Dave Stewart biography

Born in Waterloo, Central London, December 30th 1950, the infant Stewart showed musical promise from an early age, regularly assaulting sets of upturned biscuit tins with a pair of his mother's heavy duty knitting needles. After a few years, this anti-social percussive style evolved into a more systematic pummelling of his Aunt Hilda's battered upright piano. Before long, the ancient instrument was installed in the infant Stewart's home, and long and loud rang out the black note arpeggios, and high and piercing were the neighbours' cries of woe.

This nightmare scenario might have continued indefinitely were it not for the onset of adolescence, which occurred on the stroke of midnight, Dec.29, 1965. Suddenly, young Dave sprouted pimples and dark chin hairs, and that other indispensible teenage accessory, an electric guitar. Obsessed with the twangings and wailings of such luminaries as Pete Townshend, The Kinks and Jimi Hendrix, Dave forgot all he knew about playing the piano (which wasn't much) and spent excessive amounts of time contorting his fingers into painful fretboard chord shapes. The experiment, it must be said, was a failure, and although he did a few gigs playing guitar and organ with local group The Southsiders, Dave was finally forced to face his own guitaristic ineptitude and concentrate on keyboard playing.

In 1967, Dave formed a band called Uriel with school mates Steve Hillage (guitar) & Mont Campbell (bass). The group played a mixture of blues and psychedelia plus the odd number by The Nice, whose organist Keith Emerson was a major influence on Dave. Uriel began to get gigs, and played a residency on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1968. From this point, Dave's musical career began in earnest. Steve Hillage left the band to go to university, Uriel continued as a 3-piece, changed their name to Egg, and began to build up a following on the UK gig circuit. By some minor miracle, this hirsute organ trio, though playing some of the most obscure and complex music known to mankind, got a recording deal with fuddy-duddy old British company Decca Records, and made two albums, 'Egg' (1969) and 'The Polite Force' (1970). In between these two Egg releases, the band, operating under pseudonyms, also made the psychedelic album Arzachel with Steve Hillage guesting on guitar. Encouraged by his friend Chris Cutler (drummer of Henry Cow), Dave began to compose music during this period, and with Cutler formed the occasional large-scale gigging ensemble The Ottawa Company.

Egg broke up in 1972. Dave, now a long-haired young man in flared trousers, spent a miserable few months unemployed, but then got a call from drummer Pip Pyle to audition for a new group Hatfield & The North. Though the other Hatfield members never said so, it can be assumed that Dave passed the audition, as he spent the next 3 years gigging with the band and recording 2 albums, 'Hatfield & The North' (1974) and 'The Rotters' Club' (1975). Not long after the second Hatfield album was completed, Dave also recorded a reunion Egg album, 'The Civil Surface' on the then-progressive label Virgin Records.

By late '75, Dave was, in Frank Zappa's immortal words, "ready to form his own band". The band in question was National Health, formed with fellow keyboardist Alan Gowen and ex-Hatfield guitarist Phil Miller. Bill Bruford initially played drums with the group, but was finally replaced by ex-Hatfield drummer Pip Pyle. National Health continued the noble tradition, established by Dave's earlier band Egg, of playing compositions of inordinate length and complexity. This went down OK with the group's small band of supporters, but badly with the British record companies, who were preparing to welcome Punk as the next big thing. As a result, National Health languished in the wilderness for 2 years before making their debut album 'National Health' (1977), followed by 'Of Queues & Cures' (1978), but were finally forced to disband in 1979 due to lack of public interest.

Dave was not out of work for long; Bill Bruford, recently fired from the band UK, called to enquire after the lanky keyboardist's availability. Dave had already played on Bill's solo album 'Feels Good To Me', and in 1979 the two began work on a band project Bruford, featuring the prodigious talents of bassist Jeff Berlin and guitarist Allan Holdsworth. Dave, urged on by his new bandleader, now added synthesizers to his traditional keyboard set-up of organ and electric piano. The Bruford band recorded the album 'One Of A Kind', and later, with John Clark replacing Holdsworth on guitar, played 2 successful tours of the USA and recorded two further albums, 'Gradually Going Tornado' and 'The Bruford Tapes'. Performing with Bruford exposed Dave to a wider audience, and in 1979 he was voted 'Best New Talent' by the readers of Keyboard magazine (USA).

By the beginning of the 1980's, Dave had established himself as a leading British keyboardist and composer, with an added reputation for musical intelligence and integrity, but 12 years of unbroken band membership was beginning to take its toll. Rather than continuing to compose long, complex instrumental pieces which only ever seemed to attract a tiny audience of slightly disturbed males, Dave decided to try something completely new and turned his hand to song writing, arranging and producing. The immediate success of his first solo single 'What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted', featuring Colin Blunstone on guest vocals, launched Dave on an unplanned new career as a perpetrator of intelligent pop music. In 1981 he teamed up with vocalist Barbara Gaskin and embarked on a successful partnership which has endured till the present day. (See 'a brief history of Broken Records')

As well as writing, performing and producing the music of Stewart/Gaskin, Dave writes articles for Keyboard magazine (USA) and Sound On Sound (UK), and has written two books on music, 'The Musician's Guide To Reading & Writing Music' (also known as 'Introducing The Dots'), and 'Inside The Music'. He lives with Barbara Gaskin in an Orwellian South London suburb. The couple have no children, but are currently negotiating the leasehold on a cat..

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