Working with music’s stars was mind-blowing

DAVE Stewart will be on familiar ground when he headlines at this year’s Henley Festival.

One half of Eighties synth pop band Eurythmics, he was a friend of George Harrison and even lived with the former Beatle at Friar Park, his neo-Gothic mansion off Gravel Hill, for a time.

The musician and producer will be headlining on the “floating” stage with Dave Stewart’s Eurythmics, an all-female band.

Stewart, now 71, says: “When the Henley Festival said, ‘Hey, why don’t you play here?’ I looked it up and was a bit worried.

“I thought, ‘Well, if it’s on a boat you might float off down the river’ but I’ve been assured it’s this great stage.

“I’ve been to Henley many times because I was best friends with George Harrison, so I was always living in his house and he was living in my house in America and we were always jamming together.

“I’ve been in the town loads of times and I’ve been down to the river and it’s a very beautiful place.

“Obviously, it was a bit difficult for George wandering about — that’s partly why he made those beautiful gardens. He was really obsessed with gardening and really good at it.

“The documentary that was made by Martin Scorsese, [George Harrison: Living in the Material World], a lot of the footage in it is me filming and talking to George. I was living there for months at a time so Olivia and Dhani and I are very close.

“In my house in Los Angeles, I had been working with Tom Petty and Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne would come round and the whole Traveling Wilburys formed in my house and made their album in my studio there.”

Stewart has worked with many big-name musicians and found kindred spirits.

He says: “Often when you’re having dinner with people and friends, it’s with like-minded people and everybody has their stories about their journey.

“It’s bonkers, to use an English phrase, because you sometimes wonder to yourself, how did this happen? Like talking to George or Ringo Starr or Stevie Nicks, all of them knew something was different about them.

“They’d be the kid who was staring out of the window in the classroom daydreaming and getting a piece of chalk thrown at them and they probably didn’t quite fit in.”

Stewart was born in Sunderland to accountant parents and his father was a music fan.

As a teenager, he was in bands and recorded songs and even signed a record deal with Elton John’s record label Rocket.

After leaving Wearside, he spent several years living in squats in London. In 1976, he was introduced to Annie Lennox and they became romantically involved and formed The Tourists, who enjoyed modest success, including a hit with a cover of the Dusty Springfield’s I Only Want to Be with You.

The Tourists split up in 1980, as did Stewart and Lennox, but the pair continued to work together and formed Eurythmics, who had a string of hits including Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Here Comes the Rain Again, There Must Be an Angel and Thorn in My Side.

Stewart says his partner didn’t enjoy the fame: “Annie always says it was like being tied to the top of a rocket and being launched but I went through this amazing rollercoaster musical journey and worked with some of the greatest artists alive and it was just mind-blowing.”

The group broke up in 1990 and he became a successful record producer, while Lennox began a solo recording career. He and his band will be playing all the band’s hits at the festival.

Stewart says: “When we play those songs, it’s interesting because music has a massive effect on people’s memory banks.

“The audience react immediately. They’re probably not thinking about it but as soon as the opening notes of a song come in, they have a time and a place in their brain immediately and I can see it on their faces.

“As it builds up towards the end of a concert, it’s a bit of an emotional rollercoaster.”

He recruited his latest band using social media.

Stewart, who is now married to visual artist Anoushka Fisz — his third wife — says: “I’ve got all-female virtuoso players, saxophone player, harmonica player, drummer, bass and keyboards.

“They didn’t know each other at first. How I found them was via #brilliantmusicians and I direct messaged each one of them separately on Instagram, just saying ‘Hi, it’s Dave Stewart here and I was wondering if you were interested in playing, blah blah blah’.

“There’s a girl called Vanessa Amorosi, who’s probably one of the greatest singers and sang at the opening of the Olympic Games [in Sydney in 2000]. I’ve known her for like about 10 years and she is a different kind of singer to Annie but unbelievable.

“It’s a very interesting feeling because it’s a very exciting show and passionate. It’s not like, ‘Oh, how do I recreate Annie’, it’s completely different, but the songs remain the same, as Led Zeppelin would say.

“All those songs that we play in a row, probably 90 per cent of people know them and we’ve been getting standing ovations.” Stewart says many of the Eurythmics songs were influenced by the blues.

“In fact, Sweet Dreams is a blues song, it’s just it’s in a different context but it’s going through the same thing over and over, which a lot of blues players do,” he explains.

“A lot of the way that Annie and I would write songs together was that nobody else was allowed in the room. We just sat there, you know, with a guitar and her voice or whatever or piano and guitar.

“It definitely was a blues-type feeling because we lived together as a couple for four years, then decided to break up and live apart.

“For those four years that we lived together, we didn’t write one song between us or separately and then we broke up and wrote 120 songs about breaking up.”

His own interest in the blues came from his childhood in the North-East.

Stewart recalls: “I wanted to play football for Sunderland and somebody broke my kneecap in a few places and my mam left my dad at exactly the same time.

“It was like grey skies, constantly cold rain. My dad was depressed and I was just sitting there with my leg in plaster.

“I never listened to music at all and all of a sudden, this cousin sent over a blues album from America.

“I was so bored and I just thought, ‘Oh, I’ll put it on’, and it was Robert Johnson, the King of the Delta Blues singers.

“It didn’t sound like music, it sounded like a stranger’s voodoo wailing and I sat down and I went into a kind of trance and that was the moment for me.

“It was about 1968 and music was exploding with the Rolling Stones and the Beatles.

“I was so amazed by blues music that in 1991 I made a film called Deep Blues and went all the way to the Delta and Mississippi and met a great guy, Robert Palmer, who wrote for the New York Times and Rolling Stone and wrote a book called Deep Blues.

“That film was like paying homage. It was an amazing learning journey again.”

• Dave Stewart’s Eurythmics will play the Henley Festival on Thursday, July 11. For tickets, visit henley-festival.co.uk