Transcript
Dave Stewart: Hi. I'm David Allen
Stewart, and I'm a cultural engineer.
Topic: The
Internet.
Dave Stewart: Well, the Internet right about 12 years ago was a revelation when I
discovered what it did. And my
imagination leapt into, like, what it possibly could do, and would do. And right about 1995, '96 maybe, I
created my own sort of version of a YouTube channel called Sly Fi, the Sly Fi Network, I called it.
And I was running around telling everybody, "Oh, this is it. Look, we can all have our own T.V.
channels."
And I made all these crazy
programs with Damian Hernst and The Edge, Bono, and Deepak Chopra, and I had
them up, you know, but the trouble was, it was only about, you know, 100 people
could see them because they had Broadband, and they loved them, they were going
"hurray! This is the new
way! It's the future world,"
and all that stuff, but not enough sustainability to keep it going. And then I was-- I think I was probably
the first person to put out a total digital release album, which I also called Sly
Fi. And the company that I did it with, they were very forward
thinking and they realized everybody was going to want to just download stuff
and so I said, "Okay, let's not release this as a physical product." This is back in 1996 or something.
Dave Stewart: Well, let's rewind back to 1982, you know, where Sweet Dreams came out and we were using technology then in a
way. I drove with this friend of
mine about 200 miles to this place where a guy had made a prototype of a drum
computer, a little screen, and you could actually-- it was black and white. It
looked like a little Siloscope, you know, and you could actually program a beat
into it. Now, this was a
revelation and I was so excited about the idea of this.
But, again, being sort of
somebody who has a sort of vision about, "Oh, what would that lead
to? And what would that lead
to," I realized straight away, okay, everything is going to change and
people are going to make records in their bedroom, or wherever they want, because
they don't need to have these great big studios anymore to make a certain kind
of music, obviously for orchestras and stuff, and bands playing loud. And I found that every exciting. I did a lot of interviews at the time,
and it spawned a lot of young artists going, "Oh, great, yeah, I
understand I can go in my bedroom and I can write a song."
But the long tale of the
artist is something that's yet to really be unleashed because it took ages for
film companies and record labels to realize, you know, that piece of film of Bob
Dylan talking to Allen Ginsberg, stoned, you know, poetry, is actually a valuable
thing that lots of Dylan fans would love.
But CBS was like, "What the hell are we going to do with
this?" Now, all artists
have-- and creators and filmmakers and scriptwriters, and everybody, have a big
problem that everybody is trying to work out about what's the transactional
model, what's the revenue streams, how do we get transparency, what about if we
give this stuff and it happens like the last time where some great big sort of
corporate company goes, "Oh, yes, we own all this and whatever else you do
forever and ever, even if you go insane.
Please sign here."
And what's exciting about--
going back to your question about how it's changed and how it's changed the way
you think about what you're doing, is I see a world of transparency coming that
is going to be impossible to stop.
It's like a juggernaut, you know, people want to know what's going on.
And there's no reason why
they shouldn't because, now, with cell phone technology and Internet, and so
forth, you should be able to say, "Oh, I see, I buy this, and this person
gets paid that, and that person gets paid that, and the person who created it
gets paid that, and the person who…"
Dave Stewart: I was really a student of a
guy called Conny Plank, who was a German producer who worked with Craftwork in
Cannes and he was already far ahead of anybody, you know, he produced Devo and
bands like this and he taught me really what recording is all about, and he
also taught me things to do, even before looping, you know, or sampling. He was creating these big tape loops
and playing with everything like a collage.
He really let me understand
that, "Listen, whatever anybody says the rules are, there are no
rules. And you can just do
whatever you want and if it sounds fantastic to you, then you do it." So he was, like, a really big influence
and a kind of mentor at the time.
Dave Stewart: At the moment, there's a wonderful Indian composer called
A R Raman, now he's sold
about 300 million cassettes in India, and you can imagine, you know, there's a
lot of bootlegging goes on in India, so he scored hundreds of movies and he's
still only about, I don't know, 38 or 40 years old. And I'm sending files backwards and forwards to him to India
and we're collaborating on something.
Then I'm collaborating via a chap in Hong Kong, Hans Ebert, looking for a Chinese girl to do a duet with, to be
in my video, which he'll film against green screen, and I'll put her in a
complete out of context song with me.
I'm doing all these things
all day long as part of my sort of creative inquisitive nature, and I have no
rhyme nor reason why and how this would come out in a commercial way, like,
"Oh, yes, and now I'm going to make a pop video like this." It's just part of something.
