Saturday, January 16, 2021

Favorite Artists, Part 12: About Eurythmics

 The duo of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, aka Eurythmics, was one of the more popular groups of the eighties. Their musical output consisted of eight studio albums released between 1981 and 1989, plus a reunion LP produced a decade later. However, much like Joni Mitchell, this is one of those artists who earned their way onto this My Favorite Artists list mostly due to their output in one particular period of their career, in this case a tightly focused one, from early 1983 through the end of 1984.

Lennox and Stewart first achieved a measure of success together in a British band called The Tourists. Stewart and a fellow named Peet Coombes were playing together when they first met Lennox, who was working as a waitress in a London restaurant at the time. Stewart and Lennox quickly became a couple, and the trio formed a punk rock band called The Catch in 1976. They were signed to a small label and released one single, but it never went anywhere.

Later in 1976, the trio added two more members and transitioned into the pop rock outfit called The Tourists, with Coombes and Lennox splitting lead vocal duties. They had limited success, with a cover of the "I Only Want to Be With You" (which had been popularized in 1963 by Dusty Springfield) reaching #4 on the British charts and achieving Gold Record status in the process, and another single, "So Good to Be Back Home Again," hitting #8. The Tourists, however, were mostly Coombes' creative project, so Stewart and Lennox decided to split off on their own.

The duo did this because they really wanted the opportunity to experiment more with electronic and avant-garde music. By the time they had released their first LP, In the Garden, in 1981, they were no longer romantically involved. The album mixed psychedelic, krautrock influences, and charted (barely) with one single, "Never Gonna Cry Again," but it wasn't successful.

Their second album was a monster, however. After surviving a period that saw Lennox recover from at least one mental breakdown and Stewart recover from a collapsed lung, the duo released their second album. Powered by a title track that reached #1 on the American charts, #2 on the British charts and scored tons of airplay on the popular music channel MTV, 1983's Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) put Eurythmics on the map. 

This was also when they caught my attention. At some point in 1983, it was apparent that many of my old musical heroes were either dead or on their way out. Keith Moon was literally dead, and The Who had just released a much-maligned album (It's Hard) that would be their last for almost a quarter of a century. Jethro Tull was in the middle of an electronic period that I liked, but most music fans hated. Pink Floyd had just released the truly godawful The Final Cut. And Joni had fallen into a black pool of jazz from which she would never return. Even though Yes had just reinvented themselves into more of an '80s pop rock band, it was obvious I was going to need some new bands to follow.

I asked myself which bands had the potential to put together solid enough careers to lead music through the 1980s the way that Tull, The Who, Floyd et al had through the '70s. And being an obsessive-compulsive nutjob, I made myself a list. (Which I guess was an early precursor to this Favorite Artists list I'm working from now.) 

Being a lover of prog rock, I started there. (At that time, even though the punk movement had blistered most progressive rock bands until they were considered severely dated at best, and laughing stocks at worst, I couldn't conceive that it would become almost a dead art form until the birth of progressive metal several decades later.) So the first name on my list was "Asia." 

Yeah, I get from the hindsight of 40 years later that this was a bad call. But that first Asia album was pretty damned good, and I don't remember if I had listened to the disappointing followup Alpha yet. If I had, I probably just thought it was a sophomore slump. I had no way of knowing that most of the rest of their discography would range from mediocre to garbage. (Although to their credit, they did actually manage to have a pretty long career that would take them through 13 studio albums, the last being released in 2014. So it could have been worse.)

My list continued. A Flock of Seagulls. They had just released Listen, giving them two solid albums, and 1984's The Story of a Young Heart would give them a third, before guitarist Paul Reynolds would leave the band and they'd soil themselves completely with 1986's A Dream Come True. Dexy's Midnight Runners. I had to add some Celtic Rock in there, and 1982's Too-Rye-Ay had been an amazing LP. (It was, alas, also the clear highlight of a career that would only span a total of five studio albums.) The melodic rock band Quarterflash. Their eponymous 1981 debut featured some excellent sax-based rock, and I maintain to this day that 1983's Take Another Picture was a cut above just being solid. And Eurythmics. 

OK, so Nostradamus I'm not, give me a break. I had no way of knowing that the whole music industry would change so much in the '80s that it was really only U2 and maybe a handful of others that had the kind of decade-spanning careers that '70s bands like Zeppelin, The Who and Pink Floyd would have. (I added Echo and The Bunnymen to my list a few months later. But after four solid albums concluding with 1984's Ocean Rain, they also had a drop-off in quality thereafter, even though they managed to release a dozen studio LPs in their career.)

So anyway, Eurythmics was the only one of my Bands of the Future band list that make this Favorite Artists list four decades later. How did they get here?

Well, as I said in the beginning, it was really mostly on the back of the Sweet Dreams album released early in 1983, the possibly-even-better Touch album released at the end of 1983 (this was a band who knew damned well they needed to strike while the fire, and they, were hot), and to a lesser extent the 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother) soundtrack album (that went mostly unused for the John Hurt Nineteen Eighty-Four film. There was a whole legal battle surrounding it that I'm not going to get into here.)

After that, largely due to Annie's wishes I think, Eurythmics moved into more an R&B-influenced direction that I didn't really care for. 1985's Be Yourself Tonight had a number of successful singles, including "Would I Lie to You" and Annie's duet with Aretha Franklin, "Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves," both of which I found to be kind of harsh. But the only song I really loved from that LP was "There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart)".

I liked 1986's Revenge LP a little better, especially "Thorn in My Side". But the truth is, given the choice between this album and the more hypnotic In the Garden, I prefer In the Garden.

By 1987's Savage, Eurythmics was mostly out of ideas (or good ones, anyway), as exemplified by the LP's bizarre initial-release single "Beethoven". And 1989's We Too Are One and 1999's Peace were fairly middle-of-the-road affairs (although I did like the latter album's nostalgic "17 Again".)

So what was it about Sweet Dreams, Touch and 1984 that powered Eurythmics into being named one of my Favorite Artists of All Time? Well ... just about everything! I love Stewart's electronic stylings, as heard on tracks like "Sweet Dreams," "Here Comes the Rain Again" and "Julia". I love the darkness of songs like "Sweet Dreams", "This City Never Sleeps" and "No Fear, No Hate, No Pain (No Broken Hearts". I love the experimentation of efforts like "Doubleplusgood" and "Paint a Rumour". And I love the pop hooks of releases like "Who's That Girl" and "Right By Your Side". The truth is, both Sweet Dreams and Touch are nearly perfect albums. And while 1984 isn't as consistent as those two, its highlights, at least, match them.

I'd also have to add that both Lennox and Stewart have had strong post-Eurythmics careers. Stewart has released a number of solo albums (which I haven't listened to), and has collaborated with dozens of artists that I like. (I especially enjoyed some of his work with Stevie Nicks). Lennox, of course, released a number of fine solo LPs, which have included singles like "Walking on Broken Glass", "No More I Love You's" and "Why". She also sang on the sublime track "Into the West" that closed out the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

And oh yeah, there's one other thing that helped to place Eurythmics onto the My Favorite Artists list. In the summer of 1983, during the Touch tour, Eurythmics played an outdoor live show at the old Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, New York. The show also featured M+M (previously known as Martha and the Muffins) and Howard Jones (playing with just him and a mime) as the opening acts. And it might have been my favorite live concert of all time.

It rained off and on throughout the night. Jones (and his mime), playing as the second act through almost solid rain throughout, were excellent. M+M were even better, enough so that I listened to the scratchy cassette recording I made of this show for years thereafter, until I finally wore out the tape. And Annie and Dave were just amazing. They played with a full band, a duet of female backup singers (who were so top flight that there was even a moment during "No Fear, No Hate ..." were Annie was big enough to step back and let one of them practically steal the show). And I couldn't even tell you how many costume (and wig) changes Annie made throughout the show. I do remember that at one point, she was carried out onto the stage like Cleopatra by six shirtless muscle men.

And there was something else weird that happened that night. I think I was sitting right behind my future wife. Although Denise and I didn't formally meet until 1993, we later figured out that we had attended a number of the same concerts over the years, including this one. And I have a memory (it might or might not be real) that I was seated in the row behind her and the rest of her friends from The Slant, and that at one point, they offered me some of their food. I know that memory can be a tricky thing, but when we were at The B-52's/Culture Club show in Forest Hills a couple of years ago, and we pointed to where we were each seated all those decades earlier in relation to the stage, we both remember sitting in approximately the same area of the stadium. So yeah, I really think we met for the first time that night (however briefly), and that it was the cosmos way of telling us we were supposed to be together (and it was going to keep putting us in the same place together until we finally got it right.)

So yeah -- on the strength of those three albums, that concert, and the various other stray singles of theirs I've enjoyed over the years, Eurythmics has earned their place on the list of My Favorite Artists of All Time.

Next up in this series: A band I never even set ears on until they were already broken up - The Smiths!