SARAH BLACKWOOD

Born in Halifax in the shadow of 'Dark Satanic Mills' and 'Wuthering Heights' I have wanted to sing for as long as I can remember. As the ABBA song goes... "Mother... says I began to sing long before I could talk"... however vomit inducing that sounds, Mum says I was singing in my cot.

My musical passion developed in my formative years harbouring crushes on John Lennon and Julie Andrews in "The Sound Of Music", which remains my favourite film to this day. Obsessions with ABBA and Madonna followed then I discovered Kraftwerk, New Order and The Pet Shop Boys.

I wanted to be in a band for as long as I can remember singing along in my hairbrush to The Beatles so the logical step was to form a band. Taking my inspiration from John Lennon I decided art college was where it would happen. It didn't. However I did manage to befriend just about every musician in Newcastle... except from Steve Hillier and Chris Wilkie, who remained an enigma to me, until I was introduced by a friend, whilst I was paying off my student excess working in an art shop and a pub. From the fateful first meeting, with "The Jones", where I ended up having to push Steve's Lada, to signing a record deal six months later as "Dubstar", the thing I had been waiting for all my life happened as panic inducing whirlwind... From the age of 4 top of my Christmas List for Santa was "a record deal from EMI" ...imagine how freaked out i was when it finally happened. My fourth ever gig at Sheffield University was in front of 2000 students and I must have looked like a stunned rabbit in the headlights... infact the NME told me. Many times.

Dubstar crumbled in 2000 and I was sat in a pizza and wine haze on my sofa when I got a call from Kate asking if I wanted to join Technique, on tour with Depeche Mode. I fell off my sofa and onto the running machine, then onto a stage infront of 145,000 chanting Depeche fans, in an easy to clean, cheap cotton outfit (just in case of flying missiles, Fletch had kindly pre-warned us... just to add to those first gig nerves!!!) Out of this came "Client", six wonderful years of touring, running a club, "Being Boiled" learning how to DJ and learning to love music, all over again.