Dave Stewart was interviewed by Bob Harris, the legendary BBC Radio 2 DJ known lovingly as Whispering Bob for his airwave friendly voice.  Bob and Dave developed a shared love for all things Nashville, but their paths crossed much much earlier, when Bob Harris introduced The Tourists on stage on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

The evening was set in the Oak room at The Hospital club to an audience of around 100 people including Bill Wyman amongst others, and was the official UK launch of Dave Stewart’s memoir, Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This – A life In Music.

The conversation really focussed on a lot of Dave’s childhood, and his early career taking in Longdancer, and some interesting choices of how the band were paid, not always neccessarily in cash. In fact, a lot of the stories seemed to revolve around copius amounts of drug taking.  Dave credited Annie Lennox as being the person who really saved his life, and slowly helped him to reduce teh amount of drugs he took.  He shared a video of Annie cooking a shepherds pie for him in their pre-tourists days from their bedsit.

Dave also spoke about how almost every single part of his life has been documented either by film or photograph, and he dipped into his archives a few times to share with the audience, at one point sharing a video of him and Mick Jagger in a car with Mick driving looking totally lost and bewildered.  Dave commented that it was thanks to this constant archiving he does that really helped bring the book together where he would find a photo which acted as a trigger for a memory or in some cases a whole chapter.

The hilight of the evening for many was when Dave loaded Garageband onto his MAC and showed how all of the layers of Sweet Dreams had been built up, including the parts where he and Annie played milk bottles.  Dave also shared with us Stevie Wonders harmonica track for There Must Be An Angel.

I think both Dave and Bob could have spoke for hours and hours, but there was deep respect between them both that was so evident and Dave finished the evening by playing some blues on his Blackbird Diaries Duesenberg guitar.

Here’s a few clips of Dave playing and a gallery of a few photos that I took.  Dave’s memoir is out now on Kindle, Audio Download, Audio CD and Hardback, click here to view the options on Amazon where the book is currently just £9.79 here.

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