Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Eurythmics

The story goes that struggling musician David A. Stewart met Annie Lennox while she was waitressing in a London cafe in 1976 and was so immediately taken with her that the first words out of his mouth were "will you marry me?"

At the time, Lennox had already performed in various jazz and cabaret combos after dropping out of London's Royal Academy of Music, where she had been studying classical music. As a romance between the two quickly blossomed (despite Lennox refusing Stewart's marriage offer), Stewart decided to break up Longdancer, the folk act he had been involved with, and start up a new pop trio with his new girlfriend and fellow ex-Longdancer, guitarist Peet Coombes. While Lennox possessed a keening, evocative voice with a naturally soaring quality, she split her vocals in the new band with Coombes (the band's primary songwriter) and played some keyboards on the side. Calling themselves Catch, the trio issued a single in 1977 before beefing up their ranks by adding a bass player and drummer and then rechristened themselves as The Tourists.

The story of The Tourists isn't that dissimilar from that of many bands who taste success but can't quite make that jump to the next level of popularity for whatever reason. For The Tourists, success was earned over the course of their first albums and a fistful of singles chart incursions, most notably the twin top 10 songs: "So Good To Be Back Home Again" and a cover of the old Dusty Springfield chestnut "I Only Wanna Be With You" (a rather canny cover choice as the band tended to wear their overwhelmingly sixties pop/folk influence on their sleeves).

Following this breakthrough, however, things went downhill rather quickly when the third Tourists album (Luminous Basement ) failed to sell. Those ever-popular "creative tensions" surfaced between Stewart and Coombes, mainly over the direction of the band's music, which had taken a distinct turn away from the 60's pop aesthetic and towards a more modern, electronics-dusted sound. If the power struggle between Stewart and Coombes wasn't bad enough news, a myriad of external issues concerning everything from the band's management to record label woes to the tender mercies of the acid-blooded U.K. music press combined to bring about the end of the band in a matter of months. Perhaps worst of all, Lennox and Stewart's relationship fell apart at around this same time, though the ex-lovers (perhaps sensing they were onto something special) continued working together as a creative team after their romantic breakup.

Unsurprisingly, considering the direction flirted with on the last Tourists album, the new material recorded by Stewart and Lennox was far more experimental and far less "pop" in nature than that of their previous band. Most of the experimental nature of this work derived from Stewart's increasing fascination with synthesizers as the means to an end in lieu of guitars and "standard" pop instrumentation. RCA Records, who had picked up The Tourists just before their second album, was interested in the potential of the new duo (now called Eurythmics after a method of music instruction first demonstrated by Swiss educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in 1906), and kept them under contract, remaining their business home throughout the rest of their recording career, together and apart.

The first Eurythmics album, In The Garden, was released in the fall of 1981. Recorded by legendary producer Conny Plank (probably the pre-eminent experimental/"Krautrock" studio figure, best known for his work with pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk, Brian Eno, Ultravox, Devo, Neu!, and had also supervised the final Tourists sessions), In The Garden was stark, rather charmless debut that offered up an interesting mix of styles and influences in a more avant-garde sound than The Tourists, but with no real breakout potential in any of the tracks, save for the single "Never Gonna Cry Again," which had slinked as "high" as No. 63 in the charts over the summer.

With In The Garden a no-show in the album rankings, Eurythmics hit the road in an attempt to get some kind of momentum happening. While a few backing musicians had been utilized in the studio to create the album, Stewart and Lennox performed strictly as a duo on this trek, with an extensive use of backing tapes and synthesizers (which I believe was the first time this kind of performance set-up with a duo had ever been attempted as this was a full year before the existence of the next great electropop duo, Yaz).

More songwriting followed quickly thereafter, though all three singles the duo released in 1982 failed to break the Top 50 (two of them never made the charts at all). About the only good news with these records was that they were all recorded at Stewart's own home studio which he had built to help keep down production costs (as ponying up continually for professional studio time would only compound the duo's worsening financial stituation). Despite the promise and quality of the new material, this was not a happy time for Eurythmics: the stresses of trying to make a living (and failing at each attempt) while trying to keep RCA from dropping them in the process was taking a tangible physical and psychological toll on the duo, with both members laid low at various times out of sheer exhaustion and frustration.

In February of 1983, however, the hard work and emotional toil invested in the second Eurythmics album began to pay off quite handsomely: in fact, that album became the work that changed their lives and fortunes forever. While Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) was on the surface a more polished and colder-sounding album than it's predecessor, this time around there were a handful of songs present that resonated strongly with the record-buying public. Timing was certainly a mitigating factor as well, as the "experimental" sounds Stewart had been working with over the previous couple of years had now become the hot new sound in pop music. Almost overnight, Eurythmics had achieved a critical mass, and their new album exploded worldwide over that synthpop-dominated summer.

While it would be doing a disservice to the arrestingly unique sound of the album's title cut to simply state that MTV airplay is what powered the song to the top of the U.S. singles charts, the influence of the channel on the band's immediate success in America cannot be denied. The surreal, bovine-filled videoclip for "Sweet Dreams" was a huge MTV favorite over that summer, and Lennox cut a stunning figure on TV, lip-syncing the song's lyrics while dressed in a pinstripe suit and tie, her close-cropped hair dyed brilliant orange/red (Stewart was content to sit on the sidelines, emotionlessly tapping away at a computer keyboard or playing a cello in a field). The "Sweet Dreams" video also kick-started a year long Bowie-esque flirtation with gender-bending on Lennox's part, as the singer used wigs and makeup to look almost completely different (and in one case, almost passably male) in all of the band's early videos.

It's worth noting that the million-selling "Sweet Dreams" was also the first of only two synthpop singles to top the Billboard Hot 100 in 1983, the other being Michael Sembello's equally-robotronic fluke smash "Maniac" (which, funnily enough, was the song that succeeded Eurythmics at the summit). A follow-up single, "Love Is A Stranger" (one of the band's failed U.K. singles in late 1982), fell just shy of the U.S. Top 20 a couple of months later, a real shame since that song's sleek, dark, insistent pulse was just as unique-sounding on the radio as its predecessor.

While the duo's singles were winding down their chart runs, MTV aired Eurythmics: Live From Heaven, a concert shot at the London nightclub of the same name that showed the duo performing selections from Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) and In The Garden along with 3-piece backing band (and a troika of 80's-coiffed backing singers). A couple of promo videos appeared midway through the set in the form of "Love Is A Stranger" and a jaw-dropping, gospel-inflected rearrangement of "This City Never Sleeps" that knocks me off my feet to this day. I'd only had a beat-up VHS copy of this show to watch for years, and thus I was delighted recently to find out that this concert has been issued on DVD. Energetic, effortlessly cool and stuffed with songs that often sound superior to the studio versions, Live From Heaven cannot be recommended highly enough for anyone into the duo's early work. Fantastic stuff.

In the faster-paced release market that existed before the 1990s, the only way to follow a breakout year was to outdo yourself the following year, and Eurythmics proved themselves up to the task as the band's third album Touch appeared in early 1984. An instantaneous success, Touch gave the duo their first Top 10 placing in the Billboard album charts and sold over a million copies, buoyed by a trio of dizzyingly eclectic synthpop classics: the giddy, artifcial tropicalia of "Right By Your Side," the digitized torch song "Who's That Girl" and the breathtaking epic "Here Comes The Rain Again" (which remains one of the most beautiful singles in the electropop canon).

Since these were still the days when Billboard allowed what were essentially overpriced 12" singles to appear on their album charts, a Eurythmics dance EP (creatively titled Touchdance, wouldn't you know) surfaced in July of that year, containing vocal remixes and extended instrumentals of a couple of Touch album cuts, ostensibly for club play.

Even with their new album still riding the charts, Eurythmics kept to a punishing work ethic of touring, writing and recording with hardly any breaks -- trying to strike whilst the proverbial iron was still hot, perhaps. Even then, it came as a total surprise to fans when the announcement of a fourth Eurythmics album was made in the fall of 1984. A largely instrumental work that now sounds years ahead of its time, this new album was the intended soundtrack for Michael Radford's recreation of George Orwell's classic novel 1984 and instead became one of the great "lost albums" of that decade.

In an embarrasing turn of events, hardly any of the music on the album 1984 (For The Love Of Big Brother) made it into the finished film. Apparently, Eurythmics were asked by Virgin Records (the movie's financier) to craft the soundtrack without Radford's consent or knowledge, and the director was furious when informed of the move since he had already commissioned a film score by composer Dominic Muldowney. Pronouncing the 1984 soundtrack album "too contemporary" to be used in his film, Radford ended up rejecting roughly 90% of the work and stuck with Muldowney's more traditional score instead. Ouch.

Making matters worse was that RCA didn't consider the soundtrack album a "proper" Eurythmics release and therefore didn't bother to give the record anywhere near the level of promotion enjoyed by Touch or Sweet Dreams. While enough diehard Eurythmics fans became aware of 1984 to drive it briefly into the bottom reaches of the Top 100 of the U.S. albums chart over the winter, the album didn't hang around very long afterward and was virtually forgotten by the general public within months.

That's not to say that RCA didn't at least try: two singles from 1984 were issued to radio, and both ran straight into a brick wall. The first, an uptempo pop-funk number called "Sexcrime" had some serious problems gaining airplay at pop stations thanks to its title and the word "sex" being machine-gunned at the listener throughout the song's running time (oh, heavens!). Edited versions of the song (which merely chopped off the opening few seconds of the track) were serviced to radio and MTV to alleviate the strain on delicate ears, but it was to no avail.

The haunting second single from 1984, "Julia," seemed to glide slowly by like an ocean liner and was quite possibly the doomiest sounding major label single released in 1985. It was a gorgeous track, comprised of little more than Lennox's vocoder-treated singing against a sparse, celestial bed of electronics, but it wasn't exactly the kind of thing pradio rogrammers could easily sandwich between Wham! and Madonna. Oh well, it was their loss.

Following this commercial misfire, Eurythmics came back firing on all cylinders in the late spring of 1985 with their fifth album, Be Yourself Tonight. Representing the popular peak of the band as far as sales and singles were concerned, Be Yourself Tonight was also a big surprise for many people as the sound of the duo had changed dramatically in the short downtime between releases.

Save for Lennox's instantly identifiable vocals, the production aspects of the single "Would I Lie To You?" were different enough to make you wonder if this was indeed the same band that had just released "Julia" six months before. Rather than the expected icy washes of synthesizers and programmed percussion, Stewart and Lennox were now leaning strongly towards classic R&B as guitars, bass, live drums, and even a horn section took a far more prominent role in the band's sound.

The synths weren't all gone, though: the album's radiant follow-up hit "There Must Be An Angel" and the seductive fourth single "It's Alright" were both imbued with a more familiar electronic pulse, but from this point forward, the synth-heavy vestiges of the band's work disappeared from the airwaves (and largely from their albums as well). By the time album number six (Revenge) appeared in the summer of 1986, the guitars had pretty much taken over for good, and the duo had become one with the rock-fixated mainstream.