SONGWRITER, PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR DAVE STEWART IS RECOGNISED AS ONE OF THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED TALENTS OF THE LAST FORTY YEARS. HE’S RACKED UP AN ASTONISHING 100 MILLION ALBUM SALES WORLDWIDE, SCORED NINE UK TOP FORTY ALBUMS AND OVER THIRTY UK HIT SINGLES WITH EURYTHMICS, AND HAS WORKED ON HIT RECORDS BY A COUNTLESS NUMBER OF OTHER BIG NAME ARTISTS…

One of the most sought-after of writers and music producers, Dave has crafted songs for, and collaborated with, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, Bono, Tom Petty, Bon Jovi, Bryan Ferry and Stevie Nicks. He’s played live with BB King, U2, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. Beyond his creative work as a musician, Stewart is a renowned producer, author, director, photographer, filmmaker and philanthropist. His new album NASHVILLE SESSIONS : THE DUETS is a new Dave Stewart collection that presents the best duets from the recording sessions in Nashville which resulted in a trilogy of previous solo albums; THE BLACKBIRD DIARIES, THE RINGMASTER GENERAL and LUCKY NUMBERS were released between 2011 and 2013. The duets album features striking vocal performances by Stevie Nicks, Alison Krauss, Colbie Caillat, Joss Stone, Martina McBride and more. In this new interview with The Mouth Magazine, we start by talking about the Nashville songs but also take in (of course) Eurythmics and some of Stewart’s extra-curricular works…

PUTTING THIS ALBUM OF DUETS TOGETHER WAS A GREAT WAY OF HIGHLIGHTING THE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THESE SESSIONS BY OTHER PEOPLE… BUT ALSO, I’D WAGER, IT WAS A WAY FOR YOU TO RECALIBRATE YOUR OWN VIEW OF THIS PARTICULAR ERA OF WORK…
Yeah, that’s actually a very good way to put it. When I played these songs one after the other it just sounded like a great album, you know? What was interesting was, I went to Nashville and made about seven or eight records – some of my own, and some for other people like Stevie Nicks or Joss Stone or Orianthi, the guitar player – and along the way I’d write songs. Every now and then I’d write one and think “This’d be a good duet”… I tended to just put a little mark on those ones and I’d think “It could be good, a bit later on, to make an album of duets”. Then the appropriate time came. The record starts off with Alison Krauss, who’s a legendary country blues and bluegrass writer and singer. A beautiful, beautiful voice… Actually, I think Alison’s won more Grammys than any female in music history. She’s won twenty seven Grammys or something. I’d written a song called DROWNING IN THE BLUES, and I was thinking about who’s got that kind of melancholy aching voice. Alison came along and heard the song and she said she really liked it, so we ended up doing that one as a duet. Same thing happened with Martina McBride, who’s like ‘the Queen’ of country music. She kept coming into the studio and listening to the sessions, ‘cos her husband John was recording and mixing. I had a song I’d written called ALL FUCKED UP IN LOVE, right? She sent me a note saying “I really like that song, but I can’t sing it if it’s called that – so if you can change it to something else I’d really love to sing that song”… I was, like, “Oh. Wow. Hmmm. Ok”… and I changed it to ALL MESSED UP IN LOVE and that was it… We had a go and it became a great duet…

YOU’VE GOT STEVIE NICKS ON THERE… I IMAGINE SHE’S THE SORT OF PERSON SOMEONE WOULD REALLY GET THE BEST OUT OF BY WRITING FOR, RATHER THAN JUST OFFERING A SONG ‘OFF THE PEG’. DID YOU WRITE PARTICULAR SONGS WITH PARTICULAR SINGERS IN MIND?
A lot of the songs I wrote myself already, actually – ALL MESSED UP IN LOVE and DROWNING IN THE BLUES… Ummmm, probably eighty percent of the songs, y’know? A couple I wrote with the actual artist. So BULLET PROOF VEST with Colbie Caillat, we wrote together… PICNIC FOR TWO, Joss Stone and I wrote together. We went and had a picnic, Joss and I, and it was such good fun that the same day we thought we’d sing a song about it, so we wrote and recorded that, put it down right there in Nashville with the players. Karen Elson, I love her voice. She made a couple of EPs on Jack White’s label out there in Nashville and I was really intrigued by them. Obviously she was Jack White’s wife but then she became known as a sort of full-blown singer-songwriter. I’d written a song called NASHVILLE SNOW and she loved it, so she came in and we recorded that together… It’s been very interesting because normally you’d make the decision to record a duets album, like Tom Jones or… what’s he called again? Great singer… He’s in his eighties now?

TONY BENNETT…
Yeah, that’s it. Tony Bennett. Of course. These are prearranged things. “I’m doing a duets album and this is how it’s gonna be, this is how it’s gonna sound, with this person and that person”. Mine just wasn’t like that. It was done over the space of about five or six years, writing songs that cried out to be duets. That was interspersed with making other albums, so there were these little recording sessions on the side with the same players in the same studio. So it’s all got a very similar feel and sound, y’know?

SOMETHING VERY STRIKING ABOUT THIS RECORD IS THAT ALL OF THE DUETS ARE WITH FEMALE VOCALISTS. WITH THAT IN MIND, AND OBVIOUSLY NODDING BACK TO YOUR WORK WITH ANNIE LENNOX, I WONDERED IF YOU PREFER THAT PERSONAL DYNAMIC AND IF IT IS SOMETHING YOU ARE PARTICULARLY CREATIVELY COMFORTABLE WITH…
Yeah. Yeah. I do get on very well working with female artists in general. I actually love the sound of a very particular kind of female voice. It usually has a lot of emotion and some melancholia in it. That really does it for me. It’s not the screaming, belting it out, kind of singing. Also, with my voice being very low – almost as low as what you’d probably call a Leonard Cohen type of thing – it works really well with a higher voice with it… There’s not that many duets with two guys singing together, is there?

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THAT… THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THAT PARTICULAR KIND OF FEMALE VOICE WHICH TRANSCENDS THE REACH OF THE MALE VOICE… IT GETS IN FURTHER…
There is. Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. There are not many male voices which have so much wracked emotion in them. We could get into a whole psychological discussion about how men are more logical and just want to fix things, and women often just want to talk about them, and don’t necessarily want them or need them to be fixed, at a base level… I just think, also, that women are in a different place – they tend to be, emotionally, exactly where it is that their singing comes from. They also have a particular timbre which – if they can connect with it absolutely right like Annie Lennox does, or Adele does, or Sinead O’Connor does – it has a sort of incredible power. It’s actually kind of overpowering sometimes. It brings you to the point of getting goosebumps or, even, to the point of welling up. It’s so poignant.

THINKING OF THE WOMEN YOU’VE WORKED WITH (AND OBVIOUSLY A FEW YEARS AGO ANNIE HERSELF WAS QUITE OUTSPOKEN ON THE SUBJECT) HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE PLACE OF WOMEN IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY NOW?
Well, I personally think that everybody has witnessed changes and, depending on your age, you’ve witnessed massive changes… I remember Bob Dylan doing interviews, and all the interviewers looked like BBC, with their straight hair and suits and ties. Dylan had dark glasses and his ruffled hair. You go back a bit further and you see the way that artists were sort of puppets, in a way, and other people would write their songs and they’d just pop up and sing them. Then we saw the change – Dylan writing songs, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones writing songs, The Kinks and… it became “Hey, no no! We are not just puppets. These are our songs, these are, actually, our feelings”… What seems to have happened is that it’s gone back to the puppet way of before. There seems to be a few songwriters writing songs for these artists who, apart from a few who are really great, are just in that late 1950s / early 1960s mould. People sat in cupboards or studios trying to write hits and then getting these artists to sing them…

THAT CAN WORK, THOUGH. THINK ABOUT MOTOWN…
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. It did happen in Motown, with The Supremes and all those kind of bands. But we nostalgically look back at them, that great sound and the feeling of them, and it all seems to fit… So, yeah, maybe what’s happening now just ‘fits’ the lives of teenagers these days. They hear stuff and think it’s there speaking to them – because they’re living in this reality TV world, this Instagram world, that whole thing. These artists, Selina Gomez, whoever else it is, are living in that weird online and TV world, that Instagram world, too. Like, Taylor Swift’s new song. She’s singing about her rival Katy Perry. Now, that’s just so divorced from any emotional thing, any real thing, I think…

IT’S DIFFICULT TO ENVISAGE THESE SONGS LASTING, OR MEANING ANYTHING IN THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS…
Well, yeah. But strangely enough, the songs that last a really long time – like, say, AT LAST… The first time I heard it was the version by Etta James (and it’s since been sung by just about everybody who can sing)… Then you look into that song and see who wrote it. It was a Polish guy, Mack Gordon, and somebody else, Harry Warren, but you’d never have thought that in a million years… What I’m saying is, a lot of why a song can last is the interpretation of the song by the singer. It’s got to be a good song, but the interpretation can give it legs. Frank Sinatra was so brilliant at that.

HE WAS A MASTER OF IT…
He was. You hear Frank Sinatra and you don’t think he’s a puppet singing other people’s songs. You think the songs are his. He was so anal and so brilliant at everything – the orchestration, the lyrics, the timing and, obviously, the singing… Sinatra didn’t mind people writing songs for him, but he would then ring up Sammy Cahn, his lyric writer, in the middle of the night and say “Look, I just can’t sing this line, you’ve got to change it, you’ve got to make it like this or make it like that”. He’d get so involved like that because he would actually take on the song as his own, you know?

THAT ATTENTION TO DETAIL… KNOWING SO INSTINCTIVELY WHAT WOULD WORK AND WHAT WOULDN’T… HE WAS UTTERLY AWARE OF THE SINATRA ‘BRAND’…
Yep. Absolutely. And he was particularly aware of his voice and his delivery, as well. He was a great, great, singer so what I’m saying is that there are a lot of artists out there at the moment who are not all that good at singing. The songs that are written for them are pretty generic. Basic lyrics and pop melodies. It’s become more about the Instagram posts than the music.

I DON’T KNOW HOW SOMEBODY LIKE SINATRA WOULD HAVE FITTED IN TO THAT WORLD…
I don’t know how he’d have survived it. But there are still artists that come along who break through in their own way – Jake Bugg, Lorde. Artists who don’t care what everybody else is doing. “I don’t care about what anybody else is doing, I’m doing this“… I think that’s great. That stirs it all up a bit and that’s what it needs. I wish there was more of them…

I’D LIKE TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT A GREAT LITTLE ALBUM YOU WORKED ON ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO WHICH I DON’T THINK THERE’S MUCH INFORMATION ABOUT OUT THERE… YOU PRODUCED, CO-WROTE AND PLAYED ON PARTS OF BOB GELDOF’S DEBUT SOLO ALBUM DEEP IN THE HEART OF NOWHERE…
I did, I did… It is great, yeah. There is some very good stuff on there.

IT’S A GREAT ADULT POP / ROCK RECORD AND I’M VERY FOND OF IT, AS IT HAPPENS… BUT IT’S ALMOST FORGOTTEN NOW, AND WAS MORE OR LESS OVERLOOKED IN ITS DAY – ENTIRELY DUE TO BOB’S CELEBRITY AT THAT TIME. HIS STOCK WAS HIGH AFTER LIVE AID BUT THAT’S ALL ANYONE WAS INTERESTED IN. THAT’S UNDERSTANDABLE IN SOME WAYS – BUT I THINK IT DID DEEP IN THE HEART OF NOWHERE A GREAT INJUSTICE…
Bob was suffering from exhaustion and he was overwhelmed by LIVE AID and all of that. He was just about shot – he’d had to do so many interviews, and he’d used up so much energy pushing and hassling to get those LIVE AID things going. I was with him once at some event and I said “Hey Bob, why don’t you make another record?” – and he told me I was the very first person who’d talked to him just about music for absolutely ages, y’know? For a couple of years, maybe… Then I was over in Paris and he called me up and said he wanted to come and see me. So he came to see me. He said “Look, I’ve been thinking about what you said and that maybe it’s a good idea”…

HE NEEDED TO REMIND PEOPLE THAT HE MADE MUSIC… 
Yeah – “…or I’m gonna die here”, y’know? But I was going to Los Angeles. Annie and I were about to make videos for MISSIONARY MAN and a few other tracks and then we were due to be going out on this massive tour, the REVENGE tour. I’d rented a house in Los Angeles while we were filming those videos and rehearsing for that tour, and one day Bob arrived on the doorstep. So he ended up living in that house with me. We were messing around on a broken piano and a guitar – and an idea for a song started to appear. That idea became the song THIS IS THE WORLD CALLING, which later on we recorded.

… LATER ON THIS IS THE WORLD CALLING BECAME THE FIRST SINGLE ISSUED FROM DEEP IN THE HEART OF NOWHERE – AND IT WENT TOP THIRTY IN THE UK…
That’s right, yeah. Annie and I were making a video in the studio next door to the house. It was originally Charlie Chaplin’s studio, actually, and then it became A&M studios for a while. It had a lot of different parts to it. It had a big film studio where we were making the videos, and it had two or three recording studios. So I booked one of the recording studios at the same time, and when I wasn’t being filmed I’d go in the other room, the other studio, and we produced THIS IS THE WORLD CALLING.

WHAT I HEAR WHEN I LISTEN IS HIM POURING EVERYTHING HE’S GOT, HEART AND SOUL, INTO THAT ALBUM. YOU PARTICULARLY GET THAT SENSE FROM HIS LYRICS, THERE…
Yeah, you’re exactly right. DEEP IN THE HEART OF NOWHERE was a very important record for Bob. As a musician and as a person, I think. Because he’d done LIVE AID and basically had a nervous breakdown, a lot of people rallied round him. People were glad he was getting back with his music, making music, and wanted to be part of it. That brought things back for him, I think. We had about four guitarists – me and The Edge and others. Midge (Ure) is on the album, and Eric Clapton is on the other single I co-wrote, LOVE LIKE A ROCKET. About three drummers – Larry, Clem from Blondie… Annie sings on the album, Alison Moyet too…

THOSE SESSIONS MUST HAVE BEEN A REAL RELEASE FOR BOB… AND IT WAS UNDOUBTEDLY A RELIEF NOT TO HAVE TO BE JESUS ANYMORE.
I’m doing my 65th birthday show in London soon and so it’s actually funny you should ask about that record, really – ‘cos Bob is a guest at the show and he’s going to be singing some of those songs… Actually, I just remembered something else. In the middle of recording this guy came to the studio and the front desk said to us “There’s somebody very official here to see Bob”… We thought “Oh shit”. We thought Bob was gonna be arrested because earlier, in the house we’d rented, he’d got an axe and really chopped up some wiring because the alarm system wouldn’t stop ringing. So we thought the people who owned the house had sent the police to the studio to get him… So everyone was hiding – but it wasn’t to do with that at all. It was actually the guy who brings the little red case from the Queen, from Buckingham Palace, when there’s some official business, and he told Bob he was gonna be Knighted. He told him right there in the middle of a session!

THE FACT THAT YOU WERE WORKING ON BOB’S RECORD AT THE SAME TIME AS FILMING VIDEOS FOR EURYTHMICS AND PREPARING FOR A MASSIVE WORLD TOUR POINTS UP YOUR OWN WORKAHOLIC NATURE… YOUR NAME CROPS UP TIME AND AGAIN IN THE CREDITS OF MANY MANY RECORDS OVER THE LAST THIRTY YEARS OR SO… I WONDER WHAT YOU GET OUT OF THAT WORK THAT YOU DON’T GET OUT OF YOUR OWN MATERIAL, OR THAT YOU DIDN’T GET OUT OF EURYTHMICS STUFF..?
Annie and I, interestingly enough, knew each other so well. We still do. We’d go into the studio with no songs and we’d just write. We’d write all the songs and record them in just two weeks or something. There were lots of gaps – times when we weren’t touring, and we weren’t in the studio making albums. Well, I’m a musician and a record producer. So if people said “Hey, I’d like you to produce for me”… Like when I was in New York and somebody said “We’d like you to produce the Ramones on a track”, I’d think “Well, I’ll just go in the studio and see what happens”. Actually that Ramones one was a whole bonkers session in itself! Or I’d be in the studio, I had a boy called David Freeman, I’d already started a little independent record label and publishing company and one of the people I signed first was David Freeman. He’d written a song called NO MORE I LOVE YOUS, which Annie recorded. He had a band with his friend Joe called THE LOVER SPEAKS, and I got them a deal at Interscope Records with Jimmy Iovine. So Jimmy was producing them, Alison Moyet was in the next studio and Jimmy suggested I write a song with her. I’d never met her but Jimmy locked us together in a room with a bottle of Jack Daniels and about fifteen minutes later we staggered out with a song that we’d written together called IS THIS LOVE? That became a big hit for her but I didn’t produce the single, I don’t think? What i’m saying is that just all along the way when you’re a musician and you’re going round the world, you meet other musicians. You end up in hotel rooms or studios or wherever, with guitars and things, and it becomes this natural thing to collaborate…

MY IMPRESSION OF NASHVILLE IS THAT YOU’RE NEVER MORE THAN SIX FEET FROM A MUSICIAN OR SONGWRITER…
That’s true, yeah. All these country or blues artists or whatever, they’re all sitting round just writing songs. They always have done, since the beginning, the same as Tin Pan Alley… So I was a sort of travelling Tin Pan Alley, really, I suppose. Wherever I went I was likely to end up with a bunch of other artists, other musicians, and we’d end up working together or writing songs. I did do a lot of that under different names, though. I wouldn’t always do that work under my own name…

JUST THINKING ABOUT NASHVILLE, THEN, AND ABOUT NOT NECESSARILY WORKING UNDER YOUR OWN NAME… YOU MOVED OUT TO AMERICA, SO WAS THERE A NEED IN YOU TO ESCAPE ENGLAND, TO ESCAPE ATTENTION, REPUTATION OR PRESSURE… OR WHATEVER?
I think what happens to bands who get pretty successful worldwide (like Eurythmics, not just successful in one country or two but it seemed like every country in the world we had albums in the Top Ten, every album we did) is that you travel around. So we travelled all over the globe and there’d be places where you’d go “It’s alright here, it’s quite nice here, I could stay here for a bit”. There were places that seemed to be like music centres – like Nashville, like New York…

YOU LIVED IN NEW YORK FOR A WHILE, DIDN’T YOU?
I did. I shared this loft space with Clem Burke, who was in Blondie at the time. He had this loft space. Our manager, at the time, also managed The B-52s, right? And also the Talking Heads. So I became great friends with Tina (Weymouth) and (Chris) Frantz, and also The B-52s, and there was also Jimmy Destri and Frank Infante from Blondie and Clem, of course. We were like a little gang of people hanging out. Then I met Tom Petty and wrote DON’T COME ROUND HERE NO MORE with him, and he lived in Montecito, which is a part of Los Angeles that I thought was very very nice. So I decided that I’d build a house and a studio in the next street. My house became a place that everybody would come to meet up and hang out. Tom Petty would come round, George Harrison was staying in the house for a bit, Bob Dylan would come over… In fact, that’s how The Travelling Wilburys actually formed, and they recorded that first album at my house, in the studio…

 

I LISTENED TO THE EURYTHMICS SINGLE LOVE IS A STRANGER, RIGHT BEFORE THIS CHAT.
Oh yeah. Well, it’s a good one to listen to…

MY IMPRESSION OF IT NOW, THIRTY-FIVE YEARS ON, IS THAT IT’S A GREAT LESSON IN POP SMARTS. THERE’S A LOT OF ‘HOOK’ IN THERE… BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY IN SOME WAYS IS THE WAY YOU SET THAT PECULIAR MOOD. IT’S STILL AN EMOTIONAL THING, BUT THE RECORD IS ICY AND IT’S STRANGE…
The first album, IN THE GARDEN, was very sort of dark and experimental, and then the SWEET DREAMS album was totally experimental. So that was just what we did, that was how we wanted to do it. That mood. We had no idea that album was going to be successful.

LOVE IS A STRANGER IS QUITE AN UNUSUAL SOUNDING RECORD, AND IT’S A FAIR DISTANCE FROM WHAT BECAME HUGE HITS FOR EURYTHMICS FOUR OR FIVE YEARS LATER – WHEN TOMORROW COMES AND SO ON… THAT’S A GREAT SINGLE, BUT IT’S A MORE ORTHODOX SOUND – THE SHIFT FROM LOVE IS A STRANGER IS QUITE BIG. WAS THAT SHIFT, THEN, A CONSEQUENCE OF YOUR SUCCESS? PLAYING BIGGER VENUES AND BEING PRIME-TIME RADIO STAPLES REQUIRED SOMETHING DIFFERENT…
Yeah, it was that a bit, actually. We were starting to play stadiums, never mind arenas, and I suppose we got more kind of Americanised. We were starting to headline massive festivals, too. So it became a very very big sound, one that you could be larger than life, in these big venues… y’know?

I THINK THERE WAS ALWAYS A SOUL INFLUENCE IN THE WRITING, AND YOU CAN CERTAINLY HEAR THAT IN THE SONGWRITING OF LOVE IS A STRANGER… BUT BY REVENGE THE ACTUAL SOUND OF EURYTHMICS RECORDS WAS ROOTED IN OLD SOUL RECORDS…
Yeah, we both loved Stax. We always loved that stuff. I loved it because I was brought up in the North-East and we had Northern Soul, and Annie loved Tamla Motown. TOUCH, the third album, had kept a lot of that early spirit of experimentation, but then it changed… BE YOURSELF TONIGHT suddenly had a couple of tracks on it that went towards mine and Annie’s love of that stuff. So songs like WOULD I LIE TO YOU? and THERE MUST BE AN ANGEL started to appear, which then turned into the next album REVENGE. That had MISSIONARY MAN and WHEN TOMORROW COMES, which you mentioned, and THORN IN MY SIDE… When we realised we’d gone maybe too far that way for our liking we went back the opposite way. We confused the record label by coming out with SAVAGE. That went right back to the dark and moody electronics.

REVENGE STICKS OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB… THAT SOUNDS INSULTING AND THAT’S NOT QUITE WHAT I MEAN… REVENGE IS OBVIOUSLY A EURYTHMICS ALBUM, AND YOU CAN TELL IT’S A EURYTHMICS ALBUM… BUT IT IS A BIT DIFFERENT TO EVERYTHING ELSE AROUND IT SOMEHOW. IF YOU WANTED TO YOU COULD ARGUE IT’S NOT REALLY THE SAME BAND…
Yeah, you could. You could do that. I really do understand what you’re saying, there. Interestingly, REVENGE was the first one where it was actually a real band playing all the parts. The other ones, the other albums, were done with programming. Then maybe adding bits of orchestra or adding electronic drum-kit or whatever else. But REVENGE… Yeah, that was people actually playing. Like ‘One, two, three, four’ and straight in, y’know? So, for instance, THORN IN MY SIDE (which I think is a great sounding record and was a great single to put out) starts with me playing my twelve-string acoustic and then Clem Burke comes in with this really great fill. It’s just a straight band recording, that. It’s a great recording, but it’s very glassy…

PRISTEEN?
Yeah, it is pristeen. It’s also exciting, though. I do remember that song working particularly great when we played it live. Actually, thinking about it now while we’re talking about it, THORN IN MY SIDE is probably a bit like a country song. If someone else covered THORN IN MY SIDE – a country artist, a country singer or whoever – it’d probably sound like a classic. A standard, a country classic… Does that make sense? Can you hear that?

I CAN, ACTUALLY, YEAH… I GUESS THE THING I MENTIONED JUST NOW, ABOUT POP SMARTS – IT STILL HOLDS TRUE TO THIS DAY. YOU STILL USE THAT FACILITY FOR MAKING GOOD SONGS INTO GREAT RECORDS. ON THE NASHVILLE DUETS ALBUM THERE’S SOME VERY VERY GOOD SONGS – BUT ALSO SOME TRULY WONDERFUL MOMENTS… IT MADE ME CONSIDER HOW YOU’VE ALWAYS HAD THIS REALLY FIRM GRIP ON THE ABILITY TO SET AND SUSTAIN MOODS, AND TO FRAME VOCALS ABSOLUTELY CORRECTLY WITHIN THEM… IT’S LIKE SETTING THE SCENE FOR A GREAT STORY…
Yeah. I think, for me, everything in the world is about storytelling. If it’s a song, if it’s a book or a movie, or if it’s something someone’s trying to sell you… If it’s your life, basically… You have to look at it as a narrative, and try and find the story in it, try and find what’s important about that story. So I put all these things together in writing a song. Sometimes I do weird things, impressionistic things…

… MAYBE LIKE KINKY SWEETHEART? (FROM THE 1994 SOLO ALBUM GREETINGS FROM THE GUTTER)…
Yeah, I did that one with Laurie Anderson, on GREETINGS FROM THE GUTTER. Her husband is also on that album somewhere, too. You’ll have heard of him, I expect – Lou Reed… But generally what I like to be doing is telling a story, like with HEART OF STONE from that same album. It goes “I bought your record in New York City / Disc-O-Rama down on Union Square”… Well, Disc-O-Rama is a record store down on Union Square… “I must have played it a million times over / I’d close my eyes imagine you were there / You know I really dig the clothes you wear”… It’s just telling a story about being obsessed with this certain person. It’s interesting because it was about a woman called Lady Miss Kier. You might know her from the Deee-Lite records? She ended up coming and singing on the chorus of it – so the record is about her and she ends up on it! Actually, last time I played a solo gig at the Shepherds Bush Empire in London, Lady Miss Kier was at the show and she got up on stage and sang that song with me. It’s funny how life works out, ‘cos that’s desire manifesting itself in a kind of really positive way.

POSITIVE AFFIRMATION…
Positive affirmation. I’ll be, like, “God, I really love Delta blues music” and I’ve always been particularly obsessed with this guitarist and singer RL Burnside. I made that film DEEP BLUES and one day there I am on his front porch in the middle of Mississippi in the sunshine and he’s teaching me to play his stuff… But I was also sat there thinking “Bloody hell… I’m only a lad from Sunderland. How the hell did I get here?”, y’know?

SEND IT OUT AND IT COMES BACK TO YOU…
Yeah. Lots of things that happen to me are like that. It’s probably ‘cos I was thinking about them for years that they manifest…

TO ROUND UP, DAVE, I DID ACTUALLY WANT TO ASK YOU A LITTLE BIT ABOUT COMING FROM SUNDERLAND… WHAT DO YOU THINK IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN LIKE HAD YOU STAYED THERE AND NOT CLEARED OFF TO LONDON IN YOUR YOUTH, DONE THE SQUATS SCENE, MET ANNIE, FORMED THE TOURISTS, BECOME EURYTHMICS…
Ha ha ha… It would have been very different I think… But maybe only the circumstances. That’s ‘cos the one thing is, once you get the music, once the music gets in you, in your blood, I don’t think it actually makes too much difference where you are – either geography or in your life, y’know? Like, I’d definitely still be making music somehow. Probably with a local band, a local group of guys or something. Maybe I’d have got really into playing guitar, like a Bert Jansch or a John Renbourn figure or something. Those kind of players. I’d maybe have done that and just carried on doing my own thing with it – making music with guitar and voice, like a John Martyn type of way…

YOU’VE HAD SUCH A RICH AND VARIED LIFE – ALL THE FAME, THE SUCCESS, THE CREATIVE FULFILMENT AND THE TRAVELLING… THERE CAN’T ACTUALLY BE MUCH LEFT THAT YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY DONE IN YOUR SIXTY-FIVE YEARS… BUT DO YOU STILL HAVE AMBITIONS? DO THEY STILL DRIVE YOU?
Ha ha, well, actually, I really love teaching. I should teach somebody, y’know? I should pass on a bit of what I’ve learned. I’ve recently been ruminating and playing around with the idea of having some sort of school for songwriters. A place that isn’t telling people how to write songs, but giving them the knowledge, the tools… Showing them the way to open up the right side of the brain to allow the songs in, y’know? After you’ve done so much, in the end, like a craftsmen or a carpenter or a plumber or anything, there’s a point where you’ve learned everything you’re probably going to learn. So what do you do with that?

YOU PASS IT ON… YOU’RE ACTUALLY RECRUITING FOR AN APPRENTICE HERE, AREN’T YOU?!
I am, yeah! Ha ha ha ha…

Order NASHVILLE SESSIONS : THE DUETS here

Dave Stewart And Guests play two UK shows in September
Fri 8th Sept   LONDON   Shepherds Bush Empire   Tickets
Sat 9th Sept   SUNDERLAND   The Empire   Tickets