“From that moment, it blew my mind,” Dave Stewart told American Songwriter in 2022 of his music awakening between the ages of 14 and 16. Growing up in the old shipping town of Sunderland, England, young Stewart was forced to give up his dreams of playing football (soccer) after a severe knee injury and in a burst of fate was introduced to Delta Blues and a radio full of the Beatles, The Kinks, The Who, and Small Faces.
Stewart linked his musical coming-of-age to an almost out-of-body experience, under the guidance of voodoo queen, Ebony McQueen. Before “McQueen” came into his life, Stewart had never played a vinyl record, and blues became his gateway. “I put it on, and I went into kind of a trans,” said Stewart after first hearing Robert Johnson’s blues, given to him by a cousin who had visited Memphis, Tennessee. “I’d never heard anything like it. It sounded like something had come to earth. I was in shock.”
In 2022, Stewart sketched his early musical journey, young love, and other firsts, in the 26 songs of Ebony McQueen, which he is adapting into a film of the same.
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“It’s a story of my slice of my teenage life when all I wanted to do is play soccer, but my knee was broken into several parts, and my mom had left my dad, and my dad was depressed,” shared Stewart. “My brother had gone to college, so there was an empty house.”
Shot on location in Stewart’s hometown of Sunderland, Ebony McQueen will feature a score co-written with Oscar-winning composer and producer A.R. Rahman (Slumdog Millionaire, Elizabeth: The Golden Age).
Sunderland is also set to build one of the largest film studios in Europe, which will feature 20 sound stages and is estimated to create nearly 8,500 new jobs within the region. Construction began in 2023 and is set for completion by 2027.
Directed by Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth, What’s Love Got to Do With It?) and executive produced by Malcolm Gerrie, (Ibiza: The Silent Movie, Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe), Ebony McQueen will follow the script written by Stewart, along with Lorne Campbell, Selma Dimitrijevic, and Peter Souter.
Produced by Stewart along with fellow Sunderland native David Parfitt Shakespeare in Love, The Father), co-founder of Trademark Films, and David Jacobson (Lee Daniels’ The Butler, The Falconer) for Dave Stewart Entertainment, the film is in the initial stages of casting, which includes international talent from the UK, India, and the U.S.
[RELATED: 10 Songs You Didn’t Know Dave Stewart Wrote for Other Artists]
British actress and singer Sharon D. Clarke, who previously played Oda Mae in Stewart’s 2011 Ghost: The Musical, the stage adaptation of the 1990 drama Ghost, is set to take on the starring role of McQueen, alongside Tom A. Smith, also from Sunderland, though casting is still in progress with production set to commence in 2025.
“She becomes his guide through his teenage trauma, through his anxieties in life, and helps him cope with everything,” shares Stewart of McQueen. “She remains throughout the movie, while he discovers music and discovers the girl next door, and as he discovers the possibility that there’s another life that can happen outside of a very depressed town at the time.”
Photo: Helen Christensen
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