When Dave Stewart released his autobiographical album Ebony McQueen back in 2022, he promised there would be more to the story — like, a story, told on film. Now it’s lights, camera, action time.
Under the auspices of his Dave Stewart Entertainment, the Eurythmics co-founder has announced an early 2025 production start for the Ebony McQueen film, which will be set and filmed in Stewart’s hometown of Sunderland in northeast England. It will be directed by BAFTA Award winner Shekhar Kapur (2022’s What’s Love Got to Do With It?, 1998’s Elizabeth) from a script written by Stewart, Lorne Campbell, Selma Dimitrijevic and Peter Souter. It stars Sharon D. Clarke — who was also part of Stewart’s Ghost the Musical, in the title role — and Sunderland singer-songwriter Tom A. Smith as the aspiring musician guided by the spectral McQueen’s presence.
“The kernel of this idea I had very early on in (the album), and it stayed in my head,” Stewart tells Billboard via Zoom from his home studio in Nashville. “As I was writing the songs there were all these concepts or ideas or imaginings. On the album, obviously it’s me singing all the songs but in the film, it’ll be the character, and I always had that in my head.”
The Ebony McQueen story comes directly out of Stewart’s youth, from when he was an aspiring football (soccer here in the States) player laid low by a broken knee. The silver lining, and his savior, was music.
“It’s a time in my life when it was a total disaster,” Stewart recalls. “My mum had left my dad and he was depressed and my brother had gone away from college and I was alone with my broken knee. And this amazing intervention happened where a postman came with a box from my older cousin in Memphis…with two pairs of corduroy jeans and these blues albums — Robert Johnson, people like that. I had never listened to music but I was so bored and fed up, and my dad had made a little homemade record player in his workshop. So I put (the records) on and it was one of those boom! moments where in one hour everything went from gloom and doom to ‘What the hell is this?!’ How do I do this?!’ I never looked back.”
Ebony McQueen isn’t Stewart’s first foray into film. He’d directed music videos for Eurythmics and others and made his feature directorial debut with the black comedy Honest in 2000. He won a Golden Globe Award in 2005 for “Old Habits Die Hard,” a collaboration with Mick Jagger, for the Alfie remake. Prior to all that, and more on-point, he was a principle figure in producing the 1991 documentary Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads, which is also at the heart of his desire to make Ebony McQueen.
“It was a very slow process,” Stewart says of the project’s gestation. “During Covid I had quite a bit of time to develop and think about the whole thing, and it became more and more like a movie than something for the stage.” Co-producer David Parfitt (Shakespeare in Love, The Father) is a BAFTA and Academy Award winner (and also from Sunderland), while Stewart met director Kapur during 1994 in India, when they had neighboring hotel rooms and Kapur heard Stewart working on music through the walls.
“We got on like a house on fire then,” Stewart says, “and he invited me and my wife to a screening of Elizabeth, so I met him again then. Twenty-odd years later we’re suddenly doing this movie together. So it started to become like a great, very small group of people rather than sitting in a room with loads of writers at Paramount or somewhere, and some executives chipping in. This is a very homemade, indie group of people who all have the same feeling about how this should be.”
Stewart has no plans to appear in Ebony McQueen himself, not even in a cameo à la Alfred Hitchcock or Stan Lee. “It’s a very short snapshot of a period in my teenage life, probably six months, and it stays in that world so there’s no need to have me, now, in it,” he notes. He is, however, writing new music for the production, including score music with A.R. Rahman — who was a bandmate in the short-lived SuperHeavy project with Jagger, Joss Stone and Damian Marley — as well as some fresh songs.
“As the script develops and changes, you need bits of songs and melodies to fit this scene or in that spot,” Stewart says. “I love creating these melodies that can also fit in this other song later on, because that’s where you write something where the worlds are colliding and coming together. So you can have a theme for Sunderland on the river but you can also use it for a character. It’s a tool that can help tell the story.”
Firm dates as well as distribution plans are still being worked out for Ebony McQueen, while Stewart remains involved in other projects; he co-produced Daryl Hall’s latest album, D, and has toured since 2023 with a Eurythmics songbook show featuring an all-female band. Who To Love, a multimedia collaboration with Italy’s Mokadelic and actress Greta Scarano, premiered at the Rome Festival last October, and he’s been busy with Artificial Intelligence experiments in the recording studio.
“I’m getting at this amazing stage of my life where I’m not winding down. I’m winding up into a world where it’s going to be more and more adventurous with AI and things you can do now with sound and light and…sound and vision, as Bowie would say,” Stewart notes. “You can do incredible things now, in all sorts of venues. I know a lot of people are going nuts about AI, for valid reasons, but it’s not like people can make it go away. I remember when drum machines came out and there was an uproar from the musicians’ union — and drummers — and now it’s just part of everything. Or when the labels were all panicking about the Internet. It doesn’t matter how hard you try and resist it; once it’s already there it’s there, and it’s just something you have to work with — and hopefully for the better.”
