Eric Stewart

Eric Stewart is a guitarist and singer, who first hit the 60’s British charts performing The Mindbenders Game of Love and A Groovy Kind of Love. Interested in studio work, an assembly with art rock sessioneers Lol Creme and Kevin Godley resulted in the studio based Hot Legs, scoring the ethereal hit Neanderthal Man. Inviting bassist/guitarist Graham Gouldman into the fold, 10cc released their first single in 1972. Through a variety of line-ups, Stewart co-fronted 10cc with Gouldman until 1995, acting as songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist and studio engineer. A studier of The Beatles, Eric Stewart was personally invited to work on Paul McCartney’s Tug of War (1982). Stewart subsequently worked on McCartney’s Pipes of Peace (1983), Give My Regards To Broadstreet (1984) and Press To Play (1986). He released his memoir The Things I Do For Love in 2017.  Culture Sonar published a version of this interview in 2018.

• Firstly, how did The Beatles influence 10cc in terms of studio craft?

They influenced me long before 10cc in the way that none of their songs sounded the same. They always changed their style on every song. You hear artists on the radio playing the same thing again and again and again. The Beatles never repeated themselves on the albums, which also influenced me when I went into studio work, the band work became 10cc. Strawberry Studios was named after Strawberry Fields Forever, which is one of my favourite songs. My favourite of all time is probably Imagine. I agree with John Lennon, religion is the cause of conflict. You see it on the television and the internet all the time the dreadful things that happen. The Beatles were a major influence. 

• Paul McCartney booked Strawberry Studios while 10cc recorded Sheet Music. Did that influence the flow of the album? 

I think almost certainly so. I think Sheet Music might be my favourite 10cc album, although The Original Soundtrack broke more boundaries with tracks like Une Nuite A Paris and I’m Not In Love. As you probably know, I’m Not In Love started as a bossa nova piece and Kevin Godley told us it sounded crap. Then I heard people in the studio singing it and I thought it must be good. Kevin, again, suggested the vocals, and I thought a capella? So, we spent six weeks producing it, coming in at six minutes, which made it an unlikely single. It started at no.29, then hit the U.K. no.1! I wrote it about trying to say I love you in the different ways of saying it. My wife, Gloria, and I are still together all these years later. It was amazing working with three voices that could sing anything. Kevin has a great voice, Don’t Hang Up is beautiful, he and Lol Creme could sing so high! Anyway, Paul McCartney sent me a postcard telling me he really liked Sheet Music, so I think that Beatle thing of pushing and experimenting was there . Revolver might be my favourite Beatles album, George Harrison had started experimenting with beautiful Ravi Shankar Indian stuff on guitar and sitar. 

• Tug of War might be McCartney’s most accomplished album after his Wings work. With songs as energetic as Take It Away and The Pound Is Sinking and potent as Wanderlust and Here Today, how did they sound when you first heard them? 

I didn’t hear them in demo form, I’m influential on some of them on record, but I heard them in the studio. Just terrific to work with them. Paul’s very involving as a person. I sang with Paul and Linda, lovely girl Linda. We became very social, we lived very near each other, our kids went to the same schools. Paul was partial to a bottle of wine, as I was after living in France for so long. We were local, we’d eat a meal together. We’d meet up and it was Linda who later suggested that we write together. I like the production on the album, it didn’t have too many people on them like Press to Play did. And George Martin was a terrific producer. He was a great guy who worked with The Beatles, bringing in real strings and ideas to their songs. 

• George Martin produced Tug of War and Pipes of Peace. How did he work with the musicians and how was it working with The Beatles sounding board?

Wonderful to work with. I adored George, so friendly, never nasty. It was George Martin who kept telling me to write a book, because he said that I live such an interesting life outside of music. Terrific producer and a very lovely man. He had such a way about him, arms out when he’d meet you. He always had a lovely way of saying “Eric, that isn’t working” or “Paul, maybe you could sing that better”. He didn’t have to cow-tow to anybody, but so friendly. Lovely man, I went to his funeral. Very sadly missed.  

• You played with the Beatles rhythm section in So Bad (1983). How was that for a Beatle fan? 

       Dream come true in one sense for me. I saw The Beatles years beforehand when they played Love Me Do onstage. I tell a story in my book where I say my band did an audition for the BBC when The Beatles did. We passed, they didn’t! I thought it was hilarious because I thought Love Me Do was the future of English music. My mates said Cliff and The Shadows with their footsteps was the way! Singing with Paul, it might have something to do with us both being born in the North of England. Maybe it’s the weather up there, we used to get terrible colds from the weather. The Manchester accent is lazier to the Liverpool, but the voices work. The North might have made them raspier and deeper. When you listen to black artists, they have a lovely richness at the end of their voices. Like a rasp, but so musical. Paul can sing a rocker, then a ballad. Not many can do that! Ringo’s a great guy to hang around with, as well as a great drummer. 

• From this, Give My Regards To Broadstreet came together. Was John Paul Jones involved with that project?

John did work on it! I knew him from years ago when he did some work in Strawberry Studios North.Terrific guy I really loved working with him, even when he played with one of the greatest heavy metal bands, Led Zeppelin. He played with Jimmy Page, who I had met years before, even before Zeppelin. He was doing a lot of studio work and one day I asked him if I could have a noodle on his black Les Paul. He said I could even play it on the record! And that was Game of Love, the first Wayne Fontana and The Mindbenders hit. Playing Jimmy’s guitar inspired me further to be experimental. I wish I had written that one! Wayne was our frontman, then he walked off one night, so we kept playing on stage. Wayne was fed up, he wanted a solo career. Happened a lot, Gerry Marsden splitting from the Pacemakers and so on. So, I sang Groovy Kind of Love. It was written by two sixteen year old girls,Carole Bayer and Toni Wine. I heard them singing the demo, I thought it was great. Number one in America for us! Terrific smash. Anyway, Paul got the idea for Broadstreet from Give My Regards to Broadway, but knew of a place called Broadstreet in Liverpool, so that’s where that title comes from. 

• You are one of a handful of people to write with McCartney after Lennon. He had written with Linda and Denny Laine and would later write with Elvis Costello. How was it different to writing with Graham Gouldman and Lol Creme? 

Lol’s a bit wilder with his work. He’d come in and say something, which might make you stop. Then you would say life, it is a minestrone! The ups and downs of life, summed up in a title! He had some nice riffs too. I loved playing guitar on Godley and Creme songs, like Rubber Bullets.I doubled the solo, screaming solos That was a song that was written about American prisons, where you would shoot a rubber bullet to hurt, but not kill, an inmate. It came out when rubber bullets were being used in Northern Ireland! Lol could come out with lines that started the musical bent when he said “they’re doing the wall street shuffle”. I saved that title. It’s about money and happiness. Howard Hughes is a multi-billionaire, but was he happy with his life? Une Nuite A Paris conjures up millions of imagery in Paris, starting the work. Lol was very creative. Paul could be like that. You’ve probably heard this story, I went to his place telling him how beautiful it was walking through three feet of snow with the sun shining. He started singing “it’s beautiful outside”, which became Footprints. An amazing experience for me! The second track on my album [Eric Stewart / 10cc: Anthology] is Code of Silence, which came about when Paul was in my music room. He had come around for lunch, we went to the music room where I could go to record. He started playing a beautiful string section, then put down an electric piano part. I said it was brilliant, and he left it with me. I did the vocal and sent it to him. He liked it and said “hope I get credit” [laughs]. He did put the backing down, so, of course he did! I put some guitars on it. I was listening to it two days ago in my car, it sounds lovely. Paul’s stunning talent is that he can write anything in any style. 

• You’ve spoken of your disappointment with the production of Press To Play, but Footprints and Pretty Little Head still sound vibrant and fresh as any of McCartney’s work. How do you feel about that album?

            It’s unfortunate, really. We started off writing songs like Stranglehold and Footprints on acoustic guitars before the studio.When we sat down to them, Hugh Padgham was the brilliant engineer at the time.  Hugh Padgham had worked on the excellent In The Air Tonight, a terrific drum sound. He admitted to me that he loved engineering, but wouldn’t know an A-flat from a basement flat as a producer! I appreciated that. When co-producing with him, it wasn’t working. Hugh started getting nasty with me. He’d talk to Paul on the talkback and started referring to me as “he”, not Eric. He’d say “can you do it again, HE doesn’t like it”. I went with Paul upstairs to have a chat. I asked who was producing, he said the three of us. So, we knocked it on the head and said we’d think about it. The next morning, Paul’s manager calls to say that Paul didn’t think the production was working out and wouldn’t continue working with me.

 That’s a shock. When we started, we had John Kelly engineering before Hugh. The first thing we recorded was Angry. Paul had these great lyrics “What The Hell Gives The Right To Tell Me What To Do With My Life?”. I played a really good, heavy guitar riff to that. That night, Gloria picks up the phone and Paul tells her I’m a “fucking genius”. What a great compliment from Paul and his stature! I thought it would carry on, but Padgham screwed it. He said he’d walk away if he didn’t produce it himself, so Paul let me go. That was very sad. Much later on, he did apologise, saying he got it wrong too. By the time it was finished, we’d had five producers on it. Five. 

It ended up being Paul’s lowest selling album. The song Angry lost the lovely feeling. Phil Collins and Pete Townshend played it, they’re great guys, but it was too mild. I had a much angrier riff. It lost all that clout. Too many people were involved with the album, all those blipping saxophone solos ruining the songs. I would never have gone near them. It got so mixed up. C’est la vie, as we say in France! We did start seeing each other just before Linda died. We did agree whatever happened on that last album, it just wasn’t good enough. 

• You later recorded Yvonne’s The One with 10cc. How did those versions differ? 

That was a song we took from a postcard I got from Nick Mason of Pink Floyd. It had the line “when I first saw Yvonne, volcanoes exploded” on it. I showed it to Paul, and we wrote to that. Paul’s a perceptive guy. He wanted it in a laidback, ballad way, but I suggested to do it in a more reggae way. He did it in the smoother, ballad style, but I always wanted to do the reggae version, so I did it on my album. I wish it were more reggae, more Bob Marley. That Jamaican rhythm would suit the words. 

• Would you like to tell Culture Sonar of any projects you currently have planned? 

I haven’t right now. I released the book last year, that took me three years to write. I also had to collect the photographs, I started taking photos when I first started in the industry when I was sixteen. Collecting them all, I had to pay for the rights from people like Getty Images, rights for my bloody photos [laughs]. The book was worth doing, covering all my facets, the things I do for love. I once thought I’d like to be an architect, so I have a great interest in architecture, the amazing buildings that people once had to build on their back, years of work from carved stone to paint ceilings. I have many interests in life, motor racing, photography, whatever turns me on.  I spoke to Lol yesterday, he’s married to my wife’s sister, we’re an incestuous bunch [laughs]. Kevin Godley lives in Dublin, I haven’t spoke to him in a while and I haven’t seen Graham Gouldman in many years. He’s bringing 10cc back on the road, which pulses me a little, he only ever sang one song! Needs must. As I said, we lived in France for many years, but have moved back to the U.K. since 2014. We live near where Paul lived, though he spends a lot of time in the States with his wife Nancy. As well as the book, a friend suggested that I release the music I did outside 10cc. The technology’s much better now, dealing with more than 16 track, so I learned a lot. That took me about six months to re-record and remix everything. And aside from that, I’m spending time relaxing. I came back from Italy recently, my wife and I did an oil painting course there. People do ask me if I want to play or write with them, but right now, I’m happy taking it easy.