Dave Stewart - on Music, Creativity, and the Perfect Martini

Dave Stewart is a true music icon. Born in Sunderland in 1952 his first love affair was with football – dreaming of a career playing for the Black Cats, but a knee injury and his parents’ divorce changed his entire outlook. Music filled a hole - despite a music teacher who described his dreams as ‘idiotic’ it became his passion, inspired by his Dad’s high-tech (for the 70s!) stereo system, a Robert Johnson blues album and some eye-opening teenage experimentation with acid.

He signed to Elton John’s record label shortly after leaving school and after several false starts he met Annie Lennox in 1976 and formed a band together called The Tourists – a pre-curser to the significantly more successful 80s project The Eurythmics .

In the 45 years since then Dave has done it all – as an artist he’s a Grammy winner, as a producer he’s won multiple Brit Awards, as a song-writer he’s won the prestigious Silver Clef award, he’s won a Golden Glove for composing a song with Mick Jagger for Alfie and in 2024 he teamed up with Joss Stone to write a musical version of The Time Traveller’s Wife. It’s hard to put his contribution to music into context because his impact on popular music is so vast.

Let me list just SOME of the artists he’s produced, written for or recorded with:

Paul McCartney, Bono, Aretha Franklin, Alison Moyet, Bryan Ferry, Sinead O’Connor, No Doubt, Jon Bon Jovi, Bob Geldoff, Bryan Ferry, & Stevie Nicks. In fact in 2011 he briefly formed a supergroup comprised of himself, Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A.R. Rahman.

He’s one of the great innovators – in 1998 his album SlyFi became the first album to be released on the internet – it predates Google, and MySpace and Facebook wouldn’t be launched for another SEVEN years.

Now in his early 70s he continues to inspire – until Covid he owned and ran a creative members club in London, and through his new venture Rare Entity he continues to push musical boundaries and work with some of the world’s biggest names in music.

Enjoy our chat with an icon.

Cheers!

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