fight for life the wild at heart series by laurie anderson

The duo also innovated in presentation, with Annie adopting an androgynous look. “But if I play this instrument, I have no idea what I’m doing.” “I thought, ‘If I play guitar, which I know, I’ll do something regular,” Stewart said. With punk still raging in 1980, they went in a fresh direction, via a synthesiser. “Our idea of a breakup was Annie living upstairs and me downstairs,” Stewart says. In the wake of the Tourists’ collapse, Stewart and Lennox, who had been lovers since that first night he heard her sing, broke up. But their main songwriter, Pete Coombes, was a drug addict who was derailing the band (Coombes died of drug and alcohol abuse in 1997). The two helped form the Tourists, who scored hits. What are you doing as a waitress? You’re an artist.’”ĭave Stewart: Sweet Dreams Are Made of This. “When I first went to her tiny bedsit she sang a song she’d written on a harmonium. “She was more Laura Ashley dresses and longish brown hair then,” Stewart says. Understandably, Longdancer went nowhere, but soon Stewart met a young hippie woman in a health food store: Annie Lennox. “It wasn’t people having a tiny bit of cocaine wrapped in paper. “He was hugely high on cocaine,” said Stewart. Then we’d just go and take some mescaline.”Įlton was then at his peak of excess. The people running his label just handed us a bundle of money. “There were presents everywhere and Rolls-Royces. “Everything smelled of fantastic cologne,” Stewart said. By 18, his band Longdancer got signed – to Elton John’s Rocket Records, no less. He was also playing in bands, with success. So he kept taking the drug, up to three times a week during his teen years. ‘Ah, now I get it.’ The trouble is, it doesn’t last.” “It’s a speeded-up version of sitting on a mountain for 60 years and meditating. “Everything changed at that moment,” he said.

“But they let me stay with them and showed me how you change strings on a lute.” 'They could have just said 'kid, get a bus home' but they let me stay and showed me how you change strings on a lute'īy 15, Stewart was dropping acid. “They could have just said, ‘Kid, get a bus home,’” he said. As a teen in Sunderland, he saw the prog-folk band Amazing Blondel and immediately stowed away with them. “It didn’t seem weirdly perverse to me then – just weird.”Īccording to the book, Stewart began his adventures in music, sex and drugs early. “When you’re a kid you don’t know what’s going on,” Stewart said. He recounts his encounter as a kid with a Scout leader who used to wash every member of the troop’s private parts, calling it a “hygiene test”. To wit: in the book Stewart even manages to relay a tale of sexual abuse with a certain pluck. “A lot of the things that happened weren’t funny at all,” Stewart admits.

If Stewart’s memoir steers clear of speculating on that, it charmingly deflects the issue by offering a non-stop run of sex and drug adventures, delivered in the flip tone of a seasoned raconteur. We’ve met hundreds of times since then and we never discuss our songs about each other. When she sings ‘do you know how I feel?,’ it left a question. “It was probably the first time she had a chance to sit down and say ‘what happened?’ When I first heard the song, and still when I hear it, I can hear every piece of pain that she put into it. “Annie’s first single, Why?, was about her relationship with me,” Stewart said. In fact, the fallout from the pair’s fraught transition from lovers to band-mates lingered well after Eurythmics broke up in 1990, and has faint reverberations to this day.

Sonny and Cher did it the other way around: They were famous, then they broke up. “I can’t think of any other couple that did what we did – to break up and then start a band. If I wrote about me and Annie, it would be a completely different book.

“I don’t think that should be shared with the world. “I know just about every tiny molecule of Annie,” said Stewart from his home in Los Angeles.

Fight for life the wild at heart series by laurie anderson