Life and career have been a series of accidents for former Eurythmics frontman Dave Stewart, he tells Alan Warboys Life and career are a series of happy accidents for former Eurythmics frontman Dave Stewart Alan Warboys

South China Morning Post
Nov 09, 2008

Dave Stewart should need no introduction. He's one of the most successful musicians Britain has produced. He has won four Grammys, sold more than 80 million records and worked with everyone from Mick Jagger to Gwen Stefani.

Yet Stewart is not as immediately recognisable as those two stars. That's because Stewart isn't a brash, egomaniacal frontman. His genius lies in being an orchestrator: a songwriter, producer and performer who readily shares, or stands back from, the limelight.
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"I'm one of life's true collaborators," says the 56-year-old, who shot to fame in the 1980s with singer Annie Lennox in the synth-pop duo Eurythmics. "I like being with a peer."

It's not that Stewart lacks the charisma to take the lead role (he has that in spades). Rather, it's that he works best with people who can spark his innate creativity. "It's like falling in love over and over again," he says of the collaborative process that has scored him hits for Sinead O'Connor and Tom Petty.

The results of his many joint compositions are the subject of Stewart's latest album, The Dave Stewart Songbook, Vol 1, which sees him combine with a 30-piece orchestra to reprise his most famous songs with Jagger, Lennox, Petty and others.

It comes with an accompanying book of words and photographs that explain how each song came about, evoking memories for Stewart that he clearly treasures.

The body of work reveals his massive network of connections across the entertainment world, especially in Los Angeles where he now lives with his wife and four children. "I'm still friends with everyone I've ever worked with," says Stewart, proudly. "All my songs have pretty crazy stories attached."

He cites his collaboration with Jon Bon Jovi on Midnight in Chelsea, which came about after they met in rural England when Stewart was delivering photos to actress Demi Moore. He also encountered Moore's then-husband, actor Bruce Willis, and fun-loving British royals Prince Andrew and the Duchess of York (Sarah Ferguson).

It turned into an impromptu jam session and he collaborated with the Bon Jovi singer to write a song about where the American was then living. The song turned out to be a huge hit.

"It was a great experience. That's how it all happens," says Stewart, whose close friends include actor Jack Nicholson and former Beatle Ringo Starr.

What makes Stewart tick is evident in the 30-minute phone call at his studio in Los Angeles. From the moment he answers, Stewart can't keep still.

He says he's going to go walkabout and the conversation is punctured with interruptions. One minute he has crashed a party and joins in the obligatory chorus of Happy Birthday; the next he's saying hi to anyone who passes by. He tells some people, erroneously, that he can't stay long because he's on the phone to the "China Times", and others that he's being interviewed by "the biggest newspaper in China".

It could be an act, but Stewart's philosophy has long been to go with the flow, to thrive on his surroundings. He calls it "the Gap".

"Being open to the Gap in creative terms, you'll wander into stuff and discover something that's happening," he says. "Amazing things have happened to me all my life."

Those incidents have inspired all his songs. Stewart says while many people think music is composed sat at a piano with a blank sheet of paper, his reality is very different. "My stuff is born out of chaos," he says. "It gets crystallised and turns into some art form."

The "Tao of Chaos", as Stewart calls it, is like being at the centre of a storm and manifesting something worthwhile during the stillness. If that sounds pretentious, Stewart is anything but. The accountant's son is affable, open and down-to-earth: he just applies Bruce Lee's philosophy to his own art.

"If you become like water, you flow around any obstacles. You go wherever the water goes," he says. "People make the mistake of thinking, ..if it fails, I'm screwed'." Stewart's approach to life dates back to an accident he had when he was 25 and driving between the Netherlands and Germany. He punctured a lung and had a "near-death experience".

"Until then I was useless at doing anything," says Stewart. At that time an unnoticed musician in his native Sunderland in England's northeast, he decided to make the most of every experience and started to use the process of "visualisation".

"I visualised the way ahead," he says, to which he attributes his future success. "You can see somewhere miles ahead of you and you know you can get there even if you don't know how. It's about letting go of the route." Stewart's future turned out to be brighter than he could have visualised when he was playing local clubs in the 1960s.

After signing his first record deal in 1971, he struggled for years before he met Lennox. They became entwined professionally and romantically, forming the Tourists, who scored a No4 hit in 1979 with a cover of Dusty Springfield's I Only Want to Be With You.

Peroxide blonde Lennox and the eccentrically cool Stewart soon morphed into Eurythmics, the band that catapulted both to stardom in the US. Their debut album, in 1983, was Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) and the title song became one of the decade's biggest hits.

The duo notched up a string of hits that combined his songwriting knack with Lennox's beautiful but almost masculine image, soaring the charts with Here Comes the Rain Again, Would I Lie to You and There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart).

Many of those hits came after they broke up their relationship and married others. In 1987 Stewart wed Siobhan Fahey, a singer with Bananarama and Shakespears Sister, with whom he had two children. Eurythmics disbanded in 1990 after more than 250 songs and selling 75 million albums. They reunited in 1999 for the album Peace, which failed to replicate earlier successes. Stewart says they remain friends.

Lennox went solo and Stewart used his talents as a writer and producer to help the careers of countless stars that provide the inspiration for Songbook. His creativity expanded into film, art and photography. His first feature film, Honest, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000 and he has exhibited his photographs at the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the Saatchi Gallery in London.

"It's all the part of the same creative process," he says.

Musically he scored movie soundtracks, winning a Golden Globe for the remake of Alfie, starring Jude Law. He's even writing musicals, including a stage version of the film Ghost and his own zombie show he hopes to put on Broadway.

Besides being a visualiser, he's also a visionary, having tapped the power of computers for music since their infancy. Such is his prowess that Nokia hired him as a "change agent" to help promote digital music and develop young talent.

Living in Los Angeles with his second wife, with whom he has his two youngest offspring, Stewart has become involved in US politics. American Prayer, a song he co-wrote with U2's Bono, was used by Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Stewart will have celebrated Obama's win on Wednesday as much as any American. "After eight years of Bush, now is the time more than ever to radically change things," he says.

His joy might be tempered by his last dalliance with politicians. Stewart was one of former British prime minister Tony Blair's advisers culled from popular culture soon after he was elected in 1997, frequently visiting 10 Downing Street to share his insights. "That was before Iraq," says Stewart, a public opponent of the war. He still respects Blair personally, he says, but was disillusioned by his support for George W. Bush's military campaign.

It's a moment where his go-with-the-flow philosophy unwinds a little. Despite his laid-back persona, Stewart is a man who cares deeply about things, including music. It's that passion, more than the serendipitous circumstances he modestly cites, that best explains why he's been at the top of the game for more than 25 years.

The Dave Stewart Songbook, Vol 1 is out now.