Album cover and CD / Booklet design for Intastella’s album – The Rise And Fall Of A Northern Dubstar

Formed in 1990 as the phoenix from the ashes of Laugh, Intastella went on to record four top 75 tracks during the nineties, the most well-known of which is almost certainly their 1995 cover of Frankie Valli’s northern soul classic The Night. Today (22nd September) sees the release of Intastella’s fourth studio album – The Rise And Fall Of A Northern Dubstar which acts as a re-imagining of lead singer Stella Grundy’s self-penned, self-performed stage production The Rise And Fall Of A Northern Star which is well worth being viewed in its entirety here: Read full review

Disembodied voices float ethereally through the album, representations of heroes like John Cooper Clarke and villains in the forms of record executives and media personalities. They come from all sides and are unrelenting. The basslines created by Jah Wobble (of PiL fame) entangle with these voices as a synaptic overload, twisting and turning in luminescent majesty before exploding into cacophonies of sensation.

The Rise And Fall Of A Northern Dubstar is an album to get lost in, a rabbit hole into which to fall. It is a celebration of thirty years of Manchester music. It is two fingers up to the music industry as a whole. Most of all, it is a exquisitely-spun cautionary tale to the little Tracy Stars in all of us to, in the words of Stella Grundy, ‘be careful what you wish for’.