Blame McKelvie.

"I'll be around - anywhere. Any place you want me."

He asks me what Client are like and I tell him my recent experience of a live gig, and how absolutely embarassing it was. Like bumping into your auntie at a S&M party, its appropriation of electroclash boiled down to a few kneejerk Miss-Kittinisms and felt like a cringe. I did say I liked her wrist length plastic gloves though, because you have to at least pretend to be objective.

And then McKelvie notes that he always liked her voice and I concur. Because - y'know - I did.

"Is it asking too much to be given time to know these songs and to sing them?"

Dubstar always walked an oddball boundary between straight electro-pop and the folk tradition - Sarah's vowels and the melodies she chose a mile away from the synths that surrounded her. Awkward, and distracting. At their worst, listening to a whole Dubstar piece was embarassment - deliberate lyrics over deliberate arrangements deliberately thoughtful undeliberately incompetent.

Trying too hard and not hard enough.

"It's all right, I'm just a girl, she said. Talk down to me, and take me to bed"

Like a fair chunk of my thinking about minor bands of the period when I was learning to think, I find myself gravitating to someone else's description of their failings. Specifically, Simon Price's analysis of them in a live review which went something like "It's like when she sings "I'm a person with thoughts; I'm a person who thinks. But you think I'll forget if you ply me with drinks". And I think "Well, buy your own fucking drinks then".

Self-serving, smug and needlessly preachy.

But still...

"And the doorbell strangely rang..."

....I'm awake at just gone 3, telling all of Cassandra's pulpy little secrets (My net collapses as I'm about to say "I do regret not doing the rest of the first mission of Cass, if only because it leaves the sex-harassment plot hanging. With the real ending, I don't think anyone could have read it as a sexist statement". And I give you that quote out of context, as it amuses me) to Paul Black and listening to them on repeat.

For that, at least, they deserve some kind of salute. I guess this is it.