[Dave Stewart, Background]

Dave Stewart: Well, when I was about eight years old I was given a tape recorder, very first portable battery tape recorder with little reels, and it just blew my mind ‘cause I had a little microphone. I could up the street and record people talking and come back to my bedroom and play it. And this immediately made me realize that, “Oh, reality can be not only captured, but it can be manipulated and distorted.” And then I started to record music and stuff. And that was the beginning really.

Interviewer: At eight years old did you play an instrument at that point?

Dave Stewart: I didn’t start playing ‘til I was about eleven or twelve. Then when I was about eleven or twelve, I picked up my brother’s guitar and – first a banjo he had, and then a guitar. And probably when I was about twelve and a half and thirteen, I’d had kind of stolen his guitar and took it to a pawn shop and traded it for an electric guitar. So when he came back from college he went crazy and wanted to strangle me, but I just felt that I just had to do it.

I tended to just play on my own all the time and the kind of music I was liking to play none of the other kids had heard it or understood it ‘cause I was getting albums sent to me from my cousin in Memphis, blues music. And I was from northeast of England in Sunderland so they really didn’t understand it.

And then my brother brought home a Dylan album, the first Dylan album, and I learned every song on that and not a lot of people were listening to Dylan albums then. And then slowly I got introduced to the Beatles and the radio and then I started learning all those songs. Then I met a couple of people who I can play a bit with. And then when I was about fifteen, sixteen formed a duo and then a four-piece and at about seventeen I got signed to _____ Music by Conway and Chris Blackwell.

And then I went to London and became immediately involved in the underground music scene and started to make an album and got signed by Elton John and went on tours. And I haven’t really done anything normal since.

Well, to be a polymath, is what you’re describing, can be really exciting and it can be a real pain in the ass as well because I get just as excited about playing the guitar live, as I do about launching an artist cooperative, as I do about painting the wall in the kitchen, as I do about – I don’t put them in priority order. I don’t go, “Well, I’ll make loads more money if I just go on tour or I’ll make” – it’s just like, “Look, I just really feel this should happen here and I really would like to make that like that.”

But on the other hand, I’d rather be like that than somebody who would drop all the other things they’re excited and only go and fulfill the ones that they think would benefit their career. Because I think life happens now and to be creative in the moment and in the now and just be fulfilled in all of those things that you’re doing. I think that’s what about. It’s not about creating great schemes that you know in twenty years times this is gonna happen and it might not.