Eurythmics - review

How frustrating must it be for the Eurythmics; a comeback single, a greatest hits compilation, an 8-album reissue with sparkling digital remastering and a career-tracing box set are all imminent when out pops Kate Bush, ending her 12-year hiatus and steals all your thunder with her album, Aerial.

And it would be a real shame if due respect were not paid to the canon of synth duo, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, the Eurythmics.

Boxed is an amazing collectors’ piece containing eight of their studio albums, from 1981 to the present – though, interestingly, the soundtrack album to the film 1984 is noticeable by its absence. Each album has been digitally remastered, bonus tracks have been gleaned from 12” singles or live performances, and some unusual, unreleased cover songs are thrown in to make these ‘must-have’ releases.

In chronological order, these albums are an impressive legacy of the Eurythmics’ achievements. But do these eight albums stand the test of time?

Album: In The Garden
Year of Release: 1981

Description: Although Dave and Annie managed to extricate themselves from their former record label, Logo, to make this album, they carried with them the sound that was very much closer to their previous band, The Tourists, rather than what was to become their instantly recognisable Eurythmics sound.

If truth be told, In The Garden will be appreciated mainly by completists. It is an uncomfortable fusion of experimental tracks like ‘She’s Invisible Now’ and eighties’ new wave, guitar-driven soft-rock, ‘English Summer’ sounding rather like The Icicle Works.

Best Track: ‘Belinda’ – This track may begin sounding like The Tourists having a stab at Laura Brannigan’s ‘Gloria’, but the heavy-layered yet dispassionate vocal harmonies are a taste of what was to come.
Worst Track: ‘Sing Sing’ – If God had intended ‘Cars’ to be played on a tinkly-bomp synthesiser, he would have given Gary Numan a Casio keyboard. The fact that the song is sung in French and features a cat being spayed in the instrumental break must mean this song is either a work of genius or deeply lacking. The smart betting is on the latter.
Extras: A collection of B-sides from the period with the dark, nightmarish ‘Le Sinistre’ faring best.


Album: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
Year of Release: 1983

Description: An outstandingly focussed album. Dave’s industrial landscape of synth sound is matched by Annie’s cold, brittle vocals to create a polished, aloof sophistication that would define the band’s approach. The sparsity and simplicity of arrangements gives Sweet Dreams a directness, but also ensure that this album that hardly dates with the passing of time. The icy electro pop backing of a track like ‘The Walk’ would not be unfamiliar to listeners of Rachel Stevens or Sugababes’ recent output.

Best Track: ‘Sweet Dreams’ and ‘Love Is A Stranger’ are timeless electro-classics that inspired generations to the dancefloor, but a personal favourite is the haunting ‘Jennifer’. Tidal waves wash over sinister synths as Annie laments the missing heroine who it transpires has met an aquatic end “underneath the water”. A terrifying gothic masterpiece of a song to rival Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Worst Track: There are no bad tracks!
Extras: Some more experimental or instrumental tracks taken from B-sides fail to impress – but a superb deluxe remix of ‘Sweet Dreams’ and a busy reworking of ‘Love Is A Stranger’ hit the mark. A cover of Lou Reed’s ‘Satellite of Love’ fits the tone of the album perfectly.


Album: Touch
Year of Release: 1983

Description: Following a decade-defining album is never easy, but Touch makes a good fist of it. Busier production with organic instrumentation like strings supplementing the synthesisers helped raise the commercial bar for the duo and brought huge hits with ‘Who’s That Girl’ and the over-enthusiastic ‘Right By Your Side’. Purer electro is still evidenced by the seductive ‘Regrets’ and the dramatic ‘No Fear, No Hate, No Pain’. Touch remains incredibly accomplished and melodic.

Best Track: The sweeping ‘Here Comes The Rain Again’ carries a mixture of synth, strings and Annie’s plaintive vocals to make this epic song far more human and vulnerable than we had seen from the pair up to this point.
Worst Track: Not a bad track on the album itself, though the extras contain enough turkey to interest Bernard Matthews.
Extras: 2 Unlistenable B-sides sounding like R2-D2 having a breakdown, an instrumental version and an over-extended long version of two of the album tracks merely take up space before two moving live performances. An intimate acoustic rendition of ‘Who’s That Girl?’ and a stadium-wowing take of ‘Here Comes The Rain Again’ are thrilling. The cover song is David Bowie’s ‘Fame’ but it is a missed opportunity with the track resembling Grace Jones’ ‘Pull Up To The Bumper’ rather than the scorching original from “Young Americans”.

Album: Be Yourself Tonight
Year of Release: 1985

Description: By the release of Be Yourself Tonight, the Eurythmics were superstars on the world stage and this album reflects their corporate-friendly, stadium-scaled status. The sheer stomping energy of ‘Would I Lie To You?’, the epiphanic joie-de-vivre of ‘There Must Be An Angel’ and the ballsy strutting of ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’ still impress, even if their dated production doesn’t.

Future directions are glimpsed: the first shimmering, wistful opening bars of ‘Conditioned Soul’ foreshadows Annie’s future solo material from more than a decade later. There are some gems to be gleaned including a much-overlooked ‘Adrian’, a swoonsome ballad with Elvis Costello on guest vocals.

If this album has a fault, it is that all sense of danger and edge has gone. Be Yourself Tonight treads a fine line between confident, polished mastery and complacent, depersonalised blandness.

Best Track: ‘It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back)’ is the epitome of effortless, late night chic.
Worst Track: Let me introduce you to a fine Scottish word: “rammy”. It means an uproar, a free-for-all, a cacophony, an unpleasant din. To truly appreciate the word, have a listen to ‘Here Comes That Sinking Feeling’ – this track perfectly captures the semantics of “rammy”.
Extras: Are a real mixed bag. For example, did you know that Annie worked with Erasure in 1966 as the Luxembourg entry to the Eurovision? Well, ‘Tous Les Garcons et Les Filles’ is here as proof! It is a camp and wonderful oddity. Two cracking 12” versions of ‘Sisters’ and ‘Would I Lie…’ are definite bonuses, however the cover of The Doors’ ‘Hello I Love You’ is lame and soulless fare.


Album: Revenge
Year of Release: 1986

Description: Massive and successful but the Eurythmics’ least edgy album. The worst mid-eighties excesses conspire to produce an overblown, bombastic album that would leave modern audiences puzzling over where the Eurythmics’ hipness went to. Of all their albums, this one dates the worst. ‘Thorn In My Side’ wants to be cynical but is hampered by an asinine, Huey Lewis-levelled backing track. Although still tied to its era production-wise, ‘When Tomorrow Comes’ does burst with energy and is blessed with some sublime chord progressions.

Best Track: ‘The Miracle of Love’ has a tender, simplicity and a huge aching heart that transcends the appalling schlock that is most of “Revenge”. If this doesn’t conjure wintery beauty and tug at your heart, you may be clinically dead.
Worst Track: So many choices! Whenever a British band panders to a (middle) American sensibility, the result is often a frightening embarrassment like this album, packed with stinkers. It’s hard to decide which is worse: the faux jauntiness of ‘Let’s Go!’ (note the derisible use of an exclamation mark trying to instil any excitement), the thudding tunelessness of ‘Take Your Pain Away’ or the twee ready-to-rawk mess of ‘In This Town’. These are all tracks to make this ‘skip’ button indispensable.
Extras: The extended version of ‘When Tomorrow Comes’ is suitably eager and toe tapping, hard to dislike. The longer take on ‘Thorn in my side’, by contrast, is easy to hate. Taking an age to get anywhere, it succeeds in stripping away the big, brassy elements, leaving the frankly dippy lyrics ruthlessly exposed. ‘Revenge 2’ (taken from the film Rooftops) is possibly the pair’s most shameful recording on disc but remains gratefully obscure, hidden as it is in a movie no-one ever has or ever will see. Only those with an ironclad stomach, should sample their cover of ‘My Guy’, a song which has spawned a new genre, “electro-vomit”.


Album: Savage
Year of Release: 1988

Description: A two-year break and the Eurythmics return to form with a stunning, inventive bitterfest which may have tanked in the charts at the time but should be gloriously reclaimed by this collection.

The icy chill is back with some of the most psychotic vocals from La Lennox. The brilliant, uncompromising neurotic-drama of ‘I Love To Listen To Beethoven’ is a stunning opener. The ambience of the verses of ‘I’ve Got A Lover (Back in Japan)’ contrast with the rockier choruses and Annie’s dispassionate spoken voiceover. ‘You have placed a chill in my heart’ explicitly underlines the change of direction and the rejection of the mid-Atlantic morass they had got bogged down in.

Best Track: ‘Savage’ – devastating title track in which Annie goes for the marrow in terms of emotional frigidity. Unlovable and yet brave and compelling.
Worst Track: ‘Wide Eyed Girl’ – sounds like Elvis singing the theme from The Bill
Extras: 3 perfunctory 12” versions of the hits set a low standard for the extras on this album. The live version of ‘I Need You’ features the always-a-bad-sign vocals of Dave Stewart. It lowers your expectations but not far enough to cope with the cover of The Beatles’ ‘Come Together’.


Album: We Too Are One
Year of Release: 1989

Description: Almost like a retrospective, this album pulls in every direction and leaves the cracks showing. Artistically Dave & Annie had run out of steam and We Too Are One is stylistically the most fragmented Eurythmics album.
The rocky ‘We Too Are One’ recalls Be Yourself Tonight's' glory moment; ‘(My My) Baby’s Gonna Cry’ sounds like a Tourists track and the icy cynicism of ‘Don’t Ask Me Why’ retraces the feel of Touch. ‘Sylvia’ is almost a reworking of ‘Jennifer’ from the Sweet Dreams album.

Best Track: Given the spectrum of choice, this is a hard one but the ambiguous finality of ‘When The Day Goes Down’ not only draws if not a full stop, then certainly a semi-colon on the Eurythmics’ astounding canon of work, but also foreshadows Annie’s direction of the sublime Diva album.
Worst Track: ‘Revival’: If ever a song singularly failed to live up to it’s title, the Eurythmics’ ‘Revival’ would give Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys’ a run for it’s money.
Extras: The choir version of ‘Angel’ provides a moment of class amidst the forgettable B-sides and the clunky dance remixes. Out of the covers included in Boxed, The Smiths’ ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ is one of the few that Annie imprints her stamp with a committed, impassioned performance.


Album: Peace
Year of Release: 1999

Description: Reforming in 1999, Peace was ill received and fared badly commercially. But, with the benefit of hindsight, this album screams out for a critical re-appraisal.

On the surface, it may be a deeply cynical and bitter album, but it is actually the most heartfelt and personal album. How touching is it when the final lines of ’17 Again’ reprise the chorus of ‘Sweet dreams’.

What is odd about the digital remastering of this album is that the reworking has gone way beyond merely cleaning it up. Many tracks are re-arranged and have new instrumentation. ‘Beautiful Child’ develops its acoustic qualities and the string sections. ‘I’ve Tried Everything’ has a full backing now where as the original on Peace was very sparse, and reveals itself to be a classic Eurythmics track. Another beautiful song ‘My True Love’ gets the revamping treatment and shines as a sublime, strings-lush ballad of unfulfilled love.

Best Track: ‘Anything But Strong’ is the kind of song which would lend itself to so many styles – surely the definition of a standard.
Worst Track: ‘I Want It All’ – A noisy, punky, tuneless mess that neither fits on this album or if there were any justice on any other album.
Extras: 3 acoustic tracks are marred somewhat by Annie over singing the emotional parts way too emphatically thus sucking the poignancy out of them.

Originally published 15th November 2005