Eurythmics
Two "Total Opposites" Try A Bit Of Soul Searching

Musician, November 1985

By Barbara Pepe

Something I did recently was so helpful to me," Annie Lennox explains. "I went to see a psychotherapist. It's something that I've been a little bit unsure about for years. I did see a therapist once before, at a particularly tough time in my life. She didn't help at all, just sat and looked at me. I felt completely tongue-tied, like I was filling in all the spaces with words. I was more freaked out when I left than when I came in.

"This time I was very fortunate. I met a woman in Los Angeles, of all places, where you always expect a load of hype and nonsense. She was so helpful to me, just in terms of going and talking to her and asking, 'Am I mad? Am I going to go insane, or am I all right, really?' To have an unbiased opinion, a genuine opinion given back to me was the best $500 I ever spent."

Annie Lennox is sitting on a blue cushion, spine erect, in the Church, Eurythmics' London office/studio/workshop/sanctuary. The bright-white walls are lined with forty-four gold and platinum records from five countries, and framed magazine covers from around the world. Surrounded by these reflections of glory the singer rivets her questioner with clear gray eyes and offers, "We are living in this crazy, super fast, hyped-up society. There's this super consciousness, which before, we never really had. We just did what we were doing and didn't ask too many questions. Now we're full of self-doubt. Neurosis is a common disease. We used to have scurvy, now we have neurosis."

Neurosis is something the sometimes moody, always passionate musician has spent a lot of time studying, in and out of the therapist's office. Hers is the palette that paints the brooding, darker colors in Eurythmics' distinctive sound. "I'm very secretive in my lyrics," she says. Everything's there but it's so masked. I can't write a song about, Oh god you cut me up and I'm hurting.' I write more from the overview that our lives, our destinies, are already mapped out for us and that we're just unfolding them. Whatever we do, whatever happens to us at any given minute had to be.

"I've experienced the pains of these relationships, and in a way it is a kind of a catharsis for me to write about t. but it's not just my experience. It's a whole load, these plays that had to be reenacted. I could choose a lover who was masochistic and I was sadistic and somehow or other it had to be that person. I had to be the one for them and they had to be the one for me This might sound a bit funny. but that's what fascinates me

Dave Stewart has another point of view. But then, that's not unusual for these two separate but equal partners. "We're totally opposite," he insists. "If I speak to Annie for more than five minutes she sometimes gets really confused and tells me to stop it. We are complete, I think. That's why it works a lot of the time.

Annie's often very quiet," explains the male half of the duo. "Before we go onstage, my dressing room's always full and there's always tons of people come in and out, people cracking jokes, the trumpet player's doing a dance in his kilt.... In Annie's dressing room f's always totally quiet and sort of empty. That kind of represents a similar thing to how it works, really. When we go onstage and in photos, Annie seems like the real extrovert. She's at the front and I'm the guy behind. But that's a very classic thing, isn't it? There aren't many people who are the same in the dressing room and onstage."

Lennox traces this offstage isolation to her early teens: "My childhood was relatively happy, sort of normal, nothing traumatic. But at the age of thirteen or fourteen, everything changed. I became very moody, very easily depressed, a bit withdrawn. Although I seemed to be an extrovert, in my own inner world I was much more withdrawn, watching the world, trying to cope with who I was and really very confused about it. That went on from the year fourteen right up to thirty. It's been incredibly hard to deal with, but something is starting to dawn on me, that it doesn't have to be like this, it doesn't have to be all negative. It is possible for me to turn what seems to be useless, hopeless and despairing into something that is valuable. What I'm feeling about growing up, is that ultimately we take responsibility for our actions. You can't run away and hide anymore, you can't pretend, 'Oh I won't talk to this person, it'll all go away,' because it doesn't. It gets worse.

Lennox's private/ public dichotomy extends to her general perception as a stand-up singer, belying her well-trained musicianship: "I started playing piano when I was seven because there were lessons available at school. Also my grandmother had a piano. I got the chance to learn the flute when I was eleven years old. I started to play in local school orchestras and military bands, and later smaller chamber groups and ensembles. When I realized that I wanted to play the flute professionally„or so I thought„I went on to the Royal Academy. Then I actually took up the harpsichord because I enjoyed it„it's a beautiful instrument."

Dave Stewart reveals, "It was Stevie Wonder that turned Annie on to singing. She was totally into being a flute player in a classical orchestra until she was stoned for the first time. Somebody put headphones on her head and played her Talking Book. From that moment on she left the Royal Academy and just wanted to sing."

"It was such a revelation to me to listen with very heightened senses to that record," recalls Lennox. "It was an extraordinary experience to me at the time. I held that very dear, as something that had touched me, made a profound impact on me. It was something that in the future I wanted to aspire to, that kind of depth of subtlety and profound statement through music.

You use your instinct and you also use your intellect. Hopefully one doesn't outweigh the other. If you go by your instinct too much, the overall shape and form can suffer. Likewise the other way around. Too much into the intellect and it becomes a clinical exercise. So hopefully we finely balance the two things. That's what we aim to do."

Be Yourself Tonight, Eurythmics' third hit album, show Dave and Annie shading the instinct side of that balancing act, aided and abetted by a move toward out-and-out soul. Like most Eurythmic activity, it was unplanned; neither Eurythmic is a particularly avid soul freak, notwithstanding Annie's seminal encounter with Stevie. The record was originally conceived as a mingling of Indian and pop music. Then, during a 1984 tour that took them through Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Europe and North America, "we just naturally progressed into a soul orientation Dave explains. "The instruments we put together, the horns, Annie's voice, the backing vocalists, kind of got us into it. We came straight from all those gigs to make this album," mostly recorded in a derelict section of Paris on 8-track equipment lugged over from the Church.

The duo made special pilgrimages to two soulful deities, the first being Stevie himself, who added the harmonica solo to "There Must Be An Angel" while Lennox, according to Stewart, "sat at his feet the whole time looking up in amazement." "Meeting him was very daunting," admits Annie. "I was a little nervous about it. There was nobody but me and him. But it was wonderful. He's got true command. It was rather humbling."

The second pilgrimage was to Detroit and the court of Lady Soul Aretha Franklin, who joined Lennox in a duet on "Sisters (Are Doing It For Themselves)." (In their excitement about the impending session, Dave and Annie almost left the 24-track master on the plane.) "Annie was very nervous, naturally," Stewart recalls. She felt Aretha might think she was just a white girl trying to sing the blues or something. Yet Annie, believe me, was heavily convicted in everything she was doing. Aretha'd never heard Annie sing anywhere. The first take, the tape started, and you could see Aretha sort of go, 'Wow, check this out.' Annie was really singing.

"They're very alike, it's funny," Dave muses. "They're from different places completely, but they've got a very similar point where they come from, soul-wise. Annie's from a kind of very depressed working-class background in Aberdeen where there's lots of unemployment and her father was out of work a lot of the time. A lot of Scottish people have got this soul, you know, like the Average White Band.

"Annie was very friendly that day- she wanted everything to be all right. But Annie's very moody and Aretha's very moody. If she thinks something she'll say it. Aretha started arguing about one line in the song. She didn't want to sing the line, 'The inferior sex are still superior.' Aretha thought that was a bit strong. Well, it is, but Annie didn't really mean it like that. The next line was 'We've got doctors, lawyers,. politicians too,' meaning that women might be regarded as the inferior sex, but Annie's point was, 'Look we're really on equal terms.' Annie came up with a great new line that Aretha liked, which was 'The inferior sex have got a new exterior. We've got doctors, lawyers, politicians too."'

Despite suggestions to the contrary, Aretha was not a musical influence on Lennox: "To be honest with you, and I'm embarrassed to say this, I'm not that familiar with Aretha's records," Annie admits. "In fact, I don't have any of them. In the Rolling Stone review the woman criticized my singing, said I'd lust aped Aretha Franklin all through the record, It is so contrary to what really happened.

"Aretha's a much more fluid singer. My melodic lines are far more clear-cut. These are just personal differences in style, like the color of the shoes I might choose to wear. She's very florid, very decorative. She also sings with very little effort. Watching her was very interesting, technically, because I find singing hard."

"Annie's best when she can improvise," Dave comments. "Soul is one of the best mediums to improvise in because the rhythm is so hypnotic. It's got its own pulse and Annie can kind of let loose, do all the little asides. I loved when Van Morrison used to sing the brass section like 'doo do a dooop do, doo do la do.' These are often the things that give you the feel of the record, not the words."

One uncalculated benefit from the band's emphasis on soul has been the successful eradication of a "synth/pop" tag Dave and Annie believe was unfairly hung on their music when Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) was released in the U.S. in 1983. "I thought at one point the Americans were making us part of a fad by putting us alongside Tears for Fears, Yazoo and all these bands who came out at once," Stewart declares. "Annie and I realized that when we went to the New Music Seminar. We never went to it again because we thought, 'Hang on, we're not part of this.' How can you say what's 'new music'? It's all new music. Some early records of Bowie or Dr. John the Night Tripper sound like they could've been recorded yesterday. I'd rather go to the Timeless Music Seminar.

"People still call us a synth-pop duo even though they'll get sent a photo with a band that's got ten people onstage, even with brass and orchestras on the album. They still can't get it into their heads that we aren't sitting there like Kraftwerk with a drum machine."

One look around Stewart's main workroom upstairs at the Church bears out the statement. Amidst the litter of keyboards and guitars are trap sets, basses, trumpets, flutes and an array of "squinky" instruments from which he elicits the stray sounds he loves dropping into the records he produces. At the moment, he's working with Feargal Sharkey, producing the former Undertones singer's solo debut. Session musicians? They just sort of show up. "You see, we've got a launderette in the Church, basically for our costumes," Dave laughs. "All the musicians who live around here, like Paul Young's band and a load of others, come in and do their washing before they go off on tour. While they do their spin dry they come up and put on a sax solo or something."

As he did during his collaboration with Tom Petty, Stewart is co-writing with Sharkey, a process that's one part mayhem, one part deliberation and three parts talent. Putting together "A Bitter Man," for example, was done with Feargal and Dave in the studio, playing a tape over the phone to lyricist Tim Daly (who Dave says spent five years in prison for blowing up part of the Imperial War Museum). Daly free-assocated syllables to the track while Sharkey transcribed potential lyrics and sang them back into the phone.

Songwriting with Annie isn't quite as manic a process, but Dave explains that it, too, is "all mixed up. Sometimes she'll have four lines on a bus ticket and I'll have a tape of me playing bass in a bathroom, which somehow fits together." Two key elements are minimalist in the song structures and spontaneity in the writing process itself And almost all their songs share a characteristic Eurythmics twist. We've always had this bittersweet sort of thing where one minute it's really good and the next it's really bad," Dave notes.

Despite the diversity of their individual personalities, Eurythmics' musical marriage somehow succeeds. "We're very much a bonded unit," Annie asserts "It's a very good relationship. I suppose it's like your mother and father. You know they're always going to be your mother and father. Ultimately, Dave and I know this is a partnership that's here to stay, unless we get run down by a bus or something. All through this chaos he gets an awful lot done. It takes me longer to come up with results. With the two of us, it's like him pulling me along. It works. I don't know how, but it's the right kind of combination."

The two aren't engaged in a joint protect at the moment only because Lennox, who has a history of throat trouble, developed a node on her vocal chords. "The doctor showed me it in a photograph," confirms Dave. "You either have to have an operation or stop, and she doesn't want to tour with her throat wrecked." To save her meal ticket, Annie's planning a two-month retreat to her home in Switzerland.

The only other escape from public view Eurythmics have been able to effect in the past year has been into the studio. "There are so few places for us to actually go away and be quiet." Annie shakes her head. "More and more for us, the studio is becoming a retreat where the phones don't ring, where nobody is allowed to come and interrupt us. Hopefully Kenny [Smith, their English manager] will move his offices out of these premises and this will be a solely creative space. The telephone rings all the time, there's a lot of demand. There's always a country that we aren't able to get 'round to. In Italy, for example, they think we're cold-shouldering them. The truth is, there just isn't time."

Stewart takes to the tennis court or, these days, to the recipe book to relieve any stress of stardom. Not Lennox. Smiling she says, "Actually, I drink to relax. I wouldn't endorse it for everybody but I must admit I'm a better person when I've had a drink. I'm afraid I don't meditate or do anything like that and I don't go to the health club that often. I wish I did. I think hugging a friend is a good way to relax.

"I have a strange dichotomy. You know those funny cuckoo clocks in Switzerland where on sunny days the woman comes out and on cold days the man does? I'm a bit like that. I can be very icy. It's either my defense mechanism or because I really don't like that person and I want them to go away. At heart, I think I'm a generous spirit. I don't think I'm a mean, cold person.

"Something happened to me on my thirtieth birthday that changed me. I feel more positive than I ever did before. So now I'm trying to wade through and get my voice rested, which is the only important thing to me. Unless I do that, I can't sing live." She smiles. "All I want is to shut up, go away, and just rest."