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Eurythmics co-founder explains why his business card says that he is a change agent. (1:46)
 

Tavis: Along with his music partner Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart cofounded the band Eurythmics, which has sold more than 70 million albums to date. He's also enjoyed great success as a solo artist and as a collaborator, including a recent CD with Ringo Starr called "Liverpool 8."

On May 2nd, his HBO interview series "Off the Record" is back and includes a conversation with Ringo. Dave Stewart, nice to have you on the program.

Dave Stewart: Very nice to be here.

Tavis: Glad to have you here, man. How've you been?

Stewart: I've been very well, but busier and busier.

Tavis: Very busy? Yeah. I was looking at all the stuff that you have been doing of late, trying to figure out where I wanted to start this conversation and where I wanted to center it, and what was fascinating for me was your business card was handed to me and your title on the business card says "change agent."

Stewart: That's right.

Tavis: Which really goes to the heart of all the stuff you've been working on for so many years. Why "change agent" on your business card?

Stewart: Well, that's a business card that was made by Nokia, who are the largest cell phone company in the world, as you know. And they were wondering what title to give me, and basically I'm interested in creating disruptive business models, or disruptive business paradigms within the entertainment industry but also outside of it, too, so that's what I am doing.

Tavis: When you say "disruptive," oftentimes that word is not taken as something that's kind, something that's nice. When you say "disruptive," what do you mean by that?

Stewart: Well, I think sometimes when it's the end of an era or things become stale, you need something like a change agent to come in and sort of turn it upside down and look at it from the other end of the periscope, so that's what I'm doing to do with the entertainment industry, but I'm also doing that in other areas to do with sustainability and eco-friendly things.

And I think a lot of the time people start off - for instance, in the area of, say, eco-friendly stuff or the beginning of organic foods, and people would open up certain shops and websites and they all looked kind of like people knitting yoghurt sweaters, if you know what I mean. It was all very whole meal and bran and friendly.

And I think things have to be attacked with the same sort of ferociousness as they do when they campaign and market huge other businesses which are not so socially responsible.

Tavis: What about, then, the music industry most needs to be disrupted? If you're going to walk into this thing called the music industry room and start turning stuff over, disrupting things, what is that, mostly?

Stewart: Well it's funny you should say that because I've been doing meetings and talks on the top floor of the largest banks in Europe and in Visa board room and in Nokia's board room, for instance, and one of the things that's always been a problem is the transparency of accounting between the companies and the creators or the artists, and also the direct connectivity between the artists and the people, knowing who they are, who their fans are.

This is a massive subject to talk about, but for instance I knew the music business was over when in about 1985 I was called to a meeting at RCA Records and they'd just brought in the CEO of Hertz Rent-A-Car to run RCA Records, which was a bit (laughter) worrying, to say the least. And I went to meet him and he was a big guy, slapped me on the back and says, "Hey, I love your new album, it sounds just like 'Ghostbusters.'"

And I was like, whoa. And then he said, "I've got a great idea. We're going to make little toys of you and Annie and we're going to do a deal with McDonalds. And I was trying to explain that Annie was a vegan at the time.

Tavis: Right. (Laughs)

Stewart: Anyway, this chap was actually later gunned down and killed by his own children. His name was Jose Menendez; there was a big, huge Menendez trial.

Tavis: (Unintelligible) yeah.

Stewart: So in 1985 I already had the idea that things aren't well, you know? And then at the beginning of the Internet I could see easily that there was going to be a huge downfall and that it was a chance, for instance, for artists to take back some of the portion of the property which is rightfully theirs.

Tavis: I was in a conversation the other night with someone I'm sure you know, a dear friend of mine, Prince. And Prince has been talking about some of these issues for years now, particularly where accountability is concerned, where transparency is concerned.

He was out a long time ago. We all remember (unintelligible) slave carved in his face. So he's been talking about these issues for a long time, and yet I wonder, now that you're here discussing this tonight, how those kinds of massive issues like transparency, like accountability, I can't imagine any scenario under which a record company is willingly going to become transparent, willingly wants to be held accountable. That's not the way the game is played.

Stewart: Yeah, exactly. The whole business model, actually, was - well, it was about distribution and holding the pipe, and it was also about all of the food chain, which could hold money for many periods, nine to 27 months, without paying it out. But they all know that the game's up and the fence is down, and the trouble is artists, as you know, trying to get a bunch of artists together to sort of organize a new sort of revolutionary business model.

It's like trying to saddle a rat, as Quincy Jones said. But the way in which to do it is obviously, from my perspective, is to work with huge companies who know how to do this kind of stuff, and also coming from a completely different position. They're not coming from within the music industry, trying to reinvent itself. And that's what I'm in the process of doing.

You've got to understand, like, you bought that suit, say, in Milan, and you swiped your Visa card and you got impatient while you were waiting the seven seconds for the machine to go click-click, it's all right, I'll give you your suit. That information has been all around the world into your bank account, through an FDR system, a STAR system.

Said okay, you've got this Visa card, you've got this deal with your bank, the merchant (unintelligible) works it all out 1.4 seconds and you're paid and settled in 24 hours. My song gets played on the radio and sometime between nine and 27 months later I have some kind of foggy accounting saying somewhere something happened and you got something like this.

Tavis: Tell me, with all this haze around the business of music, how, for the years you've been doing this you have concentrated on the music, speaking of being disrupted. How do you keep from being disrupted by all this other stuff going on around and concentrate on the music that you have done with Annie and others over the years?

Stewart: Well, I think - some people call it, like, the tower of chaos or the eye in the center of the storm, or whatever you want to call it. But basically, I feel that all of the creative stuff is just happening anyway in the atmosphere and it's a matter of channeling it.

So I'm not worried about writing a song. I'm actually going on tour in September, playing some of my songbook catalogue; songs that I've written with Gwen Stefani or Mick Jagger or Annie or whatever, and none of those songs were like oh, how are we going to write this with a piece of paper and a piano? It was just like they came in like lightning, like bang, like that.

And so that stuff's never bothered me. The more sort of challenging stuff is the stuff we've been talking about, is I want all artists to actually have a fair chance at being rewarded for their efforts. If you think about after the - between the slabs of gone civilizations, what is left but the art?

And I think it's about time that art and creativity was recognized as a currency, and that young artists coming up don't face a future where, well, actually it's hopeless to even think about a career in this area.

Tavis: How do you view the currency, if I can put it this way, to use your word, the currency that the Internet is, can be, should be, ought to be?

Stewart: It's an interesting thing, the Internet, because nobody's actually running it, and it's just happening.

Tavis: Not yet, at least.

Stewart: Not yet. Well, we might still think nobody's running it. Maybe somebody is. But well, the thing is that there is an opportunity for people to get their stuff out there in the MySpaces and this and that. But anyway, if I'd had MySpace or if I was the owner of MySpace or the creator, and when I sold it I would have divided a billion dollars between all those kids that put their music and their films and everything up there and created the content that gave MySpace the value that it was.

If you think about it, MySpace, if you took all that stuff down, was a bunch of people chatting, and I think these kind of things that are happening all the time on the Internet and turning into huge successes and being bought in the end by anybody from one of the most powerful guys in media and turning it into whatever it's going to turn into are exploiting young musicians, young artists' works.

Tavis: So how, then, do you stay hopeful about the music? Hopeful about the music, and hopeful about the future of artistry?

Stewart: Well, because where there's a will, there's a way. Creative people and artists are like water through any way possible, whether it's osmosis or whatever - they'll get there. But you see, there is a chance, an opportunity now for us all to seize the moment and say hang on, if Visa made that card 27 years ago work, and if this cell phone exists and you can instantly get messages, and if transparency is possible and if artists could, for once, be able to directly communication with fans or the consumers, as you want to say, then there is a way for a new model to forge ahead.

All the other models will coexist, and all the brilliant people in the entertainment industry, like, they are brilliant people there, will still be working, but it'll just be called something else.

Tavis: So tell me (unintelligible) go about the music that you're working on now. There's got to be - music is never too far away from you, and you're doing.

Stewart: Well, actually, when I say disruptive business models or change agent, it's very interesting for me because when I look at a problem I look at it differently with, like, kind of an - as Brian Eno would say, an oblique strategy. So for instance one of these things here - I want to put a musical out on Broadway. I didn't start with oh, how do I write a musical in Broadway? Started with a comic, and I called it "Zombie Broadway," right? So I'm creating a musical about zombies who infested New York and the only way they think they might be able to save it is they realize zombies like musicals.

Obviously it's an allegory and it's - George Bush comes into it and various other people, but it's very funny. But that's coming at something sideways, so many things. I'm actually writing the musical right now, "Ghost," from the movie, with the original Bruce Joel Ruben, who wrote the screenplay, and Glen Ballard, and that's a musical, it'll be on the West End.

But I'm also making a 20-track album with an orchestra and performed it live in September, and many other sort of music-orientated projects.

Tavis: And the Eurythmics - it's always fascinated me. You guys - I was just going to say you and Annie - have never really officially split, to my knowledge. The group isn't disbanded. It's just that you take these long hiatuses between projects.

Stewart: We do.

Tavis: So, like, where is that relationship now?

Stewart: It's in the middle of a long hiatus. (Laughter) But what's interesting, tonight I wanted to bring on the show and obviously I understood because it was last minute, a girl called Nadira X who you met with Harry Belafonte -

Tavis: (Unintelligible) radio program, absolutely.

Stewart: Yeah, you met her with Harry in Memphis, and she's got amazing things to say, socially and politically, and she's a woman who is very intelligent. The most erotic thing in a person's body is the brain. I should know, because I co-own two erotic stores; one on Melrose and one in Covent Garden. And I think there's something happening as well in the entertainment industry that's very disrespectful to women.

As a guy who wrote a song which Aretha Franklin and Annie sang, "Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves," back in the eighties, it seems pathetic and sort of a terrible shame to me to see how women are getting exploited so much in videos and in songs, and Nadira X is one woman I think that's going to change all that. And you'll see how when we start blogging tonight.

Tavis: Let me close right quick on this. With all due respect to women, and I could not agree more with your last point, exploited is the right word on the one hand; on the other hand, it seems to me there's so many people now who are willing to succeed, willing to get success, by any means necessary that they allow themselves to be exploited by this industry.

Stewart: Absolutely, yeah. They've been - I think it's unfortunate that people sit in, like, pods at home and they're bombarded by television, and trashy television, and that sends a message out in magazines to younger people saying, "Hey, you could be really successful and famous and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

They don't tell them that it's an empty shell and they'll end up staggering around on their hands and knees on Hollywood Boulevard, so.

Tavis: I see why Dave Stewart now - I've never done this before, I never started a show holding up somebody's business card. Then again, I never had a business card presented to me that said "change agent" as their title. Now you understand why his business card says "change agent." So much Dave Stewart has going on. Nice to have you come by.

Stewart: Very nice to meet you.

Tavis: Good to see you.