pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Post subject: Dave Stewart's New Memoir: Sweet Dreams Are Made of This |  |
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Ye olde rockers will enjoy this:
| The Guardian wrote: | Dave Stewart: 'What Annie Lennox and I went through was insane'
In his new memoir, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, Dave Stewart details his inebriated antics with Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, Elton John, Bob Dylan and just about anyone else a Grammy nominating committee might care about. Yet, the star he’s most associated with – Eurythmics ally Annie Lennox – sometimes seem like a remote figure in the tome.
Phil Collins returns: ‘I got letters from nurses saying, “That’s it, I’m not buying your records”’
“I know just about every tiny molecule of Annie,” said Stewart from his home in Los Angeles. “I don’t think that should be shared with the world. If I wrote about me and Annie, it would be a completely different book.
“I can’t think of any other couple that did what we did – to break up and then start a band. Sonny and Cher did it the other way around: They were famous, then they broke up. What we went through was insane.”
In fact, the fallout from the pair’s fraught transition from lovers to band-mates lingered well after Eurythmics broke up in 1990, and has faint reverberations to this day.
“Annie’s first single, Why?, was about her relationship with me,” Stewart said.
“It was probably the first time she had a chance to sit down and say ‘what happened?’ When I first heard the song, and still when I hear it, I can hear every piece of pain that she put into it. When she sings ‘do you know how I feel?,’ it left a question. We’ve met hundreds of times since then and we never discuss our songs about each other. It’s opening up a can of worms. Who knows what will come out?”
If Stewart’s memoir steers clear of speculating on that, it charmingly deflects the issue by offering a non-stop run of sex and drug adventures, delivered in the flip tone of a seasoned raconteur.
“A lot of the things that happened weren’t funny at all,” Stewart admits. “It’s just the way you perceive it.”
To wit: in the book Stewart even manages to relay a tale of sexual abuse with a certain pluck. He recounts his encounter as a kid with a Scout leader who used to wash every member of the troop’s private parts, calling it a “hygiene test”.
“When you’re a kid you don’t know what’s going on,” Stewart said. “It didn’t seem weirdly perverse to me then – just weird.”
According to the book, Stewart began his adventures in music, sex and drugs early. As a teen in Sunderland, he saw the prog-folk band Amazing Blondel and immediately stowed away with them.
'They could have just said "kid, get a bus home" but they let me stay and showed me how you change strings on a lute'
By 15, Stewart was dropping acid. “Everything changed at that moment,” he said. “It’s a speeded-up version of sitting on a mountain for 60 years and meditating. ‘Ah, now I get it.’ The trouble is, it doesn’t last.”
So he kept taking the drug, up to three times a week during his teen years. He was also playing in bands, with success. By 18, his band Longdancer got signed – to Elton John’s Rocket Records, no less.
“Everything smelled of fantastic cologne,” Stewart said. “There were presents everywhere and Rolls-Royces. But it was totally undisciplined. The people running his label just handed us a bundle of money. Then we’d just go and take some mescaline.”
Elton was then at his peak of excess. “He was hugely high on cocaine,” said Stewart. “It wasn’t people having a tiny bit of cocaine wrapped in paper. It was mountains of it. The conversation was very excitable.”
Understandably, Longdancer went nowhere, but soon Stewart met a young hippie woman in a health food store: Annie Lennox.
“She was more Laura Ashley dresses and longish brown hair then,” Stewart says. “When I first went to her tiny bedsit she sang a song she’d written on a harmonium. It was like, ‘Holy shit. What are you doing as a waitress? You’re an artist.’”
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http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/13/dave-stewart-interview-annie-lennox-eurythmics-sweet-dreams-are-made-of-this
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