STACK #184 Feb 2020

FEATURE MUSIC

Grace Jones. “A lot of people had assumed Annie was black, particularly in America,” Stewart told Mark Lindores, “until we arrived there and they were shocked and stunned to discover she was a skinny white girl.” Of the inspiration behind her look, Lennox detailed: “I wore a suit in the video with my cropped hair. I was trying to be the opposite of the cliché of the female singer, I wanted to be as strong as a man, equal to Dave and perceived that way. Wearing wigs and taking them off again was about the affectations that women create to become acceptable or beautiful to men, about removing masks and how none of it is real. “People didn’t always get that, or understand the irony of it. Because of lines like, ‘Some of them want to use you… Some of them want to be abused,’ people think it’s about sex or S&M, and it’s not about that at all.” (Fun fact: According to a 2013 Spotify poll, the Sweet Dreams chorus contains the UK’s most misheard lyric: ‘Sweet dreams are made of cheese’.) In the wake of Sweet Dreams ’ success, Love Is A Stranger – originally a commercial flop when it was released in late 1982 – was re-released in 1983 and also became a worldwide hit. The Mike Brady-directed video for Love Is A Stranger sees Lennox playing a high-class hooker with Stewart as her chauffeur. Lennox transforms into different guises to prepare for each ‘client’. During its US premiere, MTV pulled the clip mid-broadcast in the scene where Lennox removes her first wig, concerned that she was a cross-dresser. Meanwhile, have you listened to Love Is A Stranger lately? Those percussive grunts are so sexual that you’ll blush while simultaneously trying to erase Stewart’s climax-face from your imagination. (Flashback: “Sex-sex-s-s-s-sex-s-sex-sex...” The Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four) intro – from Eurythmics’ excellent soundtrack album 1984 (For The Love Of Big Brother) , released in the film’s namesake year – was an

Eurythmics attending a radio interview in L.A., photographed by Ross King (1986)

teaching himself how to use various pieces of electronic equipment during the creation of Eurythmics’ second album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) is basically a collection of cutting-edge sonic experiments. But none of this would’ve been possible without the recording techniques Stewart learnt through working with Conny Plank (Kraftwerk, Neu!) on Eurythmics’ debut album In The Garden (1981), which Can’s Holger Czukay guested on. “Conny Plank taught me how him and Holger Czukay took no notice of anybody,” Stewart said, “and to just distort things if I wanted or record anywhere I wanted... hang mics out the window.” Eurythmics have been dormant since 2005 (when they were inducted into the UK Music Hall Of Fame) with the exception of their performance of Fool On The Hill at a 2014 Beatles tribute concert (which scored a standing ovation from Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr). The duo did re-form for the 30th anniversary celebration of Sting and Trudie Styler’s Rainforest Foundation Fund at NewYork’s Beacon Theater last December, however, performing a three-song set: Would I Lie to You? , Here Comes The Rain Again and (of course!) Sweet Dreams . Word on the interwebs? Eurythmics stole the show. Can Eurythmics tour, revealing that Lennox “has her reasons why she thinks it might be a bit overwhelming”. “Obviously the Eurythmics thing could be huge arenas,” he continued. “But it could actually be anything. It could be at the Sydney Opera House with an orchestra. It could be the two of us with just electronic gear, which I would quite like...” Okay, so how do we set up a petition to actually make this happen!? BC they just announce a tour already? Stewart has said he’d be up for a

absolute hoot to sing loudly to in the corridor just outside the office of our principal at the private Catholic girls’ school I attended – “But I was just singing a Eurythmics song, Sister!”) Elsewhere on the Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) album: Wrap It Up (featuring guest vocals from Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside) is a radical, electro reimagining of

Left: Lennox in an ‘83 label shoot Below: Lennox’s look for the Sweet Dreams clip

Sam & Dave’s 1968 hit of the same name; The Walk contains a trumpet solo by Dick Cuthell (who was playing with The Specials at the time); and This City Never Sleeps – which achieved notoriety after soundtracking a graphic scene in 9½Weeks – incorporates sounds sampled from the London Underground. As a result of Stewart

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