Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame, not the other one) has a new solo album out and has been talking to Spin about it and his long career.
The record is called The Way It Was Back Then and it finds Stewart – who is best known as a producer and guitarist – taking on vocal duties, something he says he was reluctant to do for years. “I was always shy about singing, but I didn’t used to be,” he explains.
“Being in a duo with an amazing female singer for years, when Eurythmics stopped, I formed a sort of band and I was the songwriter and singer but I decided only to play in France and Germany. I was a bit wary about my singing voice, but then slowly, over the years I was like, ‘Fuck it!’”
Interestingly, he says that whilst in the Eurythmics, he and Annie Lennox found writing songs easier after their romantic relationship had ended: “Annie and I lived the extreme happy and sad for ages,” he reflects. “When we lived together as a couple, that was about four years, we didn’t write one song separately or between us. We didn’t write any.
Then we decided to live apart, and we wrote 100-odd songs, and every song only took about 20 minutes. Then we played these songs live and we’re looking at each other, and the song might be about us, so it’s a very extreme version of happy and sad.”
The Eurythmics haven’t released any new music for twenty years and are one of the few 1980s groups that haven’t done one last world tour for old times’ sake. Stewart doesn’t see the situation changing.
“We used to exchange emails and talk quite a bit, but the last two years it fizzled out a bit,” he says of his relationship with Lennox. “I think she’s finding anything to do with Eurythmics in the past. We’ve never done anything that normal acts do when they’ve been through all of this stuff and reached a certain age, whether it’s a documentary or playing shows.”
“I would have done it (a tour) in a flash, but Annie always turned them all down. I really do think that when you have songs that mean a lot to people, and you perform them live, and you can actually see people in front of you emotionally changing, whether they’re singing the song or they’re looking at the person they’re with or whatever, you can see it having an effect. Obviously, music itself has a massive effect, but I wish we did play.”
“Eurythmics songs are incredibly hard to sing, especially for an hour and three quarters or two hours,” Stewart points out. “She did something not long ago, but she only did about four or five songs, and then she had guests. It’s incredibly demanding. It didn’t used to be. We could have done it for like 25 years, one every three years or something. But now, I think it’s too late.”
