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Jon Stewart and Louise Wener met as students at the University of Manchester in the late 1980s, where they formed what became the Britpop band Sleeper. Jon was guitarist and co-song writer in the band, who produced three UK Top 5 albums (BPI certified gold, platinum and silver) and nine UK Top 40 singles for RCA/BMG Records from 1993-1998.
Sleeper enjoyed high profile international promotion, including media exposure on BBC TV, ITV, Channel 4, BBC Radio, NME, Melody Maker, Q Magazine, and similar media outlets in the USA, Europe and Japan. Their extensive live appearances involved several British and world tours, and performances at Wembley Arena, Milton Keynes Bowl, Glastonbury and Reading Festival main stages. Sleeper also performed as opening act for REM, Elvis Costello, Radiohead, Blur and Manic Street Preachers.
In 1998 Jon moved to Los Angeles and worked as session guitarist for country legend K D Lang and ex-Spice Girl Mel C. In 2002 he returned to the UK to teach at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music. As Senior Lecturer and Head of Music Business Studies Jon has taught and helped develop a number of successful young contemporary artists including Kate Walsh, Beth Rowley and The Kooks.
As partner in film music company Music4Movies with Ann Marie Shields Jon has worked as music supervisor, music consultant and OST contributor on a number of feature and documentary projects. These include The Kid (Rupert Friend), Telstar (Kevin Spacey, James Corden, Ralph Little), 100 Doors (BIFA Award Winning C4 documentary) and Baby Juice Express (Julian Clary, Phil Davis, Nick Moran). As a member of Sleeper he also contributed two songs to the best-selling Trainspotting OST (Ewan McGregor, Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle).
A prolific writer, Jon has been the author of a popular monthly feature column for Guitarist
Magazine (“Rock Climbing” ) since 2002. He is also a PhD student at Lancaster University's Institute for Cultural Research, supervised by Dr Nick Gebhardt, where his thesis examines the music of Bob Dylan and John Lennon in the 1960s. As an academic Jon was recently featured in The Guardian for his contribution to a major conference on the American TV series The Wire, where he discussed the producers' ultra-realist approach to the use of music. Jon also features heavily in Louise Wener's autobiographical book on Sleeper, Different For Girls, which was published by Ebury Press in 2010.