This month, Eurythmics mainman and platinum weird leader Dave Stewart lends his first-hand knowledge to all those aspiring to become a rock legend.
CHARACTER
They say it takes all sorts but what really is needed? You need to be someone that’s got a big hole that needs to be filled as Bob Geldof said. Ideally the person has to be somebody that when they are younger think they are going to feel comfortable on stage, so obviously they need something inside them so that they will thrive on that environment.
It’s about creating your own period and mythology. Everybody you buy a biography of whether its Dylan, Ray Charles or Johnny Cash it’s kind of like Greek tales, a mythological take, heroic things. Each chapter something has happened or they did something or they looked a certain way or there is a photograph that is almost like capturing the moment of pop culture or rock culture. Dylan with his hair all out and dark glasses, Elvis in his black leather, kind of bound to Las Vegas with an acoustic guitar round his neck, and it could be when Johnny Rotten wore that ripped bondage type shirt. Spur of the moment things can cause it to just go ‘bang’ and that’s it.
RIDICULE
How do you put up with that inevitable ridicule? When somebody is on their way to the direction and vision of the singular purpose that they are aiming towards they can get buffeted and bashed around on the way. But they have the momentum needed so that these things don’t stick. Nothing can disturb the momentum propelling them forward. With the speed of that and everything it’s like they are shooting down a vortex and its difficult then for anything to stop it.
HELP!
There is no way you can seriously think about becoming an icon all on your own, so who do you turn to for help? What you need is at least one or two true believers who can guide you see the dangers and also think you’re think you’re the real hot one and will do everything they can to make other people realise that, for instance Kosmo Vinyl, who was like the fifth member/manager for The Clash. He was their friend first and he’d be whizzing around putting up posters, but he didn’t believe in that whole fame thing so much. Madness also had something like that. With various artists that you see really quickly shooting towards fame will have one person or a little army of people, true fans, who will do anything to help. But often there is a person who is their right hand, a person who isn’t a performer but who will actually be brilliant at strategies and creating a buzz. Andrew Loog Oldham was the guy who was the most brilliant publicist, marketer and manager of the Stones who created all these headlines like ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’.
ADULATION
What do you have to do to deal with the adulation? Try to avoid it. I’ve always been the person who has tried towards making the front person the iconic character so it has been kind of different for me. At the beginning for Eurythmics I worked with Annie [Lennox], helping create her look and sort of in a way her strange surrealistic style in videos and photographs and watched what happened when it came out. We’d make it all the way to the cover of Rolling Stone and this would cause massive waves about gender benders and cross dressing and that was fantastic. I must have this mad thing about picking a female idea, a concept, a mythological concept, and making it more and more powerful.
PITFALLS
Everybody, and they can’t help it, gets caught up in this whirlwind of everything being so exciting and intense that you end up burning the candle at both ends staying up until six in the morning. That’s all great in the period of building up to being a rock star. But as soon as you start having to do tours, up in the morning to get to the next place, you get to bed at six then have a roadie knocking on the door at like nine and you go “Oh fucking hell” and open it. And then you’ll do anything to stay awake, then do anything to go to sleep. You get into a cycle of uppers and downers, built up with drinking; you end up in a mess. It would be uppers and downers, speed, tablets to go to sleep. You end up being regimented by medicine. Stuff to relax, smoking, basically all the things that are not healthy. And then you’re eating crap food because you are always hungry but it’s one in the morning and there is nowhere open. You just pound your body really.
WORDS BY GARY KNOX
