LOS ANGELES, OCTOBER 2005: Back in the early 1940s, legendary crime writer Raymond Chandler used this suite of rooms on the sixth floor of a Hollywood office building as his work place and home away from home: The High Window, the third of his novels to feature the hard-bitten, Bogart-enacted detective Philip Marlowe was crafted on a typewriter here, and remains in print to this day. And now, this same downtown address is the centre of operations for omni-talented, mutli-tasking, forever-busy Dave Stewart, a son of Sunderland in north-east England but now settled on America’s west coast with his wife and young family. And it was here that he brought his former musical partner Annie Lennox two months ago, while she was on a flying visit to the US.

"I just wanted to show her my new studio set-up," he says in his typically soft-spoken, unassuming way, and nodding in the direction of a small, square room kitted out with the most cutting edge recording equipment currently available. Within hours the pair had written the best part of their first new material for 5 years, I've Got A Life remembers Annie, whose most recent accomplishments include mesmerising a global audience of millions with her performances at this summer’s Live 8 concerts in London and Edinburgh, and winning the 2004 Oscar for Best Original Song with 'Into The West', from The Lord Of The Rings: The Return of the King. While Dave himself has recently picked up a US Music Critic Award and Golden Globe for Best Original Song in a Motion Picture for 'Old Habits Die Hard', for the celebrated re-make of 'Alfie'.

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