1990-10-11 Dave Stewart And The Spiritual Cowboys - Spiritual Cowboys - The Marquee Club - London - The UK

Information

Artist : Dave Stewart And The Spiritual Cowboys

Date : 1990-10-11

Tour Name : Spiritual Cowboys

Country : The UK

Town : London

Venue : The Marquee Club

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PublicationReview
Guardian (UK)THERE'S only one major problem in being a workaholic and playing in a famous rock band — what to do with yourself in those tedious months when the rest of the band decide to take a lengthy break. Rock history is littered with dubious solutions, from Entwhistle's Ox to Richards' New Barbarians or his solo album. Now, as Annie Lennox takes time off from the
music world and Eurythmics, her colleague Dave Stewart has rounded up a bunch of friends, recorded an album with them, and fed it back to the clubs where he started back in his struggling days with The Tourists.
Stewart, the only genuine rock idol on stage, modeled a series of his long-jacketed, embroidered Eurythmics suits. He looked deadpan as ever behind the pencil-thin moustache and lank hair and acted as if he was engaged in a serious chore rather than having fun.
Admittedly, he did have problems. The patchy Spiritual Cowboys album suffered from both over-ambition and a lumbering tedium in many of the rock ballads, and he now had the unenviable task of proving he could do better on stage. Alas, he had not stacked the odds in his favour.
He was surrounded by two boisterous drummers, a keyboard player and a batch of guitarists — an ideal line-up for a stomping rock night out. It was unfortunate then that Stewart's vocals were not up to such hefty backing, which also happened to be unsuitable for much of his material.
The result was an uneasy compromise — overblown ballads, often with half spoken vocals, but suddenly changed direction when he stopped singing and switched to a blitz of guitar solos. So a grand, sing-along ballad like Love Shines, which could have been a middle-of-the-road standard in other hands, became a dreary anthem under the rousing finale, while a rocker like Party-town simply failed to rock. Stewart was far happier with lighter, more quirky material like Jack Talking or the decidedly Dylanesque, tuneful and charming ode to suburbia, This Little Town, on which he played impressive harmonica.
A few more songs like that and Stewart's Spiritual Cowboys could perhaps provide the basis for a viable solo career. As it was he suffered from the Keith Richards syndrome, a song writer and guitarist in urgent need of a lead singer.

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