Don’t Ask

Written by STEVE Hillier

When September 2011

Where Brighton, East Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features EXS24, Roland System-100m & Juno-106, Korg MS-20

“If you ask me, I will tell you”

Daren Taliana shines on this song, his mix takes it to a place no other Dubstar song has been. It’s about as close to a contemporary dancefloor song as the act ever made. So what do we have in this song? Chopped up guitars? Check. Analogue Synths everywhere? Check. Vengeance drums? Check. Client style Sarah vocals? Check. Mad squealing AR Kane guitar solo from Chris? Check.

Don’t Ask is a banger, could have been the come-back song for the three of us and opened a new chapter. That didn’t happen, obviously, but it justified my trip to Malta. And it was a bit of a mad one, finding myself in the Mediterranean again. Dex had been managing South Central, also from Malta, and their flatmate Daren AKA Tim Mason was an up-and-coming dance producer. Dex thought it would be good to get Tim in to mix the best of the Dubstar songs I’d written, the key thing was to avoid them sounding like they’d been ‘made in a laptop’. I hadn’t made them in a laptop, but anyway…

The Maltese boys knew a great studio on the island naturally, so I paid for Daren to spend a week mixing. The results were good, very good. The problem was the mixing of these songs was premature. They weren’t ready to be mixed because they weren’t finished. The vocal parts weren’t nailed, Chris hardly played on most of them. In the rush to get things finished and having lost years to personal issues and associated dramas (and my dwindling interest in the whole project) we ended up with exactly what we should have anticipated: great-sounding unfinished songs. That wasn’t Tim’s fault, it was mine.

You can read the full story behind Don’t Ask here on the Dubstar Archive blog

EVERYTHING’S ALRIGHT

Written by STEVE Hillier and Cat Goscovitch

When May 2004

Where Hove, East Sussex

Originally sung by Cat Goscovitch

Features Roland System-100m & Juno-106, Korg Ms-20

“People get the wrong idea”

Probably the best song Cat Goscovitch and I wrote together. ‘Everything’s Alright’ came together very quickly, and was based around a chord sequence I’d had kicking around since a very young kid in Abbey Wood. I’ve always loved the sound of extended chords, the way that they imply a melody you don’t quite hear, those extra notes at the top being seasoning to what would otherwise be simple harmonic movement. That approach was perfect for Cat’s way of writing, where vocally she floats on top of the harmonic action for the verse, then rhythmically kicks in with a massive hook in the chorus. And she always writes massive hooks.

Because of this, I hawked ‘Everything’s Alright’ around various A&R meetings in the 00s…it always went down well, Cat sounded terrific but no one was biting. They didn’t want it for any of their artists. This caused bafflement and frustration for me, what exactly was wrong with this song?

The answer is as intriguing as it was frustrating. It seems that the primary skill of the songwriter for hire is to write a hit that’s characterful, but not TOO characterful. You can’t be generic, but you can’t be too out there. You have to be edgy, but not scary. And being slightly odd isn’t a good idea either, which can be a bit of a problem for me…

I’ve been told since I was a kid that the songs I write have a sound, a ‘signature’ to them, a Steve-character that’s pervasive in all my work. It’s a double-edged sword. This can work well if you’re writing for your own act, it can be defined by these idiosyncrasies… Dubstar is the perfect example and testament to this fact. But being characterful inevitably means you’re going to irritate as many people as you’ll impress. This is what I do, I can’t help it.

Anyway, having been overlooked for years, ‘Everything’s Alright’ didn’t see the light of day again until this second attempt at United States of Being. It was one of the tunes that Paul Tipler mixed and sounds awesome. It also has my favourite self-penned bassline. Cheers!.

We Need To Get Off This Planet

Written by STEVE Hillier

When February 2008

Where Hove, Sussex

Features EXS24, Kontour

YouTube Link

This song didn’t get as far a recorded vocal from Sarah, but I laid down the backing track ready for her to arrive. She didn’t, but it’s otherwise complete. I was thoroughly enjoying Dubstep in 2007, beguiled by how such laid-back music could be graceful and threatening simultaneously. We Need To Get Off This Planet is my attempt to take Dubstep to Dubstar, ironic in so many ways. 

When Dubstar folded forever in the first weeks of 2014, I turned my attention fully to ‘the future’. I’d spent years of my life on what felt like a fool’s errand, trying to revive an act that had expired many years earlier. I threw myself fully into the two modern styles of music that had seen me through my teens, twenties and beyond….Shoegaze and Electronica.

I put together my first set for GGGGHOST later that year and took it around Europe for three years. It was never supposed to be a recorded act, purely a live experience. I supported Ulrich Schnauss on a couple of occasions, which was fun.

This means the only recorded version of this song is the dub from a GGGGHOST gig in Brighton. There may be more GGGGHOST material on Spotify at some point.

Window Pain

Written by STEVE Hillier

When February 2010

Where Hove, EAST Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features YAMAHA CP-70B, ANALOGUE SOLUTIONS Telemark, Moog Little Phatty

YOUTUBE LINK TO PIANO VERSION

“You don’t need to lay me down, I’m ok"

The comeback single, finally the tectonic plates are moving! That was the rest of the gang’s plan. And why not, it had a great chorus, a strong melody, meant something, you could dance to it, had a minor Danish ending, and it sounded like Dubstar had woken up in the twenty-first century. Finally.

And inevitably… 

I’m not a big fan of Window Pain. I’ve had this feeling before. The one where you know something’s good but you’re not feeling it… your head says “yes” but your heart says “come back later”. This had happened with Stars, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. My inability to spot or even like a hit means I will never make an A&R person, and Andy Ross’s ability to spot one at a thousand paces is one of the reasons why he is one of the best. He came to the comeback show at The Lexington in 2013 and told me “that Window Pain song, the new one, sounds like a single”. Or he may have said hit. I’m not sure because I was too miserable by the end of that gig to listen to anyone. I know he was being positive, whatever he actually said.

And ultimately I think Andy was right. So did the others. Stephen Hague produced a version of this song and there was even a video made in a campsite in Dorset (in which I ended up being dressed as a gimp lying in a wood on a dark and cold November evening. Nope… I have no idea what the point of that was either). But the piano version is the first time the song has been released in any form.

This original unreleased recording of the song features the debut of two modern analogue synths in my collection, Analogue Solutions Telemark and the Moog Little Phatty. I’d not bought synthesizer hardware in years, instead using software whenever I wanted something my collection couldn’t provide. Tom from Analogue Solutions had met Sarah at an event somewhere and given her the Telemark and Oberkorn sequencer to try out. She and Paul had not been able to make head nor tail of them, and that’s no surprise, you really need to know what you’re doing with modular gear. So I bought them off Tom and put them to work. The Moog was for the bass of course, but I sold it a few years later. I loved the look of the synth but never warmed to its sound. Sacrilege, but I did an A/B comparison with Native Instrument’s Monark and preferred the software Moog to the real thing. 

I still use the Telemark though. It has a reputation for squeaks and squawks but it also has a unique bottom end. It’s ideal for solid sub-bass with a rounded edge, and it’s one of my three ‘go-to’ synths for analogue bass (the others being the Korg MS-20 and Roland SE-02).

HIT

Written by STEVE Hillier

When April 2011

Place written Hove, Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Roland Jupiter-6& System-100M, Yamaha CP-70B

LINK TO PIANO VERSION

“He beat me”

I didn’t have much to write about in my own life in 2011. Things were pretty solid, I was about to move house, I’d reduced the amount of work I was doing outside of making music to nearly nothing, and the second Dubstar reformation was drifting along, so…

I wrote about Sarah. I’d done this before, notably on I’m Conscious Of Myself, but this time felt different. There was plenty to write about, plenty to say. And it felt important to say it.

Hit was written at the very tail end of me working as a pro-writer. Consequently, the Scandinavian influences on the music are clear and present for all to hear. I’d been listening to the electronic pop emerging from Eastern Europe and incorporated that into the arrangement. There’s also an Ultravox reference in the melody and vocals. I’d been a huge fan of the band in both incarnations and finally got to meet Midge Ure in Copenhagen last year. Strange it’s only now in 2020 that I can hear their influence on my writing for Dubstar loudly and clearly.

There are several versions of Hit. The Tim Mason version, my original demo and a further refinement I’d made in 2013 to update the sounds a bit. Plus I wanted a reason to use my Roland Jupiter-6 (for the last time, sadly) and Roland System-100M. Sounded awesome. I’m confident this song will see the dance floor in some form one day, if not through Dubstar.

FACE THE MUSIC

Written by STEVE Hillier

when February 2012

Where Brighton, East Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Analogue Solutions Telemark

Youtube link

“With one piercing blow I set you free”

The Dubstar song that actually features a lyrical dagger through the heart, not simply imply 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 time 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 repeated 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.

I’d recently seen The Robin Guthrie Trio at Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar in Brighton. A basement spit-and-sawdust venue and loved every second, it was 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, with Bordeaux following a few years later. ‘How Close Your Soul’ conjured up a vision 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 Alexandra Daddario would play Sapphire. The music would be by Budd and Guthrie, ‘How Close Your Soul’ specifically. And who would write the 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 can’t get more Dubstar than that.

SO SAY WE ALL

Written by STEVE Hillier

When September 2011

Where Brighton, East Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features FXpansion’s BFD, Yamaha CP-70B, Korg MS-20& MONO/POLY

YOUTUBE LINK TO PIANO VERSION

“All that we leave behind”

This work is my proudest moment as a songwriter on the entire Dubstar journey. 

So Say We All is the sound of acceptance and unity. If the song ‘United States of Being’ from four years previously was an explosion of glorious intent, So Say We All is the moment where you sit back and reflect on where that unity has taken you and what you have learned about yourself.

It was written on a walk into central Copenhagen after a party at Solveig’s place in Christianhavn. There was something about the Nordic air, the view of the canals, my ongoing love affair with Scandinavia (then in its fifteenth year), the proximity to Christiania, my hangover...the lyric and melody came to me in an instant:

“All that I was meant to be

Every way that time has changed me

All that I was meant to do

Every word I said that was not true

And all that we leave behind, all we resign

Like a child in my arms is

All that we leave behind, it…

Crumbles to dust

And sand in my hands

And drifts away

But it stays 

While you learn to live again”

I sang it into my phone and brought it to the Dubstar demo sessions at Gavin’s studio ‘Base HQ’ in Newcastle later that month. A classic Dubstar song was born. And through the long crescendo coda, or Danish Ending as I like to call them, I mixed in vocal snippets from all of the other songs that were destined to be on this second attempt at a finished album. It was a direct and clear homage to Looking Glass by The La’s, one of the songs that had brought myself, Chris and Paul Wadsworth together all those years previously. It felt right.

If ever there was a song I’d written that worked exactly as I’d wanted from start to finish, it’s So Say We All. I put it next to Stars, Song No.9, I Lost A Friend, In The End and Day I see You Again… these are the finest Dubstar songs of them all. 

We will not hear their like again.

You can read the full story behind SO SAY WE ALL here on the Dubstar Archive blog

In The ENd

Written by STEVE Hillier

When September 2006

Originally sung by STEVE Hillier

Features FXpansion’s BFD, Yamaha CP-70B, Roland JX-8P & Jupiter-6

“It all works out in the end”

Stephen Hague recorded a superb version of this song. The world should hear it. Maybe it will one day.

In The End was written at a writing retreat in Umbertide, Italy, that was organised by Chris Difford of Squeeze. Chris and I had spoken a few times over the years at the BBC Radio studios in Brighton. I was a regular guest on Phil Jackson’s ‘Introducing’ program, where he would play demos of local bands and people like me and Chris would decide if they were any good. 

He invited me to a writing retreat that was happening in September 2006. I arrived a few days later than everyone else from Barcelona. I’d been at a wedding with Bill Brewster, the legendary DJ and author and by the time I’d arrived in Umbertide, a no-horse town that was closed on Mondays I was exhausted, utterly wrecked. This put me on a bit of a backfoot for the rest of the week. Friendship groups and alliances had already been formed, I was struggling to get any writing done. 

But by the end of the week, I’d managed to spend some time alone with a Fender Rhodes and a view of the Umbrian hills in the distance. I wrote In The End, a message from someone who has died to the loved one they left behind, a topic I’ve returned to in recent years. A classic Dubstar song.

FRONT TO BACK

Written by STEVE Hillier

When January 2010

Where Brighton, East Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Roland Juno-106

“Girls say they will, but they won't”

This song has been celebrated as ‘the campest thing you’ve ever written’, and it’s up against some stiff competition.

But this song isn’t another ‘Last Song’, this was the first song I wrote for Dubstar after I’d agreed to Sarah that I’d do more work after we split in 2008. This time it would be impersonal. I’d had enough of the soul searching, the drama, the pointless and endless problems, I just wanted to get on with it, get back and get off. So I wrote what I thought was a potential dancefloor smash and called it Front To Back.

There’s an ambition I’ve had since 1984. I’d had all the usual ones of being signed, getting on Top of The Pops, seeing the world but there was still one nagging at me.

In 1984, and at a school disco at the Danson Park Sports Club next to Welling United’s football ground, everyone was dancing to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Two Tribes’. From that moment I had a burning desire to write my own Two Tribes, a dance floor classic. Front to Back was supposed to be it. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Dubstar didn’t manage a dancefloor classic although some of the remixes did come close… there’s still time.

Front To Back sounded like a peculiar mash-up of New Order and Stock Aitken and Waterman, and because it’s Dubstar, there’s a veiled reference running through the whole thing. So we had cowbells, handclaps, detached vocals, and guitar parts with no business being on a tune of this nature. Tim Mason did a good mix of this song and I did an update too. If there was an instrumental hanging around it might make an interesting curio for release one day.

You can read the full story behind Front Back here on the Dubstar Archive blog

Sister

Written by STEVE Hillier

When June 2011

Where Hove, Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features FXpansion’s BFD, Yamaha CP-70B, Arp Odyssey, Korg MS-20

“Baby's gone”

<text redacted>

Superstar

Written by STEVE Hillier

When June 2012

Where Brighton, East Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Yamaha CP-70B

“Best by far”

Exactly what the world needed, another song entitled Superstar.

Claire and I had moved to a new house in July of 2011 and the musical and creative floodgates flew open. Luckily for me they haven’t closed since. I’d spent much of 2011 with Hockeysmith, and with their embryonic success firing me up I decided I was going to write hits again,

Although I’d spent most of the 00s on the production and songwriter treadmill, I hadn’t faced the music industry as an artist since 2000. I’d forgotten that the pressure on artists was fundamentally different to songwriters. We don’t make the magic happen for the audience, that’s what the artist does. We supply the script they perform. And you need to have that magical and essentially sacred combination of singer and song in order for an act to work. Annie and Georgie Hockey-Smith had that in 2011. Dubstar…?

Once Hockeysmith had signed to 4AD and returned to Wales, my involvement was essentially over. I turned my attention back to Dubstar for the final time and wrote the last flourish of songs. It was do or die, ‘time to piss or get off the pot’ as Chris put it. And what a flourish:

Superstar

So Say We All

You/Me

Window Pain

Don’t Ask

Interpretation

And then there were the two remixes I put together, some of the production work I’m most proud of.

But in the meantime, Superstar sounded like St Etienne, and not in a good way. Dubstar had been compared to St Etienne throughout the 90s, and though it annoyed me at the time in reality it was a fair comparison. It wasn’t just that both acts had a blonde Sarah out front, were trios and specialised in arch pop. Their initial musical idea was also a fundamental building block for Dubstar. I remember clearly, quite an achievement given how wrecked I was, the moment I first heard Only Love Can Break Your Heart in Rockshots nightclub on a Tuesday night in August 1990. It blew my mind. Here was an indie voice singing a sad pop tune over a Graham Central Station break beat. THAT was what I wanted to do, definitely that. Nothing else, just that. The musical idea that would become Dubstar was born in a near-empty gay club on a cold Tuesday night dancing to St Etienne with an alcoholic friend called Mick. Thanks, Tommy, it meant a lot.

We played Superstar in our set at The Lexington in 2013…it went down well, but there’s only so long you can ignore the fact that if you’re a band that’s doing a comeback after fifteen years the crowd only want to hear the old songs.

Circle Turns

Written by STEVE Hillier & Sarah Blackwood

When February 2012

Where Brighton, East Sussex & London

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Roland SH-101, Telemark, Fender Jazz Bass

YOUTUBE LINK

“The slow moving axis of time that is making you heal”

The first new song from Dubstar in thirteen years, and the last one we’d ever release. 

Circle Turns has a lot in common with Just A Girl. Sarah had a lyrical idea she recorded into her phone and emailed to me, I wrote the music in five minutes on the Yamaha CP-70B and put the arrangement and mix together alone on a Saturday afternoon in my studio in Brighton. We didn’t record a proper vocal, there wasn’t time. I do know that It sounded great, like an emissary for the album that was about to be released. All the Dubstar attributes were there, sad but ultimately positive lyrics, chromatic lead melodies, beautiful pads (in this case supplied by frozen reverb slices from the Dog In The Snow sessions) and deep bass from my Roland SH-101 which I’d used onstage at the The Riverside tribute gig. Again, Chris wasn’t around for this session, but I was able to include him by resurrecting some guitar licks he’d laid in Gavin’s studio for a different song. 

This is the only writing collaboration Sarah and I had in twenty years, and it worked. I wouldn’t have chosen this as a ‘first song’ for a comeback, but it could have been worse. Circle Turns is a sneak peek of just how great the fourth and fifth albums were…and then Dubstar was gone.

INterpretation

Written by STEVE HILLIER

when September 2011

Where Brighton, East Sussex

Originally sung by Sarah Blackwood

Features Korg MS-20

“This isn’t hate for you" 

There’s a lot of Cat in this song too, I’m not sure how, something in it rings a bell.

By the time we came to record these final Dubstar tunes, things were changing swiftly. It was a new decade, Chris had left Jesmond and was now living in Tynemouth fifteen miles away with his family. Gavin had moved his studio from behind Central Station to a commercial park on the bank of the Tyne near Benwell. 

And this time there wasn’t the same sense of ‘Wahey!’ that we’d experienced in the 00s sessions. Up until we played our first show in fifteen years at Miles Jacobson’s fortieth birthday party, we’d recorded and rehearsed in Gavin’s studio. Chris and I would go on the rampage in the centre of the town (although with less abandon than we had in the 90s) and then end up in As You Like it, a bar at the bottom of Osbourne Road built into an office block that would serve drinks and live bands until the early hours. If you wanted to get wrecked with the Jesmondites, and I always did, you went there.

And maybe that was the underlying issue with this final attempt at a reunion for me. We’d moved on, several times. I was definitely up for some fun, I loved the writing and the playing, but not the drama and intrigue. I couldn’t see the point in it and still don’t. This time, if it didn’t work, it didn’t matter, I no longer had emotional skin in the game. I’d completed what I needed to do with my twenties, with Newcastle, with Dubstar. My thirties had been defined nicely and, now in my forties, I was beginning to relax. I knew there was no career in reviving the act, but any musical positives that could come in this decade could be an enjoyable bonus. Those bonuses would make the work worthwhile.

In the meantime, Interpretation was another tune that Tim Mason worked on in Malta. It came out well, could have done with a better lyric but overall is a solid album track. Not that album tracks mattered more in 2011 than they do in 2020, but still….I did what I could.

You/Me

Written by STEVE Hillier

When April 2007

Where Hove, East Sussex

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Sarah Blackwood

FEATURES EXS24

“There’s a light that shines before you, you’re in a state of grace”

Now this is a song! 

I had a question, how far back could you strip music, how far could you reduce a song to its bare essence and still have it work? The answer was obvious. Take inspiration from all the Hip Hop and Scandinavian techno I’d been enjoying since 2000 and throw it at a regular Steve Hillier song, but one which was about the lyrics and the mood. Remove the melody and chord sequence, don’t retain anything like that. Make a Dubstar song, then strip it to the bone. You/Me is the result.

You/Me has one chord, a four to the floor kick throughout (another nod to The Field) and no other percussion, just an off-beat one-note bass line, a sample from Arvo Pärt (actually, it’s seven samples of the same moment in Cantus for Benjamin Britten from seven different recordings). Miraculously it works superbly from start to end. There's a repeated guitar clang throughout too, like Dubstar had become The Fall and been captured in a sampler. There are drones, lots of drones… because as Super Hans said, the longer the note, the more the dread. 

The musical heavy-lifting is the lyric, there are more words in this than in any other Dubstar song by far. It’s a reflection on how two people can become magical, like a mythical creature or unit, complete and entire in their own world. Not lovers, something transcendent. I love it.

Something You Should Know

Written by STEVE Hillier & Emma Kirby

When April 2009

Where Cardiff, Wales

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Emma Kirby

FEATURES Yamaha CP-70B, Korg MS-20

“I was aiming high thinking you were mine, you dragged me down so low”  

Great chorus!

I met Emma Kirby at Point Blank, the music and DJ school where I worked for a few years in Shoreditch, London. She was nineteen at the time and although there were nearly twenty years between us, we hit it off immediately and remain friends to this day.

In the aftermath of the Client kerfuffle the previous year, Chris and I were looking for a replacement singer for Dubstar. Too much effort had been put into writing, recording and otherwise creating the new album that there was no way I was going to give up simply because the singer from Client wasn’t available. 

Emma could fit the bill. She brought two things to the table Dubstar didn’t have; youth and cowriting ability. Over a period of about a year, I visited her in Cardiff to write and record at her house. This was a lot of time to dedicate to something new but my view was that the worst that could happen was, just as with the dozens of other songwriting trips I’d engaged in, I’d end up with more songs.

So Emma and I wrote loads together, and Something You Should Know was the first. I was really excited about this. Emma had a similar laconic delivery to Sarah but with a different accent. It truly was the start of something new, and her voice suited the Yamaha CP-70B even more than Sarah’s.

Unfortunately, three things got in the way of us pursuing this musical idea. Emma had glandular fever, a common enough illness but debilitating nonetheless. At this point, she’d had it the whole time I’d known her but neither of us had realised. It was only after she’d recovered and returned to full health that we realised how ‘low-powered’ she’d been during these writing sessions.

And she was going to University in Bath. That might get in the way, right? It wasn’t going to work.

At least not for a few years. It was Emma who brought me in to help complete these tunes in 2014. getting into the charts was a nice way to finish off a year that had otherwise been marked by the end of Dubstar. 

The last and most obvious reason was, and remains the case, that Dubstar requires Sarah Blackwood on vocals. Looking back it would have been ridiculous to replace her, and I’m glad that didn’t happen. Doing a comeback is awkward enough, but with a different singer or writer? It wouldn’t have worked.

You can read the full story behind Something You Should Know here on the Dubstar Archive

Under Your Thumb

Written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards

When 1966

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY Mick Jagger

Youtube link to original

One of the first songs we recorded after I’d agreed to reform Dubstar again following the events of 2008. The Dubstar version of the song isn’t really a cover of the Stones's original but the Bossanova version by Anakelly.

Since 2002 I’d been spending most of the summer months in Puerto Banús, Marbella. The bars play great music and I noticed that, just like Reggae, you can take any song and sing it in a Bossanova style. Need proof? How about Nouvelle Vague’s version of Sister of Mercy’s Marian? Or this entire album?

Or this playlist

Dubstar didn’t do Bossanova, although we’d referenced it before. What we did do though is cover songs that seem to say something about what we were going through. This time it was Sarah’s divorce from Client. It’s an oddity in Dubstar’s canon. Both Chris and Sarah knew the original, yet somehow I only knew the updated Bossanova version. It features one of the most passionate vocals Sarah’s delivered. Like the hand-burning incident during Wearchest, a strong dose of upset can certainly put the adrenalin into her voice.

You can read the full story behind UNDER YOUR THUMB here on the Dubstar Archive blog	

If I can’t change your mind

Written by Bob Mould

When1991

ORIGINALLY SUNG BY BOB MOULD

YOUTUBE LINK TO UPDATED DUBSTAR VERSION

Youtube link to original

Another Dubstar session at Gavin’s, another cover. Quite why we chose this song is lost to me now, but the original is tremendous, maybe we could take it somewhere new?

The answer is maybe, yeah. Sarah sings it very well indeed, it definitely suits the newfound anger in her voice post Client. And we had the South Central boys on the mix. They did a tremendous job. 

But, why did we do this? I can’t remember. I’m sure there must have been a good reason. Maybe it was an extra song for Amnesty? 

I’m IN Love With A German Filmstar

Written by The Passions

Youtube link

Youtube link to original

We were asked to contribute a cover of a song for Amnesty International via Buffet Libre, a Spanish record label. This would be the first new material released by Dubstar for a decade. Sarah wanted to record a Kirsty MacColl song (I think it was ‘There’s Guy Works Down The Chipshop Swears He’s Elvis’). I thought we could do better than that and suggested we did The Passions’ classic instead. So we did. 

The Dubstar version is cheeky for a variety of reasons and this is my fave: if you line up our version next to the original you’ll find that despite both songs vary wildly in tempo they’ll sync up throughout. This is because as I used The Passions original as a template, and matched the tempo changes throughout to save time. A lot of time.

South Central mixed this song. I’d been friends with Rob and Keith for many years, and Dex, an old friend who’d had a hand in Dubstar for years suggested we should work with them. Not a great fit if I’m honest, the Maltese boys were dance floor specialists while Dubstar was something else. But they did make this song take off, it’s great. The perfect final Dubstar cover.

You can read the full story behind I’m In Love With a German Film Star here on the Dubstar Archive blog