All Tomorrow's Parties

A familiar name in the Canterbury scene, Dave Stewart's career reached unexpected highs in the 1980s when he teamed up with Spirogyra's Barbara Gaskin for an unlikely pop cover. Forty years on, the pair are still making "intelligent pop" with a ninth studio album on the way. Now preparing to play a very special one-off show in London this summer, Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin tell Prog about the unexpected spark that's led to their longstanding musical, and romantic, relationship.

- Sid Smith

In March 1981, Prog readers would have been forgiven for raising an eyebrow in surprise upon seeing Dave Stewart, previously keyboardist with Egg, Hatfield And The North and National Health, sharing a Top Of The Pops stage with The Zombies' Colin Blunstone. They were there promoting Stewart's delightfully skewed reworking of Jimmy Ruffin's What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted as it hovered just outside the UK's Top 10.

But that surprise would be as nothing compared to the shock of seeing Stewart back on the show a few months later, this time with Barbara Gaskin singing an equally idiosyncratic arrangement of Lesley Gore's 1963 teen-angst hit, It's My Party. When the song settled down to a four-week stint at No.1 nobody was more astonished than the duo themselves. "It was just completely bizarre," says Gaskin, reflecting on the strange and unexpected turn in their careers that ultimately changed their lives. "We'd both been in bands prior to that and we were 30 when we had that hit, so we were kind of mature, but of course, we were very surprised when it shot up the charts."

"It was insane," recalls Stewart. "It was like a kind of crazy film made by a lunatic director of what could happen to serious musicians if they take a step to the left into a new dimension. It was like a fantasy film."

His previous forays into TV had been with National Health on The Old Grey Whistle Test and as a member of Bill Bruford's band on BBC Two series Rock Goes To College at the tail-end of the 1970s. While both of these could be said to embody the kind of show on which you'd expect to encounter Dave Stewart, fronting a single that become a best-seller in places as far afield as Germany and Australia was most definitely not.

Recording the song was intended to be nothing more than a laugh at the time, says Stewart now.