From Melody Maker, October 21, 1995
DUBSTAR's songs may be deliciously soft and sweet, but, as JENNIFER NINE finds out, the band themselves are not fluffy, pink bunny-wunnies. Dub sex: MELANIE COX
I'M still on planet earth, I think, but only just. Planet Earth
(the club) is in Newcastle, and tonight it's heaving with students dancing and
snogging like their lives depended on it. Dubstar's beaming
songwriter/programmer Steve Hillier mans the decks just as he has since the days
when an 18-year-old Chris Wilkie stood patiently outside the DJ booth, waiting
to convince Steve to form a band with him. Singer Sarah Blackwell (sic),
self-described "naaath'n lass" from Halifax with an impressive
capacity for drink and disorder, and a singing voice as silvery and remote and
regretful as the stars, stands nearby. Laughing into a pint, blinding false
eyelashes big as fishing lures at a school of goggle-mouthed boys, and pulling
faces at us over their shoulders.
And, standing next to me, guitarist Chris,
whose eyes always look a little sad, and whose hands might shake a little when
you talk to him but coax effortless riptides and shimmering tricks-of-light from
a set of strings like no-one since, ooh, Johnny Marr.
"Aaaaahhh,"
we both exhale, as a favourite song comes on: "There She Goes", by The
La's. "You know," says Chris' quiet Gateshead lilt in my ear, "songs
like this almost seem as if they weren't actually written by anyone. Just...
arrived from somewhere."
Chris should know. Listen to "Stars",
their ravishing dub-and-synth first single, or "Anywhere", their
second. (Heck, you can even listen to them on Radio 1.) Or listen to "Disgraceful",
their lush, desolate and sky-kissed debut album produced by Stephen Hague. And
you'll realise that these songs just arrived, too.
Like a FedEx package
from the Milky Way.
DUBSTAR do not make fluffy-iced, pop-sugary fairy cakes. For a
start, they're self-confessed "4AD obsessives". ("Oh, yeah, I was
an utter completist," blushes Steve. "I even went so far as to get a
job with their distributor to get my hands on it all. I think the saddest thing
I did was to attempt to get the Cocteau Twins' autographs, which I really should
have known was not the thing to do.")
If anything, they make fairy
cakes with strychnine. "Just A Girl She Said" is a sweepingly gorgeous
setting for Sarah's spat-out reply to men with dicks for brains ("I wrote
it in an absolute fit of anger after work at the bar one night," she says).
"Popdorian" is, apparently, about unsafe sex. The soaring "Not So
Manic Now" is about a little old lady getting her head smashed against a
wall. "St Swithin's Say" turns a heartbreak Billy Bragg song from
sandpaper to silk against the ears.
A lot of the LP, they tell me, is about
Life Being Sad, while "Stars", their buoyant debut single, is about
The End Of Everything.
According to the band.
Blimey.
"Oh,
yeah, it's happening a lot now - we're getting a lot of people using words like
'sugar-sweet' and 'fluffy'," says Steve, cheerfully. Steve escaped to
Newcastle from a justly obscure corner of sarf London a few years ago and hasn't
stopped being cheerful since, by the looks of it.
"'Sugary pop band',"
adds Sarah, rolling her eyes over her glass.
"I remember, when 'Stars'
came out, hearing a DJ doing his Top 10 tally and saying that his ambition was
for the song to be on 'Top Of The Pops'. And all I could think was, 'This isn't
pop, this is... just maudlin rubbish!'"
"'Stars is the most
desolate lyric I've ever heard," insists Sarah. "'Watch the stars
go out'... That's pretty bloody final, isn't it?"
Yes, but you
can't beat a pretty song with an absolutely gutted lyric for real
steal-your-heart impact, after all. Try "There Is A Light That Never Goes
Out" (which, funnily enough, always makes me think of Dubstar).
Chris
smiles.
"Well, that's good. That's a lot like how we feel about it,"
Steve agrees.
"STARS" didn't really just appear from nowhere.
That song, in fact, has been kicking around for a few years, since long before
Sarah joined the band, back when it was just Chris playing guitar and, on
vocals, Steve. (Sarah insists he sounded "lovely like Martin Gore" as
Steve wriggles with embarrassment.)
"But to be honest," says
Steve, recovering, "'Stars' hasn't really changed much. And it still sounds
like quite an indicator of our state of mind. Which is," he smiles again, "everything's
crap."
"We were never the happiest group," says Chris,
apologetically.
"You know," interjects Sarah, suddenly excited, "I
just found the first version of 'Elevator' [another potential future single from
'Disgraceful'] and it's gorgeous! It sounds like lift music! Er...
sorry, shouldn't I have mentioned that?"
Misapprehension number two
(or three, if you accept my theory that Dubstar do come from the Milky
Way): Dubstar must have wanted to be famous. Stephen Hague production, Radio 1
airplay...
"That was never really part of our plan," says Steve.
That'd be the Five Year Plan for the band that he's already joked about. It
appears to be mostly about not-so-subtly rude album covers, as you'd see if you
look at the cover of "Disgraceful".
Food have since had to do a
less rude version because of disapproval from what Sarah calls "the back to
basics brigade" among retail outlets. At which point Steve smiles,
mock-innocently, and says, "Well, you can't get more basic than a vagina
pencil case, can you?"
Well, no, now that you mention it. Except
for... I flick through the CD booklet, full of photos and plastic objects by
certifiably odd artist Robert Steel.
"Ahh, you've spotted the baby
with the tube up its bum, have you?" Steve giggles.
"Anyway,"
he says, returning to the matter at hand, "I'm sure success was part of the
record company's plan, but we were really convinced that nobody was going to
like it at all."
That's the biggest lie I've heard all day. Or the
second biggest, after the bit about "Stars" being maudlin rubbish.
"It's not! It's not at all!" he protests. "Before we even
approached a record company, I always thought that anything happening was going
to be years away."
Maybe changing the name helped (from - yes! - The
Jones). Or finding Sarah. It somehow involved being drunk - which by now I
realise isn't surprising - down by the Tyne. And a tape of Sarah's voice falling
into Steve's hands. You can imagine the impact better if you remember that, at
this point, Steve and Chris (in what they politely allow me to call "The
Crap Years") were doing gigs that consisted of things like "our own
4AD night, of the most obscure songs ever". To a dog and two people, one of
whom was Sarah.
"It did take me a while to get my head around it,"
says Chris of the change from two blokes to Dubstar. "But you can do so
much more when you've got a good vocalist, and Sarah's such a good vocalist..."
"Oh, shut up!" she growls, blushing furiously.
"It's like
getting a new guitar," Chris concludes. High praise indeed.
I STILL haven't worked Dubstar out by the time Steve has to go back
to DJ-ing. And I still haven't entirely worked them out by the time we're
walking the streets of Newcastle at 3am, looking for a bridge to take snaps on.
In the meantime, Steve has enlightened me about the Eighties. ("They were
awful! The clothes, the politics. Sure, there were pockets of good music, but
it's so much better now.") Sarah has confessed to "feeling like
crapping me pants" whenever she performs onstage. We've mused about the
differences between men and women.
And then Chris tells me that, since
they've started releasing records, he and Sarah have both had strange, recurring
dreams about death.
So what do Dubstar think Dubstar are?
"Ahhh,"
sighs Sarah, looking up, savouring the moment. "Different things every day."
"Misunderstood," says Steve, half-jokingly.
Chris says nothing.
His sad eyes crinkle a little as he smiles. He lights a cigarette, and his hand
shakes so faintly you can hardly tell.