Eurythmics
Anything Goes

Musician, November 1983

By Freff
Photos by Deborah Feingold

By now you've heard "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" on the radio. Maybe you've even bought the album of the same name. And I will bet good green American Folding money that you think Eurythmics is a synthesizer band, and that Annie Lennox does the singing and Dave Steward does all the playing. Why shouldn't you? I mean, it's what all the reviews say. It's what the bio from RCA, their record company, says. It also happens to be dead wrong.

Of course, lack of truth has never derailed a convenient preconception. But when the truth is wild and eccentric and even a little revolutionary, ah! That's quite another thing. So read on. And next time you hear Sweet Dreams," remember to listen for the milk bottles.

There's a certain standardized ritual to the making of a record, You do your demos, work out arrangements with the band, practice until you've got them down cold, and then Go Into The Studio. There you spend an hour getting the drum sound together (only an hour, if you're lucky), an hour on the bass, an hour on the guitar, another hour trying to regain the enthusiasm you had when you'd walked in tour hours before, and finally, frustrated and sweaty and beaucoup bucks poorer, you walk Out with a take you can't stand but which the engineer assures you can be "fixed in the mix." Only it never can.

Dave and Annie found a better way. Actually, they didn't have much choice. After splitting from the Tourists in 1980 and making In The Garden, their first album as Eurythmics, at Conny Plank's West German studio, they ran into nerve-shattering management troubles. By the time everything settled out and they were free of that entanglement, they were also free of useful things like money and a recording contract.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. "I dressed up like a businessman-l had a briefcase and everything-and I went down to our local bank manager," recalls Dave. "I told him that Annie and I were going to do something absolutely amazing and that the bank should invest in us. I made the point that most bands spent thirty thousand pounds just recording one album, but that we could buy the equipment we needed for seven thousand and then make all the albums we wanted." The bank manager didn't know a microphone from a macrame, but Dave's figures and track record and sheer chutzpah convinced him that the chance was worth taking.

Of course, Dave never mentioned the fact that they'd never engineered a recording studio in their lives....

Their "studio" was a dingy, v-shaped warehouse attic. No acoustical tiles, no drum booth, no double-sealed glass window: they played and sang in the same room with their tape deck and mixing board, which were a TEAC half-inch 8-track and a cheap, used Soundcraft, respectively. For microphones, they had two Beyers, which they used to record everything-Annie's voice, trumpets, percussion, the piano-and for outboard processing gear they had a handful of old effects boxes, a space echo, and one (count it, one) spring reverb

They made the Sweet Dreams album with that. Go and listen to it. It sounds like it was recorded in the finest of two hundred-dollar-an-hour rooms, instead of a place most people would barely credit with demo capability. Raw talent and no pressure from the time clock are two reasonable explanations for that disparity, but at the heart of the record's sonic success is a different attitude about recording. No more "fix it in the mix." Instead it was get the sound right, no matter how long it took, and then record it flat. And if it didn't sound right later, scrub it and do it again.

Having fun counted, too. That's something Annie and Dave learned from Conny Plank, back when they'd been working on In The Garden.

This is how Dave remembers it: "Conny and his partner Holger took me aside one day to show me what they were doing-all these weird, obscure experiments. They'd make rhythm tracks out of tape loops of pinball machine counters, and add a bass drum even though they couldn't play drums, and then they'd play some kind of scratchy violin part all the way through and I'd say, 'what the hell, that sounds terrible.' But they'd never use it like that. They'd kind of switch it in and out, and then run it through a space echo, and phase it.. .and it would sound really great. Compared to that, everything I'd ever done in a band seemed boring I could see them running around, rubbing their hands with glee, and getting real excited-and these were forty year-old men! They were like kids with paint pots and a blank canvas. They could do anything."

Annie and Dave started doing anything, too. And a whole lot of people came round and caught the bug. The Specials recorded in the attic, as did Jimmy Destri and Clem Burke of Blondie. To them, it was toy town: a place to relax and go crazy in and around recordings for Sweet Dreams me most bizarre sessions went on such as improvisation a jams with Clem Burke on drums, Adam Powell of Selector playing dub bass, and Dave's stepfather (an ex-Jesuit priest turned Buddhist) exclaiming haiku poetry in French. Dave even started dragging total strangers in off the street, people who had never even seen a tape deck, let alone thought of recording a song, and setting to work with them. This is a synthesizer, and this is a tape echo, and when you press this button then

I trust you begin to get the picture Just to make it concrete, here are a few examples from the album

-There's lots of stuff you'd guess was synthesizer that isn't That string sound in 'The Walk'? A Farfisa Combo Compact through the spring reverb. The clinking counterpoint in the chorus of 'Sweet Dreams"? Milk bottles pitched to the right notes by filling them with different levels of water And the weird, rattling feedback along with the rain noise in 'The City Never Sleeps' is just that: feedback. To get the environment they wanted. Dave and Annie bought subway tickets and stood on the platform, recording the trains going by with a little Walkman-like tape machine When they got back they found they didn't have any open tracks left on the Teac. so to get the trains into the song, they added them directly into the 2-track master during mixdown. The clicking of the wheels caught Dave's ear. To him it sounded a little like guitar feedback. So he grabbed his Gretsch Country Gentleman, plugged it in, held it in front of little monitor speakers so it would pick up on the clicking and start feeding back for real and he submixed that in, too.

-That same trick was used for most of Annie's multiple harmonies. Since there were no clear tracks, she sang them during mixdown, standing next to the mixing board with earphones on.

-Part of the rhythm track from "Love Is A Stranger" is an unusual, on-the-downbeat grunting sound. That's a reverb-processed chef from a neighborhood restaurant, one of the novices Dave pulled in off the street.

-All the piano on the record is there by fortunate coincidence, The floor below their attic was occupied by a frame-making company, owned by a man who was an avid pianist; so avid, in fact, that he'd installed a grand piano in the shop so he could practice before work every morning, Annie and Dave got permission to use it after hours. They ran their two Beyer mikes down on long cables, set up a talkback system so they could cue each other, and then played all the piano parts by flashlight (the regular lights having been shut off at night),

-Many, many, sound chains. Even though their Movement Audio Visual drum computer (an English instrument not in general release yet) used digitally-recorded drums,they weren't quite right, So, Dave says, "we'd do things like send the snare out to trigger a white noise, send the white noise through a phaser, and send just the phased version of the white noise through a repeat echoor something like that. Sometimes we had the most outrageous connections. A real engineer would have been appalled."

But it worked. Two world-wide hit singles and a hit album, followed up by a three-song EP ("Who's That Girl?") that has so far sold 400,000 copies in England and Europe alone,

All that success, of course, has meant expansion. Not long ago, Dave and Annie bought an old church and converted it to a 24-track studio, complete with goodies like a Lexicon delay and a Harmonizer (though they still have only two Beyer mikes). Question of the day: will extra track space kill that wild, simplicity-enforced creativity?

Apparently not, Whew.

We're still banging metal bottles together. I mean, the very first thing we recorded in the place," laughs Dave, was a ukelele submixed with a Roland Juno 60. It's all in the brain, you know, not in the equipment."

If there are two things that Annie and Dave unquestionably agree on, it's a) they are total opposites, and it's that difference that makes Eurythmics work, and b) by the time a song is finished, they can't tell who did what anymore,

- What.? package of contradictions! Dave is the techno-whiz, usually starting songs from the simpler bottom end, coming up with a rhythm and a bass line. sketching in the rest with punchy, brass-section chords. Annie instinctively tackles it from the top, with lyrical bits of poetry worked out in exercise books, and melodies and chord changes carefully written down in music notation.

But there are exceptions. Like "Sweet Dreams," the song they're best known for.

"Dave and I almost split up the day we wrote 'Sweet Dreams,"' says Annie, in her quiet Scottish accent, remembering a particularly bitter point during their between-contracts period. 'I'm very negative and he's very positive. But we were just having a terrible time and I couldn't take it anymore, and I said so. And he said, 'Okay, fine, you don't mind if I go ahead and program the drum computer then, do you?' I was lying on the floor, curled up in a fetal position or something and he programmed in this rhythm. It sounded so good that in the end I couldn't resist it. I sat down behind the synthesizer and fain!, the rift came. I got that, said, 'Oh, that's good,' and we put it down."

And then she improvised the lyric. Into the microphone. With the tape running.

That's right, improvised. What you hear when you put your stylus down in that song's groove is Annie Lennox's first and only take (except for the part about "hold your head up" in the chorus; that came later).

Annie is responsible for about ninety percent of the lyrics. Dave says he "likes her lyrics better." She tends to take phrases everyone has heard so many times they don't hear them anymore, and then twist them around; examine them from new angles; pull out fresh meanings. They also serve double-duty as statements to herself.

"Eurythmics music is bittersweet. I can't sing something that's just cliche anymore, because just to say 'I love you' is too profound. It's too intimate, really, too sacred a thing to say in a song." Of course, the true test of a song's strength is how well it survives translation into another musical idiom. Only the valid ones, the pure ones, can make that crossover. (Can you imagine a reggae "Volare" or a country-western "Camelot"? Sheer horror.) So far, Annie and Dave's tunes are making the leap just fine, and they're the ones kicking them over the boundaries. I told you earlier they weren't just another synthesizer band. Right now there are three different recordings of "The Walk" available in England: the "soul" version that's on the LP, a heavy disco adaptation ("a little bit like Grandmaster Flash," says Annie), and a solemn gospel and grand piano version, in which all the synth lines are sung by a choir.

"We're quite variable," says Dave, "and we could go... well, anywhere. In three years' time we might make an album that's just acoustic 12-string, four cellos, and Annie's voice, doing traditional Scottish folk songs. You can call everything Eurythmics. It's not really the name of a band. It's the name of a project."

Good as Eurythmics are on record, eccentric and inventive and involving, as good as all that-they're better live. Lots better. I got my first hint at the sound check for their show at the Kabuki. a theater at San Francisco's Japan town. Soundchecks are incredibly revealing, mostly because of the desperation factor. They are innately futile. The game is not to make the sound good, but to isolate and solve as many problems you can at each new gig and pray that only two or three emergencies will come up during the show. And as if the standard troubles weren't enough this time around, there was also a mobile recording truck from the Record Plant downstairs, taping the show for later broadcast on the BBC. Pressure. And you know what? It was hardly noticeable. Annie fulfilled her self-characterization of negativity at first, seeming a little down, but she perked right up when a gift of flowers came in from fellow RCA act Jefferson Starship. And Dave.. well, Dave was utterly unflappable. One minute making out a detailed set chart with song times for the guys in the mobile, so they could change tape reels without missing anything, another minute cheerfully cranking out a Beatles improv on his guitar, vamping with the band's three backup singers. An incredible variety of music flowed from his fingers as he checked effects settings and monitor levels. Blues slide work. Richard Thompson's "Calvary Cross." Funky rhythm rifts. Some classical finger picking.

The man can play. And Annie's voice live is stronger and more dramatic than on record. Even at soundcheck, clearly saving herself for the evening's show, she eclipsed the album versions of the songs they ran through.

Where had they come from. Annie's got the simpler story. (That should warn you about Dave's.) Growing up in Aberdeen, Scotland, she never had a lick of training as a singer, except for the usual church choir experiences. But when she was seven, she started studying piano, and at eleven she picked up the flute. By the time she was seventeen, she'd qualified for the Royal Academy of Music. "On the first day I arrived I discovered that I really hated it. A lousy place, totally lousy. But it was my way of getting away from the provinces, and I was so young and naive, I couldn't think of any alternatives." She stayed for three years

"I'd been taught that there was a perfect phrasing, a perfect sound. a perfect dynamics. But there is no perfect. The most perfecting thing is to express yourself, totally, but nobody teaches you that. I think for most trained musicians, it's just a job. I learned that there and it was horrible."

Annie's turning point came when she moved into the flat of a friend who had a stereo. She'd never had records; there wasn't money for them. But now she had this collection at her disposal, and she made a discovery, and a rediscovery: Joni Mitchell, "the first woman who ever wrote anything really potent," and Motown. Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. "My Cherie Amour" and "Heard It Through The Grapevine." The songs she'd danced to as a teenager in Aberdeen and loved, without really comprehending what they were. Those tunes started to sing again as an escape from the instrumental regimen the Academy was forcing on her. "It was quite a relief to find a place within me that was pure expression. At the time, I remember that I used to think, I'm just black and everything would be all right. It sounds odd, now. But it was like a place to be, mentally. When I'm frightened, and nervous, and really searching for someplace safe, then that's where I go. It's my ground base."

She needed it more than once, after she left the Academy. Survival was a string of jobs as waitress and bookstore clerk, music a succession of failed connections and bad deals. (At one point, she almost shared management with the Bay City Rollers, and unlikely connect ion if ever there was one.) And then, in 1977, she met Dave Stewart, who promptly got her in to see a music publisher he knew, proclaiming her "an amazing singer," even though he'd never heard her.

That's Dave all over. I could write a book the size of War and Peace and not cover Dave Stewart's life. He's rock 'n' roll's Candide, hurtling from disaster to exploit to disaster, always convinced that this is the best of all possible worlds. Dave got his start in music learning Mississippi John Hurt and John Fahey from records, then Dylan songs, and finally T Rex. When he was fourteen, he stowed away in the back of Amazing Blondie's van after a gig. Anybody else would have been promptly on his way back to hearth and home when discovered the next morning, but not Dave; he spent the next six weeks of school holiday traveling with the renaissance-music band, being taught pavanes and galliardes on the lute. By the end of the tour he was playing a few tunes to open for their show. Great experience. So what if he had to sleep in the back of the van with their pet Great Dane? Later on he opened for Ralph McTell; founded the band Longdancer, which was signed to Elton John's Rocket Records for 56,000 pounds (money the band squandered in six months of living like drug-fogged lords at a fancy hotel-record? We were supposed to make a record?"); ran a record shop into the ground and worked with a ten-piece soul band; joined an offshoot of Osibisa; spent a solid year on acid, inventing his own language; left his wife to run off with a member of the Sadista Sisters and her baby; got into three car crashes; was held prisoner at gun point by a German promoter; was deported; suffered multiple collapsed lungs and a major operation.... No wonder sound-check couldn't faze him.

Up onstage for the show, now. Eurythmics on the road is an eight-piece band. Dave alternates between straight and bottleneck guitar (run through an lbanez multi-effects rack and a little practice amp of unknown English vintage); Roland CSQ-100 sequencer and SH-09 hooked into a space echo, and a Tascam Portastudio. The Portastudio serves more than one purpose. On its various tracks are recorded drum patterns, sequencer runs, vocal choir effects. Dave fades them in and out as he wants, augmenting and ornamenting the songs. Sometimes the drum pattern can be heard by the audience; sometimes it's sent strictly to the band's drummer, giving him a reference beat for his own exertions on a full Simmons electronic drum kit, plus real snare. The bassist snaps and pumps furiously, humanizing the beat. The chordal keyboardist (Dave plays mostly bass lines and single-note rifts) keeps texture happening with a Prophet 5 and a Juno 60.

The backup singers bring in the damnedest simultaneous hints of cabaret and Motown. And of course.. Annie. Annie who is pulling out all the stops.

Listen. This is the heart of it. David Bowie would be thrilled to have as much stage presence as this woman has When she comes striding out in her white suit, white pants, white cap and red gloves, and whisks off the plastic mask she is holding over her face to reveal a misty red stripe of make-up across her eyes (she's worn it in concert before but it's perfect for this place, very Japanese). it's like she's twenty-five feet tall. Even when she sinks down so low on the stage you can't see her beyond the audience's bobbing heads, you're still somehow aware of her She's got the gift. And the real miracle is she's not yet at her prime, that next time around she'll be even better.

'No matter what, music is still a very powerful form of communication, whether it's being bought and sold in a marketplace or what. You still have this bottom line. does it mean something to people, does it hit home, does it cut?"

Annie said that after the concert, trying to reconcile success and art. But I think they gave their own best advice to the audience and themselves in the version of Sweet Dreams" that was their final encore. On the album, it's a cynical song, with the emphasis on the verse. Onstage the focus shifted to the chorus, which they belted out like an anthem: "Hold your head up."

Words to live by. Thanks, and amen.