Happy 20th Anniversary to Dubstar’s third studio album Make It Better, originally released August 28, 2000. (Note: Make It Better is not currently available via streaming platforms, hence the absence of embedded streaming below.)
“We’ve always wanted to raise the thing that everyone’s thinking, but no one’s saying,” Chris Wilkie explains during my chat with the Dubstar co-founder and his musical partner of nearly three decades, Sarah Blackwood. The distillation of one’s creative ethos into a succinct statement isn’t something that happens every day, but I was fortunate enough to capture it during our conversation, a follow-up to our 2018 discussion about their fourth LP One.
This time, the duo looked to turn the clock back twenty years and revisit their third album, Make It Better. “We felt like it was the right time to do a deep dive into it and I’m happy that we did,” Wilkie opines.
Facing down the millennium, Dubstar—then a threesome whose roster included programmer Steve Hillier—had positioned themselves as cult heroes on the cusp of mainstream superstardom. Make It Better should have been the set to propel them into the latter category—it was not to be. But, as the saying goes, “out of adversity comes opportunity” and this is certainly true about how this body of work is regarded today.
The road to Make It Better began with their first collection, the lauded Disgraceful (1995). Issued on the Food subsidiary of EMI Records, Dubstar’s inaugural affair romanced critics and record buyers alike. Soon thereafter, their sophomore long player Goodbye (1997) heightened the group’s stylish pop approach; live gigging became a prominent factor in the promotional lifespans for both LPs.
Wilkie recalls how the demands of maintaining their upward trajectory upended Dubstar’s amiable dynamic almost immediately, “We signed with EMI Records in November 1994 and then we hit the ground running in January of 1995 making our first album (Disgraceful) with Stephen Hague—that became a gold record—and we did another one (Goodbye) shortly after that. And we toured extensively, and our feet barely touched the ground until 1998. In less than four years, we turned from a cute, optimistic pop trio from the North of England into Fleetwood Mac—and I don’t mean that in a good way.”
Press Photo Courtesy of EMI | Credit: Zanna
The expectation for Dubstar to transition from the road to the studio to begin work on their next record—soon to be presciently titled Make It Better—loomed over the now fractured troika. Sensing that there was something amiss, the top brass at EMI—who had upgraded Dubstar from the Food imprint to the EMI roster proper—requested a meeting with all three members to assess the crisis.
Wilkie elaborates, “There were rumors around the label about the fact that we were in bad shape. And also, we had issues going on with management and you can’t be signed to an institution like EMI without good management.” Blackwood confirms, “We were on manager number five by then, weren’t we? We had, like, six managers in seven years.”
The stress of maintaining what they’d built sent ripples outward which touched other aspects of the band’s professional standing and their personal lives in equal measure. “I had actually developed a debilitating anxiety disorder over the preceding years, so I was self-medicating with alcohol to suppress that,” Wilkie confides. “But also, just to cope with the fact that this band that I co-founded no longer resembled itself, you know? And it was in this condition that we presented ourselves in the offices of Neil Farris, who was the new managing director of EMI, who had summoned us. But Neil was very gracious, and he said to us, ‘Look, I believe in you. So, you should take time.’ And I think what he was saying was, ‘you should take time to sort yourselves out. We’ve got this beautiful mill in remote, rural Oxfordshire. Go there, take your time, pull yourselves together and maybe start writing (your new record) and things like that.’”
Dubstar decamped to Oxfordshire to lay the preliminary groundwork for Make It Better—it was the first in a sequence of protracted exercises to bring the album into being. Even more frustrating, this excursion did little to pull the band back into cohesive formation. “Go unify, sort yourselves out, love each other again and the exact opposite happened,” Blackwood remembers. Not long after the Oxfordshire misfire, song building resumed in Brighton with Wilkie and Hillier. Their exchange of artistic energy was in a form of flux. Hillier had started penning songs for other projects separate from Dubstar. If the material was untenable for said projects, he presented them to Wilkie and Blackwood.
This additional interpersonal shift did not go unnoticed by Wilkie. “We reconvened months later and did some demos in Brighton which kind of involved me and Steve working on instrumentals together,” he recalls. “He had kind of maneuvered himself into the position of gatekeeper of the birthing process; so, he and I would work on these instrumental things and I wouldn’t get to hear really what the words were or what the song was about until Sarah turned up to sing and she was presented with the lyric.”
Despite the continued breakdown in Dubstar’s creative communication process, they found common ground in how to tackle the production for Make It Better—they opted to do it themselves. It was huge step forward for Dubstar, although mounting tensions within the ranks made it something of a mixed blessing as Wilkie observed, “We had decided we were going to self-produce this record and also decided to take on Mike ‘Spike’ Drake to be our co-producer; he’d been the mix engineer on our previous two records that Stephen Hague produced. We brought Spike in to be the adult in the room with his more seasoned ability and maturity, that meant that he could navigate us through this process. They (the sessions) went quite well and we started to feel like the music was coming together. But, in the background things were still personally unraveling a bit for all of us.”
Construction on Make It Better resumed at a studio stationed in Newcastle and it was there that the spotlight fell on Blackwood’s struggles with her self-esteem and alcoholism. “Sarah was able to function as an artist, still, to a supernaturally high level, but she could barely function as a human being at all,” Wilkie recollects. “By the end of the (Newcastle) sessions Sarah had split up with her boyfriend in Manchester. Consequently, you know, I invited Sarah to come live with me (in London) so that, at least, I could able to see, day to day, that she was okay and until everything got back to normal.”
Blackwood—whose sobriety has now spanned fifteen years—expounds, “It had got to be too much, and my relationship disintegrated; it was horrendous. I was suffering very badly from imposter syndrome as well, I had that to contend with—I wasn’t just drinking to drink and I had a lot going on in my head.” But the act of making music proved to be somewhat restorative for Blackwood in spite of the increasingly fraught working conditions. “That was what pulled me through,” she confesses. “It was the fact that it was all about the art and that was the thing in my life.”
Cover Artwork for the “I (Friday Night)” Single | Credit: Zanna
Blackwood was thrust further into the limelight as the focal point of the eventual marketing campaign for Make It Better, working with famed photographer/filmmaker Zanna. “We were excited to work with her,” Blackwood says. “The thing was we’d moved (again) by this album—because EMI was sort of like an umbrella with Parlophone—and all the cool bands were on Parlophone, like Radiohead and stuff, the Beatles had been on Parlophone. So we wanted to be on Parlophone!”
We were really excited, but when they (the label) said they wanted me to be on the album cover, I was instantly disappointed,” she continues. “I thought that there were far more interesting things to put on the album cover. And I thought it was ironic that the EMI side had let us get away with the fanny and the pencil case (for Disgraceful) and then Parlophone, you know, they were (supposed to be) more experimental, but they wanted to do the major label thing which was push me as the image person. Because of my sort of imposter syndrome, I felt uncomfortable with it, but I did it.”
Although mastering for Make It Better had commenced in June of 1999, the album did not reach the public until the following August—but the finished product was well worth the wait. Fourteen sides comprised the long player with Hillier having written twelve; only “Mercury” and “Another Word”—written by Kirsty Hawkshaw, Wilkie and Blackwood respectively—bore no scripting input from Hillier. While it is true that pieces like “Take It” and “Arc of Fire” weren’t intended for usage on Make It Better at first, Hillier was wise to rope them in for inclusion. Each selection present coalesces to form an aural portraiture of dark passions and varied emotional states of the human psyche. None of these topics were foreign to Dubstar, but this time around the group were able to find themselves in the material.
Much of this was down to Blackwood’s gift as a faultless interpreter. Blackwood’s tough, but glamorous vocal flair echoes frontwoman contemporaries Shirley Manson (of Garbage) and Sarah Cracknell (of Saint Etienne). Yet, she distinguishes herself from her peers with an inimitable sensitivity to yield a very human underpinning to her performances on “Mercury,” “When the World Knows Your Name” and “I’m Conscious of Myself.” “Mercury” proved to be an affirming experience for Blackwood as a singer who was a longtime fan of its original mistress Kirsty Hawkshaw. “I actually met her (Kirsty) a few years later and I was so excited, because I always felt like I was never a singer because I couldn’t sing like in a soul voice,” she admits. “And then when I heard Sinead O’Connor and Kirsty as well, I thought ‘Oh, oh!’—not that I’m comparing myself to those (singers), because I’d never think that I’m that amazing—but I can do this. Kirsty was one of these people who made me feel, yeah, I can do this, there’s a place for me here as a singer.”
Synched to the incendiary lyrics of Make It Better are the kinetic tracks backing them. From the clubby breakbeat textures of “Stay,” to the ferric rock of “Rise to the Top” around to the unlikely cowpunk-disco corker “I (Friday Night),” all these disparate aesthetics manage to function in cooperation and form an eclectic widescreen pop experience. Make It Better had become quite the next level effort from Dubstar even with its troubled genesis.
Returning to “I (Friday Night),” Wilkie speaks fondly about its inception. “I remember doing ‘I (Friday Night)’ really well; the guitar part, I sorta took that a little bit from ‘That’s Alright Mama,’ you know, the Elvis (Presley) song, I was always trying to think outside of the box. I felt like on that song, the shape of it in terms of the chords, there wasn’t much going on. Perhaps I was trying to overcompensate by making it really busy on the guitar, but it has a certain charm to it—especially in the context of when Sarah sings the chorus, it’s a very kind of staccato melody.”
The earmarking of “I (Friday Night)” as the first single from Make It Better in May of 2000 foreshadowed Hillier’s impending departure. “It was the first indicator that I had that he (Steve) was on his way out,” Wilkie explains. “I got a call from him out of the blue—I didn’t even think he was in the country, I’d thought he’d gone on vacation somewhere—but suddenly he told me he was at the end of my street and could I meet him for coffee. So, I went down to this Starbucks on England Lane, in London, and he’s sitting outside. He told me that he wanted to get going, that he wished us well, but that he couldn’t take it anymore and that he wanted to leave. He claimed that it was mostly due to the frustration with Sarah’s problems with alcohol and stuff, the chaos and everything.”
In the wake of Hillier’s exit, Wilkie and Blackwood did the promotional rounds for Make It Better, which arrived in UK stores on August 28th, 2000. Hillier’s parting was the (then) decisive blow to Dubstar. Not long afterward, the lush midtempo number “The Self Same Thing” went out at as the second and final single from Make It Better.
Cover Artwork for the “The Self Same Thing” Single | Credit: Zanna
In a “clearing out the cupboard” measure, as described by Wilkie, Dubstar backed “The Self Same Thing” with high-end outtakes from Make It Better: “Redirected Mail” (with Gary Numan), “And When You Laugh” (with Ian Brodie) and “Victoria.” Because “The Self Same Thing” was an extended play, it was ineligible to chart, single-wise—another unfortunate development. Exhausted with this series of events, Wilkie and Blackwood embarked on their final contractual commitments before placing Dubstar into a form of suspended animation. Never given a chance to find its own footing, Make It Better was lost to all the sudden changes impacting Dubstar and slipped quietly from view.
Eighteen years would come and go before Wilkie and Blackwood reactivated Dubstar to issue their fourth album, One (2018). In that space of time, Make It Better developed its own lore with a niche sect of Dubstar enthusiasts (this writer included) who were captivated by its ruminative wiles that went overlooked upon its release.
Time has softened Dubstar’s own perspective on the long player too. “I must admit that it sounded better than I remembered,” Wilkie says. “It is an anomaly in the Dubstar story. I noticed that when I listened back to it, it has more attitude and definitely occupies its own space.” Blackwood went one step further to comment on its possible appeal, “I think that it’s the kind of vibe where people might sense the layers and layers of emotion going on.”
Plucked from the most turbulent period in Dubstar’s story, Make It Better emerges triumphantly from that epoch as a wholly unique record that saw the group investigate the darker edges of pop music. With the unveiling of Dubstar’s fifth album Two now imminent, Make It Better is definitely worth revisiting.
Editor’s Note: The interview elements of this tribute have been slightly edited from the original version, per the request of a third party.