A couple of friends of mine were joking about how forgettable and unimportant Stevie Shears appears to be within Ultravox canon. I've been taking that as a challenge to find out anything about him, and I'm practically empty handed. A genuinely weird level of empty handedness for a band so successful.
I've been searching through newspaper and magazine archives and using a few different search engines and pretty much this is all that has come up:
- Stevie was the third member to join Tiger Lily. (John, Chris, Stevie, Warren, Billy, is the order) He played guitar up until Systems of Romance
- He was gone around 1978, apparently during a US tour, it's unclear if he left on his own or if he was fired. He was replaced by Robin Simon.
- After this, he was in the bands Cowboys International and Faith Global, which takes us up to 1983.
- An old version of the Ultravox Website had a forum, and Stevie (maybe, some people fake this stuff) made a single post on it in 2000 claiming he was still alive and still playing guitar.
Additional details:
Warren said that Stevie was "loyal and dependable" but that he had to leave because his guitar work was holding the band back.
Warren in the same interview implied that "Stevie Shears" is not a stage name.
I found a Usenet post asking this same question from 1992, but alas, no responses.
John Foxx said that Stevie was sick a lot of the time and they had to cancel shows because of that.
I'm literally looking for any information about him at all. Are there biographies about Ultravox that mention him? Defunct fansites? Punk documentaries?
I would ask this question on some Facebook page, since I feel that's where most Foxx era fans congregate, but I am one of the few Ultravox fans without an account on that site.
Thank you in advance :)