Dave Stewart would like to share a secret. Stewart, who, with Annie Lennox, occasionally comprises Eurthymics, believes he has stumbled, through his music and his life, upon the answer to world peace and universal harmony. And now he’s going to tell you. Are you sitting comfortably?
“I think the way Annie and I moved on after our relationship had ended contains the answer to world harmony,” he proclaims, with absolute seriousness. "If the leaders of the world could just take a leaf from our book, a lot of the problems we're seeing around the world today would be solved.”
Talking about your personal life is often an anathema to musicians. Stewart, it appears, will discuss nothing else.
From his recording studio in Los Angeles, he's explaining how he and Lennox came to record a new Eurythmics single “almost by accident”.
However, the track ‘I’ve Got A Life’ feels like a distraction. What he’s really keen to explore, you sense, is his relationship with Lennox, once intense, then troubled, then non-existent. Are we to conclude he still feels something for her more insistent than friendship?
“No matter what happened between us, we never allowed ourselves to fall out,” he says, deflecting the question. “There was never any bitterness, which I think is an important example – to everyone in the world.”
The new single, a dollop of drive-time synth-pop, was conceived last summer when Lennox popped around to Stewart’s newly refurbished studio.
No sooner had she appeared on his doorstep than the pair were jamming at a piano: “We were just messing about, to be honest. We hadn’t planned on writing anything. Within a few hours, though, we’d made this piece of music.”
To accompany the single, Eurythmics have sanctioned a greatest hits collection, tracking their progression from avant-rockers (their neglected 1980 debut In The Garden featured members of the Krautrock band Can) to electro populists (‘Sweet Dreams’) to platinum purveyors of soppy balladry (‘The Miracle Of Love’, ‘Thorn In My Side’).
The journey was never planned, says Stewart, who is niggled by the opinion, widely held, that after that initial flurry of weirdo-pop, Eurythmics became just another chart act (along the way, selling 30 million records).
“We were always so misunderstood,” he rues. “The public interpreted what we did at only one level, when there always were several depths of meaning.”
The world looked at Eurythmics and saw Bananarama for grown-ups; Stewart thought he was in Kraftwerk.
At the same time, it irritates him immensely that, even today, he is regarded as a boffin, who, were he not a rock millionaire, would probably be repairing GameBoys.
“I’ve never had a huge hang-up with the machinery of songwriting,” he insists. “I think this misconception comes from the 'Sweet Dreams' video, where I played a sort of scientist-type, who is manufacturing the music in a lab, while Annie sings. We were being ironic, but a lot of people assumed we really were like that.”
He doesn’t envisage further collaborations with Lennox in the near future. She has a stop-start solo career to fret about; he’s trying to launch his new rock band. That said, Eurythmics will always be part of both their lives. Stewart cannot envisage he and Lennox never recording together again.
“Nothing’s in the pipeline,” he says. “We just let things happen when they are meant to happen. I don’t think either of us want to return to the grind of having to do an album a year, then tour it, then go back and do another album. But we still regard Eurythmics as a living entity.”
Eurythmics last toured five years ago to support the album Peace And Love. Some of the ticket receipts went to Greenpeace; during the show Eurythmics lectured their audience on the importance of “peace and understanding”. Critics accused the pair of preachiness. Stewart feels they were spreading political awareness.
With stardom comes obligations, he believes. The Peace And Love tour was the Eurythmics giving a little back (Lennox reportedly chafed at his bombast and did not speak to him for 18 months). If they were guilty of anything, Stewart says, it was of treating audiences as intelligent individuals and seeking to communicate a sophisticated message to them.
“As an artist, you have a pulpit,” he explains. “Whether or not that's a good thing in every case is a different issue. The fact is that people pay attention to what you have to say. With the Peace And Love tour, we decided to put our necks on the line and make a powerful statement. Did we look silly? Who cares. We just wanted to make people think”