Dave Stewart performing songs from Dave Does Dylan on PBS TV.
As one half of Eurythmics, Dave Stewart created a chart‑topping blend of soul music and electronica. Now he’s paying tribute to his earliest influences.
“When I was a kid, I had two Bob Dylan albums — The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side Of Bob Dylan — and I was just fascinated with the lyrics,” recalls Dave Stewart, co‑founder of influential ’80s synth‑pop duo Eurythmics. “And I used to sing these songs when I was about 16 years old in the folk clubs of my home town of Sunderland.”
Almost 60 years later, Stewart has paid tribute to this formative influence by recording an album of covers titled Dave Does Dylan, recorded in a minimalist fashion that retains the simplicity and directness of the originals.
“It depended on where I was,” explains Stewart. “Sometimes I’d be in a hotel room, sometimes in my home studio in the Bahamas, and sometimes in Nashville or sometimes, God knows where. We — Jesse, my engineer, and I ‑ always take a couple of mics with us on the road so that we’re able to record into the laptop. So, I’d just sing the song live straight into the iPhone and I would post the recording on Instagram, and people would react to it and go, ‘I love that song and it sounds really good. Why don’t you put it out so we can get it?’ Then management said, ‘Why don’t we make some vinyl for Record Store Day?’ So, we did a vinyl run of about 3000 for Record Store Day.”
Stewart’s go‑to microphones for the road weren’t extravagant by any means. “They’re not fancy or special but very reliable Shure mics,” says Stewart. “Basically, two Shure SM7Bs — one for the voice, and one on the guitar — and sometimes we used an Audio‑Technica AT5045 on the guitar too, depending on where we were.”
Dave Does Dylan was recorded very quickly, using two Shure SM7B dynamic microphones.
When it came to guitars, Stewart’s choices were more varied. “Again, it depended on whatever guitar I had with me at the time,” he says. “One of them was an Australian‑made miniature 12‑string Maton which I used on the track ‘Shelter From The Storm’. I also used my blue Takamine that I originally bought back in the ’80s, as I was using it for concerts and we’d have it in my hotel room. I also used this beautiful limited‑edition Martin that John McBride, who owns Blackbird Studios in Nashville, gave to me for my birthday. It is made out of the wood of a ship that sank like 200 years ago. Martin made a very small amount of these guitars out of this wood. Also, an old 1948 Gibson LG‑2 parlour guitar. I have around eight guitars in my studio in the Bahamas, and about 16 guitars in my little home studio in Nashville.”
Tour Management
Dave Stewart first appeared upon the scene in the late 1970s with pop‑rock group The Tourists, fronted by his then girlfriend and later Eurythmics partner Annie Lennox. The group released three albums in quick succession: their self‑titled debut in 1979 was followed later that same year by Reality Effect, yielding two UK top 10 singles with ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ and ‘So Good To Be Back Home Again’. Luminous Basement appeared in 1980 before the group disintegrated while on tour in Australia. It was while they were licking their wounds and contemplating an uncertain future in a hotel room in the Australian country town of Wagga Wagga that Stewart and Lennox stumbled upon an idea that would alter their lives.
“I’d brought in my suitcase this tiny little miniature sort of plastic synthesizer called an EDP Wasp,” recalls Stewart. “You couldn’t press a keyboard down and it was like a Stylophone and was black and yellow like the colours of a wasp. But what was great about it was that you had the basic synthesizer controls where you could change the sound. And at first, I was trying to make it sound like a didgeridoo. Then I started playing just very simple bass lines on it. As Annie and I were in the hotel room, Annie started singing along a bit to what I was playing. We were just messing around but we kind of vaguely had this idea that just the two of us writing songs could be quite good. When we got back to England we decided to pursue the idea. We’d been living together for about four years, in a squat at first, but now were living in this apartment. So, all we ever did was see each other and talk to each other 24 hours. It was just us two. We started to get folie à deux so we decided we should live apart — so Annie moved upstairs, and I downstairs.”
In early 1981, both Stewart and Lennox headed to Cologne, Germany to begin the recording process for the Eurythmics’ debut album In The Garden with German producer Conny Plank, who had worked with leading Krautrock groups such as Neu!, Cluster and Kraftwerk. By this point Stewart had added further gear to his sonic arsenal, and working with Plank gave Stewart an education in the art of recording.
“I had gone to a music shop and got a little bit more additional gear for the Wasp,” he says. “I got a Caterpillar master keyboard and a Spider sequencer and basically when I wired them together, I could start sequencing the Wasp and it was really powerful‑sounding. So, I got really into that and then I got a couple more other things: a Roland TR‑606 Drumatix, which is another little drum machine, and a Roland Space Echo, and I was making all this kind of weird experimental‑sounding stuff.”
Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox in the studio, 1982.Photo: Peter Anderson
Annie Lennox in the studio.
Dreamscapes
Released in October 1981, In The Garden featured a supporting cast of musicians that included members of Krautrock pioneers Can and Blondie drummer Clem Burke. It didn’t meet with much commercial success, but its atmospheric soundscapes and experimental spirit hinted at what was to come. For the 1983 follow‑up Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) Stewart and Lennox relinquished the musicians, preferring to remain a duo. Holing themselves up in a makeshift studio located in a picture factory attic, they went to work on what would become their signature sound.
Dave Stewart: On the Sweet Dreams record, you can hear it’s me in the bedroom with my gear playing the bass lines on a Roland SH‑101 onto a four‑track cassette TEAC 144 Portastudio.
“On the Sweet Dreams record, you can hear it’s me in the bedroom with my gear playing the bass lines on a Roland SH‑101 onto a four‑track cassette TEAC 144 Portastudio, like on ‘I’ve Got An Angel’,” he explains. “Later on, when we got an eight‑track, we bounced that four‑track onto the eight‑track. Sweet Dreams is very unique‑sounding because it was almost like soul music meets a very Germanic kind of electronic Kraftwerk‑y kind of thing. It wasn’t like New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’. But on the other hand, it had elements of this dystopian kind of emptiness to it that left a lot of space for Annie’s vocal. That was one of the things I really focused on when I first began producing. The first thing I ever produced was a Tourists song called ‘The Loneliest Man In The World’ where I left a lot of space as well, but I was only given two hours in the studio to do it, and I had everything, like tubular bells and all sorts of things going on.
“A lot of it was trying to create as much space as possible so that Annie’s voice sounded crystal clear, pure, and not drowned out. But making sure the backing track still sounded incredibly powerful. A lot of that has to do with literally not having anything in the stereo picture on top of each other, as well as looking at the difference of frequencies and not having the cymbals or the hi‑hats from a drum machine be on the same frequency as, say, an electric guitar within the limited tracks we had.
“We only had seven tracks to work with, because the eighth one was running a sync tone into this very strange prototype of a drum computer. And so those tracks, if you played them back, it’s really hard to make sense of them because you’ll hear on one track, it might have Annie’s harmony of a backing vocal before it suddenly turns into a sequencer playing.”
Pulling The Strings
The album’s celebrated title track owed much to an illicitly borrowed instrument. “The guy who owned the picture‑framing factory had this expensive Oberheim OB‑X synthesizer with a cover on it, and we were told not to touch it. When I started the rhythm of ‘Sweet Dreams’, Annie was very depressed at that point, lying on the floor saying, ‘Oh, nothing’s going to work’. She was waiting for me to get this drum machine working because it was a prototype, but it was very unusual and she was really feeling like giving up. And all of a sudden, I got it working and I put in this downbeat, which was a mixture of a tuned‑down tom‑tom on top of a bass run, and then a four‑on‑the‑floor on the bass and she suddenly leapt up and was like, ‘What’s that?’ It was just so infectious.
“And then we said, ‘Ooh, let’s just take the cover off this synthesizer and switch it on. He won’t mind.’ And we did, and we switched it on and it had that exact string sound without programming anything. It must’ve just been left on that sound. Maybe it was some preset sound or something that was in it. So, Annie started playing along with my sequence and it was just so infectious and powerful that we were both jumping around. Annie went from laying on the floor completely depressed to sort of celebrating. As she started singing ‘Sweet dreams are made of this,’ I quickly got a mic. We only had one Beyer stick microphone — the kind of mic you used for hi‑hats and things like that. And all of Annie’s vocals were done with that mic.
Dave Stewart: As she started singing ‘Sweet dreams are made of this,’ I quickly got a mic. We only had one Beyer stick microphone — the kind of mic you used for hi‑hats and things like that. And all of Annie’s vocals were done with that mic.
The makeshift studio setup that was used to produce Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This): to the right of the mixing console are a Lexicon Prime Time delay and Roland Space Echo, and Dave Stewart’s prototype drum computer.
“When we were mixing the album, we had to have little marks on the board so that myself, Annie and Adam Williams — a great bass player from the band The Selector, who helped put that studio together for us, and was also great at engineering — had to write all sorts of marks at various points in the songs. We had to mark where something might quickly move from there to there and that from there to there and that from there to there, like you would with automation today, but there was no automation back then. If you didn’t do that, suddenly a sequencer would’ve come blasting through a harmony track.
“Normally we would get it right in about the third or fourth take. We’d rehearse the moves and then press record and print it onto a Revox two‑track reel‑to‑reel tape recorder that we stole from the record company, because we may have had an eight‑track, but we had nothing to then get it off the eight‑track. We used the tape already on the machine, and printed the album on top of it because we didn’t really have much money to keep buying tapes, so God knows what we recorded over! We were just recording on top and wiping out stuff.”
Writing Process
Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) would set the course for the group’s upward trajectory to becoming one of the biggest synth‑pop acts of the ’80s, with a sound that was uniquely their own. “We were determined and desperate to make a new mark, and forge a new identity in music and for ourselves,” admits Stewart. “It was all about the things that we loved, put into one thing. In order to achieve this, we made a board and I would write in a line down the board on one side our likes, and on the other side, our dislikes, just in case we wandered into doing things we didn’t really like. On the ‘like’ side we’d have written things like, ‘electronic’, ‘soul’, ‘Motown’, ‘Stax’. We’d look at that and go, ‘Well, the vocal can be like some soul thing, and the backing can be electronic,’ and we kind of stuck to that format.”
The Eurythmics writing process was always a collaborative effort between the pair. “It was just always the two of us in a room. We didn’t like anybody else being there while we were doing it. And because we’d lived with each other, we knew each other really well and we could say anything, like, ‘Oh, that’s not going to work.’ I’d usually start these kind of soundscape music tracks, whether it’s ‘Sweet Dreams’ or ‘There Must Be An Angel’ or ‘The Walk’ or whatever. And Annie would have a journal that she was writing, though not particularly song lyrics; sometimes it was just rhymes, sometimes just sentences. And then she would always let me have a look at the journal and I would be thinking about the rhythm of the track and what was going on. And then I would pick out a line or maybe four lines and say, ‘This is an amazing title for this and that.’ And we’d get inspired about it, think about it and then start singing along with the backing track and then it starts to become a song.
Eurythmics’ sound developed through the ’80s.
“We worked together like that for like eight albums in a row, and it became a very quick process after Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This). While Sweet Dreams was a lot of experimentation, with Touch [1983] it took just three weeks of writing and recording. And the same with Be Yourself Tonight [1985] and Revenge [1986]. We’d sort of created a way of working and a sort of template for ourselves. Even though, on Revenge for instance, I realised that we were now playing in arenas and big places, and so made songs that would possibly fit in those arenas, like ‘Missionary Man’ and things like that, it was still the same kind of process.
Dave Stewart: To this day, I don’t make any demos, and never have. If I had something on the Portastudio, it was bounced onto the eight‑track and that was part of the master.
“To this day, I don’t make any demos, and never have. If I had something on the Portastudio, it was bounced onto the eight‑track and that was part of the master. And whoever I work with, I will not make a demo either. I think when you make a demo, often you capture some spark of brilliance and then you try and recreate it again, but it starts to fade away. I might then add to it, change it a bit, edit it about, but the thing that first came out is always in it. The record label often will say to me, ‘Do you have any extra demos that we could put as special tracks?’ And I’m like, ‘No, we just have other songs!’”
Further Explorations
In 1990, the duo decided it was time take a break from what seemed to have become an endless treadmill of recording and touring. Not one to remain idle, Stewart was soon busy with new projects. “I sort of decided I’d done so much music, I needed a break from music,” he says. “Instead, I went to New York and made this solo album called Greetings From The Gutter [1994]. And then I went to Jamaica and recorded another solo outing, Sly‑Fi [1998], in this little house I had there by the river. And it was the first album ever released on the Internet, before David Bowie. They say that Bowie was the first guy to release an album in 1999 [hours...] on the Internet, but he wasn’t, as that was already released through an online music services company called N2K.
“And then I didn’t make any records for about 15 years, until I ended up in Nashville. And I made The Blackbird Diaries in 2011 and then literally a trilogy of albums in two years. Each of those albums was made in about five days; writing the songs, and recording them. And then I didn’t make any albums until this Dylan one.”
Eurythmics reunited in the later part of the ’90s before Lennox retired from the road in the ’00s to focus on other projects, though she and Stewart have since performed a handful of one‑off special shows, such as Sting’s 30th anniversary ‘We’ll Be Together’ benefit concert in December 2019. In 2024, Eurythmics returned to the road without Lennox, her position being filled by Australian singer Vanessa Amorosi. “Vanessa and I had been messing around playing and writing songs, just as friends, since she first came to Los Angeles about 14 years ago,” says Stewart. “She’s incredible and one of the greatest voices I’ve ever recorded.”
Favourite Eurythmics Track?
When asked if there’s any particular favourite song or album in Eurythmics’ body of work, Dave Stewart chooses ‘Here Comes The Rain Again’ and its parent album Touch. “When we came to make that album I thought we couldn’t just stay stuck in the same Sweet Dreams world; we had to branch out a bit. So, I got myself this big Gretsch Country Gent guitar, brought in a whole orchestra, got a sequencer and another little high sequencer and a bass sequencer, and it was like this mad mixture of sounds. And it captured again this sort of melancholy atmosphere with a very hopeful chorus, which is one of the signatures of Eurythmics music. In the verses it might sound like, ‘Oh God, this is so tragic’, but once you get to the chorus, some major progression comes in and the lyrics are slightly altered to make it feel like you’re not going to slit your wrists.
“If you analyse just about all the songs, there’s only a couple that actually make you feel really up all the way through, like life’s great. And one of them, ‘Right By Your Side’, even the chorus goes, ‘cause when depression starts to win / I need to be right by your side’. It’s always got that little twisted thing going on, and I think that’s what keeps your music current. It’s not all fluff and Disney and it’s not all completely the end of the world, yet it’s got this funny mixture in the middle somehow. To me it is reality. Reality isn’t all damn terrible and it isn’t all great. It’s up and down every hour or every day. You don’t know what’s going to happen next — but you’re hoping for the best.”