In Conversation with Colin: Dave Stewart

They discovered a shared obsession with art-house movies by the likes of Italian directors Fellini and Pasolini with the conversation eventually turning to blues music. Spending five hours together and ending up in a late night Mexican cantina, that first meeting was the start of what was to become a lasting friendship.

Dave continues, “We had lots to talk about and then he suggested we do a video the next day, he’s very spontaneous as in Renaldo and Clara, or if you’re playing on stage with him he’ll just suddenly change the song a bit or the key or whatever. I fortunately have a bit of that in me as well, as Annie knows or anyone who has worked with me knows.”

For Stewart, it’s a chance to get to know his biggest hero; the songwriter who prompted him to pick up a guitar as a teenager and who inspired his lifelong infatuation with music.

Dylan, in return, came to appreciate his British friend, once referring to him thus: ‘Captain Dave is a dreamer and a fearless innovator, a visionary of high order, very delicately tractable on the surface but beneath that, he’s a slamming, thumping, battering ram, very mystical but rational and sensitive when it comes to the hot irons of art forms. An explosive musician, deft guitar player, innately recognizes the genius in other people and puts it into play without being manipulative. With him, there’s mercifully no reality to yesterday. He is incredibly gracious and soulful, can command the ship and steer the course, dragger, trawler or man of war, Captain Dave.’

Stewart has reciprocated his love of Bob by recording an album of Dylan songs appropriately called Dave Does Dylan, released on vinyl as part of Record Store Day.

Such has been the positive response to his original Instagram posts that he has turned his stripped-back, one-take efforts into a fourteen track album with just his warm, expressive vocals and deft acoustic guitar.

The album bears songs from his hero’s folk period which Stewart learned in the sixties, such as ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ and ‘To Ramona’.

It also takes in well-known Dylan songs from later years like ‘Simple Twist Of Fate’, ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ and ‘Make You Feel My Love’.

There’s a rendition of the lesser-known ‘Emotionally Yours’ from the 1985 album Empire Burlesque, which is of special significance for Dave Stewart.

But before he continues describing events from forty years ago and the almost spiritual meeting in Los Angeles, Stewart recounts his childhood and his first introduction to the music of Bob Dylan.

“In 1966 I was fourteen and wasn’t interested in music at all, I just wanted to play football for Sunderland. But I had my knee broken and the same month my mum left my dad and so my brother had gone to college, he was four years older and I was sitting in a very bleak afternoon with horizontal rain hitting the window and fortunately the doorbell rang out of the blue and I hobbled to the door because I had a cast on my leg and it was the postman with a big box and a stamp on it that said Memphis USA.

“My cousin had sent it, and in the box were two pairs of Levi’s corduroy jeans which I’d never seen before in Sunderland, and underneath were some blues albums because he had been to Memphis and got into Delta blues. So I played one of them, it was Robert Johnson and I went into a trance, then I hobbled into the kitchen and put on the radio, and my mind was blown, there was The Rolling Stones and Kinks and all these bands it was like an epiphany. Then I remembered my brother had left two albums before he went to college, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side Of Bob Dylan. Then I put one on and my mind was blown the same because of the words that were coming out of his mouth.”

Enthused by what he heard, Stewart went to his brother’s wardrobe and got hold of his five-string guitar. “I couldn’t really play it,” he admits. “But I tried to make a bluesy sound, but I got so obsessed with these Dylan records and I realised he was singing a bit like Mississippi John Hurt and I was putting all these things together.”

Dave visited a certain Mr Len Gibson who lived two doors down, a World War Two veteran and prisoner of the infamous Burma Death Railway, “who had made a guitar in a Japanese prisoner of war camp out of bits of old crates and wire, he was one of the few survivors that came back.”

Stewart says: “I asked him if he knew how to tune the guitar and make it work and he was very helpful.”

Despite practicing with the tuning all wrong he was obsessed to the point he learned all the songs on the Dylan albums. His school relief teacher had a folk duo and with a few other boys they formed a band playing mostly Crosby Stills & Nash songs.

“We sent a tape to London and got signed to Island music by Chris Blackwell and Lionel Conway and literally two months later we got signed to Rocket Records by Elton John.

“From then on, I started collecting every Dylan album that came out, I loved his seventies records, Blood On The Tracks and Desire.”

On the new album Dave Does Dylan Stewart sings his own version of the song. “I know just about every Dylan song, and so many of them have been over the years hailed as socially political protest songs, and so I’ve picked songs that have a tight connection to my heart as he would say. I wasn’t even making an album, I was actually in hotel rooms, bored waiting for the show, I played sixty shows last year so I would just sing into the i-phone and put it on Instagram and got a great response from people.”

Stewart recalls how the Traveling Wilburys – Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne all convened in his back garden for nine days in May, 1988, “My house and the Church Studios in Crouch End for some reason all became this meeting place, and so George Harrison wanted to live in my house in Los Angeles with his son Dhani and Olivia and I think I went and stayed in his house and I got Shakespears Sister to record in George’s studio. So, what happened with The Wilbury’s was George went to see Bob at his little home studio and he was talking about a song and singing a bit of it and on one of the flight cases it said Handle With Care and so he said ‘oh yeah, it’s called ‘Handle With Care’.

“Tom Petty used to be around my house all the time and I would be around his house, the only person I didn’t know that wasn’t around my house was Roy Orbison.”

Bob Dylan’s lyrics and melodies have sustained Dave through the best and the worst of times, and he hopes his album can do the same for Dylan fans who understand the mastery and the mystery Bob has bestowed on the world and still does to this day.

Colin Palmer