Proud Mackem Dave Stewart releases most 'intimate' album to date including songs inspired by Sunderland

Fresh from debuting his new music at The Fire Station, Dave Stewart has released his new album.

The Way It Was Back Then, tracks from which Dave performed at two intimate home town shows recently, is now available on all digital service platforms.

Some of the songs were inspired by a long trip home last summer, when the multi award-winning music maker went back to the street where it all began.

It was rather serendipitous that he managed to find an Air BnB in Barnard Street, Barnes, the very street he lived until he was nine-years-old.

Although Dave is constantly creating, it was a holiday home that proved deeply inspirational and spawned new album track, The House Where I Was Born, a personal love letter to Sunderland, which Dave wrote in 2025 while looking out from the window of Number 9 towards Number 10 where a young Dave lived.

With the lyrics referencing the street, Penshaw Hill and his late parents, it’s a song that captures a powerful connection between memory, place and identity.

With the album as a whole, rather than approaching it through traditional songwriting sessions, Dave embraced an instinctive, almost meditative creative process.

Alongside his engineer/ bassist/ drummer Jesse Samler, the music emerged organically through spontaneous explorations of chords, melodies and emotion.

Speaking on The Way It Was Back Then, Dave said: “I wasn’t aware that I was making an album. I started to record myself singing songs at the same time as playing guitar.

“Almost every song, I just sang the words at the same time as singing the melodies and playing the chords, kind of freeform.

“There is a lot of looking back, and I suppose everyone goes through this at different times in their life, especially at my age, but this is not looking back in a soft nostalgic way.

“These songs are about memory, survival, love, loss, damage, loyalty, betrayal, and the strange feeling of still being here after all of it. All of this spewed out, with no lyrics written down, straight off the top of my head in one take.”

Alongside the digital release of the album on October 30, Dave released an accompanying video for Cry If You Want To, filmed impromptu by British artist and longstanding creative partner Kyle Wilkinson (HAUS OF THRILLS Studio).

Filmed at Eurythmics fan Steve Gayler’s house in Wingrave, it began with a different purpose: Stewart was visiting to look through Gayler’s Eurythmics archive and film some of the collection.

While there, Stewart and Wilkinson decided to turn the visit into an impromptu music video.