“It went down a storm so I thought I’d take it on the road,” Dave tells me, with an echo of his native Sunderland in his gruff voice. “Then Covid hit. But after Annie and I were inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall Of Fame, I thought **** it, it’s now or never!”

Stewart, 71, and his Eurythmics co-star Annie Lennox carried out the nonetheless stupendous Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) on the Los Angeles induction ceremony final November, however she isn’t concerned within the tour.

“We’ve been asked to play together for 25years. We’ve been offered everything, as you can imagine, but Annie doesn’t like touring. She found it gruelling.”

Instead, he’ll carry out with an all-woman group of virtuoso musicians and three singers “who are also brilliant,” he enthuses. “It’s just like seeing the Eurythmics. You’ll hear all of your favourite songs live for the first time since 1999.”

The duo’s magical alchemy spawned a string of unforgettable 80s hits – Who’s That Girl, Here Comes The Rain Again, There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)…

Their recipe of gospel, Krautrock and psychedelia, enhanced by Annie’s haunting vocals, offered greater than 100million albums.

Stewart has ‘Stardust’, tattooed throughout his knuckles, symbolising desires turning into actuality. But if younger Dave’s boyhood ambitions had come true, he’d have discovered a really completely different type of fame – enjoying within the pink and white striped strip of Sunderland Athletic FC.

“I grew up dreaming of playing for Sunderland. I played football for my school team, I played in three different teams, I played on our cobbled street every night. From six years old to 13, football was my obsession. My dad used to take me to Roker Park – the roar of the crowd, the small of the peanuts…every match was an occasion. Then I broke my left knee.

“I remember the doctor saying ‘You’ll be able to play football in a year’. I was devastated.”

His cousin despatched presents from Memphis, together with Robert Johnson’s album, King Of The Delta Blues Singers. “I put it on and went into a trance, it affected me so much.”

Using his older brother’s Spanish guitar, Dave discovered it surprisingly straightforward to select melody traces. When his mom left his accountant father, Stewart escaped into pop – “I couldn’t think of anything else. I told the careers officer I wanted to work in music. He handed me an offer to work at the Pyrex factory.”

At 16 he dropped out of Bede Grammar School and joined a prog-folk combo known as Amazing Blondel, by hiding at the back of their van and leaping out, guitar in hand, after they reached Scunthorpe.

Moving to London, Dave spent a lot of the 70s enjoying with forgotten folk-rockers Longdancer, frittering away cash on leisure medication.

He met Aberdeen-born Lennox in 1977. She was working as a waitress in a Hampstead restaurant – virtually a Human League music – after dropping out of the Royal Academy Of Music. It was love
at first sight. They had been a pair for 5 years, residing in a squat and performing in Peet Coombes’s The Tourists who had two
Top Ten hits, together with a canopy of I Only Wanna Be With You, earlier than folding, owing the report firm £35,000.

Stress over debt break up them up, however Dave and Annie nonetheless shared a squat and she or he even helped him stop his drug dependancy.

Dave lastly bought clear at 28, after a automobile crash punctured a lung.

During the lengthy restoration interval he threw himself into writing songs that turned the Eurythmics’ life-changing 1983 album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This).

When the duo arrived in America there was already an enormous buzz about them.

“A DJ in Cleveland had got hold of a white label of Sweet Dreams and was playing it. Eventually the record company realised it was us.” They bought a US supervisor and performed Forest Hills Stadium, NY, with the B-52s.

“Rolling Stone magazine wanted to put us on their cover. Our eureka moment came in San Francisco. We got a phone call saying, ‘You’re number one’. Annie and I jumped up and down on the bed, then sat down and thought, what does it mean?”

It meant queues across the block from that night time on. They packed out arenas everywhere in the globe. “We played the Reichstag in Berlin in 1987 and there were riots – East Berliners were fighting the police, trying to get over the wall.

“It was the night Bowie played and it was all going off on the other side…”

Pop generally is a scorching and sticky enterprise, by no means extra so than when Dave ordered clam chowder in a elaborate New York resort on the top of the Eurythmics’ fame. “I was in the shower when it arrived, so I wrapped a towel around me and put the bowl on the leaf of the table while I loosened the towel.

“The leaf collapsed and the clam chowder spilled where you don’t want it to go. It was boiling hot and sticky. I had second-degree burns. It’s one of most painful memories in my life. I couldn’t eat soup for years.”

Dave was partly accountable for certainly one of my most painful recollections – once I ended up boxing world welterweight champ Lloyd Honeyghan on the Eurythmics’ finish of tour celebration in December, 1986.

“That was the Revenge tour,” he remembers. “It wasn’t meant to happen. It got out of hand.”

He apologises unnecessarily, as a result of I loved each second. Once the ache subsided. Futuristic Eurythmics’ hits got here with movies stuffed with then unique gender-fluid imagery, like Annie’s enterprise go well with in Sweet Dreams and her a number of costume adjustments in Love Is A Stranger.

“As we started writing songs together, I learnt how to record and produce. I also wrote the video scripts, three and a half minute surreal films, that were quite strange compared to other people’s videos.

“Sweet Dreams is a massive anthem. You still hear it everywhere – string quartets, EDM festivals…”

urythmics’ albums had been within the UK charts for 9 years. “We had hits in pretty much every country, including South Korea, India and Malaysia. But different songs topped the chart in different territories.

“Poland went for The Miracle Of Love, Australia preferred Would I Lie To You.”

Dave remembers an ill-fated present in New Zealand. “A cyclone came across the football stadium and fans were getting blown away. That also happened in Virginia.”

Jack Nicholson, a fan who turned a good friend, taught them methods to get most impact from minimal effort.

“He told us when you go back on stage, stand together holding hands and stare at the audience.

“We did, and they went crazier than I’ve ever seen them go before.”

Dave and Annie are nonetheless associates and discuss typically, he says. “We’ve had disagreements but never a row.”

Three-times-married Dave has two sons with second spouse Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama and Shakespeare’s Sister; and two daughters together with his Dutch spouse, photographer Anoushka Fisz.

Author, film-maker, hotelier, charity fundraiser…multi-award-winning Dave was nicknamed “the wasp” as a baby as a result of he was at all times buzzing with power.

He wrote the songs for The Time Traveller’s Wife musical, which has simply opened at London’s Apollo Theatre, with
Joss Stone. (Before that got here Barbarella and Ghost: The Musical).

Stewart claims he goals to “collapse and chill out” after this tour, however he’s already planning gigs for subsequent 12 months.

“I want to keep playing live, I’ve always loved playing guitar. The world is my stage.”

● Dave Stewart’s Eurythmics Songbook Tour performs Sunderland Empire Nov 10 and London Palladium Nov 17. Tickets at livenation.co.uk