HOLLOW EARTH

Stewart's earliest encounter with a keyboard was at the tender age of 3, where, left alone with a newly purchased Bontempi Reed organ, he lovingly broke off every single key! The subsequent "interview" with his parents might explain his psychological drive to acquire as many keyboards as he has done! This early experience was followed by many years in the musical wilderness (spent climbing trees, skimming stones and many other outdoor activities that excluded the civilised learning of an instrument). At the age of 11 his Grandmother bought him a piano (tenuously based on his ability to play John Denvers "Annie's Song" using one finger - and mostly on one note! Inspired by this turn of fortune, he studiously ignored it as it lurked in the corner of the room and continued to climb trees, skim stones and stubbornly refuse to come in for tea!!!

A small brush with stardom (playing the xylophone at a school concert) and an awakening of his "music soul" in his early teens led to a dramatic inversion. Away went his tan, his leathery feet and hands, and his grazed knees, to be exchanged for pale, vampyrish skin-tones, a predilection for darkened rooms and an obsession with the cracks between the ivories and ebonies! By 15, he was listening to and playing pieces by Rick Wakeman (who, if he'd been dead, would have been spinning in his grave) and starting to write his own compositions. A guitar arrived on the scene and a
whole new vista opened up before him (but not, apparently, for his parents who now felt besieged!)

A formal education and the real world intervened for a brief matter of 20 years or so in which he played for a "one-night only" band called "Dragonfly"; an abortive "Queen-meets-Yes-is-defeated-by-the-Thrash-bass-player" band called "Blackstone Edge"; and finally hooks up with Kym Blackman to form the first line-up of "Hollow Earth".

Stewart has lost count of (or run out of fingers and toes to count them on) the number of gigs he has played with "Hollow Earth", but he has yet to encounter an extreme sport that can give the same adrenalin rush as suddenly realising that he hasn't the faintest idea of how to finish the intro to "Firth of Fifth" when he is now half-way through it! His as-yet unrealised ambition is to get the Genesis epic "Supper's Ready" into the set, and he is working on a concept album based on Ursula le Guin's original "Earthsea" trilogy.

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