HILLIER: I was DJing in one of the clubs in Newcastle. I met Chris, our guitarist there and we liked the same sort of music so we did stuff together as The Jones for about a year with me singing. To be quite honest, the results were quite toilet. A lot of the songs on Disgraceful as well as a couple of the songs on the new album were written duing that time period, so the songs in essence were good, we just needed someone else to sing them. I met Sarah, who was a friend of a friend of mine; the friend came around my house with a tape of her voice and accidentally left it there so I stuck it on and was immediately impressed and found out how I could get in touch with her. We met up and got on reasonably well and we started to get the band set up -- this was in '93.
DMA: So it took the band a year to drum up record label interest?
HILLIER: Oh no, no, no! When Sarah joined, we immediately started working on the songs and by six months we were signed. Although, as I said, Chris and I were working together before Sarah joined, we were just messing around, getting pissed and smoking hash.
DMA: Like most people involved in dance music in the UK...
HILLIER: (Laughs). Exactly.
DMA: So, when you were a DJ, what types of sounds were you spinning, and how much has that had an effect on the Dubstar sound?
HILLIER: I started off DJing at a very young age promoting parties at school playing alternative music until the start of the 90's when I got bored of alternative guitar bands. It was the same time that indie rock people were crossing over into the acid house movement. They had grown up listening to the Smiths and by 1990, they were full-on into acid house and rave. It happened for me the same way -- I heard this music and was like 'fuckin'ell, this stuff is much better!' I got into it through stuff by Andy Weatherall and Movement 98...sort of the Ibizan sound.By '92, I was into the more drum 'n bass and big-beat sound. Had it not been for this music, Dubstar probably would have been a guitar band and we'd never have done all these remixes.
DMA: Speaking of remixes, you have done a few remixes yourself...
HILLIER: Oh yes, I have. I'm certainly well aware that there is a world outside of making pop music with Dubstar and I want to excercise that through the remixes I work on. Of course, It's all a question of time for me how many remixes I work on, but I love to do them. So when i get the opportunity, I turn out some sort of big-beaty remixes. I have remixed some of our songs, like 'Disgraceful' which I did in a drum 'n bass style as well as 'No More Talk' which is more on the big-beats tip. I'm currenly doing a remix for Billy Bragg which is kind of unusual, but it works...I recently did a remix for a Belgian band called Hoover [Hooverphonic here in the US -- the song's called 2Wicky]
DMA: With the release of "Stars" i've noticed that you've not included any more remixes of a track that many DJs here in America caned on import...is there any reason that you didn't?
HILLIER: It's because we've done so many mixes of it already...God, there's like seventeen or so remixes of that song floating about...X-Press 2, Motiv8, The Rapino Brothers, Way Out West, Mother have all done mixes...and all of them are good in their own right. I guess we figured with all these classic mixes done to this song we weren't about to go to the record company and tell them to squeeze another mix out of "Stars." Also, since this is basically our first release in America, we're not quite sure how the dance scene is here and who should be used to remix the song for the market.
It should be known that THERE ARE NOW AMERICAN MIXES TO "STARS." They were done by Vission and Lorimer on a limited promo 12". Do you think our interview had anything to do with this??
Special thanks go out to Liz Morentin at A+M Records for scheduling this interview.
Written 7/31/97
Originally posted by Jennifer Warner, reposted with permission.
