Sue Steward
Telegraph journalist who once looked after Sid Vicious and went on to become an expert on salsa
SUE STEWARD, who has died aged 70, was a journalist and broadcaster who worked for 12 years as picture editor on the arts desk of The Daily Telegraph. Her endless curiosity and eclectic range of enthusiasms led to her writing knowledgeably across the whole spectrum of the arts, from photography to “outsider art”, but it was for her particular passion for music from Africa and Latin America that she would become best known. Her work as a journalist and broadcaster made her an influential figure in elevating “world music” to wider attention at a time when the term was hardly known. Her book, Salsa: Musical Heartbeat of Latin America (1999), is widely regarded as the definitive history of the form, earning her the nickname La Stewarda.
Sue Steward was born on September 19 1946 and grew up in Stathern in Leicestershire. Her father, Francis, was a corn merchant, her mother Jean looked after their two daughters and a son.
After attending Melton Mowbray Grammar School, she studied at Liverpool University for a degree in Botany, Zoology and Chemistry. But her principal passions were music and photography. Following a brief period as a secondary school teacher she moved to London, working as a picture researcher for the nascent environmental organisation Friends of the Earth before taking a job with Richard Branson’s newly founded Virgin Records, firstly in the mailorder department, and then in publicity, looking after a diverse range of artists from Mike Oldfield to Captain Beefheart.
“Sue was an inspirational figure,” Branson recalled. “She loved music and the bands that made it. And she was perceptive – she could spot trends with a clear eye and she was usually right.”
It was Steward who introduced Branson to the photographer Trevor Key, who would design and photograph the cover for Virgin’s first album, the multi-million selling
Tubular Bells. When the producer of that album, Tom Newman, recorded his own LP, the first track was a song dedicated to her, Suzy. “I think, in those days,” Branson said, “Tom might have had quite a choice, but there was something about Sue that tells me none of them had a chance.”
Her work at Virgin led to a period working with Malcolm Mclaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols, where her duties involved arranging the domestic affairs of Sid Vicious and his wayward girlfriend Nancy Spungen – a pairing that she would later describe as “helpless, charming and absolutely terrifying”.
In 1981, along with the writer David Toop, she co-founded the music magazine Collusion. Sue Steward had visited New York, returning with a cache of 12 in hip hop singles, and her piece for Collusion was one of the first in the British press to pay attention to the new genre. By now, she had developed a particular passion for Latin American and African music, cultivated by scouring the racks at Stern’s African music shop in the Tottenham Court Road. As well as contributing to Collusion, she boosted world music through her writings in City Limits and Straight No Chaser. At the same time she worked as a DJ for the pirate radio station K-jazz, wheeling her large collection of records in a supermarket trolley to the tower block in South London from where the station was broadcast, the better to avoid the attentions, as she thought, of investigators from the Department of Trade and Industry.
In 1992 she joined The Daily Telegraph as a picture editor on the arts desk. It was while working on the paper that she began writing her book, Salsa: Musical Heartbeat of Latin America, tracing the music’s geographical roots from Cuba to the US, from Puerto Rico and Colombia back to Africa. Sue Steward travelled in Latin America and immersed herself in the Hispanic musical community in New York, establishing friendships with artists including Celia Cruz, Ruben Blades, Willie Colon and Gloria Estefan. “All the musicians on that scene just loved her,” David Toop remembered. “She was a complete rarity – a person from England who really knew about the music and loved it.”
The book was published in 1999, and in the same year, along with her co-author Sheryl Garrett, she published Signed, Sealed, Delivered – True Life Stories of Women in Pop,a study of the changing place of women in pop from the 1950s to the era of punk.
While continuing to write extensively about music for a wide variety of publications, in later years Sue Steward became increasingly involved in photographic and art projects, writing about “outsider art” for the magazine Raw Vision, curating photography exhibitions and becoming photography critic for the London Evening Standard.
She left London for Brighton, living in a small house crammed with records, photographs, books and paintings, continuing as an enthusiastic supporter and champion for young artists, musicians and photographers, teaching, lending advice, and judging photographic competitions.
Sue Steward was a woman of great personal warmth and humility. The fluency of her writing belied the agonies she would go through at the typewriter, struggling to convey her passion for the subject at hand. Nothing illustrated the integrity and eloquence of her writing more vividly, and movingly, than an article she wrote for the Observer in 2009, on the subject of photography and death.
In this she described how she had photographed her mother following her death in a nursing home. She wrote of her deep sadness at arriving four hours too late to be at her mother’s side as she died, and standing with her family at her bedside. “My brother and sister-in-law stood mute, two of the kindest carers wept, and Mum lay partly under the covers, her hands exposed. She was in a different realm from us now, one I didn’t understand. We were here, she was here, but where was she? I’d missed that moment of transference I’d so badly wanted to witness – her ‘passing’, but, for the first time, understood how that word is so apt.”