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Dave's background Both Annie and Dave had considerable diversity in their lives before their paths crossed. As a boy growing up in the northern England town of Sunderland, Dave's first dreams were of sports stardom. He seemed athletically well coordinated in his preteen years and tried his hand at running, pole vaulting, soccer, and even skiing. But he told a Billboard interviewer: "When I was 12, I broke my knee in a match and was in hospital for ages. I got so fidgety with nothing to do that someone brought me a guitar, which of course was near fatal."

He focused the next few years on learning as much as he could about playing guitar. But while he listened to pop music on the radio or records, he didn't attend his first rock concert until he was 15. (His primal influences, he said, were folk- rockers such as Robert Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt.) The first band he heard live was Amazing Blondel, which combined English folk music with rock. Dave was so carried away that he ran away from home, stowing away in the group's traveling van. His parents, after finding out about his whereabouts, reluctantly consented to his staying with the band as sometimes roadie and backing guitarist.

After a while, he formed his own band, Longdancer, which was given a contract in the mid-1970s by Elton John's label, Rocket Records. In pursuit of his musical goals, he spent a considerable amount of time on the road, driving to all sorts of engagements at small clubs throughout Europe. That phase of his career was brought up short by a car crash in Germany that caused, among other things, an injury to a lung. He returned to London for repair surgery on the lung and some rest and recuperation. While doing that, he began talking about new projects with another Sunderland musician, Peet Coombes. The two were having dinner in a London eating place when they struck up a conversation with their waitress, Annie Lennox.