Stephen Dale Petit

Grave illness and a broken heart have tested Stephen Dale Petit – but the bluesman tells us that completing his Clapton-bolstered masterpiece, Be The Love, is all that matters

- Words Henry Yates

For Stephen Dale Petit, new album Be The Love holds a Molotov cocktail of emotions. The Anglo-American bluesman takes a deep breath and decides which one he’ll dredge to the surface first. There’s pride in an album that is hands-down the career peak of the man once dubbed a “blues hooligan” by Mojo, who has revved and ripped up trad-roots since he debuted with 2008’s Guitararama. There’s heartbreak bleeding across seven tracks that kick the hornet nest of a failed relationship.

Alongside that, there’s gallows humour, which the 56-year-old draws upon more each day as he battles a life-threatening illness. “I didn’t start out trying to make a masterpiece,” he reflects. “But I was diagnosed with cancer in November 2022, within months of starting Be The Love. It certainly occupied my mind, the premise that this album wouldn’t get finished. So music became everything. I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m not going to try to please anyone – the songs are the songs, and this album is me.’”

The songs on your new album, Be The Love, aren’t written about your illness, are they?

“No, I wrote them from a whole different place. The relationship I was in broke up, earlier in 2022. She also happened to be in my band. It was all unclear for a few months. And when I established what the new reality was, I literally broke down. Then I grabbed a guitar and Cherish A Ghost came out.

“They say there are five life events that are all equal as emotional minefields. Birth, death, marriage, divorce and moving house. This relationship might as well have been a divorce. We were so close. And I wrote Cherish A Ghost from the wound, when it was still a wound, in the process of healing. I cried and cried. But you go through every emotion under the sun. A Better Man is almost like a rediscovery: ‘Okay, there is no us, so what’s my identity?’ All the songs are about her, except one –