Eurythmics

London, 1981. Annie Lennox lies in a hospital bed, rushed in after a nervous breakdown that has robbed her of both her appetite and her will to live. On the other side of the room lies her partner-in-crime Dave A. Stewart, likewise confined to bed with a mysterious lung ailment - though in his case the doctor is really just turning a blind eye, since the hospitalisation is clearly the result of the unabashed drug use that the patient in question indulges in even at breakfast. But telling a broke musician to clean up his act is like asking Winnie The Pooh not to stick his paws in the honey. Years later, Dave himself would recall his lysergic years like this:

[…] I'd eat once every four days, get through industrial quantities of amphetamines and never sleep. Or I'd leave the house to buy bread or matches and turn up again three days later with some guy called Circles.

In short, by this point Annie and Dave are already on the ropes of a short-lived career, run aground on one of those treacherous reefs lurking just below the waterline. The brief spell of fame won with the Tourists thanks to their version of “I Only Want To Be With You” by Dusty Springfield (a UK #4 in 1979) has already largely evaporated, and with it the intensely close romantic relationship between the two of them has also come to an end — though the artistic partnership carries on, with all the legal and emotional baggage that entails: a clean slate that's left them empty-handed but hungrier than ever for success. The intriguing but prickly debut released as Eurythmics – “In The Garden” (1981) – has gone completely unnoticed, and their label currently has zero faith in them. During the gruelling tour to promote that record, the duo find themselves having to do almost everything on their own, from booking dates week after week to setting up the stage and loading and unloading the instruments from the van every single night. She's stressed and short-tempered, he's exhausted and out of breath — it's a miracle they haven't killed each other. That subsequent hospital stay was practically written in the stars.

The Legend of the £5000

It's around this time that the legend is born of how, once out of hospital, Dave manages to talk his bank manager into a £5000 loan. And it really is the stuff of legend, because by the financial rulebook of a grim, Thatcher-throttled Britain, Mr. Stewart was hardly the safest bet to hand money to, especially if the goal was getting it back with interest. Just picture it: a penniless musician bearing every visible sign of a reckless lifestyle, showing up with no credentials to speak of beyond that fleeting old UK #4 scored with a band that's now defunct (and he didn't even write that song!) – admit it, you wouldn't lend the guy an umbrella in the rain. But who knows, maybe it was lunchtime and the bank manager just wanted to get rid of yet another pest that day. Or maybe there's truth to the claim that Dave, for all his apparent quietness in Lennox's shadow, is actually a stubborn, quite insistent little character when he wants something. Whatever the case, that day Mr. Stewart walked out of the bank with a triumphant grin plastered across his face, holding a cheque that was modest by the standards of what he intended to do with it, yet still well beyond the financial means usually available to him. Two ways this can go: either it pays off, or they're washing dishes for the next two years.

And this is where Annie Lennox's equally legendary Scottish thriftiness comes into play — a woman of iron will who always knows how to say no to whatever extravagant nonsense crosses her colleague's mind, and who counts the coins in his trouser pockets come evening. The duo's first joint move is to rent a flat in Chalk Farm, in Camden, and turn it into a makeshift recording studio, since proper studios cost too much. The rent is a bargain, Annie's thrilled with the deal, Dave rather less so: of course the rent's cheap – the flat sits above a sawmill! How exactly are you supposed to record an album while they're chopping up fir trunks downstairs?

Which brings us to the duo's second big joint investment: a princely £1999 (plus VAT) spent on a Movement System Drum Computer, a hybrid drum machine built on samples from the popular Simmons Drum Synthesizer, but fitted with a screen that let you compose and record digitally (even while they're chopping fir trunks downstairs). On the recommendation of mutual musician friends such as Robert Clash and Adam Williams (the latter plays bass in the celebrated ska band The Selecter), Dave travels in person to get hold of one of the brand-new MSDC units, made at a specialist shop in Bridgwater, Somerset, and spends the night sleeping on the shop floor while the machine is set up. By the time he makes his heroic return to London, Eurythmics are among the first in the world to work with this synthesizer (other famous examples of the machine in use around that time can be found in the work of John Foxx, Mick Karn, and Kim Wilde on “Cambodia”).

But Eurythmics have other ideas, and either way they have to make do, since all they have to complete the entire record is a simple eight-track recorder. They all but eliminate the usually dominant traditional pop instruments – guitar, bass, drums – and combine the prized sound of the MSDC with that of other contemporary machines like the Oberheim OB-1 and the EDP Wasp. During mixing, the eccentric Dave keeps one hand behind his back while gripping a pair of garden shears in the other, with which he can only operate one of the eight faders at a time — a rather brutal trick to stop himself blending the eight tracks together and to keep the sound of each individual part as clean and crisp as possible. On a shoestring budget, Eurythmics create an unprecedented, almost entirely synthetic mélange that represents the absolute cutting edge of electronic sophistication available at the time: a sound that's clean, cold and robotic, yet with a roundness in the low end and a smoothing of the edges that make it incredibly enveloping — a softness never before captured by any other single piece of electronic gear. As Annie recalls:

It sounded so sophisticated!... except we always had to wait for the sawmill downstairs to switch off its machines before we could record the vocal parts...

No need to belabour mankind's fascination with the Machine; from Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream to the space-rock of Hawkwind and the disco music of Giorgio Moroder and Patrick Cowley, on through the British wing of New Order, Depeche Mode and the Human League of “Reproduction”, by now the application of electronic instruments to popular music demands to be taken every bit as seriously as the six strings of a guitar. The Movement System Drum Computer still had plenty left to reveal, but the sophistication of the sounds it produced, and the creativity with which Eurythmics blended them with other keyboards, were already more than capable of carrying the whole synth-prefixed movement toward crisp new horizons, effectively marking a “before” and “after” in the synthetic productions of the '80s. Riding high on its popular success, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)” remains one of the most famous and best-loved examples of the genre. And all of it achieved on a genuinely tiny budget, if you consider the sheer scope of the result. Annie Lennox, meanwhile, is still counting up every penny she clawed back.

So is that the secret behind a landmark record laid bare — sheer cunning in getting early access to a cutting-edge machine? Only partly so. Tchaikovsky, after all, had a brand-new celesta smuggled over from France in great secrecy to compose the famous theme for the Sugar Plum Fairy's dance, and the instrument's peculiar timbre certainly helped him pull it off: on opening night, the audience was left open-mouthed when that little piano tucked away in a corner of the orchestra began pouring out glittering cascades of metal. Or think, more recently, of Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead's fascination with the ondes Martenot, an extremely rare and delicate electrically vibrated instrument also invented in France in the early 1900s, whose use on tracks like “How To Disappear Completely” and “Where I End And You Begin” weaves those indescribable yet “warm” alien sensations that, in the early 2000s, were essentially impossible to replicate with any other software. So by the standards of early-'80s fashion, Eurythmics really were travelling in the fast lane.

Is that boy a girl, or is that girl a boy?

But technique, as we know, is at best only half the work. While Dave and his collaborators lose entire days programming the computer, buzzing like teenagers with a new Game Boy, it's Annie Lennox's magnetic presence that completes the picture of a work now genuinely deserving the word memorable. Just looking at her would be enough to convince you: even features, ice-cold eyes and a sharp, mannish haircut that leap right off the screen. But really, all you need to do is listen to her: she writes cold, cutting synthetic lyrics and then delivers them with a staggering vocal range, sliding from icy, brooding new wave mantras to the heartfelt tones of blue-eyed soul. It's no surprise, then, that her self-confessed touchstones are David Bowie and Grace Jones, both supremely gifted vocalists, masters of gender-bending and skilled croupiers when it comes to shuffling the deck and hiding behind new, enigmatic identities. Through the images beamed out by a newborn MTV, Annie Lennox quickly becomes one of the leading faces of the Second British Invasion, an androgynous, captivating figure, yet also mysterious in her art-school sophistication, sparking bewilderment and curiosity in audiences right from the start — including the notoriously more wary American side of the Atlantic.

The singer's shape-shifting personality is already visible in the first three singles that Eurythmics doled out cautiously over the course of 1982. April brought the release of the bass-serrated electronic pastiche “This Is The House”; the response to a track like that was still precisely zero, but Eurythmics were clearly playing a game of subtraction. With just a handful of words assembled in a Dadaist fashion, half of them sung in Spanish, the duo recreate with striking effectiveness the experience of living in a house crammed with all sorts of characters — the universal feeling of intense cross-cultural contact that still greets anyone today who leaves their hometown behind for the chaos and temptation of a cosmopolitan city (a famous bit of trivia: among Annie's flatmates during her pre-Eurythmics Berlin years was none other than our own boisterous Gianna Nannini).

Listening to the brisk stride of the following single, “The Walk”, on the other hand, is like wandering late at night into the fog around the Thames, except the cosmopolitan city has now taken on the guise of a seductive, dangerous woman, played by Annie with all the sly composure of a Cheshire cat, while a nocturnal noir-jazz trumpet and a string of hypnotic, discordant voices lurk in the background. Still, this is only June 1982, and however miserable the English summer might be, the public isn't ready for the autumnal inflections of a track like this one.

With the following single, “Love Is A Stranger”, released that November, Eurythmics nonetheless nail one of their finest tracks ever, as well as the true artistic manifesto of the whole project (though the public wouldn't catch on until later, when the song re-entered the charts the following year, carried by the overwhelming success of the next single, discussed further below). You'll know it by heart, of course, but revisiting “Love Is A Stranger” still sends shivers down the spine today: a soft, hypnotic pulse seasoned with little synth blips that sound lifted from an old video game, over which Annie recites blunt words of love treated like a drug addiction, climbing into an inimitable falsetto for soul-tinged, Motown-flavoured backing vocals. The accompanying video shows off, in full glory, a magnetic, photogenic figure, all wig changes and knowing glances, while the viewer can't tear their eyes away, trying once and for all to work out: is that boy a girl, or is that girl a boy?

Sweet Dreams (and a Bright Future on Waking)

Finally, in January 1983, it was time for the fourth single to be released, and what a single it was: "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" initially crept in quietly, teasing only the more aesthetically-minded listeners, but after weeks lingering in the lower reaches of the charts, it finally took off thanks to the other enigmatic accompanying video, and after a gripping battle against "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, it even climbed to the top in America, turning it consequently into a smash across the rest of the globe (including a fine No. 2 back home) — for Eurythmics, life would never be the same again. What else is there to say about such an iconic track? This is Annie at the peak of her raw, controlled and deliberately ironic Scottish realism. The words she delivers with such urgency — about the eternal human doubt that haunts anyone who ventures into the creative world — are gathered into a kind of religious mantra steeped in a cold, detached, no-frills anger. Dave, for his part, adds one of the stickiest synth riffs ever written, drum-machine rhythms as merciless as whips cracked on a marble slab, and constant melodic stops punctuated by the piano, framing the nervous jolts of Annie's voice. In a word: perfect. The public was bewitched, the track's sound was dazzling, and Eurythmics happily gave it all away for free — the machine Dave fiddles with in the iconic accompanying video is none other than the Movement System Drum Computer, coddled like a baby, as if it were the band's third member.

Riding the tremendous success of the new single, the dazzling "Love Is A Stranger" was immediately reissued too — cracking the American top 30 and landing a fine No. 6 in the UK — and all that was left for the wider audience was to discover the rest of the album, which had already been sitting in stores waiting for them since January 4th of that year. No disappointment there: inside "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" lie all the remaining pieces of a fascinating, enigmatic puzzle, exactly as promised by the mysterious cover artwork.

The beauty of "I've Got An Angel", for instance, is that it's essentially a track built on a dub backbone — here Adam Williams's influence from The Selecter is unmistakable — yet the ultra-modern production transfigures it into an apocalyptic synthetic ride, with Annie chanting a piercing lament over the top and even playing the flute herself. Not to mention the remake of "Wrap It Up", featuring guest Green Gartside of Scritti Politti, which once again showcases the full potential of the MSDC when paired with unconventional songwriting (compare it to the original version, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter in the 60s for the celebrated vocal duo Sam & Dave). Here Dave lets the bass pedal loose and builds a thunderous rhythm section, spiced up by finely calibrated funk-guitar inserts in the bridge, while Annie literally splits into four different people: she bounces around with the excited energy of a little girl who's just discovered the sound of her own voice through a microphone with headphone monitoring, then plays with cacophony, turns into the serious singer, and finally transforms into the most seraphic of soul singers, giving an amused wink to Aretha Franklin and the vocal harmonies of The Supremes. All of this packed into just three-and-a-half minutes of dazzling, thoroughly enjoyable song.

The urban dash powered by a nervy car-horn rhythm of "I Could Give You (A Mirror)" instead casts Annie once more in the role of a frustrated, disillusioned chanteuse, but this time her voice is left almost entirely alone to command the melody, showing itself at the peak of its diva splendor, moving between velvety timbres, slides and falsettos, while in the background Dave's keyboards advance with the relentless bulk of an assembly line.

On the album's more introspective side, one can't help but be captivated by "Jennifer", a kind of coldwave stroll that picks up on Lou Reed's poetics and soaks them in a "Blade Runner"-like atmosphere — the wall of acidic guitars rising in the epic, tear-jerking finale is simply evocative. And after the mysterious "Somebody Told Me", a track that once again moves along a sinuous synth line and Annie's paranoid, cacophonous introspections, comes another captivating noir moment to close it all out: "This City Never Sleeps", six-and-a-half minutes of shadowy urban dub steeped in alien noises and the sound of a distant train, the perfect backdrop for hearing Annie tell of the silence and loneliness felt in the heart of the night when you're lost in the big city and all you can hear is the hesitant beating of your own heart (though in its own way the performance also carries a fair amount of sensual charge that wouldn't go unnoticed: three years later the song would be featured on the soundtrack to "9 1/2 Weeks").

The verdict for posterity is an easy one

With "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)", one could ideally close out in style the golden age of English synth-pop from the late 70s/early 80s, while at the same time opening a new chapter in the bombastic treatment of synths that would take hold for the rest of the decade. An album that is at once as cold as new wave and as warm as soul, as introspective as a solitary autumn evening and as raucous as a banshee with phosphorescent makeup smeared across her eyelids, avant-garde to the point of being almost impenetrable and yet exquisitely pop at the same time — a quick glance at all the references made in this piece shows how such a work forces one to fish among the most disparate names just to give even a rough idea of it in words. Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox's talent lies exactly in this delicate balance: on one hand, the curiosity to stray off the musical beaten path of their time, and on the other, the ability to bend even the cruelest synthesizer to the will of a witty, wildly original and endlessly thrilling songbook.

The best part is that for Eurythmics, the run doesn't end here at all — if anything, it had only just begun. But even if their fate had turned out less brilliant than it actually did, "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" remains on record for future generations, forever ready to scratch the ears with its sinister, sinuous digital smiles.

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31/12/2017