TAKE IT

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN JUNE 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Roland S-760, R0land JD-800

Spotify Link

“I give you cash, the one thing you do is take it”

Take It was written for Gary Numan, not Dubstar.

Following our well received cover of Everyday I Die, I developed a friendship with Steve Malins, Gary Numan’s biographer and manager. At some point in early 1998 we were talking about a collaboration, although it was never clear whether this would be a Steve Hillier or Dubstar collaboration. Not that it mattered, in 1998 that amounted to the same thing. So I went home to Hove and wrote Take It for Gary to sing. For some reason this collaboration didn’t happen, at least not in 1998 and I can’t remember why. So many ideas are discussed with so many parties when you’re a signed act having hits it can be difficult to keep track of who promised what to whom. Even I’d forgotten the history of this song until writing these notes.

Take It is also the first song I wrote after the abandoned writing retreat in Oxfordshire, you can hear the frustration of the situation from the very first note. Based entirely around chopped-up breakbeats and sampled guitars, the main synth line in the chorus was an accident that occurred when the MIDI delay feature in Logic came on and was routed to the JD-800 playing a techno hoover sound. Just like in Everyday I Die, the musical moment was perfect serendipity. Why not ‘take it’ to my childhood hero?

I (Friday NIGHT)

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN JUNE 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

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’ve 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 I now have done with this piano version. 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 release of the Food era represents the bittersweetness 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.

THE SELF SAME THING

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN JUNE 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

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. And now it is the song it should have always 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 a 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 weekend 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 (and I’ve never once regretted this decision), 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.

MERCURY

Written by KIRSTY HAWKSHAW

Released when JUNE 2000

Originally sung by KIRSTY HAWKSHAW

Features Roland S-760, Roland VG-8

Spotify Link

SPOTIFY LINK TO ORIGINAL

“If only I could be over what hasn’t begun”

I’d long been an avid reader of the music technology press, I’d written for it too. Future Music magazine became my home in the 00s where I contributed reviews, features and a long series called ‘Success’. This was my guide to how to succeed in the music industry based on my experiences with Dubstar, and it was pretty good if I say so myself, although hopelessly outdated now. Some years later I was asked to write a book on the music industry, but that’s another story…

In 1998, in the month I’d moved to my new flat and away from The Conqueror, VATs and the endless smuggling, Future Music had Kirsty Hawkshaw’s Mercury on their cover CD. I fell in love, even bought the album it was taken from (which is superb). I’d been aware of Kirsty’s work for most of the decade. She’d performed a cover of Jane’s Fine Day that I’d enjoyed but it was Mercury that made my heart melt. And as usual with songs that melted my heart I wanted to do a cover of it, so we did. Unfortunately the Dubstar version stamps all over the gossamer beauty of the original and converts it into T’Pau without the inherent humour. That was not my intention.

There have been many covers of my songs over the years, some I’ve loved, the occasional scratched head and ‘what are they thinking?’ moment but nothing that is as unsympathetic to my original song as Dubstar’s version of Kirsty Hawkshaw’s Mercury. All I can do is apologise, hope she enjoyed the royalties and draw a veil over this sorry story.

STAY

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN JULY 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Roland S-760

Spotify Link

“Sarah makes it better”

The first twenty seconds of this song are the best on the album. But once the guitar line ends (which is supposed to and actually does sound like The Shadows), Stay wanders off the melodic path and loses its way, permanently. It’s difficult to know what else to say about this song, so instead I’ll tell you about Stay With Me by Hatchie.

I saw Hatchie play on a couple of occasions at The Great Escape festival in Brighton in 2018. I was blown away… an Australian woman playing melodic shoegaze but with a pop mindset. I loved it. Earlier this year she released Stay and it dawned on me…if Dubstar were thirty years younger and just starting out, this is EXACTLY how we would sound. I don’t for a minute think this was her intention, how could it be? But there’s an exhilaration in knowing that someone else has discovered the same ingredients that we found all those years ago and has done something new and excellent with them.

And as I’m writing about other songs called Stay, I must also mention Stay by Sash!, one of my favourite songs of 1998. A nascent pop-Trance hit, it felt like a trashy successor to Robert Mile’s Children which had been a huge hit earlier in the decade. I’ve often kicked myself for not writing Trance tunes of my own in this period, but by the time the preparation for the promotion of Make It Better had finished two years later I’d already moved on to DJing tunes like this, and my Trance ambitions were forgotten.

ANOTHER WORD

Written by CHRIS WILKIE

Released when JUNE 2000

Originally sung by SARAH BLACKWOOD

Spotify Link

“One more reminder of the liar I admire”

The final Chris song in the Dubstar canon, and this era’s solely released 6/8 song.

Not his best song by a long stretch (that would be The Thought Of You), overly long, no chorus and with an inexplicable guitar solo at the end.

The sound of an act struggling with its own mortality.

WHEN THE WORLD KNOWS YOUR NAME

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN AUGUST 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Roland S-760

Spotify Link

SPOTIFY LINK TO ORIGINAL

“Let’s make the memories that dreamers only claim”

I was acutely aware that every new friend I was making in Brighton in 1998 either knew nothing about me at all, or that I was regularly on the TV with my pop act. An odd situation, hence the title.

‘When The World Knows Your Name’ was inspired by walking with a friend down Lansdowne Place in Hove to VAT’s bar, a dingy and fantastic late night drinking den under the Star of Brunswick pub (now long gone, but next to BIMM where I used to teach songwriting). The song is ‘what if?’, like when Mark Corrigan in Peep Show meets someone new and wonders ‘what if you’re the one?’ in nearly every episode. What if we, you and me, got together? What if we got together tonight? What if we did all those things that we’d talked about…right now? But the song is the realisation that it’s not going to happen, the disappointment and acceptance. Sometimes the thought of what you could have done is better than the memory of what you actually did.

There are three released versions of this song, one recorded at the Arts Centre with Spike and the demo, recorded in one take back at my flat during the Make It Better demo sessions. I’m not a fan of the version on the album so when EMI released a best of Dubstar I insisted they used the demo instead. They happily agreed, so when you want to hear the vocal version this is the version to play. Sarah sings the song perfectly and in one take, a fact that I hope she’s proud of. The third is the piano version from the Dubstar 25 series, which I rather like.

ARC OF FIRE

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN April 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Roland S-760, Roland JD-800

Spotify Link

“We are the dying babies”

This is not a Dubstar song, and wasn’t intended to be. By early 1998 and with Dubstar once again without management, I’d started a decade of writing with and for other acts, including a well liked breakbeat act (I can’t divulge their name I’m afraid, that’s why it’s called ghostwriting… but you know them). This was for them. Unfortunately they’d changed musical direction before I’d finished the demo, but I was already thinking that moving Dubstar towards a heavier sound would make sense. Maybe it was the best way to escape the 90s, which by 1998 was feeling stale. Arc of Fire could be our rocket into the new millennium?

This was misguided. I was hoping that we might replicate the success of The Cardigans, who’d grown up from being a twee (and fantastic) indie band from Malmö to a proper BAND from their third album onwards. A truly inspiring transformation, they’d landed on the world’s stage as a rock act and were dominating. Dubstar could be next. And I was pretty sure I could write an English Lovefool. The problem was, unlike The Cardigans, Dubstar was not a band, and never could be. We were a studio creation, mates hanging out in my flat with some samplers and a guitar. Sarah was a folk singer, not a rock singer. And I don’t write rock songs. Damn.

So without the vantage of hindsight Arc Of Fire was repurposed for Dubstar and became the first song to be completed for the marathon demo sessions that made Make It Better. I loved it at the time, it was big, bold, brash and, yes… a new direction for the act. Lyrically it was going in a new direction too, talking about the end of the world. The arc of fire I was referring to was the flaming exhaust emanating from the back of a nuclear missile. Get in!

BELIEVE IN ME

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN SEPTEMBER 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

Released when JUNE 2000

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Roland S-760

Spotify Link

“I'm wrong”

The last song to be written during that first long and stressful demo session for Make It Better.

In my ongoing quest to write something contemporary and ‘a hit’, this was my attempt to get Dubstar to sound like Oasis. Peculiar as that sounds now, there was a precedent. Years earlier, Judy Finnegan had told us live on This Morning that she thought Not So Manic Now sounded like Oasis, to which we smiled and nodded graciously. It was a sweet moment, and confusing. Problem was, Dubstar simply didn’t sound like Oasis, and my attempt at writing meaning-free Noel Gallagher-style lyrics ended up sounding simply… meaningless. There is a difference. And Sarah doesn’t sound like Liam much.

Still, the song rolls along nicely, the break beats are all there and chorus is amusing too.

I’m Conscious of MYSELF

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN January 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

Originally sung by SARAH BLACKWOOD

Features Roland S-760

Spotify Link

“Don't you just love my arse?”

Sarah arrived in Hove by train from Manchester to record vocals one afternoon. She sat in my lounge with Chris and talked about the events of the last few weeks over hot water and lemon. She covered every subject with such passion and in such rapid succession I was bamboozled, I couldn’t keep up… then had a eureka moment: this is a song! Maybe not an entirely serious song, it’s not going to be another ‘Ghost’, but we’d already recorded ‘Last Puppy In the Shop’ so why not?

I’m Conscious of Myself is the list of things she said that afternoon, a tribute to Sarah that resembles Elastica’s northern cousin, had one existed. It was written in minutes, like all the best songs.

I wished we’d played this song live at some point because it’s so much fun. It remains a hidden gem, tucked away at the tale end of the album at the tale end of the band. I’ve noticed on several occasions that if you ask Amazon’s Alexa to play Dubstar, I’m Conscious of Myself is the first tune she serves up. A refreshing surprise, but why?

RISE TO THE TOP

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN January 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

Originally sung by SARAH BLACKWOOD

Features Roland S-760

Spotify Link

“Go!”

Jo at Food records told me the shouting in this song sounded like an old Hip Hop record… by which I think she was pointing out that it didn’t work. My reaction was ‘yes, that’s right!’. If Rise To The Top sounded like an old hip hop record, so be it. That was exactly what I thought we should be doing. That and trying to be a thrash metal band.

I’d been living in Hove for nearly two years by this point and the musical environment at the seaside had permeated everything I was writing. Gone were the endless indie band discos, the rock nights and the ‘drink all you can find then call an ambulance’ student nights to be replaced with bar after club after bar playing either Hip Hop, Big Beat or James Brown. Often all three. Now Dubstar was a Brighton band, even though the guitarist lived in Gateshead and the singer in Manchester.

Rise to the Top is a mad idea that just-about works. Unfortunately, once again it’s not a Dubstar song. I used to think that an act could take their audience on a journey with them as they explored their music collection and musical whims. It’s a big ask, but is it worth asking? At the time I thought it was, now I’m not so sure. Although I think the person who likes ‘Ghost’ can also like ‘When The World Knows Your Name’ and ‘Self Same Thing’, would they enjoy a metal sampling pseudo Big Beat record? Nope, that makes no sense, little sense even to ask.

My current favourite act is Cigarettes After Sex who seem to have just one idea. Luckily it’s an amazing one. So that’s my advice to young acts today, do something fantastic, then do it again and again and again.

SWANSONG

Written by STEVE HILLIER

when JANUARY 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

Originally sung by SARAH BLACKWOOD

Features Roland S-760, ROland VG-8

Spotify Link

YOUTUBE LINK TO SWANSONG DEMO

“Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end”  Mary Hopkins, Those Were The Days  

And so we arrive at Swansong, the final song Dubstar would officially release on an album. This is the sound of the end, two people who despise each other and will separate forever. It’s spiteful, it’s bitter, and it’s exactly what I wanted say. This was the last act of an act that began as a stoned daydream to become a 4AD records artist… but instead had taken three people around the world on a crazy and rather wonderful escapade. Not a bad swap really.



And with a farewell reference to the 4AD dream, there’s a nod to the Cocteau Twins as this song fades out. I had to get this in, they were the reason Dubstar existed.


Swansong features a wall of guitar from Chris right at the very end. We created this by him playing the same part in various places on the neck of his Fender and using the Roland VG-8 to ‘retune’ his strings. Sounds tremendous, and we returned to this idea a couple of times on the United State of Being sessions too. I prefer the demo version of this song to that on the album. Sarah sounds utterly deflated on the original, and it works perfectly. The impassioned vocal on the album….not so much. The piano version captures more of the feel I was going for than either earlier versions. Oh well…

B-Sides & Bonus Songs

I LOST A FRIEND

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN November 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760, KORG PROPHECY

SPOTIFY LINK

YOUTUBE LINK TO I LOST A FRIEND VERSIOn

“I’ll never see him again except in memory of someone good”

I left Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne in March 1997. I felt as if I’d done everything I could on Tyneside, I’d had two significant and long lasting relationships, both now ended. I’d DJed everywhere from Luckies Pub to the Riverside, performed at pretty much every night club and worked at both Universities. I’d formed a music act and we were doing well. It was time to move on, and I had a choice: London for the sake of work, or Brighton for the sake of my happiness. I chose the latter. I’ve not regretted the move once.



But I didn't leave Jesmond completely. I returned half a dozen times even before we made Make It Better back at the Arts Centre, trying to find…something. A pilgrimage, an inability to let go? These were not happy occasions, I’d alight at Central Station and pull up my hoodie or pull down a baseball cap in case I bumped into someone I knew. Paradoxically I’d hang out in the bars later that day hoping to bump into someone, anyone I knew from the old days. I think I spent more time in the Forth Hotel after leaving Newcastle than I did when I lived there.

I’m not sure exactly when it was, but one cold winter’s morning in 1998 I was walking around Newcastle city centre and into the library, just behind the HMV records that we’d opened two years earlier. I wanted to speak to my ex-girlfriend, I had no idea how to reach her. I had an address but couldn’t bring myself to simply turn up unannounced… I needed a telephone number. So ‘I searched the phone book’…nothing. More broken-hearted than depressed, I spent the rest of the day wandering around the city searching for evidence of my past. Anything that would validate the decade I’d spent on Tyneside in the rain. It’s peculiar, but now I have spent more than double the time living in Brighton than in Newcastle, I have more memories of heading north to find my past than of the past that I actually had up there.


I Lost A Friend is that lonely day in song form, one of my favourite self-penned songs. This is what Dubstar was about, not breakbeats and rock guitars… a dagger through the heart and a melody through the head. There are two versions of this song, the I (Friday Night) B-Side and the ‘version’ below, which is stripped right back and loses the Smiths-style DMX drum machine for something more sympathetic to the song. I prefer that one. And this one.

VICTORIA

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN MAY 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760, Novation Bass Station

“The end of you”  

There are songs of mine that I think are weak, some are great, most are alright, even pretty good. But there’s only one I actively dislike, and it’s Victoria.

I’ve made a point to avoid cynicism, spite or any sense of bitterness that isn’t earned in my songwriting. Victoria has all of these. In fact, that’s all Victoria is. It would have been better to have released an instrumental version of this song, not because Sarah did a bad job of the vocal, quite the contrary, but for the scathing and uncharitable lyric. That’s my fault, and I apologise.

On a happier note, I’d managed to find the Rock Chips for my Drumulator, as used throughout Treasure by the Cocteau Twins. I love these drum sounds and although it made little sense to use them on most Dubstar songs, I think they work here? Also, this song features lots of mangled guitars, some fed through the Bass Station, others through the digital filter in the S-760. Sounds pretty cool to my ears and an affectionate nod to Depeche Mode’s It’s No Good, if not quite as good.

STAY TOGETHER

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN January 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

YOUTUBE LINK

“I can see you’ve fated me”  

A bonus song that appears on the Japanese version of Make It Better.

This was my attempt at writing something as amazing as The Bangle’s Eternal Flame. I didn’t get there, but instead arrived at a song that’s as odd as it is charming.

My enduring memory of recording Stay Together was Sarah’s strong objection to my use of a vocoder to generate the harmonies on this song, much like this amazing Eurythmics song. And this classic by Imogen Heap. And everything by the incredible Japanese House. The vocoder survived In the demo but by the final recording it was gone. 



When I wrote Stay Together, I’d already completed thirty other songs for Make It Better, all composed within eight months of each other. Today, writing thirty songs in that time wouldn’t raise a sweat or even an eyebrow to me but in 1998, after four years of constant work on Dubstar, where the self imposed pressure to redefine the band and somehow continue was so heavy…it was way too much. The final demos for the third album were completed and I was drained of creative juice. I had been running on fumes for a while too. It would take me years to recover.

Twenty two years later I returned to Stay Together and reworked it here. This green hazed daze of a version is by far my favourite now.

REDIRECTED MALE

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN December 1998

WHERE Hove, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD & GARY NUMAN

FEATURES ROLAND S-760, KORG MONO/POLY

SPOTIFY LINK

“Lost words of love from you”

Heartbreak again, this time from the perspective of someone who’s moved out of their marital home. You’ve lost your relationship, your home, maybe your children too. How long until you lose your mind?

Gary Numan sang this duet with Sarah, although they were never in the same room. Chris and I journeyed to Gary’s house in Essex to make the vocal recordings, and I recorded Sarah back in my place in Hove. Gary is a very genial man, and when you’re with him there’s a sense of simply hanging out with a terrific chap from West London. But then he sings, and Gary Numan is in the room. That was quite a moment, I made a note to send the ten-year-old Steve Hillier… a message from the future explaining what was going on. He wouldn’t believe his luck. And Steve Malins told me he’d never heard Gary sound like that before. I couldn’t have been prouder.



Of all the B-sides of this era, this one and ‘I Lost A Friend’ are the most successful. Things that sounded odd back in 2000 now sound awesome, like the incredible glassy sound of the Roland VG-8 on the guitar creating that faux twelve-string guitar sound. It’s so clearly artificial, it’s gorgeous. Also, the half-time drum programming precedes the arrival of Dubstep by some years. I’m not saying the ‘steppers copied my drums on this song. That’s for others to say…

And by the way, the correct spelling of this song is Redirected Male, not mail. It was a reference to the subject of the song being sent away, a rather obvious play on words.

EliZabeth Taylor & Richard Burton

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN March 1999

WHERE Hove, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES ROLAND S-760

SPOTIFY LINK

“It’s not like I hang around waiting”  

Except I did, for years. A relationship where you break up, get back together, break up, get back ad infinitum. And this process takes years until eventually you bore of the process, of each other. Or grow up. My partner in crime told me we were just like Taylor and Burton. I loved this idea of a couple being forever entwined, occasionally estranged but permanently joined. In our case it turned out we weren’t. It was heartbreaking at the time, but I got a few good songs out of it.

This is one of my favourite songs from the Make It Better Recordings, but with twenty years perspective maybe it could have been slightly less twee? Beyond that, it’s a simple and true idea expressed perfectly by Sarah. What more could you want from a Dubstar song?

NEW FRIENDS

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN MARCH 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“We’re only pretending we feel the same…”  

How you feel at 21 is markedly different than at 25, and by the time you’re 29…unrecognisable. I think Morrissey once dealt with this?

New Friends is the feeling that you haven’t moved on as far as you thought. What can replicate the passion of your first adult relationships when you’re reclining into your late twenties? New Friends is the realisation that there’s no way back, that nothing can compete with the memories of someone good. The lyric was inspired by bumping into ‘someone I used to know’ outside Lloyds Bank at Grey’s Monument in Newcastle years before. It’s one of my favourites of the Make It Better era:

New friends, these are our new friends
Mine's a streak of a lad whose already been had
And a face you've seen somewhere before

New friends
Meeting your new friend
She's got legs to the skies, her lips match her eyes
And a voice that knocks men to the floor

And we laugh
'Cause we both know it's funny to see them
Yes, it's daft but I didn't think we'd come to be this way

New friends
Talking to new friends
The connection is there but I really don't care
'Cause all I can think of is you

New friends looking at your friend
It's that pain in your eyes as she waves us goodbye
Should I tell that you're better in bed?

And we laugh 'cause we both know it's funny to see them
Yes, it's daft but I didn't think we'd come to be this way
We could dance, we could shake off the shackles and end this game, but…
We should laugh 'cause we're only pretending we feel the same
About new friends
Our new friends
We've got new friends

ANYTHING

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN MARCH 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760, KORG MONO/POLY

SPOTIFY LINK TO ORIGINAL

“Bored by twenty five, burned out by twenty nine”

This is the moment I realised I’d run out of things to say, I was exhausted. Done. So now I’ve said everything I wanted to say, let’s write about how nothing is worth anything. That could be good, right? People will love that.

The sound of this tune is pretty cool, I just wished I’d written a better song to go on to of it. I was getting excited about the amazing things you could do with Logic and the Apple Mac G3 I’d bought us for the abandoned Oxfordshire session. The ability to move chunks of audio around which we don’t give a second thought to today was revolutionary in 1998. I was amazed. Let’s do it on everything! Or indeed Anything.

I realised once this song had been released that the chorus bears an uncanny resemblance to Thank You for the Music by Abba. Not the melody exactly, just the way it moves. Earlier in the demoing process, Chris, Paul, Sarah and I had become steaming drunk in my lounge in Hove with the best of ABBA playing. It had nested in my head and grown there, fermenting for a few weeks until emerging over this strange post-trip hop tune.

Oh, and the vocal snippet at the end where Chris says ‘Paul and Bill and Liz’ is from an answerphone message he made for the new occupants of my old flat on Waterloo Street. That’s not interesting, but it is true.

AND WHEN YOU LAUGH

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN DECEMBER 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD & IAN BROUDIE

FEATURES Roland S-760, KORG MONO/POLY

SPOTIFY LINK TO ORIGINAL

“These are the days when wars are won”

There was a palpable disappointment with how I (Friday Night) had performed in the charts. Secretly I was relieved, thinking that getting to number thirty-eight meant we were still in the music business after a couple of years out of the spotlight. Maybe we were, and to generate some excitement for what would be our final release, I had the idea of doing duets with some of our favourite singers. Gary Numan would be an obvious choice, Holly Johnson too (though he graciously declined telling me in a phone call that The Last Song was a bit camp for him, have we considered contacting Marc Almond?).

To be fair, the duet idea was quite common in the 90s, the precursor to the ‘featured vocalist’ releases that have dominated music since the 2000s. Space had achieved one with Cerys Matthews and Stephen Hague was working on a duets album with Tom Jones too, so if it was good enough for The Cardigans it was good enough for Dubstar.

We had toured with the Lightning Seeds back in 1997 and we were keen to have Ian Broudie appear on the CD. We recorded his vocals in an afternoon in a studio in London near Ladbroke Grove, I can’t remember its name (although it might have been this place). Although the idea was to record duets, Redirected Male and And When You Laugh were both written for Sarah to sing alone. Consequently, there’s a slightly contrived feel to these arrangements, if not the vocals.

There’s something rather fitting to the way the song fades away on the Spotify version of the album, with Chris’s meandering guitar solo and a captured sample of Sarah repeating the word ‘sorry’. To me it feels like Dubstar sauntering out of the studio…and away from the music industry forever.

Unreleased Demo Songs

Wide AWake

WRITTEN BY Sarah Blackwood, STEVE Hillier & Chris Wilkie

WHEN August 1998

WHERE Wantage, Oxfordshire

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

DUBSTAR ARCHIVE BLOG POST

“My head in the porcelain bowl"

I Will Be Your Girlfriend had made it into the Top 30, but there was a real panic between us that Dubstar may be dropped by EMI. The supporting tour had been disastrous (although not the London show thankfully, and somewhat miraculously). We’d parted with Stevø, our manager. We were essentially rudderless again, but to our relief (and my astonishment) Dubstar were moved from the EMI wing of the EMI corporation to the Parlophone wing, where the rest of Food Records acts resided. This meant we would get to do a third album. 

The new president of EMI suggested that we go on a writing retreat, re-group, get some new material together. On the face of it, this was an excellent idea. Go into the countryside, relax, do the best work we’d ever done, come back, wow the label, have hits. In reality it was exactly the wrong thing to do, possibly the worst thing. Dubstar never wrote together. Songwriting is an entirely solitary process for me, and apart from a period in the 00s when I was doing collaboration after collaboration it’s remained that way my whole life. I think this has been the same for Chris too. So putting three people together in a metaphorical submarine, three people who had been living together career wise for five years but had also moved to far reaches of the country to pursue other lives was misguided. Totally.

But how could we say no? I was so grateful that we were continuing and maybe writing together would defuse some of the tensions that were growing exponentially between the three of us. Like how a rowing couple has a baby to bring them together. That always works well…doesn’t it?

Wide Awake is the only song that emerged from that month because I abandoned the session after just ten days. Tempers were getting frayed, we had too many visitors coming over to party. Also, I’d already written over twenty songs with my friend Ruth Calder for our project Sexus, I was not in the mood to write yet more for an act that felt like it was only hanging on and together by the skin of its teeth.

It’s not a great song and repeated sampled shouts don’t help it to be taken seriously. Having said that, I really like the chopped up Amen break. It was an attempt to do something as funky as Kung Fu by 187 Lockdown. Quite why that was on my job list is lost to history.

DAVID

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN October 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“You look different today”

Trying a bit too hard on this one, and I can’t remember why so many of these Make It Better demos had Chris shouting on them.



Most of the songs for Make It Better were written in a different way to Disgraceful and Goodbye. On those earlier records, nearly every song had been sketched out on piano first, melodies, words and structure entirely sorted before the samplers and computers were switched on. On Make It Better, most of the songs grew out of drum parts and samples, something I’d not done before or since. It’s the solo writer’s equivalent of jamming, and I’ve since realised it doesn’t suit me.

David is a prime example of this approach, nice beat put together from old funk records, a few chords and samples but no real inspiration in the words. This was supposed to be me telling myself to get my act together. In the end it sounded as if I was having a go at one of our closest friends who happened to be called David.

Gus Gus released a song called David just after I’d written this. It wasn’t much good either, but includes the fantastic line ‘I still have last night in my body’. Wish I’d written that.

Go Home

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN January 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“Go home today”

An attempt to write a country song for a dream pop act and consequently the worst song I’ve ever written. Contains a sampled banjo, which are words you never want to read. When I came to mix this tune, I made it sound like something that His Name Is Alive would reject for being too obtuse. And for the final chorus I pitch shifted Sarah’s vocal so it sounds like she’s suddenly gained 100 KG in weight for no reason other than I could.

Funnily enough, the record company didn’t think this song was suitable for release.

I am the crime

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN July 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“Stay with me”

This song could have made it onto Make It Better, no question. 

The Wolfgang Press were the least celebrated of the classic 4AD acts from the 80s, being too odd even for the most open minded of Cocteau Twins fans. Consequently I thought they were great, and although much of their output was difficult even for me, they occasionally wrote fabulous songs and even better song titles. I Am The Crime was one, so I borrowed it and wrote a completely different song around it (there truly is no comparison between the two except those four words). 

If Sarah can give Depeche Mode a run for their money when it comes to vocal self flagellation, then this song is the proof. Chris does a nice job with his chiming guitars too. I think it’s me playing the Thin Lizzy harmonised lead guitars on this although I could be wrong. And to top it all off, there’s a fabulously cheeky Cardigans reference in this tune too.

Now I’m listening to this again, hearing Chris’s beautiful eBow solo at the end, this song really REALLY should have made it onto Make It Better. Oh well.

You can read the full story behind I AM THE CRIME here on the Dubstar Archive blog

I Don’t WAnt To DIE on a Tuesday

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN August 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“Misery, misery, misery for me”

1998 wasn’t the right time in our careers for me to write a humorous song about killing yourself. However, twenty one years on the joke is far funnier now. The melody itself is something you could have heard as a TV theme from the 1970s, and Sarah brings the whole thing to life with her broad Halifax accent. 

Again, I think a couple of songs could have been exchanged on Make It Better for this one. At least ‘I Don’t Want To Die On A Tuesday’ doesn’t take itself too seriously and was actually written for Sarah to sing. Also, this is the only song I’ll ever write that refers to Eastenders. That will never change.

Last Puppy In The Shop

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN August 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“Oh! Poor little thing”

A combination of trip hop beats and a lyric about being left behind. Could have been a nice end of album tune, and apparently the record company quite liked this one despite it being about a puppy.

It was inspired by this song, which I fell in love in with on the trip to LA to record this video. Tarnation were fabulous, Paula Frazer still is. 

In the years when I was writing songs for the three of us to play, I got into the habit of following crazy ideas just because they amused me. This isn’t simply self indulgence, it’s where I found most of my ideas. It reminds me a little of Russel Crowe’s depiction of John Nash in a Beautiful Mind. When asked why he thought he was being spied on by the FBI he responded that he was convinced this was true because he got this paranoid idea from the same place he got his incredible mathematical inspirations. 

The sensible musical ideas that occur to me come from the same place as the absurd ones, and many times I can’t distinguish between the two…at least not when I’m in the middle of writing. And there was a very strong sense of humour running through Dubstar, much of which came from Chris. His North Eastern sense of the absurd-treated-as-normal was amplified even further with his own Graham Chapman inspired mischief. So combine that with my own sense of taking things to their logically stupid extreme…and you’ll find endless in-jokes in Dubstar work, from record covers to song titles and beyond. 

This has proven troublesome in later years. I’ve discovered that not only do other artists not work like that, but some actively find it annoying (that means you Emma). I suppose it’s my version of taking the stabilisers off and going on artistic flights of fancy, knowing something great could appear at any moment. The problem is that when you’re working with someone who isn’t flying it can seem like intense self indulgence…or that I’m not taking the situation seriously.

Maybe I’m not? Imagine writing songs for a living. How mad is that?

My Friday

Written by STEVE HILLIER

WHEN June 1998

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

DUBSTAR ARCHIVE BLOG POST

“Don't take the pain, just leave it behind on my Friday”

I thought this this song could have been a Beck-style late 90s hit. Unfortunately, as it appeared right at the end of the first gruelling demo session for Make It Better, it was never fully realised. 

So what do we have? A brilliantly disaffected vocal from Sarah, loads of crazy guitar sounds from Chris, an uplifting lyric and synth sounds, plus a huge riff permeating the whole thing, like Stars but positive and heavy. It was all a bit under-cooked on the first demo submission though and easy to see why it was overlooked by the label. I made a Dub version for inclusion on the front cover of Future Music in 2000, but ditched it for the far inferior break-beat version of ‘Rise To The Top’ that eventually made it onto the magazine. This one goes on the list of ‘songs I’d like to redo when I retire’.

The Thought Of You

Written by Chris WIlkie

WHEN 1998

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760, Korg Prophecy

“And now the thought of you is making me think I’m…"

Chris’s greatest song by far. And one of the best arrangements that emerged from the entire Make It Better sessions. The problem is that this song has a charming, amusing, child-like but easily misconstrued lyric...it simply wasn’t releasable in this form. We didn’t think to change it. It was simply too funny. .

Or maybe it’s more than that? When people hang out together for years, share existential concerns together, they develop their own language, their own dialect. Phrases that outsiders might never understand, might take at face value and be horrified. And as an insider you might not realise these phrases don’t travel. Or worse, you do realise they won’t travel but assume it will be alright. People will know, they’ll understand? 

The Thought Of You hit the Dubstar sense of humour right between the cheeks, and another song that would have improved Make It Better bit the A&R dust.

Just to repeat that point, because it’s worth highlighting: this is one of the best Dubstar songs from this era and would have been released had we not left it in its unreleasable form because we thought it was too funny to change.

That’s the essence of Dubstar, right there.

Touching INside

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN January 1999

WHERE HOVE, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“And now my hands can tell my brain that I'm touching inside"

A song about sex? Could work. Dubstar sounding like Blur? Why not? Oblique references to masturbation? Done it before, twice… let’s do it again. 

This song is madly catchy, features a really nice organ sample apparently played by Kirsty Hawkshaw’s dad (funny how personnel in music are often closely linked). It didn’t make it onto Make It Better, maybe it was just too cheeky and it didn’t make sense compared to the other bombastic songs. Lyrically it was yet another example of the Dubstar sense of humour, with lines like ‘it’s in the things your Dad said we couldn’t do’. Too odd and easily misinterpreted for release.

What’s It All About?

Written by Sarah Blackwood, STEVE Hillier & Chris Wilkie

WHEN August 1998

WHERE Hove, EAST SUSSEX & Didsbury, Manchester

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“I’m Ingrid or Audrey, and I’m smoking a cigarette in a long holder"

Sarah’s poem of drunken regret. She sounds great on this, though musically it’s completely mad, even for the Make It Better sessions. Take a bass line inspired by Air, throw in a chorus by Marxman and you have a recipe for…? Who knows. 

What’s interests me here is you can hear the beginnings of Sarah’s Client B voice and writing style, something that wasn’t obvious at all back then. It also strikes me that Sarah’s words come from a fundamentally different place to mine…

The song ends with a crescendo of Sarah swearing from clips from the vocal takes I’d made. There’s also a sample of Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army telling Sarah ‘you really must try to control yourself’. So the humour took over again, and the song didn’t make the album. I think Sarah was rather short-changed on this track as her poem is good, but we had so many stories of drunken debauchery in our cannon at this point it was hard to take another one seriously. Unfortunately, the parts to this song are lost forever, stored on Iomega Zip disks that lasted less time than the hangovers we were recording. If they had survived, I’d really like to give the poem a more sympathetic musical home. 

You’re Better Off Without Me

Written by Sarah Blackwood, STEVE Hillier & Chris Wilkie

WHEN August 1998

WHERE Hove, EAST SUSSEX & Wantage, Oxfordshire

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“Grow up, act your age and stop sulking"

Sarah wrote the words and melody to this one, the accompaniment being a long sample of ominous strings and some seagulls. Yep… seagulls, and Chris doing his genius of love voices in the background. Sarah did a great job on the writing here, and I think this was the only surviving song she wrote in my absence from the Oxfordshire session. It concludes with a string arrangement straight from the Dead Can Dance school of drama which sounds terrific. It probably was never destined for the album if I’m honest, but once again I think Sarah was rather short-changed with this arrangement. 

The disparity between how she writes and I write is blatantly obvious here. It’s a poem, or maybe a folk song where the cynical message is perfectly conveyed in her delivery. I don’t write like that. But it would have been perfect for Client.

You’re Mine

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN August 1998

WHERE Hove, EAST SUSSEX

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“A different planet and a different place”

A dream pop band turning themselves into the Pixies via Blur’s Song 2. It actually works rather well, but it’s not even remotely Dubstar. Like, not in any way whatsoever, and it wasn’t written with Dubstar in mind either. 

If it had ever been finished it could have been an 90s Indie Dance Floor smash. As it stands it’s a true oddity in the Dubstar canon…three people doing the exact opposite of what they’d done previously and probably should ever do while still sounding incredible. Maybe you have to go that far out to come back?

Your Words

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN January 1989

WHERE Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY SARAH BLACKWOOD

FEATURES Roland S-760

“You said you’d tried it all and it got you nowhere”

This is the first song I’d written on moving to Newcastle in 1988. It’s alright, but sounds exactly like what it is; a teenager trying to make sense of relationships with all the earnestness the 80s and inexperience can muster.

Doing Your Words as a Dubstar demo was another attempt at reworking an old idea to see if it sticks, except this time it wasn’t good enough to pursue. The arrangement is pretty good, lots of breakbeats flowing around but doesn’t hit its stride. Forgettable. And I actually had forgotten all about it until I came to write these notes.

Unreleased Bonus Songs

Secrets

Written by Fiat Lux

WHEN 1982

WHERE Wakefield, West Yorkshire

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Steve Wright

FEATURES Logic EXS24, Nord Micro Modular

“Now You Know Me Inside Out”

It’s not clear to me how this happened, but after Self Same Thing had been released and I’d told Chris I’d left the band because I could see no future pursuing Dubstar, Tommy Manzi (our manager) rang to let me know that EMI/Parlophone wanted to hear some new material. I knew this was the last chance to avoid being dropped, but I’d already left the act. There was no way I could turn down this opportunity for redemption…and knowing there really was nothing to lose whatsoever I started the samplers up again. I approached this session in a far more relaxed manner than the entirety of Make It Better and enjoyed myself writing for the first time in years. 

We recorded six songs, Secrets was the first, a perfect choice of song for the band. It was a return to where we’d started. Fiat Lux were an act I’d adored as a young teenager, this song in particular. It was championed by Annie Nightingale on her regular Sunday night program on BBC Radio 1 and I loved the lyric…that sound of a man revealing his vulnerability, but still sounding like ‘a man’. Why not flip it, gender-wise, get Sarah to sing it, release it, get back on Top of the Pops and put the destruction of the past three years behind us?

Secrets worked out well and sounds great to this day. Specifically, it sounds like it was recorded in 2000, with its angular rhythms and Nord Modular synth bass (I wish Nord would bring that instrument back in some form, it was awesome). But it was never released. Shame. 

The Perfect Smile

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN September 2000

WHERE Hove, East Sussex

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Sarah Blackwood

FEATURES Logic EXS24, Nord Micro Modular

“A place full of wonder, since the day you were born"

I’d long grown out of listening to indie guitar music. The style had expired for me back in 1992. Sure, I’d stuck with it for a few more years, you couldn’t avoid it in the Britpop years but frankly the most notable thing about the guitar bands in the 90s was how little they’d progressed musically since the 80s. Or even 70s. So, bored to death of the 90s, I’d become, and remain, fascinated by the rhythms found in RnB records. Back in 2000 I didn’t get it…how could you write an uptempo, high energy vocal song and yet have the drums roll along in half time, somehow being laid back and simultaneously aggressive? It struck me there was something truly exciting here. Little did I know that an entire musical genre was coming down the line that would specialise in just this. My annoyance that the word Dubstar would be mistaken for Dubstep for nearly two decades was only tempered by my love of the style. I even received a Facebook message once from a teenager complaining that our band name didn’t suit how we sounded. I know. We’ve been saying that since 1994.

The Perfect Smile uses those RnB rhythms to gently trample all over what was a rather lovely and reflective love song. The sonic consequence is it’s really neither here nor there, the sound of ‘potential’ and being ‘potentially good’ is probably the worst thing you can be in music. Also, Sarah just doesn’t suit singing straight forwardly ‘nice’ songs, as we discovered on ‘Stay Together’. But when I revisited it years later in the wake of the problems that ‘Sister’ had caused, it seemed that all that was required was a complete rethink. As usual.

And then The Perfect Smile became yet another lost Dubstar song that was demanding to be released.

You can read the full story behind The Perfect Smile here on the Dubstar Archive blog

Dizzy

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN September 2000

WHERE Hove, East Sussex

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Sarah Blackwood

FEATURES Logic EXS24, Nord Micro Modular

“I love you"

A non-song that has more to do with learning how to get the best out of the EXS24 than writing.

Maybe that’s not entirely fair. Dizzy bears more than a passing semblance to Sunny, the famous Andy Williams song. Except that this tune, with its rolling break beats, lands somewhere between Portishead and the songs I would do with Ben Ofedu (from Phats and Small) just a few months later. 

In a way Dizzy is a continuation of the mistakes I’d made during the writing of Make It Better, where the beats came first, the song later. But I was loving the freedom of using a software sampler over the Roland S-760. Moving chopped up breaks from Steinberg Recycle to the EXS24 was trivial and near instantaneous, unlike the gruelling chore it had been over SCSI into the Roland. On the other hand, maybe something was lost in this convenience? Maybe the delay between idea and result actually helped refine the process? I’m not sure, I’ll have to get back to you after a suitable pause to reflect. Despite this…

I could never go back to using hardware samplers, I don’t think any of us could. All the inconvenience of using tiny LED screens to get even the simplest of ideas completed, samples in and then out again over SCSI…we all knew this was a pain in the MIDI socket in the 90s but not quite how much until we never had to do it again. 

I bought an AKAI 3200 sampler around this time, convinced I was missing something. I never got on with it and sold it a few months later (along with my Sequential Circuits Pro One, I don’t remember why).

Haunted

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN September 2000

WHERE Hove, East Sussex

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Sarah Blackwood

FEATURES Logic EXS24, Nord Micro Modular, Roland JV-1080

“I’m panicked, frothing…"

Dubstar do UK Garage? Brilliant!

And it worked. Seriously, it really did. Of the six songs that went off to EMI from this session, this is my favourite. I’d worked out how the UK Garage rhythms were put together, why they worked, loved them, and applied them to a really simple musical idea that had come to me during my move from the old flat to our new place overlooking the sea. 

Why go Garage? From the very first days, the concept behind Dubstar, for me at least, was to combine dance rhythms with chanson. It’s there in Stars, No More Talk, St Swithins…in many ways that approach is the essence of the early to mid 90s for me. So putting those UK Garage rhythms behind a Steve song was an obvious progression. If we had persevered in 2000 rather than wandering off a few weeks later I think this would have been the musical style I’d have pursued. It would have been a mistake, but it would have been fun.

Touch and Go

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN September 2000

WHERE Hove, East Sussex

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Sarah Blackwood

FEATURES Logic EXS24, Nord Micro Modular, Roland JV-1080

“We'll be heard this time"

Andy Ross once told me how Mike Edwards from Jesus Jones had sent him a bunch of demos, the final song of which was a jokey thing basically saying ‘well done Andy, you’ve got to the end of the tape’. I thought this was a brilliant idea, so I did it too.

Touch and Go sounds great, but lyrically it’s an embarrassment. Even Sarah realises this…she sounds utterly bored in this recording, and who can blame her? When the highlight of a song is chanting ‘we’ll be heard this time’ you’ve got problems. 

But with a little refinement this could have been great. The programming is excellent and it even includes some scratching that I had left over from the remix of Starshine by Cuba I’d done earlier in the year for 4AD. It sounds like what it was, people in their late twenties making the sound of a party from their student days with technology from the year 2000. I was convinced this kind of souped up and superb dance music was going to blow that 1990s self-aware-irony off the dance-floor any second. It did. Unfortunately Dubstar had nothing to do with it.

Leaving in the Morning

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN June 2000

WHERE Hove, East Sussex

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Jo Morgan

FEATURES Logic EXS24, Nord Micro Modular, Roland JV-1080

“They'll never forget you"

Finally, a proper song.

Colin Schaverian, who had been Stevø’s assistant at Some Bizarre rung me to ask if I’d do some writing with a singer he’d discovered called Jo Morgan. So I did. There was a lot of downtime between the completion of Make It Better and its release and I felt that in order to make a successful transition from artist to writer/producer you had to say ‘yes’ to everything (although I changed my mind about that a few years later). Jo and I wrote a dozen songs together. 

Jo is lovely, and a couple of these tunes are superb, but the session wasn’t fully successful. Colin wasn’t taken with the tunes, so I did what I so often do…lock myself in my studio for an hour and write something on my own. Leaving In The Morning was the result. I wasn’t intending to write more Dubstar, but left to my own devices that’s what pours out. So here we have a song about a fly-by-night woman…an imaginary character, something that’s rare in my songs.

And I love it, its one of my favourites from this era. It works on every level, one of those pieces I can point at and say ‘yep, that’s finished’. Unfortunately, the era when it would have been most relevant for EMI to release Leaving In The Morning was 1993. It was now 2000 so it made no sense, a song out of time. If Dubstar had put this out in 2001 it would have been bizarre, like the Britpop bands that were somehow hanging on to their record deals, treading water until the Indie Landfill would open in 2002.

Janis

Written by Country Joe McDonald, Barry "The Fish" Melton

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Country Joe McDonald

FEATURES Logic EXS24

“I find myself missing you and I”

A gorgeous song that had helped me through my first major relationship break up back in 1990. I ended up sharing a house on Otterburn Terrace, Jesmond with a couple of guys who came from a very different musical tradition to mine. They were smoking a vast amount of weed, I was regularly exposed. And although Americana has never been my thing, Janis definitely was. 

Unlike so many acts of the 1990s, Dubstar didn’t fall into the pit of cocaine that ended so many hearts and careers. Unfortunately, no one becomes more interesting on weed either, which is a shame. This cover is a homage to those days, and once again we have Sarah singing a song written by a man about a woman. And it works. That’s Dubstar.

The Last Song

Written by STEVE Hillier

WHEN April 2000

WHERE Hove, East Sussex

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Sarah Blackwood

FEATURES Roland S-760

YOUTUBE LINK

“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, and 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 the 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…