MAN ON FIRE

Heartbroken and stricken with cancer, Stephen Dale Petit found his masterpiece in the shape of Be The Love, an album that burns with the urgency and creativity of a man on borrowed time.

- Words: Henry Yates Photos: Rob Blackham

One Friday night back in August, my phone lit up with Stephen Dale Petit's caller ID. Nothing unusual in that: the Anglo-American bluesman doesn't use press officers, has little regard for office hours, and by this point is almost a friend. He asked me to stop what I was doing, check my emails, listen to the six-minute track he'd just sent me, then call him straight back. Seems important, I thought.

The song was stunning: a stately slow-burn lament topped by a molten guitar solo, with Petit acknowledging a litany of fuck-ups over his 56 years, but always cycling back to the titular phrase: 'I will do all that I can, I will strive to be a better man'. When I returned the call, full of praise, the guitarist told me I was the first 'outsider' to hear the lead track from his new album Be The Love, which he believed was the album of his career. But when I asked why it had taken a half-decade to put out a followup to 2020's Visions - winner of Classic Rock's blues album of the year - the conversation got heavy. For the past three years, Petit told me, he'd been fighting an aggressive cancer. Now, it was no longer a case of if, but when.

"I went through all this in 2017," he said. "Then it was five years of all-clear. I thought it was done. But at the end of November 2022 I got the call.

"I had a scan, which showed the tumour," he continues. "It's in a really difficult-to-access place. After my first chemo, when I began easing back into Be The Love, I thought to myself: 'Well, if this proves to be my last album, let's pull out all the stops and make it a masterpiece."

To those who have followed his studio records since 2008's