn we recorded a version of it round at mine in Jesmond in early 1994. This original cassette is lost to time, but we rerecorded it with Graeme Robinson and his partner Jon Kirby (who added an extensive keyboard arrangement) some months later. It was this that was submitted to Food records, but was never released.
I liked this version and thought it would a brilliant song to perform onstage as an encore or even record as a B-side. But with the benefit of twenty seven years of hindsight I’m relieved we didn’t. I don’t know whether the sentiment would have been conveyed properly and almost certainly would have been misinterpreted. Despite my occasional lashing out at the John Major government, we weren’t an overtly political act, so the socialist and humanitarian context would have been lost. Instead we would have been seen as a northern pop act singing a song that almost everyone associates with English patriotism.
Patriotism has its time and place but it was definitely not what Dubstar was about. These were the Britpop days: there was much discussion about the song and Blake’s original poem, so we would certainly have had to answer questions and not have a clue what to say:
Journalist: Is Dubstar a patriotically English band?
Dubstar: Not particularly…
Have you been to Jerusalem?
Not yet…
Do you go to church?
Sometimes…
Will you sing other hymns?
Probably not….
Are you Christians?
There’s one confirmed Christian in Dubstar, there might be at least another…
At best it would have been a distraction from everything else we wanted to talk about and risked us being caught in the same controversy that Morrissey had stoked a few years earlier (and ever since). But none of these concerns take away from the majesty of this unreleased recording, once again showcasing the beautiful pure tones of Sarah’s vocals from the earliest of Dubstar days.
And yes, I do prefer Jerusalem over God Save The Queen. Who doesn’t?
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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Dubstar: St. Swithin's Day original demo recorded at Steve's in Jesmond
On a Saturday night in August 1996 at around 22.00, Billy Bragg joined Dubstar onstage to sing St Swithin’s Day at the Reading Festival. We were headlining the NME tent, it was the biggest crowd the act would ever play. It was also the culmination of a long journey…
I was introduced to the music of Billy Bragg by my dear school friend David Sullivan in the summer of 1984. He’d come round to my parent’s house in Welling on a Friday night with a vinyl copy of Life’s a Riot With Spy versus Spy. We loved it, played it repeatedly into the small hours. The music was different to the other acts we had in common: we were Gary Numan fans, Cocteau Twins fans, Durutti Column fans but Billy was nothing like these acts other than being an independent artist. A bold London accent that reminded me of Paul Weller, nothing but a guitar to accompany him… not the sort of thing we usually went for but there was something else that caught our imagination and set him apart.
It’s well documented that Billy’s vocal style can be as challenging as it is endearing, it’s fair to say he has a character voice. But there was one thing you couldn’t debate: he meant each word he sung. Every word meant something to him, therefore every word said something to us. And being fourteen, knee deep in teenage angst and about to dive headfirst into our first proper relationships, when Billy sang we listened. He was telling us about his life, so he was telling us about ours.
It also helped that he seemed to be playing somewhere in London every other weekend in the mid 80s. These were the days of the GLC (Greater London Council, not these guys) who would put on free concerts in parks from Peckham to Wimbledon and even as far afield as Hackney. We went to them all, Billy was a regular fixture, as was Smiley Culture. And that dentist bloke with the violinist. These were great times where my love of live music was born.
So we were proper fans, and here began a run of six exceptional and life-affirming Billy Bragg albums that soundtracked my teens and twenties (you’ll find a playlist of my faves here). I was entranced. I wanted to write songs like him, and form an act that sounded like the Cocteau Twins to sing them. Somehow. Looking back now, if you throw in some Charles Aznavour, Smiths, Depeche Mode and a massive slab of Boys Own and you’ll have the perfect Dubstar influences Venn diagram…
Fast forward to 1994. Sarah had replaced me on vocals in The Joans and we were recording demos for gigs in and around Tyneside. The starting point for St Swithin’s Day was the breakbeat and bass line…I’d been lent a Kawai K1m by Sharon Wilson, singer in the other band I was in at the time. I wasn’t much of a fan of the synth, but discovered that if you stripped everything back you could access the built in samples and play them straight from the ROM. I liked the string sample, and was inspired to write a bassline to a break beat from my collection of Ultimate Beats and Breaks albums. It was days later when I was humming along forgetfully that I realised you could sing Billy’s St. Swithin’s Day to it… then it hit me, imagine a dance version of a Bragg ballad, how cool would that be?
Sarah sang it perfectly, and a defining trope of Dubstar was born: woman dispassionately sings the emotionally charged words written by a man. Of course we didn’t know that would be important to the act, we were simply doing what we did…it’s only now after all these years that it’s clear this was a defining aspect of Dubstar.
Later that year Andy Ross of Food Records played the GDR demo of St Swithin’s Day to Steve Lamacq, who in turn played it out on his BBC Radio 1 evening show (I loved the fact that Andy affectionally referred to on air us as coming from ‘oop north’). This was our first play on national radio. It would not be our last.
Two years later and with five Top 40 singles under out belt we were rehearsing to headline the NME stage at the Reading Festival at NOMIS studios in Kensington. Billy Bragg came round to work out how we could have him join us onstage to play the encore of St Swithin’s Day. He strolled in and was charm itself and self deprecating too (“I only sing in two keys, sharp and flat”). Inevitably I said something stupid in response and wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I don’t think he noticed…
It was immediately clear there was going to be a problem for Billy as we’d changed the key of the song. St. Swithin’s Day was now in that sweet spot that was both too hard to sing an octave lower than normal and impossible to sing an octave higher. He had a simple compromise though. Billy would join in on the B sections (“and the fact that you don’t understand”, “the times we all hoped would last”, “the polaroids that hold us together”) which just about fit within both singers’ ranges. Perfect.
I don’t normally get nervous on stage at all, been living there since the age of fourteen. But standing behind my Roland JD-800 onstage in front of six thousand people at the Reading gig I noticed there wasn’t a microphone setup for Billy. I freaked, I couldn’t believe it, he would come on and have nothing to sing into. So during Manic, which we always played early in the set I ran off stage to tell the crew they’d forgotten about Billy…but I couldn’t find them! Aaaggghhh! So for the rest of the set, the most important gig of my life, I was running offstage during each song to find someone, anyone who could sort this out. Of course when I did eventually find the tour manager he reminded me that you wouldn’t have a mic setup for an entire set without a singer, obviously. And that the roadies would set Billy’s mic up for the encore when we were offstage. Obviously.
PS: we recorded another Billy Bragg song on that day back in 1994, something I’d completely forgotten about until rediscovering these cassettes a few months back…
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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Dubstar: Joni, the song that became 'I Will Be Your Girlfriend'
Joni, the instrumental that two years would become ‘I Will Be Your Girlfriend’ was conceived as an opening tune for the newly revamped The Joans in 1994, now for the first time with Sarah on vocals. I’d written the house piano vamp years earlier, a funky lovechild of the kind of piano parts I loved on Alison Limerick and TransGlobal Underground records. But what made the song come together was the Joni Mitchell sample.
Except it wasn’t a Joni Mitchell sample. I didn’t realise it was a reinterpretation of Big Yellow Taxi until a couple of years later. I was never much of a fan of the 70s, embarassingly for a DJ my musical general knowledge really on began in 1978. If you need someone for your pop quiz who is ‘good at the 80s’ I’m your man, but Beatles trivia? Sorry… prior to the arrival of punk I knew basically nothing. So with a smaple of this nature I was flying blind. An act calling themselves Aquarius had resung Big Yellow Taxi and put it into their own proto trip-hop song Hey Babe…I thought it soudned terrific so I sampled the hook line on my Roland W-30 and strung it together with this modified hip hop break, a bass line from my DX100 and the piano vamp played on a Korg M3R that also added some mad percussion. Chris made some superb guitar shapes and bingo, Joni sounded amazing as a set opener…plus no one else was doing stuff like that on Tyneside in 1994. Dubstar had arrived!
There were plenty of acts in other parts of the country who were making music like this though, and it was these who were the biggest inspirations for the Dubstar sound. I’ve linked to a selection in this blog post…
When Sarah joined us in 1993 it was clear that we would have to refocus our act. Chris and I had spent the largest part of 1993 becoming ever more obscure, noisy and, frankly…unlikeable, musically speaking. And yet there I was writing all these catchy tunes that were trying to escape from oblivion, potential chart gold but framed in noise. Was it my love of My Bloody Valentine and the entire 4AD Records rosta that was holding us back?
I’m not sure, but it became obvious that the best way to incorporate Sarah and do something that might be successful was to move away from the walls of sound and into a world where other people could enjoy these songs for once. In other words, get a grip.
So the shoegaze records were put away and I let the tunes I’d been DJing take over. This was the musical decision that defined the move from ‘The Joans’ to ‘Dubstar’. After ending my ambitions to be a singer, this was probably the most important career decision I’d made.
And in Joni you can hear some of the attributes of the music that would appear on Disgraceful. There’s the tiny vocal sample idea that would open Anywhere, the rolling break beats found in St Swithin’s Day and Stars…not forgetting the huge dub basslines that feature throughout the Dubstar cannon.
Listening to this humble cassette recording, it’s amazing to think it was made on a simple portastudio on the floor in my front room in just one take. You can clearly hear that we were having A LOT of fun… I miss those days a lot too. And sometimes I wonder if Goodbye would have sounded better if we’d added Joni to Goodbye rather than Girlfriend. But that was twenty five years ago, we’ll never know. Maybe Girlfriend could have been the opener to Make It Better? I suppose it’s true, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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Dubstar: The very first run-through of ‘Day I See You Again’
Day I See You Again was written during the first recording session for Disgraceful at RAK Studios in London. As with so many Dubstar songs, the melody had been jogging around my head for years before the events detailed in the lyric. It took the real day-I-saw-you-again for the words to appear…and become one of the most celebrated Dubstar songs. The lyric appeared in about ten minutes, which is the optimum length of time to write a song. The best work always comes quickly.
Day I See You Again throws a spotlight on a philosophical and artistic consideration I’ve wrestled with since school days: you want to write great songs, so should you be portraying yourself, how you feel, what you’ve done… or should you invent a separate character to be your hero? Can you do both? And if you were to do both, would that compromise the audience’s sense of the singer? Who is that person?
This was an issue for me in the Dubstar days: it wasn’t going to be me singing my words but Sarah, not simply a different person but a different gender too…so should I write from my perspective, or a female character I’ve invented… or what I imagine is Sarah’s perspective?
This troubled me deeply at the time, so I made a policy decision in 1995 that I’ve stuck with it ever since: I would not invent characters in my songs. I would write sincerely in my own voice. Inspired by my musical heroes like Billy Bragg, I realised that in order for my songs to work it’s crucial that the listener believes what the singer is singing is true, whoever that singer is. That truth could only come from personal experience, so I’ll write about that.
But that puts Day I See You Again in a peculiar middle ground. In order for the song to make sense, I wrote it from a straight woman’s perspective fantasising about a man, not a straight man fantasising about a woman. But how can you do that without inherently compromising the song, losing the inner truth? Wouldn’t the gender swap spoil the whole thing?
The solution was to take inspiration from Morrissey, who even gets his name checked in the lyric.
In Morrissey’s work, particularly in The Smiths, he rarely if ever mentions the gender of the person he’s singing about. This leaves a large aspect of the context of the song and the situation open to the interpretation of the listener…is this song about a man, a woman, a forbidden homosexual encounter, a hidden longing? The writer creates these gaps that the listener fills with their own concerns.
It is for this reason that every Dubstar song I wrote after Day I See You Again, there are occasional gender specific references that Sarah makes about herself but almost none about the other person in the song. The story and characters the listener creates will always be stronger than anything I could write, so I left that aspect out.
Jesmond Dene 2021, the park in the valley of the Ouseburn in Newcastle Upon Tyne. This recording was made just above the park in my old flat on Grosvenor Avenue
So how to complete Day I See You Again? Keep the sentiment as if it were me singing about ‘the day I see you again’, but just swap the genders signifiers (“if the man/woman you’ve grown to be…”). This also seemed to contribute to the sense of ‘kitchen sink realism’ that journalists would discuss when the album came out. Perfect for the Britpop era, and completely unintentional.
This recording, found on an old cassette in a cupboard in Hove remained unseen or heard since 1999. It’s the first time Sarah sang the song, you’re hearing the very first run through. We were in the front room in my flat in Jesmond…as usual I’d kept writing songs for inclusion on our first album even though the track listing was pretty much confirmed at this point. It was composed on my piano in the front room but I’d made this faux Russian orchestral arrangement on the Roland S-760 sampler so it might round off the album with a contrasting and sophisticated mood.
One rainy Tyneside afternoon I sang it to Sarah and she sang it back to me. That’s what you can hear here. I left the tape running after Sarah finished and sang it again so we could firm up the rhythm of the words and have a recording she could take home. This is the last recording I made of my own voice singing a new Dubstar song for more than a decade. The next time was for the sessions that would become the first unreleased album United States of Being in 2006.
The room where Day I See You Again was composed, it’s now a students’ flat this picture being from the estate agent’s website 2021
A few interesting things in this recording:
This version of Day I See You Again includes the full third verse, half of which was edited out by Graeme Robinson. At the time it seemed that the last verse no longer made sense…now I’m sure it was the right decision.
It also includes the original instrumental Middle 8 section which we replaced with a double chorus. It’s quite clever, the same vocal melody and words but entirely different accompaniment. I talk about this in my songwriting lectures….
Both Sarah and I struggled to get the words to flow and spent ages fitting them to this slow 3:4 arrangement. This explains the slightly wonky performance on Disgraceful where the song has been straightened out to 4:4. It has a certain charm though, who wants perfection in art?
The key was a bit high for Sarah, so when I demonstrate how to sing the song it’s WAY too high for me. Hence my exclamation at 6’39” of ‘fucking hell, no wonder you’re the singer’ with Sarah laughing in the background. What I meant was ‘no surprise I’ve stopped singing and you’ve taken over, I can’t do this and you’re way better at this than me’. I’m not sure that comes across on this recording. Glad I can clarify it now, better late than never.
It’s amazing to have found this among the dozens of cassettes-in-the-cupboard, the first run through of a pivotal Dubstar song…sixteen months later Sarah would sing it as an a cappella encore headlining the NME tent at the Reading festival. The roar of that crowd, the sheer power in the affirmation of that moment is a memory I treasure nearly twenty five years later.
The official poster for Reading Festival 1996
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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Dubstar Preludes Volume 3 Preview: Make It Better
Dubstar at 25+1: Dubstar Preludes Volume 3
Over thirty demo recordings were completed for the third Dubstar album ‘Make It Better’. With Chris living in Gateshead, Sarah in Manchester, and me down in Hove we were as far apart as you can be while still in England*.
All three members of Dubstar in one place
There was another problem too:
My songwriting portfolio was empty… Disgraceful and Goodbye included many songs that were up to ten years old, in fact only two songs on Disgraceful were written for the album, ‘Not Once Not Ever’ and ‘Day I See You Again’. It was a similar story for Goodbye. This meant all of the songs for Make It Better had to be brand new compositions** .
So after I abandoned our ‘challenging’ writing trip to the mill in Oxfordshire (Dubstar never wrote together, what were we thinking?), I sat down in my new flat in The Brunswick development in Hove. I wrote fifty seven new tunes for the album including a collection of instrumentals that I would write words for at a later stage. That’s not so many for a professional writer, but writing as a recording artist requires a different mindset to someone who writes for money. For me, great music depends on a connection to something personal, something real, something true…after all, songwriting is an art. Art takes time, patience, and a space to indulge yourself.
Whereas a pro-writer must come up with golden ideas every time she’s in a writing session, to somehow be more general yet simultaneously edgy, commercial but not cheesy. This is not an easy task. I lived in that world for a while and it was the hardest I’ve ever worked.
The writing setup for United States of Being, the follow up to Make It Better. Note the return of the piano.
But back to Dubstar… In some ways constant writing is a reflection of a lack of confidence, you think that eventually you will write the next Winner Takes It All, the next I’m Not In Love, the follow up to Stars. You know you can do it, you just haven’t managed it… yet. It will be the next song, next song. But as any writer knows, you get to a point where you can’t trust your own quality control. And if you’ve not hit your best work after fifty songs it’s probably not coming. There comes a point when you simply can’t make it any better, you have to demo together, you have to commit to the songs you have.
Steve and Chris rehearsing in Brighton. Photo taken by Sarah of course
To complicate things further, my writing process had changed since Newcastle. I’d left my piano back in Jesmond, so I was writing on synthesisers and guitars for the first time. This was exciting but brought challenges. The record company had bought us a brand new Apple Mac G3 which was incredible. The previous two albums had been put together using ADATs, Cubase on my Atari ST and of course the Roland W-30. This was the modern world, this was Logic Audio V3. This was…a lot to get my head round.
Single artwork for Make It Better, the preview single for DUBSTAR Preludes volume 3
There was no rehearsing of the songs on Make It Better. Essentially I would create the whole arrangement alone, Chris would make trips down to play on what were effectively finished instrumentals. Sarah would arrive another day where I would sing the melodies to her…and that would be the very first time the song would be heard, not just for Sarah but for me too. Madness really, I wouldn’t countenance working like that today. But we were geographically separated, the situation required a compromise to work at all.
After thirty two songs were demoed, I think we were all at the end our tethers. I wanted to keep writing but the time had come to start recordings proper. So I stopped.
My Fender Rhodes, as featured on Make It Better
What this meant was there was a huge backlog of unfinished and undemoed songs written in this period that were never heard. That’s where DUBSTAR Preludes Volume 3 comes in. These are the best five of the twenty five (!) unrecorded songs from the Make It Better era.
Make It Better, the song itself, is a preview from the prelude, a direct update of the original recording from 1999. You can hear my bass and guitar parts recorded at the time, while the melody is played out in 2021 on my Fender Rhodes with extra supporting parts added to complete the sound. It’s a little scratchy, but those initial recordings were never intended to appear in this form. I think it has a certain charm, I hope you agree.
*Unless one of us was in Cornwall. Or Devon.
** (except ‘Your Words’, which wasn’t a particularly strong song anyway)
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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Dubstar and Human League at Tynemouth - The Final Gig
Dubstar at 25+1: The Final Gig
…and a heatwave on Tyneside
We played our last gig of the twentieth century on Wednesday 12th February 1998 at the Norwich Waterfront. The tour to promote ‘I Will Be Your Girlfriend’ had not been a happy excursion. For an act that was more a studio creation than a live experience we’d played a remarkable amount of shows in short succession. By my reckoning we’d completed nine tours in three years. This outing was the last time that we played with the extended line-up of Rochelle Vincente on backing vocals and Sleeper’s Diid Osman on bass (not forgetting the amazing Paul Wadsworth on drums of course). And on that final show in Norwich it was Diid’s birthday, the band sang ‘happy birthday’ to him on stage while the audience gazed on, baffled.
That was it until we shared a stage for Miles Jacobson’s Birthday (erstwhile of Food Records, now Managing Director of Championship Manager) in November 2011. A long thirteen year hiatus for Dubstar, but we’d taken a breather and now we were back. Next we headlined the Riverside fundraiser at the Cluny in Newcastle on August 29th 2012, then the big comeback show at the Lexington Pub in London on 15th April 2013 and finally ‘The Mouth of the Tyne’ festival at The Priory at Tynemouth with the Human League. We didn’t know it at the time but it was to be the farewell…
Dubstar at the Riverside Fundraiser, Cluny, Newcastle 2012
After the abandonment of the act and first United States of Being album in 2008, the coterie of advisors we’d grown around us evaporated, but I’d kept on nodding terms with Simon Watson, the Human League’s manager. A fellow resident of Hove, our paths had crossed on a handful of occasions, I think Sarah knew him from her days singing for Client too. He had a proposition:
“The Human League are playing in Tynemouth, would Dubstar be available to support?”
It was an intriguing idea. As an act we’d already begun to drift apart again, Chris was up north, Sarah in London and me settled in Brighton… but we said ‘yes’, why not? And playing home turf again (Chris was living literally across the road from the venue) would be great.
So on July 10th 2013 I travelled to Newcastle by train, Sarah and Paul B brought up my equipment by car. That evening I met some old friends from the Newcastle music scene at the Cluny and made a presentation at a music conference nearby. The following day, slightly bleary-eyed we completed one sweltering and very quick rehearsal at Gavin’s studio Base HQ in the Armstrong Industrial Park, just as we had the previous year for the Riverside show. We were hot and bothered and ready.
The day of the gig was even hotter.
The dressing room was in the disused Coastguard Station and was enormous, with the most incredible views of the North Sea and the Tyne river. We had the back rooms, the Human League the main observatory which was even bigger. Our vegetarian curry was delivered after soundcheck, and as I sat there eating alone I had to laugh at the very Dubstar nature of the situation. We were playing in Tyneside, but not Newcastle, opening for an act I’d adored as a child but had lost track of. We had an incredible view, but through someone else’s dressing room. I was sure I’d been here before….
Waiting to go onstage…the view from the Coastguard building at Tynemoth (Chris, Sarah and Paul B)
The show went well, everything was smooth, I only played half a dozen wrong notes. It was a short ‘greatest hits’ set plus Window Pain, an unreleased song from our second completed United States of Being album.
Using the venerable Prophet 600 for bass was a bold move, it felt like the earth was moving for the closer Stars. I looked down at the crowd, literally, who were mainly families picnicking in the fading sun, kids running around with their parents occasionally nodding their heads. This was how we’d started all those years ago and it somehow seemed to be the future for Dubstar too, playing old songs to fans of other bands. Hmmm…
Inevitably Human League were amazing, you can’t argue with Being Boiled, Empire State Human or Love Action. And why would you want to? I was a little irritated they included ‘Together In Electric Dreams’…I’m an original fan, I bought Reproduction on vinyl in 1979 and that’s not a League song! The crowd loved it of course, no one cared no matter how hard I frowned. Phil thanked us from the stage which was a thrill, and from deep in my memory a voice was telling me ‘one day all records will be made this way’.
The show was over by 21.00, remarkably early. We’d nearly finished the rider and were simply hanging around as I watched the League pull out of Tynemouth. Jo and Susanne were walking the grounds of the Priory with multiple champagne bottles under their arms, Susanne calling out ‘Phil, are you coming back in our car?’ The luckiest women in pop indeed…
I strolled out into the evening heat to sample the delights of Tynemouth, a place I knew well but had never explored at night. The town was heaving with League fans in t-shirts in the sweltering heat, the atmosphere electric. Normally I loved the post gig banter with fans, but tonight I wasn’t inclined, because…
Tynemouth Priory in a heatwave
…Dubstar had just completed a circle with a circumference of decades. We started on Tyneside twenty two years earlier, left Newcastle, travelled the world and now we were back where it all began. And yes, It was great to play with the Human League, an honour, but I couldn’t shake the nagging thought that I’d already done this years ago. An entire generation ago.
So I went out to the benches on the promenade with the final beer from the rider and listened to the music I had on my phone. The songs Emma and I had been working on, the Dog in the Snow productions, the Hockeysmith songs, my own new material, ghost writes I’d completed…
And although I’d realised this the previous year, now I could feel it and I could see the evidence all around me. There was no angle to grow Dubstar from here, at least not in a way that would work for me. The circle could keep turning but would only ever be a border, an impassable frontier defined by all we’d accomplished decades earlier. That was the exact opposite of what Dubstar was supposed to be.
I looked out through the haze to the sea and the ships queuing to enter the ‘Port of Tyne’… this wasn’t a sad moment. It was elating, the dramas were complete, the struggle was over and the journey had been great. I finished the beer, put my headphones on and slipped away…
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Stars - Demo at Graeme Robinson's house in Darlington June 1994
I wrote ‘Stars’ in early 1992 as a reflection of my concern of what to do when Walker’s Nightclub closed. It had been my home for three years, and suddenly it was gone. Three years later, on this day in 1995 it would be the first Dubstar release and the first time we made it into the UK Top 40. It would go on to be the most successful of all the Dubstar songs.
There were many versions of Stars, last time I counted there were over twenty remixes. And prior to our debut on Food Records there were half a dozen other versions too. On these cassettes next to me I have two live takes and a studio recording with me on vocals, a run-through from Jesmond and a live version with Sarah singing, and this…the demo that was taken to Camden Town in June 1994.
It was recorded in Graeme Robinson’s back room in his house in Darlington. He’d invited us to make some demos with him and his sidekick Jon Kirby having seen us play at the Riverside a few weeks earlier. There was some talk about taking these tunes being played to record companies…we knew he was the drummer in a Food Records signing called ‘Planet Claire’ (fronted by Claire Worrall who went on to play keyboards in Robbie Williams’ band and is now married to one of my musical heroes Stephen Duffy).
But we weren’t thinking anything much would come of this trip to County Durham. In the world of music, thing’s normally don’t.
So I took my Roland W-30 sampler down the A1M and laid the entirely programmed arrangement onto Graeme’s tape machine. Chris is playing on this demo somewhere but is mixed so low I can barely make him out, Sarah sings well though.
In the earlier versions of the song there was no middle 8, so Graeme suggested I wrote something new to break up the choruses that repeat towards the end. Unfortunately I couldn’t think of anything. I have a problem revisiting old songs, something to do with a short attention span I suppose, and this one had been around for more than two years at this point. All I could think to do was pause, maybe take a break from the singing? It was supposed to be a ‘Dub’ song after all…consequently this became the defining structure for Stars.
We recorded three songs in that first session, I think they were Stars, Anywhere and Elevator Song. Jon drove Graeme down to London to meet Andy Ross at Food, and then back up to mine in Jesmond. He had some good news…
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Not So Manic Now - Rehearsal at Steve’s in Jesmond May 1994
The first release form the treasure trove of cassettes I found last month!
During the first half of 1994, and prior to singing to Food Records, Sarah, Chris and I were performing regularly across the North East of England and rehearsing in the lounge of my flat in Jesmond. I don’t recall why we stopped working in the local rehearsal rooms, but I know that on this occasion we needed to record the live set as demos for more gigs. The whole recording survives to this day on my cassette.
The gig was at Rumpoles in Middlesbrough the following Saturday. There were eight songs: we opened with ‘Joni’ (which two years later would become ‘I Will Be Your Girlfriend’, ‘Manic’ was number four and we closed with ‘St Swithins Day’. For some reason ‘Stars’ wasn’t in this set…
At the gig I was enjoying myself and thinking ‘we’ve actually got something here’. It was the first time that the act had really come together live since Sarah had joined eight months previously. The crowd seemed to love it, even the bar staff. Unfortunately, apart from one show at Newcastle’s Riverside later that month we wouldn’t play live again for well over another year. Damn.
This is the original arrangement for Manic that I discussed on dubstar.com. More upbeat than the version on Disgraceful, it’s way more fun but lacks the majesty of the single released eighteen months later. Despite this version obviously being a work in progress, you can clearly hear Sarah relishing the song.
My strongest memory of this time is the cognitive dissonance of believing we were finally getting somewhere, this act sounds good… and days later waking up on my 25th birthday thinking this act is doomed. I’m too old, it’s never going to happen. It was literally the next day that Graeme Robinson invited us to work with him in Darlington, which led directly to us being signed by Food Records with months.
There’s a lesson in that…
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DUBSTAR Preludes Volume 2
Almost all of the early Dubstar songs began their lives in my home in Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne. I was lucky enough to share an entire Tyneside flat with just one other person which gave us both a huge amount of living space, a dream at only £120 a month each.
With this luxury I would write the song on the piano in the front room with the view of Jesmond Dene, then put together an arrangement on the Roland W-30 sampler in the back room later that day. This working process gave us Disgraceful, Song no.9, Stars, Day I See You Again, Anywhere…almost all the songs on Disgraceful.
Goodbye was slightly different. In 1995 I moved the equipment out of the flat and into our first studio in the Newcastle Arts Centre on Westgate Road, directly over the Star Inn pub. The following year when the time came to record the B-sides to Elevator Song, the studio moved to a much nicer room in the main quad of the centre (with heating!). Rental per week? £20. I maintain to this day that one of the best things Dubstar ever did was not move to London…
Consequently for the second Dubstar album there was a longer delay between the writing of the songs in Jesmond and demoing them in the studio. Whereas previously everything I had written had some sort of arrangement made the same day, in 1996 there were dozens of tunes that started their lives at home but were never completed. Not even demoed…
This is where Dubstar Preludes Volume Two comes in.
During the Covid-19 pandemic I’ve had the time to listen through the Minidiscs and DATs of tunes that I started writing for the act but ran out of time to complete. It’s amusing to reflect that even though Goodbye was way too long at fifteen tracks, there were still piles of other tunes waiting to be completed in the wings. As I said to the head of Food Records…”there are always more songs Andy, and some of them are good”.
So here are my favourite four of those compositions, each written twenty five years ago in the late Spring of 1996. I hope you enjoy them:
There was never a Dubstar instrumental. Sarah was the star, it wouldn’t make sense to have her missing from a Dubstar tune. But Infinite Summer was written with this destiny in mind, just to try something different. I had plenty of problems to write about but I was concerned that our audience might be getting tired of hearing Sarah singing my state of mind. Hmmm….
So Infinite Summer was written as a guitar instrumental, possibly as an opening song to the new album. The fact that it sounds nothing like anything that eventually made it onto Goodbye explains why we’re hearing for the first time now.
I included this tune in my GGGGHOST live sets in 2015-17. The original idea was to have one simple motif repeating throughout the song (the doo-deeeeee-dah melody) and then write a vocal to sit on top. But there wasn’t enough musical space to insert another melody, so I didn’t try. A rare case of harmonic restraint from me. Also, I was shying away from doing another spoken word piece like ‘Unchained Monologue’, so it was forgotten for twenty years.
On the original minidisk you can hear Lee and Herring’s “Fist of Fun” playing in the background. Can you get more 90s than that?
I had hoped that Dubstar would record a dance anthem (with words) for the second album. We’d gotten some of the way there with the Motiv8 version of ‘Stars’, but that song was really a slow, dubby ballad. This new song would be written from the get-go at a dance floor friendly 125BPM. It would also have an uplifting-rather-than-reflective-melody that would land us smack-bang into the front of the record boxes of the super star DJs. That didn’t happen of course, I was distracted by the Britpop activity around me so wrote more sad-anthems instead.
This piano piece arrived on a cold early morning in Jesmond when things weren’t great, at least not for me. So I played a melody with an accompaniment that was straight 8th notes all the way through, something I’d been avoiding for years as it sounded too much like Shoegaze (which I love, but Dubstar couldn’t be shoegaze). No such restraint now.
Sunset on a Family is the sound of an unseen child moving through my victorian flat, a future ghost simultaneously sadder and older than its years.
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland Volume 3
With the re-release of ‘Stars’, it was on 24th March in 1996 that Dubstar achieved our highest chart position in the UK Top 40.
And to commemorate, today sees the release of the last instalment in the DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland trilogy, an idea that began as a misunderstanding & blossomed into a suite of piano pieces… memories of the songs that I wrote & then recorded with Chris Wilkie & Sarah Blackwood when we were Dubstar.
It’s been a fascinating journey. Covers excepted, all of these songs started their lives alone with me in front of a piano…and went off into the world to have a life of their own. DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland has felt like I’ve called them home from a journey across time & space courting producers, engineers, band members, record companies, fans…
And now they’re home, sepia crystallisations of memories from a long, long time ago.
I didn’t return to or reference the Dubstar recordings to make this trilogy, these are how I recalled the tunes, and mainly without the words. Those were from another lifetime…reenacting them now would be reciting lines from a diary. No, not a diary… mimicking the sounds you made & thoughts you had as a younger & foolish person. Bon mots from a VHS of a birthday party, Christmas with the family, words that could only exist in their specific callow context, a land forever lost.
Then found again, as if you were climbing into your loft for the first time in decades.
I hope you’ve enjoyed these recordings, they’ve been an enjoyable obsession for me during this pandemic…the first occasion in thirty years that I’ve actually had the time to look back & assess how far we came. And as the pandemic feels like it’s subsiding there’s a new vista coming into view. New horizons and a new soundtrack, & all of it arriving very soon.
Thanks Dubstar.
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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If I Can't Change Your Mind
We made our first release as Dubstar for nearly a decade all the way back in 2010. A cover of The Passion’s ‘I’m In Love With A German Filmstar’, it was released by Buffet Libre as part of a compilation for Amnesty International and remains a favourite of mine from the late Dubstar period.
We actually recorded two songs for the compilation earlier in 2009, the second being this cover of the Bob Mould classic ‘If I Can’t Change Your Mind’. There were two versions. Like Filmstar, South Central completed a mix (which sounded great)...and there was this demo, recorded at Gavin’s studio 'Base HQ' behind Newcastle Central Station.
‘Filmstar’ and ‘Change Your Mind’ were the initial songs we recorded after the sudden ending of the relaunch of Dubstar in 2008. I think you can hear a tangible sense of ‘nothing left to lose’ in these tunes, a sense of fun and just doing something because we could. The noughties were nearly over, the opportunity to revisit old glories squandered. The act could only ever be a hobby for the three of us now…in many ways it was a relief.
My strongest memories of this time were the evenings where we'd finish recording and go for a pint with Gav at The Forth Hotel, our local from the 90s… then head back to Jesmond for late night drinks at ‘As You Like It’ before Chris returned to his family in Tynemouth. It was like we’d come full circle from 1991.
There were a further sixteen Dubstar songs recorded in 2010 and 2011. They remain unreleased.
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'Just A Girl, She Said' live at BBC Maida Vale Studios
Dubstar was truly getting into its stride when we were invited to play live at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios for the Marc Radcliffe show on Radio 1. We were to perform stripped back, kind of acoustic versions of songs from our first album to promote its release. Exciting times.
And there’s a confidence in this recording that maybe isn’t present in the version on Disgraceful. From the oboes and flutes, to the understated guitar playing and Sarah’s impassioned vocal, this live version is my all time favourite of Just A Girl.
My enduring memory of this session was the studio at Maida Vale, there was a sense of history everywhere I looked. It felt…amazing frankly. But like so many of these extraordinary Dubstar events, it sped by in an instant. I can’t remember what we had to do next, but I know it had to happen IMMEDIATELY, not a chance to take stock and catch our breath. It was great.
The BBC were extremely supportive of Dubstar from our first release right through, and Marc Radcliffe was a particular champion. Thank you everyone, it meant a lot.
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland Volume 2
On this day in 1995 Food Records released Dubstar’s ‘Not So Manic Now’, the act’s breakthrough single. In those days you had a greater chance of a song landing high in the charts if you released your single in the few weeks after Christmas before the rest of the music industry returned from their Caribbean holidays. A song could sneak in while no-one was looking, and it worked.
Manic arrived at number nineteen in the UK Top Forty singles chart, our first of three visits to the Top Twenty. This was immensely exciting. We appeared on Top of the Pops, a crowning achievement for a new act. The record company threw us an infamous after-show party at Soho House in London too…quite a night. My hangover has just about worn off.
And so to celebrate this landmark anniversary, I’m releasing the second instalment of the DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland trilogy, a collection of piano reimaginings of another thirteen songs I wrote for the act plus a piano version of Brick Supply’s ‘Not So Manic Now’, the song that was our first bona fide hit.
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I discussed back in October how DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland began, a misunderstanding that led to a summer’s worth of piano playing and recording. As the days are so short, it feels fitting to release this collection on a Sunday at Christmastime, a cosy dose of memories for the season of nostalgia. I hope you enjoy it.
And a big thank you goes out to Roger Newbrook again for his fantastic photography.
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Face The Music
Written by Stephen Hillier
When February 2012
Where Brighton, East Sussex
Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood
Features Analogue Solutions Telemark
“I'd find you again, in another world...”The Dubstar song that actually features a lyrical dagger through the heart, not simply implies it.
Every year Café Del Mar would get in touch to ask if I had anything that would be suitable for their compilations. And every time I’d said no, but as we were now in full reformation mode it seemed this was the moment to reconnect with our Ibizan roots. I said ‘si, here’s Face The Music’. Cafe Del Mar said ‘non’. Dammit.
This song was originally known as ‘Sorry’, but I thought it best that I would rewrite the words. Chilling out with a Negroni watching the sun going down to a song where someone is repeatedly telling you they’re ‘sorry’ didn’t make sense to me. On reflection, it also didn’t make sense to submit Face The Music, which had a sullen and obviously incompatible mood running throughout. Unfortunately, knowing what’s appropriate and when has never been my strength.
In the winter of 2012 I’d seen The Robin Guthrie Trio at Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar in Brighton. A basement venue, it was a totally spit and sawdust kind of place. I loved every second, one of the most important gigs of my life. So I investigated his solo catalogue. He had released three stunning albums with Harold Budd: the Californian ones that were mirror images of each other, and Bordeaux following a few years later. ‘How Close Your Soul’ conjured an image in my mind: What if Sapphire and Steel were to be updated for the 21st Century, like Battlestar Galactica had been? Where would it be set? Who would play the leads? And who would supply the music?
I had answers to all of these questions. It would be in black and white, it would be set at night in a deserted French village, Alexander Skarsgård would play Steel and Karen Gillan would play Sapphire. The music would be by Budd and Guthrie, ‘How Close Your Soul’ specifically. And who would write the main theme? Me of course, and Dubstar would play it.
That’s what Face The Music is, not a tune to chill out to as the sun sets into the Mediterranean, but the theme to a romantic remake of an obscure 1980s Science Fiction TV show. You don’t get more Dubstar than that. Seriously, think about it… you don’t.
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The Last Song
WRITTEN BY STEPHEN HILLIER
WHEN JANUARY 2000
WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX
ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD
FEATURES ROLAND S-760
“What's our future, where are we going, who'll pay for us now?” In the winter of 1999/2000 Dubstar felt like it was going to end soon, well before Make It Better was even released.
I loved the idea of closing the act, a dramatic flourish, leaving the trio I’d worked in for the previous seven years with a song. My way of saying goodbye to the fans and meaning it this time. Swansong had been my first attempt at this, but even in the turmoil of the turn of the millennium it felt way too spiteful for me. Maybe I should have another go, write a song that could have come from the Disgraceful sessions. Something more conciliatory?
So in January 2000 I wrote ‘The Last Song’ as part of the duets idea for the Self Same Thing EP, hoping Holly Johnson would sing it with Sarah. He rang me up, was the very personification of politeness and consideration and told me it was too camp for him, have we considered Marc Almond? This has become one of my favourite moments of my entire career, to be turned down by one of the biggest voices of the 20th Century because my work was too dramatic (or overly emotional? I’ve never been sure what camp is…). Quite an honour.
Sarah sang it solo round at my place in Hove. One take, and there it is, a true account of how it feels when the curtain finally closes. Maybe it was the knowledge that this act was going to end, and pondering the question of ‘where do you go when the music finally stops?’
It wasn’t my intention when I wrote it, but revisiting ‘the Last Song’ yesterday I imagined it as from a musical, a finale for the supporting characters who are having to leave the play as the rest of show continues. More Brectian tragedy than Andrew Lloyd Webber.
I particularly like the way the song closes, lyrically the door is left ever so slightly ajar…it’s only the year 2000, we’re just turning thirty, this might not be the end, maybe we’re freaking out and there are more songs ‘yet to come’? Little did I know there would be around fifty of them…
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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We Still Belong
WRITTEN BY STEPHEN HILLIER
WHEN NOVEMBER 2005
WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX
ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD
FEATURES ROLAND S-760, YAMAHA CP-70B, FENDER RHODES, KORG MS-20
“We never lied” There was talk of Sarah doing more Dubstar. We’d stayed in regular contact over the years and our vapour trails probably crossed on her way to Slovakia to play gigs with Client and me on my songwriting trips to Stockholm. I was excited, it felt right. I had an ongoing sense of Dubstar having more to say, we were cutoff too soon.
So I started writing songs specifically for the return. But given the heartache and drama from the 1990s which were constantly nagging in the back of my mind, I needed to reassure myself that this was a good idea…
I wrote this song to prove to myself it could be done, that it should be done. Initially We Still Belong was a statement: ‘hey, we’re back!’ Did you forget about us? Well we’re here, now please move over and make space’. Hooray!
But that’s simply not the kind of song I write. Also, I’d spent the previous three years listening to nordic heroes such as Sigur Rós and Mew in the villa in Spain. That was the music I wanted to make, huge melodic and dramatic expressions of joy and angst. Isn’t that what Dubstar always was anyway?
So I changed my song. ‘We Still Belong’ became a lyrical development on the theme that Human League explored in their classic ‘Dreams Of Leaving’ from Travelogue. It concerns that feeling of having to get away…and not knowing whether leaving will make things better. An expression of fear. It’s my favourite Human League song by far.
And ‘We StIll Belong’ is one of my favourites of those mid-00s compositions because I felt I’d hit the balance right on every level. The melody, the words, the structure, the pianos, the direction. And, crucially for me, it sounded like 2005, not 1995. This song was pointing the direction ahead and the space we could occupy. We still belonged.
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
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DUBSTAR: Lost & Foundland Volume 1
Dubstar’s first album ‘Disgraceful’ is twenty five today
To celebrate, I’m releasing a solo album ‘Dubstar: Lost & Foundland Volume 1', a collection of piano reimaginings of thirteen songs I wrote for the act plus a piano version of Billy Bragg’s ‘St Swithin’s Day’.
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Back in July, someone tweeted me that Dubstar’s Stars was twenty five years old that day. I’d forgotten, completely, thought I’d missed the opportunity to mark the anniversary. No one else was doing anything, maybe I should?
Over the years since its release, many have told me I should do a new version of the song, maybe as a Marks & Spencers’ style piano ballad. I’d shied away from this idea because, well, I’ve never been that good at spotting a musical opportunity. And yet it WAS twenty five years, I should do something. So I quickly recorded a piano version on my old Yamaha CP-70B electric grand piano and put it up on YouTube to mark the anniversary of the day the song made the UK Top 40.
Later that day, Claire said ‘oh, that’s good, you should do another twenty five’. She meant write another twenty five blog posts, the writing notes I’d included on www.dubstar.com. The explanation I’d given for Stars had caught the imagination of Dubstar fans on social media, so why not do some more?
But I thought she meant do piano versions of another twenty five songs I’d written for the act. Er…ok, that’s a huge amount of work, a crazy amount of work. By the time I’d realised my misunderstanding, I was too excited by the idea to turn back.
So everyday for twenty five days I spent an hour playing & recording an old Dubstar song, then immediately put it up on YouTube with writing notes, explaining the providence & inspiration being the song. It was an extraordinary experience…many of these songs I hadn’t played since they were written, some I’d not thought about in years, decades. And with every song I found a melody that I could fall in love with again. So I did. And when the ‘Dubstar 25’ project came to a close with Day I See You Again, I kept going…
Today fourteen of these recordings see their official worldwide release. From ‘The Gender We Lose’ that Chris & I included on our cassette album “Gear” as The Joans back in 1992, through to ‘So Say We All’, the song that should have closed our 4th (or 5th) album as Dubstar. I hope you enjoy them.
I must also give a big thank you once again to Roger Newbrook for his fantastic photography that accompanies this release.
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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Disgraceful, the beginnings
The original artwork for the Dubstar album ‘Disgraceful’
“The most exciting moment for me was discovering that Food Records wanted a Dubstar album, not just singles.
I’d heard stories of how acts would be signed for a couple of releases… then record an album if their singles had done well. They’d only be taken seriously or invested in properly once they’d proven themselves in the market. I’d seen in my days at Pinnacle Records that this absence of money was the kiss of death for most new acts.
Even worse would be if an act was put into a ‘development’ phase. This meant the record company thought the act was promising, but not promising enough to actually release any music. So they’d sign them, hold on to them for years, release nothing, drop them…and through this process the artists couldn’t sign with anyone else. Another kiss of death. And I won’t even mention ‘production deals’ <shudder>.
But that wasn’t the situation with Food Records. Andy Ross wanted an album. That meant a proper advance, a proper publishing deal with a bit of luck, proper time in a recording studio with a real producer (for a change). This was the real thing.
And when the news broke on Tyneside, there was a tangible reaction of ‘what the fuck?’ among the bands we hung out with. Although we’d been familiar faces on the Newcastle scene, especially through my club nights, Dubstar had transformed from The Joans in secret. We had all this great material but had stopped playing live, no one outside of the three of us, our management and Food Records knew about it. That ‘The Joans’ would be signed out of all the hopefuls on Tyneside was…a surprise. To put it mildly.“
”I realised we were a ‘priority act’ when EMI was ferrying us to meetings around London in Black Cabs. I’d grown up in South London, regularly visited Camden Town and the West End as a teenager with nothing but a fiver in my pocket… the idea of jumping into taxis was alien to me. Why spend all that money to sit in traffic when you could use your Red Bus Rover or a Capitalcard to get around for free? Seemed like incredible profligacy.
Yet this was how the music industry worked in 1990s, cash was thrown around in a way that I would observe but not understand for years. There was money, it had to be spent…and in the 1990s it was being spent on us.
Being based in Newcastle was a stroke of financial good luck for Dubstar. It meant that the record company would pay for our meals, drinks and accommodation every time we came down South for a marketing meeting. If we’d had made the classic mistake of moving to London, like so many bands in the 90s, that wouldn’t have happened. We would have been expected to pay our own rent, transport, to feed and water ourselves at huge personal expense. And be broke as a consequence.
EMI must have paid well over £100,000 just putting us up in superb hotels across the land. A priority indeed, and a luxury too. To say I’m grateful for the experience is an understatement.”
”The recording studios were superb too. Disgraceful had begun its life in my humble Tyneside flat in Jesmond. Most of my programming was completed there almost a year before finishing the work in London. I’d already completed the writing**, programmed the drums, keys and bass to all of the songs in the early days of 1994: the next step was making demos with our new manager Graeme Robinson. He’d run a studio in Darlington, but this had closed for some reason, so he’d setup equipment in his back room.
We spent a month or so down there making the recordings that enabled us to be signed. They also formed the basis of the Disgraceful sessions.
Then in 1994 we met Stephen Hague at RAK studios and saw how proper records were made: slowly, carefully, diligently, with a budget and a lot of money spent on food and, yes, accommodation. Chris, Sarah and I lived in the house next door to the studio for the best part of a month in the winter of 1995 in platonic wedded bliss, broken only by the regular appearance of our management. The RAK studio house had the biggest TV I’d ever seen, a bath the size of a small swimming pool (which took nearly an hour to fill) and a sauna on the top floor, ideal for hangover days.
And what did we do in this house? I’d like to say we partied, but we weren’t really sure how to. RAK is in St John’s Wood next to Regents Park..it’s not a party kind of place. So we spent the first few nights commuting to Camden Town in the rain trying to find the party over there. Funnily enough, even at the height of Britpop there wasn’t that much going at the Good Mixer on a Sunday night.
So inevitably we spent a lot of nights in the house, entertaining visitors and basically having a hell of a time in between long bouts of hanging around, waiting to be called in to record our parts next door. We became regulars at the Duke of York, we never did find out what went on beyond the closed doors of the Lyndhurst Club…
The three completed songs were Stars, Anywhere and Disgraceful. I was stunned hearing Anywhere for the first time. It was our song, but… it felt like I was hearing a hit record pouring out of the radio. That was a new feeling. Wow!”
**except Day I See You Again, which was written as Disgraceful was being recorded
Want more? You can find the story behind every Dubstar song ever recorded including dozens of unreleased songs right here at Dubstar.com
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter for up to be the first to hear new releases and up to the minute news
DUBSTAR Preludes Volume 1
There are demos of songs. There are live recordings. There are ‘works in progress’ and first drafts of songs that appear on collectors’ editions of classic albums.
But what do you call it when you complete a song, forget about it…then it re-emerges somehow, years later when you think you’re writing something new? That’s what you’ll find in the Dubstar preludes, the precursors. The original songs that were the unconscious starting points for new, often completely different songs.
Most of these tunes didn’t have titles, there wasn’t time. They only survive on cassettes, scraps of notebooks, sometimes even Minidisks (I LOVED Minidisks). Luckily, what I lack in photos and diaries I can more than make up for with a huge archive of my writing that stretches back to the 1970s, covers the entire Dubstar era and much more. There are a lot of these tunes.
So the Dubstar Preludes are a curio, a minor release, a glimpse at a different road that a songwriter could have pursued.
I often visualise writing as a spider’s web of possibilities, many of which can lead to a positive outcome, a good song. But no matter how much you practice, study, how often you write, you simply have to pick a creative thread and hope for the best. That’s how songwriting works.
Many of the completed Dubstar tunes are what happens when you get a second chance to pick a thread. The preludes are the original silk. I hope you enjoy them.
It’s Raining in my Mind
Prelude to ‘Disgraceful’
This melody and the lyrics that accompany it were a precursor to Disgraceful, as I think you can hear clearly in the chorus section. Disgraceful had a rather sad birth in a house on Windsor Terrace, South Gosforth. This precursor was the last song I wrote on my piano back in Jesmond before temporarily moving out. It was hugely influenced by Franz Liszt, I think that’s clear. It’s funny, but hearing it in this form, it seems obvious to me that this isn’t a Dubstar song at all. Little did I know that a rewrite would be the title track of the act I’d formed with Chris earlier that year and go on to be an international success.
The title is a something Chris said to me as we were driving over the Tyne Bridge during one of the United States of Being sessions…
After the Valentines
Prelude to ‘Everything’s Alright’
I’ve been a Shoegaze fan since before the term was invented (By Andy Ross who singed Dubstar…I don’t think it was supposed to be a compliment). So it was an incredible treat to see the reformed My Bloody Valentine play at the Roundhouse in Camden, sixteen years since I’d seen them at Whitley Bay Ice Rink. And they haven’t mellowed, that’s for sure. The gig was so loud that despite my aviation quality ear protectors I had to put my fingers in my ears lest they bleed. And when I took them out, it was like someone had smacked me on the side of the head. Or what I imagine it would be like to accidentally open the door of a submarine on the sea bed.
Anyway, this tune was written a couple of days after on the train back from meeting Stephen Hague in Hastings. I was still shaking, actually physically shaking from the gig, it was more of an experience than a joy really. I’d had the chord sequence in the back of my mind since a very young age. My grandfather had bought me an organ with single keys for chords on the left hand and I loved playing a succession of majors or of minors, no regard to key, I was too young. I think these early experiences with harmony have hugely influenced my writing.
I used the tune as the basis of ‘Everything’s Alright’, the song I wrote with Cat.
Just a Woman
Prelude to ‘Just a Girl She Said’
I’ve mentioned before that ‘Just a Girl’ was a combination of my composition submission for my O’ Level music and one of Sarah’s poems. It was the discovery of this piece, one of the easy drafts of that work that was the inspiration of this entire prelude series. I was looking through my scrapbook in my loft down here in Brighton when I came across a piece of manuscript that I must have put in the encyclopaedia of music that my parents had given me for my studies for O’ level. It was very rough, my manuscript writing has never been that great frankly. My reading’s not much better, but I played it on the CP-70B and remembered from way back that this was the original doodle for Just A Girl. It might be a bit of a stretch but I think you can just about hear the Dubstar themes, especially towards the end.
A Stranger to Everyone
Prelude to ‘When You Say Goodbye’
This is the only piece on this volume that had a title before its inclusion. Again, it had a rather sad origin, written in the days before Dubstar’s headline appearance at the NME tent at Reading 1996, when my relationship was ending. I enjoyed the way the music is very simple, cheerful, it could be an exercise by J. S. Bach…but the mood in my head was one of utter bleakness. Isn’t it curious how sometimes the most cheerful of compositions arrive in the midst of serious upset?
As the final writing sessions for Goodbye got underway in late 1996 and early 1997, this was the perfect starting point for another Dubstar tune in 6:8, the best time signature. After 5:4 of course.
Oh, and I played this piece as part of the GGGGHOST sets in 2015/16. It was always one of my faves, and sounds gorgeous on a Yamaha DX7.
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