Dave Stewart: “Heart Of Stone” (EastWest)

The story-line about a man’s attraction to a pop songstress and the subsequently fulfilled hope for an affair is decadent yet hardly credible. Stewart was always the musical academic attempting to unlearn all he knew and ‘Heart of Stone’, co-written with Sharon Nelson, is yet another effort at trying to forget the rules and create thoughtlessly perfect pop. However, it sounds too well crafted to ever be anything more than an exercise in form.