Stars

Written by STEVE Hillier

When February 1992

Where Jesmond, Newcastle Upon Tyne

Originally Sung By Steve Hillier

Features Roland W-30, Yamaha DX100  

Spotify Link

YOUTUBE link to GDR demo of Stars 1994

Youtube link to Steve hillier’s 2021 Glitterball Remix

STARS and KING TUBBY DJ MASHUP 2001

Stars on Wikipedia

Stars Interview with Steve Hillier in Electronic Music magazine

“We’ll take out hearts outside, leave our lives behind and watch the stars go out”

Stars, Dubstar’s most successful song, was written as Walkers Nightclub in Newcastle was closed. It was an infamous haunt for students and gangsters and the first Tyneside nightclub that I worked in. Walkers Nightclub was a favourite haunt with the more discerning Geordie clubber, I’d DJed at the permanently sold-out Wednesday’s ‘Westworld’ club night since 1989…my first regular nightclub spot since arriving in Newcastle.

Walkers had numerous difficulties, from regular overcrowding to problems with the drug trade and a broken air conditioning system. Despite this its closure was a shock. The club had come to define the mid-week music scene for me and many others on Tyneside. While The Riverside was there for bands, in the late 80s and early 90s Walkers Nightclub was where you went to dance. And on a Wednesday (and later Thursday night at my indie club ‘Futureworld’) you came for my choice of music. Walkers is where I met Chris Wilkie. It’s also where the Dubstar story begins. I took a phonecall in my Tyneside flat on a Thursday afternoon, the police had closed Walkers. I was getting ready for a special club night for the release of the latest Cure album…I’d spent weeks arranging this with a promo company based in Blackheath called Streets Ahead. It was a big deal for all parties, and now I had to tell them the club had closed.

Crestfallen, I walked down through the rain into Jesmond Dene to stare at the animals in the petting zoo and gather my thoughts. I had no idea what I would do. Walkers had been the largest part of my income for years, it also was the springboard from which I got the rest of my gigs, such was the glowing reputation of the Westworld night.

I decided to write Stars, one of the most important decisions in my career, maybe in my entire life.

Walkers returned as Planet Earth in 1993, and regained the Walkers crown to become the late-night drinking spot for many Dubstar sessions. It was a five-minute walk from The Forth Hotel and our studio ‘Stink Central’ at The Arts Centre. It was handy to know that when we got off the train from Kings Cross at one in the morning there was somewhere that would let us in for the tenth drink of the night.

Planet Earth was a terrific club, there’s nothing like it down here in Brighton. But it couldn’t replace Walkers, it had an extra something. Danger maybe?

I wrote Stars on the old piano in my front room in Jesmond, with a lead melody that only features on the ‘acoustic version’ on the B-Side of No More Talk (and now this new piano version). It came together quickly, which is always a good sign. Stars took on a life of its own when I completed the first draft using my Roland W-30 sampler and sequencer. Almost the entire arrangement you hear on the Dubstar version was assembled on the W-30. There’s also a lead ‘twinkle’ from the Yamaha DX100 I’d bought for £100 at Mckay Sounds on Westgate Road earlier that month…a pure sine wave, largely because it was the only sound I liked from the keyboard at the time. That opinion changed soon after. I now own three.

The arrangement to Stars was conceived with a nod to Massive Attack, my favourite new act at the time, and the Dub Reggae tunes I grew up with in Lewisham, South London. Of course, being one of my songs, and having very little idea of how Dub Reggae works it had a strong melody and wistful lyric…a reflection of how I was feeling about the state of the club scene on Tyneside. And what on earth I was going to do next.

I didn’t understand why people liked Stars so much at first, I wasn’t keen on recording it at all. But through my experiences working at Pinnacle Records, my first job after leaving school, and out of respect to Andy (the boss) Ross at Food Records, I knew that if there were any point in signing to his record label it would be to allow his expertise as the guide for the next stage for Dubstar. He wanted to release Stars first, so we did. It went on to be the most successful Dubstar song by far, and is still played on the radio and featured on playlists across the world today.

Today, I know why people like it. It’s grown on me too. 

STARS makes the UK TOP 40 thirty years ago today

A blog update 8th July 2025, on this day thirty years ago, Dubstar’s first single Stars reached number 40 in the UK Top 40 singles chart.

[TRANSCRIPT]

Over the years, I’ve been asked what did that feel like, what did that mean, mainly by my aspiring songwriting students? And I don’t think I’ve ever given a conclusive answer because, well it’s so hard to know. What exactly does it mean to have a hit, and I suppose more specifically what did it mean for us?

On a personal level, for me it meant that what we were doing was real. You see, up until this point all Dubstar had ever been was a lesser know act on the Newcastle band scene, who, to everyone’s surprise and maybe even annoyance, had become the first act in many years to land a major record deal. In some ways all this meant was, if you were feeling al little cynical, that someone down in London liked us enough to get us to record some songs. That’s great but that could happen to anyone, in fact I’ve discovered many times since that label ‘interest’ or even what used to be known as a development deal was common place for a unknown act if you were simply plausible enough. That was the 1990s folks, and it was, as it it remains today, the kiss of death.

Now we were in a different place.  Food Records had released a song by us and it had charted. That meant that we were more than the latest signings, we were actually in the game. We had shot and we had scored. In public. Wow!

It also meant that the Dubstar game had changed in an instant. You see, I’d always imagined that we would sign to small indie label and release a string of essentially boutique records to be sold in independent record shops, probably somewhere towards the back, bubbling along as a middling alternative act. This wasn’t through lack of ambition on mine or Chris and Sarah’s part, it was simply what we liked, that’s what the acts we liked did. As long as the imaginary indie label liked us they’d keep putting out our songs. And that would be terrific.

But we hadn’t signed to a fly by night indie, we’d signed to a major label, Food Records. And Food meant business, by which I mean that Andy Ross did things properly. We were intended to make great records, and to sell a lot of great records. No pressure, right? And here we were with our very first release hitting the top 40. Next release we’d need to be even higher, and we managed it. This was the beginning of a small version of the big time.

So getting to number 40 soon seemed like quite a lowly achievement, a stepping stone to higher in the charts. And we actually did have a future. The radio had played us, we’d been on TV, the press seemed to love us, the record itself sounded terrific. Well played everyone.

So how did it feel? I was elated, and then immediately daunted, then elated again. I walked up from our flat on Grosvenor Avenue in Jesmond to the off license on Acorn Road and bought a bottle of champagne. And somewhere there’s a picture of my partner and I toasting this moment, raising a glass to Lucy the grey tabby cat looking out over the back yard, bemused as to what on earth would posses her humans to be dancing around in the drizzle. She stayed in, we stayed out.

What did it mean? It meant there was a huge amount of work to do. Let’s get on with it!

On reflection, getting to number 40 in the charts was not very high but it was high enough to start a chain of events that has echoed through the decades right the way to where I’m sitting right today.

The currency of the music business is confidence, and nothing puts more confidence in the bank than having a visible, tangible success, no matter how small (although big is better of course). And the great thing is, once that success has been banked, unless you do something really stupid, its value grows over time. Number 40 in 1995 was quite a lowly achievement by the standards of the day, but it was enough for the record company, press and media to back Dubstar for the next single Anywhere, which charted higher. And then Not So Manic, and eventually the Stars rerelease. In fact the entire period of two years until No More Talk was released was about ever growing confidence.

Those tangible achievements allowed us to tour the world, find life partners, make money doing what we loved and then when Dubstar was finished, to move into other roles in the music world such as songwriting, production, singing in a different act, education and more. All built on having had a string of top forty singles. Eight of them.

When I was lecturing I would tell my students, to paraphrase what Mike Smith our publisher once told me: The key to success is to have hits. Anything, no everything happens when you have hits.

Congratulations to Dubstar, thirty years ago today.

This was the second time we appeared on Top of the Pops and real high point for the act. You can read a full account of that experience over on the Dubstar Archive here.

Dubstar’s first video, and it’s not great. However, I do think it has real charm and Chris and I end up looking pretty cool. It also starts a long term trend of video directors dressing me in sunglasses. I can’t think why…

Sadly this video has been removed by Warners Music. Seems odd to me as all the other Dubstar videos still exist on the internet but this one, which is the best of the bunch. However you can access this video through Spotify here.

The amazing video that was shot for the US market in the Nevada desert. There is also a superb Melody Maker interview that chronicles the experience here.

The original ‘acoustic’ version of Stars was included on the B-Side of No More Talk in 1997 and remains my favourite of the many versions of the song. This update includes an improved version of the vocal and you can read the full story on the Dubstar Archive here.

Yet another version of Stars, but this one is probably the one that took the longest to record. I started this remix in our studio in Newcastle upon Tyne in the summer of 1996 for the Disgraceful remix album but it was never completed…until 2021 when I discovered in a pile of hard drives that had been stored in our villa in Puerto Banús for nearly twenty years. More details can be found here.

The piano version that was recorded as part of the lock-down project Lost & Foundland during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.

This version of Stars was recorded in a tiny studio in Middlesbrough and in many ways is the starting point of the Dubstar ‘sound’. We have rolling breakbeats, Dub basslines and soaring melodies. Nice, and you can find more details here

Having a hit record meant we had numerous opportunities to appear on TV shows across Europe, and here are two examples.

And this is the starting point of the version of Stars that would eventually end up on the Disgraceful album. The big harmonic opening is now much louder, and of course we have Sarah on vocals for the first time. I wrote about this early version of the song here.

For an act from Newcastle upon Tyne we spent a lot of time in Middlesbrough! This is the very earliest recording of Stars in existence, with me on vocals and Gavin Lee on drums. We were known as The Joans for the best part of two years, read our story here.

And here we can a fan video recorded at the Dubstar comeback show at The Lexington show in 2013. Funny how Chris always stood stage-right and photographers would stand stage-left!

I was re-establishing myself as a DJ in the Brighton & London area at the time, everyone else was making their own mashups, I thought I’d give it a go. Luckily I had the vocals of all the Dubstar songs, I could do anything I wanted right? The process was a lot more difficult than it appeared… Consequently I only made three mashups for my DJ sets, this being my fave. Why not combine the most famous Dubstar song with the most famous song by the original Dubstar, King Tubby? This was the rough and ready result, the future sound of 2002.