Steve Stewart
“When I was 18 or 19, living in Cumbria, I was dragged to a show by The Enid. It was one of the most extraordinary formative musical experiences of my life. It was 1983 and I was very anti-chart music, and they were so far away from the mainstream that you needed binoculars. With Steve Stewart there were no pentatonic scales, so it was very non-bluesy and very non-American. I love players whose style is so individual that it precedes them: David Gilmour, Mike Oldfield, Brian May… You instantly recognise the sound, and Steve’s one of them.
“It appealed to me that this was very classically European – more Elgar or Mahler than American blues – as I have pastoral English-sounding musical sensibilities. They were full-on rock, mind you, they weren’t lily-livered, and they were like nothing I’d heard.”