Dave Stewart’s Ghost-ly encounter

SINGAPORE — Musician and producer Dave Stewart is best known as being one-half of The Eurythmics, the man who, with singer Annie Lennox, churned out all those hits in the 1980s such as Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of These), There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) and Would I Like To You?

He has also written scores for films and worked with some of the biggest names in pop and rock, from The Ramones and Ringo Starr to Bono and Bruce Springsteen.

But for about two weeks next month, Singaporeans can witness what the Grammy Award-winner called his “most complicated production”: The musical Ghost, which plays at Marina Bay Sands.

“Yes, it’s a far cry from The Eurythmics or producing The Ramones,” he quipped over the phone from Los Angeles. “But when you see the scene with the subway ghosts and the strange music that’s accompanying it, you think, ‘Actually this is pretty freaky’.”

Stewart said this penchant to do musicals could have stemmed from a childhood experience. “I’ll let you in on a secret – well, I’ve got a book coming out next February so it wouldn’t be a secret then –but when I was about five years old, we lived in a tiny little house, and my dad would spend a long time in the shed, doing things with bits of wood and wire. We didn’t know what he was doing. Then one morning, he’d wired up these speakers and he put them in the corner of the bedroom and the kitchen. He put on a vinyl record and suddenly the whole house burst with music.

“It was the first time we’d heard music that loud. He had bought every single Rodgers and Hammerstein musical album so the first five years of my life was spent listening to every Rodgers and Hammerstein musical with my dad singing along at the top of his voice. That’s probably how I got into this way of arranging or writing songs — using unusual string parts, for example — and how when I started to work on the musical, it seemed strangely familiar.”

Musically, Stewart’s resume is a large and varied one, but he said that he never thought about doing musicals at all. “I got approached out of the blue. I met Bruce Joel Rubin, who wrote the screenplay for (Ghost) and got the Academy Award for it. And that was what brought me in — I thought, this is a complicated challenge, so I said yes.”

He continued: “Ghost was a deep dive into huge epic topics — death, love, betrayal, all that great stuff ... And I realised that just about everything he writes is about death, love and all that. Like Jacob’s Ladder, it was the same thing! But ... I spent many months with Bruce and many hours talking about his thoughts and he’s a brilliant writer. Working alongside him is amazing because he is a master of his craft — a real deep thinker. What looked as first like a glossy movie ... when you get into Bruce’s mind, you see the depth of which he’d gone into.”

Of course, writing music for a musical is different from writing for a movie, “You have to propel the story musically, otherwise it’d just be people talking and it can be a little boring for the people in the back row,” he said with a laugh. “It’s really like a jigsaw puzzle; and you have to work closely with everybody ... For example, the costume department will say, ‘Hey that song has to be a bit longer because we can’t get the costume on in time’. It’s so weird to have write a song that’s one minute and eight seconds ... But when (it comes together) it’s a fascinating thing to see.”

And Stewart had a piece of advice for those who are going to see the show: Bring loads of tissue paper. “You can’t stop the tears coming,” he said. “Even guys, macho tough guys who take their wives to see Ghost — and I’ve seen it in theatres around the world — you see the wives crying and the guys are sitting there, going, ‘I’m not crying’; and then they start to sort of cough or look to the side or pretend like there’s something in their eye!

“I think this has sold more Kleenex than any other show.”

For someone who has done so many things in his life, there seems to be nothing left that he needs to do, musically. But Stewart begs to differ, saying that he would “love to go into the studio with Stevie Wonder again”, even as, in the same breath, he claims to be obsessed with a band called Les Butcherettes, a Mexican garage punk band formed in 2007 in Guadalajara by lead singer Teri Gender Bender.

“Music offers infinite possibilities. Look at how many people are writing music all around the world. Going back through the centuries up till now, people are still doing it and you still keep hearing different things,” he said, adding that it was “amazing” how many variations one could get out of the music scale. “I’m still constantly fascinated by it.”

However, the musician admitted that there is a downside to his existence. “I wake up very early but all of my best ideas start coming into my head only when I’m about to go to bed exhausted,” he lamented. “It drives me mad because I’m so tired and I want to go to sleep and I find that I need to write all those ideas done. I can’t remember being asleep – but I suppose you wouldn’t if you were asleep.”

He did have a plan to get all these thoughts down, though he wouldn’t recommend it to everyone. “When I go to the doctor or dentist or to the hospital – or for reason why they would give you anesthetic – I always tell the doctor or nurse, ‘Hey just as I’m going under ... can you write everything I say?’ And they always look at me like I’m crazy. But I read what they’ve written later and I go, ‘Oh, that’s good!’”

Still, in an age where millions of singers and musicians are all vying for the listener’s attention, either online or onstage, Stewart reckons that there’s only one way in which up-and-coming musicians can stand out: Write your own songs.

“It’s like what Joe Strummer from The Clash said: ‘Here’s three chords, now go write a song’. You’ll have a lot more success connecting with an audience if you’ve written your own song that you would (by doing covers). The thing is, everybody is doing cover versions and going on YouTube and having loads of people look at their video. That’s one thing but it’s not really doing much for the soul of the musician. When someone like Amy Winehouse or Jake Bugg comes along and sings their own song, it becomes a different story.”

Music is the realm in which Stewart lives and breathes, and it seems that there’s nothing Stewart wouldn’t do musically. “I love to experiment,” he said, before adding: “Outside of music though, there’s lots of things I won’t do: I won’t sit on a bowl backwards, that’s for sure!”

Ghost runs from Nov 4 to 15, at the Sands Theatre at Marina Bay Sands. Tickets from SISTIC.