AVClub.com Dave Stewart Interview

The A.V. Club: What led you to do The Blackbird Diaries? You hadn’t done a proper solo album in quite some time.

Dave Stewart: That’s right. It’d been about 13 or 14 years. But you know, I hadn’t actually thought about it, because for some reason, I didn’t ever think of myself as a solo artist, you know? When the Eurythmics first broke up, I had another band called The Spiritual Cowboys, and I lived in France at that time, and we played all around there and made albums. We had gold albums in France, and that was just… actually, it was one of the great times, because I had an old painted Rolls Royce that I’d jump in with a picnic basket, and we’d go play these little Roman amphitheaters, like in Arles and places like that. I actually sing about it on my album, in a song called “The Gypsy Girl And Me.” They hold about 2,000, we’re outside in this ancient crumbling amphitheater, and that was great fun. And then I did a solo album called Greetings From The Gutter, and I had great fun doing it, but I never looked at it as if, “Oh, I’m having a solo career!” But then I got married and had more children—I’ve got four children now—and started doing all sorts of things with photography, film stuff, doing music for movies and writing songs with and for other people. This only came about because there was this big volcanic ash storm that hit Britain from Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano. I was grounded and I didn’t have a guitar, and I wanted to buy one, and it turned out to belong to this guy called Red River Dave. I bought it in the guitar case with all of his songbooks that he’d written his songs in, and some photographers. Did you get the actual CD, with the liner notes?

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