Eurythmics 'The Ultimate Collection' album

Eurythmics formed in 1980, essentially out of the ashes of the Tourists but quintessentially out of the ashes of the relationship between singer Annie Lennox and musician Dave Stewart. The Tourists had achieved a huge hit single with their cover version of Dusty Springfield’s I Only Want To Be With You (No.4 in the UK in November 1979), but things hadn’t worked out either professionally, or personally, for the pair so it was high time to try something new.

Stewart commented somewhat later that “most couples get famous and then break up. But we broke up and then got famous.” Around the same time, Lennox said that she “knew creatively I didn’t want to work with anybody else except Dave” and that there was a strange type of tension caused by the pain of the break-up and the excitement of working together on the music.

The original meeting between the pair happened in London around 1976. As Dave explains, “A mutual friend invited me into his new squat, sat me down with a bottle of Jack Daniels and then insisted that I should come to meet his friend who was working as a waitress in a local restaurant.” Annie, who had recently graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in London, was actually working at a “rather conservative health-food restaurant.” Bearing in mind their condition at the time, it is hardly surprising that Dave and his friend were ejected from the restaurant almost immediately and ended up writing pathetic messages on the steamed-glass of the outside windows. Annie remembers things slightly differently. “The first words Dave said were, “Will you marry me?” she says. “I thought he was a serious nutter. From that night on we were inseparable.”

Annie and Dave started living together and formed (with Peet Combes) the Tourists. Although Annie was a classically trained flute player, this was something she had been trying to play down, finding occasional work as a vocalist and writing her own material. She was a massive fan of Tamla Motown, and Stevie Wonder in particular, and Dave was the perfect foil for her pop sensibilities. Dave had found the perfect soul-mate in more ways than one. “Annie stopped me being so excessive in my lifestyle, eating only once every four days, taking huge amounts of amphetamines and never sleeping.” Initially, neither of them thought of what they were doing as a career, more of a mutual support system for their shared love of music. And ironically, it was the success of I Only Want To be With You, or, as Annie describes ,“an ironic cover of a Dusty Springfield song, ” that forced them to quit the Tourists and form Eurythmics.

Eurythmics are so called because the word begins with the first three letters ofEurope (“and we always felt more European than exclusively British”), kind-of half-encompasses the word rhythm (“which is the backbone of all music”) and, most importantly of all, is an extension of the movement art of Eurythmy, which is something Annie had studied at school. At the time, the name was obscure enough to raise eyebrows amongst the record executives who would have preferred (something akin to) Annie Lennox and the ex-Tourists but they stuck with it as a way of showing the world they were a band and not a female singer in front of a load of backing musicians. They were a different kind of band, though, as essentially they were a duo employing a different set of musicians for every record and tour. As Annie explains, “People start off in bands all equal due to their love of music and ultimately they end up hating each other because they’ve been on tour for so long. We didn’t want that to happen to us, so we decided to change things every year or so. The only constant was our creative relationship.”

Eurythmics - 'In The Garden' (1981)
From left to right: Annie Lennox & Dave Stewart
Photo Credit: (c) 1981 Peter Ashworth The first fruits of this “creative relationship” became In The Garden. This record (the duo’s first album as Eurythmics) is a hidden gem, and I say “hidden” merely because it is doubtful that many have heard it and, even though the band were signed worldwide to RCA, the record was initially only available in America as an import. Recorded at Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne in 1981, In The Garden belies its humble origins and stands the test of time, more than anything, simply because it comes from the heart.

Produced by Plank himself (who’d produced Devo and Kraftwerk) and featuring Blondie’s Clem Burke on drums and Can’s Holgar Czukay on (amongst other things) “Thai stringed instruments and French horn”, the record could have very easily kicked off the electro-clash movement – if historians hadn’t seen fit to slot in this particular episode a decade or so later.

Clem’s recruitment came about because Dave and Annie saw him in a club and Annie persuaded Dave to go up to him and ask him if he wanted to join.

“Conny was always so stimulating and interesting,” remembers Dave, “and Holgar always used to around the studio. Holgar was extremely eccentric and always great fun to play with.” Holgar, of course, had been Stockhausen’s star pupil and Stockhausen’s son, Marcus, ended up playing brass on In The Garden. Blondie influences are noticeable on, in particular, Your Time Will Come, but whether this is anything to do with Clem or Annie’s personal fascination with Debbie Harry is a moot point. For Annie, Blondie was “the ultimate pop band” although for others this is something that Eurythmics were soon to become themselves.

Listening to In The Garden now, some two decades after its release, is to be transported back to an era when electronic artists like Depeche Mode and Human League ruled the airwaves. There are other influences too: Dave’s guitar work is reminiscent of both Chameleons and Magazine and the track Take Me To Your Heart is all lost-future, contemporaneous Kraftwerk. Ultimately, of course, the record is the tale of Eurythmics taking flight for the first time, of Dave and Annie striding out into the world “as equals, as one” and of them letting their hair down after the trials and tribulations of the Tourists. Their next record, however, was to take them to a different level altogether.

The transformation of the Eurythmics of 1981 and In The Garden to the Eurythmics of 1982 and Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) could not have been more pronounced. Singer Annie Lennox and musician Dave Stewart might have still been making music but it was a music of such vibrant intensity that it was becoming impossible to ignore. Less than a year after its release and before 1983 was out, the duo had spent almost forty weeks on the singles chart in the UK - the title track alone had spent fourteen weeks there, peaking at No.2 in the UK and at the top spot in the US – and Dave and Annie’s lives had changed forever. Annie recalls the demos for Sweet Dreams, which were recorded on an eight-track system. “We used so many different textures. It sounded so sophisticated, but often we had to wait for the timber factory downstairs to turn off their machinery before we could record the vocals.”
Eurythmics - 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)' (1983)
From left to right: Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart
Photo Credit: (c) 1982 Lewis Ziolek

At any rate, the first single from these sessions Love Is A Stranger released in November 1982 showcased a Eurythmics capable of sweeping all before them. It was a minor hit (54) but the accompanying video caused a considerable stir due to Annie’s startling confidence and her varyingly androgynous appearance. The sleeve of the album featured Annie in an eye mask, almost as if she was defying the possibility of her success. Annie was to use this look again on the cover of the Touch album, something she explains by suggesting that “we all wear masks when we meet and when we interact with the world. Take the mask away and you will see a different persona. The mask, for me, is a way of performing.”

Dave maintains that at the very beginning, “No-one in the record company (with the notable exception of A&R man, Jack Steven) thought we’d be successful.” He’d actually gone to see his bank manager and persuaded him to lend them £5000 to buy the studio gear necessary to record the album themselves, promising that they would pay him back “tenfold.” He continues. “Sweet Dreams itself only arrived in America by import and a radio station in Cleveland Ohio, was playing it, and that’s how it started to become a hit. We sent this video off to America and the next thing we knew it was constantly being played and people were discussing it: is that woman a man, or is that man a woman?”

There’s little doubt that Sweet Dreams, as a song, hit a nerve, but, as Annie explains, its nascent conception lay in the quagmire of self-doubt that has plagued every songwriter since time immemorial. In this case, there was no search for “approval” or “recognition” but instead an attempt to tell it how it is. She says, “After In The Garden, we thought, “Let’s try something else. Let’s figure out what we really want to do.” She continues, “When we wrote Sweet Dreams I was in a funk of a mood and I thought we were crap and the whole thing was pointless.

Dave was doing his best to be valiantly encouraging and he put down some drumbeats and keyboards and I suddenly started to write these lines: Sweet dreams are made of this/Who am I to disagree?/I travel the world and the seven seas/Everybody’s looking for something.” I was trying to relay a cool anger about our predicament.” Anyone who has ever heard these lines, sung in Annie’s unique, inimitable style will know that they are sung like a mantra, a chant for the disaffected. For her own part, Annie trying to deliver them with “a cool anger” was her way of saying: here we all are on the planet, trying to make sense of our lives, this is my ego, ergo, and this is yours, too.

Eurythmics - 'Touch' (1983)
featuring Annie Lennox
Photo Credit: (c) 1983 Peter Ashworth After the huge success of the Sweet Dreams single, Eurythmics re-released Love Is A Stranger and had another Top Ten hit which stayed on the chart for eight weeks. By now the duo was a household name – something that Annie Lennox or Dave Stewart had really envisaged. And in the midst of all this new-found success, Annie and Dave had managed to find the time and inclination to record Touch – possibly their finest album to date.

Dave explains that, “We made Touch very quickly, recording it upstairs in the Church Studios in Crouch End (north London). We made it so quickly in fact that they hadn’t actually finished the studio and Michael Kamen ended up conducting the orchestra in the corridor.” The record has an enormous array of influences – African, Caribbean, South American, as well as the usual suspects.

Annie says this is because she is like a “sponge” or at least that she comes from “the north east of Scotland where even the sea is grey” and that somehow she has always embraced the opposite, i.e. colour and eclecticism. Dave offers another explanation: “The first cheque I ever got was for Sweet Dreams and I’d always dreamed of going to the Caribbean. So I booked a flight and arrived on Christmas Eve and I spent the night on the beach thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’” He continues, “Before Touch we were focussed on an icy, cold, electronic, European type of music and the success of Sweet Dreams meant that we could experiment. We were free in our minds and we didn’t have to repeat ourselves.”

Touch was produced by Stewart again and engineered by Jon Bavin and together they brought the best out of a new 24 track machine that the band had just invested in. For an album that has such diversely warm influences, Touch has some dark moments. Of course, this is often the case with Eurythmics records but Right By Your Side which reached No. 10 in November 1983, and Here Comes The Rain Again, which reached No. 8 some two months later, might almost be said to be the “lighter” moments on it. Touch can almost be seen as a companion piece to Sweet Dreams but only in so much as it was recorded “on the run” when Eurythmics had experienced the first fruits of major success. Dave and Annie were beginning to experiment with new equipment, new ways of recording and, in Annie’s case, a completely new way of communicating.

When the pair of them first got together as Eurythmics they wrote a manifesto on the wall of their studio, proclaiming their likes and dislikes. Amongst their likes were “Tamla Motown”, “electronica”, “coldness” and “independence” and it is probably true to say that Touch realised these ambitions more than any other Eurythmics record. It is extraordinary to think that the band recorded seven albums in a frantic eight year spell and that Touch itself took a mere three weeks to record and mix. They must have done something right because the album spawned three Top Ten hits across the Atlantic and in hindsight, is now widely regarded as the record that broke Eurythmics right through to the mainstream.

In 1984 Eurythmics released the soundtrack to the controversial film 1984 which itself yielded the hit Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty Four), a song that was banned by most American stations for so-called objectionable content. Soon after this, in 1985, they recorded their “Motown rock” album, Be Yourself Tonight.

The Motown influences have been well documented - at the age of fifteen; Annie had discovered Motown after starting to go to dance halls in Aberdeen. Her love for the genre is explained thus: “I was in Russia just after perestroika and I came back to England and it felt like the Caribbean>. If you take colour out of culture you are left with flatness and grimness. Motown, for me, is a palette of sound, colour and expression of both joy and pain.”

Eurythmics - 'Be Yourself Tonight' (1985)
From left to right: Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox
Photo Credit: (c) 1985 Peter Ashworth

For Annie, Stevie Wonder had always been king of Motown. She says, “For me, there is something about his voice. His albums are kind-of progressive Motown because he had a broader message and spoke about the world. I used to find myself experimenting and trying to make sounds like him, trying to copy him in fact.” Annie and Dave actually wrote There Must be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) hoping that somehow they’d be able to submit it to Stevie Wonder with a view to him recording it himself. However, a voice in their combined subconscious suggested they should do it themselves but also make an attempt to contact Wonder to see if he might be interested in appearing on it. It was Annie’s song but Dave sent it to Wonder and, amazingly, they got a call back saying that he loved it. Although Wonder was in a different time zone, they set a date for recording.

Dave continues, “We waited at the studio in Los Angeles for him to arrive up until midnight, but he didn’t arrive so we left the studio feeling all despondent. I’d just got back to my hotel at 1 o’clock in the morning when he called to say he was at the studio. He was up for doing it there and then so I rushed back, got everyone together and went for it. He played the harmonica solo absolutely brilliantly and everyone was just speechless. I muttered something to him into the mike from the console, like, “Well, that was amazing. Could we do it just once more for good luck?” Stevie agreed and we ran through the song again and when we got to his solo section again he played an Irish jig. He knew it’d been amazing first time round so he wasn’t gonna bother again. I thought that was pretty funny.”

There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) is about “longing for a spiritual connection - a protectiveness and security to take our anxiety away.” The love song has often been seen as some kind of secular requiem anyway, and it’s only one small step to lift everything up to a higher plane. Nevertheless, the apparent “spiritual” nature of the song is a slight parody, something that is all too obvious once you’ve witnessed the camp, over-the-top video. There’s more camp tomfoolery, of course, elsewhere on the record, in particular on Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves. When Annie originally wrote it, she’d immediately thought of Tina Turner but no one, however, could have envisaged the extraordinary chemistry generated between Annie and her eventual cohort, Aretha Franklin.

They recorded the song in Detroit and as Dave explains, “Aretha turned up with four guys and a load of home-baked food. At one point she sang The Way We Were with just me in the room. There were actually tears in her eyes and it was just awesome. I remember feeling really proud of Annie, seeing her and Aretha together at the mic.” The song went on to become a global hit with Annie and Aretha performing it on stage together at the Free Nelson Mandela concert on June 11 1988 – one of the proudest days of Annie’s life. To this day, the song is still seen as an anthem to female emancipation all over the world.

Eurythmics - 'Revenge' (1986)
From left to right: Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox
Photo Credit: (c) 1986 Claude Gassian Be Yourself Tonight finally established Eurythmics as a several-trick pony and produced the duo’s first British No.1 with Angel.

Revenge, the pair’s fifth album, saw them repair to a favourite haunt – Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne. It also saw the return of Eurymics’ original drummer – Blondie’s Clem Burke. The album yielded four hit singles: When Tomorrow Comes, a huge rollercoaster of a pop song with a Springsteen-esque edge and a crashing verse and chorus; Thorn In My Side which peaked at No. 5 and had all the elements of an impossibly catchy version of how the Hollies might have sounded in 1986; the stunning ballad, The Miracle Of Love, which is the album’s signature song; and Missionary Man which kicks off the album and features the best harmonica solo since Stevie Wonder had made all that effort on the Be Yourself Tonight album.

On the subject of Revenge, Annie points out that, “Never has an album been more aptly named.” She continues, “Revenge was just the mood we were in at the time because we had been through so much shit.” Dave agrees. “We’d had a hard time with the Tourists and being ripped off but we’d never stopped touring and playing even though every record had a load of hits on it. We never got complacent or not hungry. I think all our frustration came out on Revenge.”

Revenge is a very cold, sweaty and claustrophobic record full of mood swings and scene-setting sound effects.

Eurythmics - 'Revenge' (1986)
From left to right: Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart
Photo Credit: (c) 1986 Claude Gassian

The sound effects are ever-present – Let’s Go, for instance, starts with a train leaving a station, In This Town kicks off with a torrential rainstorm and I Remember You is all Tom Waits’ town-dwelling sleaziness topped off with ambulance sirens. The album was recorded and mixed at Studio Grand Armee in Paris – as well as Conny’s in Cologne – and it was here and hereabouts that Dave had decided to wander the streets with a tape recorder. He reveals, “I taped conversations and sounds from the street and ambulances and people arguing. I wanted to recreate that feeling when you are in a crowd full of people and you escape into your head for twenty minutes or so. I wanted people to lose focus and forget where they were.” Revenge is testament to the success of that little experiment.

Eurythmics - 'Savage' (1988)
featuring Annie Lennox
Photo Credit: (c) Alistair Thaine (1987) Revenge is a grandiose beast of a rock ‘n’ roll record, built - and I use the word advisedly - to be performed live. It instigated the biggest Eurythmics tour to date and remains to this day, Dave and Annie’s best-selling album worldwide. The tour, however, brought the duo to the brink of exhaustion and, in 1986, the prospect of recording their sixth album in as many years must have filled them both with dread. Savage, the album in question, is a very dark album indeed. Having said that, from a technical point of view, Savage is probably the most electronically sophisticated record Eurythmics have ever released and, to this day, it still enjoys the distinction of being Annie’s personal favourite.

Well, it hadn’t always been. On the brink of recording, Annie was in “a particularly dark place” and her and Dave had decided to write separately for the first time. Usually, Dave and Annie would work on a lot of the music together and at some point Annie would retire to a corner and come up with some lyrics.

This time around, however, Dave recorded a lot of the music himself and then gave it to Annie on cassette. She didn’t like it at first and it was only during an extraordinarily productive period in Paris in spring 1987 that the record pulled into the amazing shape it is today. The album was recorded at Chateau Dangu in Normandy and then mixed at Grand Armee Studios in Paris (now a familiar haunt) and it was at the latter that Annie came up with “an explosion of words and creativity.

Savage kicks off with Beethoven (I Love To Listen To), which has the distinction of being innocuously sinister and frighteningly relevant both at the same time. Annie delivers her lines as if she were a bored and demented Stepford Wife spouting bilious poetry while the song describes a life of leisure within the confines of a relationship based on material needs. You never know, however, when “Annie” is going to snap – although the lines “When I said I wanted a new mink coat/I was just thinking about/Something sleek/ to wrap around my tender throat” give something of a clue. Beethoven (I Love To Listen To) sets the tone of the album perfectly and the record continues with I’ve Got A Lover (Back In Japan) and Do You Want To Break Up which are all electronic beats and simple pop harmonies. The latter, in particular, is extremely odd as it skips nonchalantly over the subject of breaking up whilst Dave – with his finest Prince hat on - doodles away in the background. The drum sounds on this track are not drums at all – they are sampled recordings of Dave and Conny Plank tapping bamboo trees in a forest in Japan.

Indeed, the record as a whole employs an enormous array of samples which have been processed by a Synclavier, at the time an extremely innovative piece of equipment. It was Olle Romo’s task to programme this unwieldy beast – no simple task – particularly as when Dave first bought it from Canadian folk artist Buffy Saint-Marie, it had Buffy’s voice all over it. From Dave’s recollection, the Synclavier was “enormous”: much of Savage was recorded in the smoking room of an old French house and a lot of the time you couldn’t actually get in there as the Synclavier took up so much space.

Savage has a seductive, mesmeric quality but has the reputation of being dark and difficult. It still managed to conjure up the customary four hit singles, however, Beethoven (I Love To Listen), Shame, I Need A Man and You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart – and spawned a Savage video collection by Sophie Muller which is worth the entrance price alone. Dave and Annie didn’t tour the album as such - indeed it would have been difficult to do it justice (and they’d have needed a crane to get the Synclavier on the road) – and this, no doubt, is due to the fact that Savage is possibly the most personal Eurythmics record in existence. After its release, the duo took a break and married (other people) before reconvening to begin the recording of their seventh album, We Too Are One. It would prove to be a troublesome experience.

We Too Are One was recorded in Paris in 1989 and released in August of that year. At its inception, they both realised that something between them was about to give. “We were actually having difficulties being in the same room and should really have moved to opposite sides of the planet,” recalls Annie. “We Too Are One is a deeply ironic title because our relationship had become nightmarish.” Interestingly, producer Jimmy Iovine was chiefly brought in to act as a buffer or umpire between Dave and Annie.

The title track itself (although if you look carefully you’ll realise there is no title track as too changes from its also usage to just mean the pair of us) features Charlie Wilson on “harmonica” but only credits him with backing vocals. Why? “Well,’ says Dave. “Charlie was blowing in his hands during one take whilst I was playing guitar and Annie was singing and we all started laughing. But when we heard it back we thought it was great”.

Eurythmics - 'We Too Are One' (1989)
featuring Annie Lennox
Photo Credit: (c) Jean Baptiste Mondino (1989)

Eurythmics - 'We Too Are One' (1989)
featuring Dave Stewart
Photo Credit: (c) Jean Baptiste Mondino (1989) The King And Queen Of America (which follows) is a much straighter affair, although camp enough to have graduated from Bowie’s Let’s Dance Academy. “A critical, cryptic, ironic and vicious stab at Western culture and the American Dream,” says Annie. “The King and Queen are symbols of the American Dream which is that everyone can be a winner. Well, no they can’t actually. There never has been a King and Queen of America but I suppose there are a million contenders.”

Musically, We Too Are One has a band-vibe rather than, as Dave says “chaos and orchestras.” It might have heralded the demise of Eurythmics for almost ten years but the record sits easily amongst the best things the duo has ever recorded. The split that ensued had become inevitable before Annie and Dave had even entered the studio and we should be thankful for “the beautiful mess” that is We Too Are One.

At any rate, darker forces were at work, something to which Annie refers when she says: “I don’t want to box Eurythmics into something that is easily marketed and easily sold and easily disposed and easily composed. In order to keep creativity alive you have to move on and if you become stuck with one sound and one look and one genre that’s okay but it doesn’t satisfy either of us enough. I don’t fit into any slot. I am not really a rock’n’roller and I never really was a punk or a hippy. I’ve never really been anything other than myself just reacting to the music of the time that I like to listen to. I am always the person I am now.” Or, in other words, once you have achieved it all and come to the end of some kind of rainbow, it is time to rip it up and start again.

Ten long years passed between the release of Eurythmics’ swansong We Too Are One and the recording of their Peace album in 1999. Since We Too Are One, Dave had taken time off to pursue his photography career amongst other things and Annie had pursued a successful solo career. Both, however, had found the time to have children and both had found a renewed perspective on life. The circumstances of their resumed acquaintance remain quite hazy but what is certain is that they had actually written four or five songs together before either of them realised the significance of what was happening. Or as Annie puts it: “Dave just looked me in the eye one day and said: “What are we doing? Are we making an album?” To which the answer was a resounding “probably”.

Eurythmics - 'Peace' (1999)
From left to right: Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart
Photo Credit: (c) Anoushka Fisz (1999)
Eurythmics - 'Peace' (1999)
From left to right: Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart
Photo Credit: (c) Anoushka Fisz (1999)

The idea of Peace - and the Greenpeace and Amnesty International affiliations that go with it - actually only came much later than these original sessions. The original subject of Peace is more to do with “the human condition on a personal level” or, if you will, “inner peace,” rather than what one might call the vagaries of peace as a generic term of beneficence. But Dave and Annie were members of both organisations and both felt it was time to support them more fully. And then Dave, with his usual synchronicity, bumped into two members of Greenpeace on the street, brought them into the studio and told them that Eurythmics would donate all the proceeds and merchandising to their organisation from an as-yet unplanned and an as-yet barely envisaged tour.

You can tell which peace came first when listening to 17 Again, the album’s opener. “Hey, hey, I’m a million miles away/Funny how it seems like yesterday” is surely about the inception of Eurythmics all those years ago, and ‘All those fake celebrities/And all those vicious queens/All the stupid papers/And the stupid magazines” cannot be anything but a bitter indictment of the madcap journey Annie and Dave set out on at that time. The line “Sweet Dreams are made of anything/That gets you in the scene” speaks volumes and sends tingles up your spine. For the record, at the age of seventeen, Dave was living in a disused railway station in Scotland (after having run off with gypsies at the age of fifteen) and Annie had just won a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London. So no change there then.) By track two, however, the haunting I Saved The World Today, the record tackles a more “universal” theme with “There’s a million mouths to feed/And I’ve got everything I need” proving to be the definitively-emotive sentiment. Ditto track three, the Patti Smith-tinged Power To The Meek.

Track four, however, which is called Beautiful Child, is just stunning. So good in fact that when questioned on the subject Annie can only say: “Songs are little gems that you have to mine out of your subconscious” - which should give you an indication of how wonderful it is. When they wrote it, Annie started playing piano and Dave joined in on guitar and another little gem was born. And the lines “The human race/ Is running out of space/There is no better love/And human love is what it takes” show precisely what the pair meant by saying that the record was about inner peace as much as anything.

The track Peace itself, is so gloriously nihilistic that it even assuages its own solution to the ills of the planet by proclaiming itself to be “just a word”. Well, marvellous, we all say in unison, and many a true word has been spoken in jest and all that, but I defy you to get anything positive out of the following refrain: “Stop the world/Turn out the sun/I’m so tired of it turning round” or “Stop the world/Just shut it down/There’s no point/ In it spinning round.” And yet, after hearing this song, you will.

Peace, of course, is the last record Eurythmics recorded together. During an eighteen year period, the duo released eight studio albums, and sold over sixty-five million copies worldwide. Even now, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart are still the most charted male/female duo in the UK and their Greatest Hits album (1991) has sold more than eight million copies across Europe. Officially, they have only ever “split up” once. The rest of the time they could really only be said to be resting and “enjoying the silence”. Although both pursue a variety of other interests and alternative careers, Annie and Dave still share one of the most creative musical partnerships the world has ever seen. As they have said, they are “opposite and yet the same” and each is the other’s greatest inspiration.

“The future remains a mystery to me,” concludes Dave. “We are the only couple I know that have split up and yet stayed together.”

See you in the future.

PHILL SAVIDGE 2005

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Eurythmics - The Ultimate Collection