Stephen Shears spent fifty years in service to instruments most people never think about until they go wrong. Based in West Pennard, Somerset, he was a freelance piano tuner and restorer of the old school — meaning he tuned by ear, a skill increasingly displaced by smartphone apps, and meaning he would drive four days to Inverness and back rather than leave a job undone. That kind of commitment doesn't advertise itself. It just shows up. He trained at Newark College, Nottinghamshire, on a piano tuning and restoration course, and the freelance career that followed took him to every conceivable setting: box trailers, the grotto at Stourhead House in Wiltshire, concert halls, and flood-damaged homes where instruments that looked past saving turned out not to be. In Bath he shared a workshop with a carpenter and a french polisher — Roger Forsey and Philip Ireland — and together they could bring back pianos that most workshops would have written off. The Bryan Adams connection is the detail that travels. Shears restored a grand piano, hired it out, and it ended up in the video for 'Everything I Do (I Do It For You)' — the 1991 song that sat at number one in the UK for sixteen consecutive weeks. His name is nowhere in the credits. That seems exactly right for the kind of work he did: essential, invisible, and done with complete seriousness. Beyond the technical work, Shears was a performer. He started the folk dance band Jigs for Gigs in the 1970s and kept it running for decades, playing keyboards across Devon, Somerset, and Gloucestershire with many of the same original members. He also played as a duo with his younger sister Alison — A Pair of Shears, a name that rewards a moment's thought — and performed occasionally as a bass player. His wife Kellie, whom he married in 2000, is a music teacher. Music was not his job. It was the structure of his life. The detail that his daughter chose to preserve from his teenage years is not a musical achievement but a physical one: he once ran the equivalent of a marathon to retrieve a forgotten instrument so he could make band practice on time. That is a specific kind of dedication — not talent-display, not ambition, but the refusal to let other people down over something that matters. He taught his own father the trade too, and they worked on pianos together. He cooked hearty meals for his family. He never raised his voice. Shears died aged 70, survived by his wife Kellie Simpson, his children Adam and the obituary's author, stepdaughter Eden, six grandchildren, and his siblings Alison and Jane. He was born in Kings Langley, Hertfordshire, joined a church choir at 10, learned cello and piano, and never really stopped.
