The story of Eurythmics

Aberdeen, Sunderland and a health food restaurant

Annie Lennox was born on Christmas Day 1954 in Torry, a district of Aberdeen in Scotland. She was an only child, and her parents, Thomas and Dorothy, pushed her toward music and art. At the Aberdeen High School for Girls she learned flute and piano, sang in the choir and played in orchestras and military bands. She also took classes in Dalcroze eurhythmics, a Swiss method of teaching music through movement, and that strange word would one day become a band name. In 1971 she won a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London to study flute, piano and harpsichord. It did not go well. She felt out of place, doubted her talent, and left before finishing, paying her way as a waitress, a barmaid and a shop assistant.[1] [2]

Dave Stewart was born on the ninth of September 1952 in Sunderland, in the north east of England. As a boy his dream was to play football for Sunderland, but he was also obsessed with recorded sound, and he used to tape the noises in the bakery next door and play them back in his bedroom. As a teenager he stowed away with the folk band Amazing Blondel after a gig, and they taught him how to restring a lute. He started taking acid at fifteen. By eighteen his folk rock band Longdancer had signed to Elton John's Rocket label, which handed them money and little direction. The band went nowhere, and Stewart drifted into London squats and years of drug use.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stewart's memoir, published in 2016, also records something darker from his childhood. He wrote that a Scout leader subjected the boys in his troop to what he called a hygiene test, washing their private parts. Stewart later told the Guardian that as a child he did not understand what was going on, and that it simply seemed weird to him at the time. He has described much of his early life with a joking tone, but he admitted that many of the things that happened were not funny at all. By his early twenties he had also married, to Pamela Wilkinson, in 1972. That marriage lasted until 1977, and she would play a small but important part in the Eurythmics story later on.[1] [2] [3]

The meeting that changed everything happened in a London health food restaurant where Annie was waiting tables. A friend had insisted Stewart meet this girl with a great voice, and he and a companion sat outside staring through the window until her shift ended. That first night she took him back to her tiny bedsit and played him a song she had written on a harmonium. Stewart was stunned, and asked her what an artist like her was doing working as a waitress. They became lovers almost immediately. He was hooked on speed and cocaine at the time, and by his own account Annie nursed him through a detox she improvised on the spot.[1] [2] [3]

With Stewart's friend Peet Coombes, a gifted songwriter from Sunderland, the couple formed a band called the Catch. In 1977 they put out a single on Logo Records, Borderline, backed with Black Blood. It came out in Britain, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal and sold almost nothing. Before long they recruited the bass player Eddie Chin and the drummer Jim Toomey, who was always billed as Jim Do It Toomey, and renamed themselves the Tourists. Coombes wrote most of the songs and sang many of them, while Annie sang harmonies and played keyboards and Dave played guitar. It was a real band at last, but it was not really their band.[1] [2] [3]

The Tourists and a night in Wagga Wagga

The Tourists had a busy few years. They released three albums, The Tourists and Reality Effect in 1979 and Luminous Basement in 1980, and toured widely, including a spot supporting Roxy Music on their Manifesto tour in 1979. Their big moment came with a cover of Dusty Springfield's I Only Want to Be with You, which went top ten in Britain and Australia in 1979. So Good to Be Back Home Again followed it into the UK top ten in 1980. On stage, Annie played an old Vox keyboard that had once belonged to John Lennon. But the band was tangled in legal fights with its management, publishers and labels, and there was trouble inside the group too.[1] [2] [3]

The biggest trouble was Peet Coombes. He was the band's main creative force, but he was addicted to heroin and drinking heavily. On a tour of Australia in 1980 things fell apart. Annie later recalled that a strike in Sydney stopped their plane from landing, and the passengers were put up in hotels until it ended. While they waited, Coombes went on a drinking binge. Stewart said he became very sick on that tour. Annie remembered him as hugely gifted, with demons she never understood, and said the rest of them were left as a ragtag remnant. The Tourists broke up in late 1980, and Coombes soon drifted out of the music business altogether.[1] [2] [3] [4]

According to Stewart, Eurythmics was born in a hotel room in Wagga Wagga, a country town in New South Wales. Late one night he was playing with a little black and yellow portable synthesiser, making sounds like a didgeridoo, and Annie began singing along. They wondered whether the two of them could make weird, experimental electronic music on their own. On the flight home they ended their romance, but not their partnership. Stewart has joked that their idea of a break up was Annie living upstairs and him downstairs, still meeting for tea. He later said he could not think of any other couple who had split up and then started a band together.[1] [2] [3] [4]

They were determined not to repeat the mistakes of the Tourists. This time there would be no fixed line up. Annie and Dave would be the only permanent members and the only songwriters, and they would bring in other musicians whenever it suited them. Stewart made a deliberate break with his past, selling two of his guitars to buy a drum machine, an echo unit and a synthesiser. He reasoned that if he played guitar he would make something ordinary, but on an instrument he could not play, something new might come out. For a name, Annie reached back to those childhood movement classes and chose Eurythmics. They kept the RCA record deal from the Tourists.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Cologne, a horsebox and a bank manager

The German producer Conny Plank had worked on the last Tourists sessions, and he became the key to the new project. Plank was a legend of the krautrock scene, the man behind records by Kraftwerk, Neu and Cluster. In one account, the duo went to a New Year's Eve party at his studio near Cologne, met the D.A.F. drummer Robert Görl, and jammed through the night. Plank pushed them to record demos and helped secure the deal for the album. They made In the Garden at his farmhouse studio with a remarkable cast, including Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit of Can, Blondie's drummer Clem Burke, and Markus Stockhausen, son of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Plank taught Stewart to treat sound itself as an instrument. Microphones were hung high in a barn and dangled down a well. Playground noise drifts through the opening track, English Summer, a typewriter ticks through She's Invisible Now, and a woman's satisfied laughter runs through Revenge. Stewart later said those sessions shaped how he produced records for the rest of his life. In the Garden came out on the sixteenth of October 1981 and flopped. It failed to chart, the single Never Gonna Cry Again stalled at number sixty three, and Belinda sank without trace. Annie was critical of her own singing, saying she had used only one colour from the whole paintbox.[1] [2]

They took the album on the road as a duo, with backing tracks and electronics, hauling their own gear around Britain in a second hand horsebox. They even skipped amplifiers, plugging everything into a mixing desk on stage, and some audiences thought they were miming because the sound was so clean. It was grim work. Stewart remembered one gig that drew four people, and a drive home through snow at six in the morning with Annie in tears. The strain took its toll. Annie is reported to have suffered at least one nervous breakdown in this period, and Stewart ended up in hospital with a collapsed lung that needed surgery.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stewart decided they needed their own equipment, so he put on a suit, took a briefcase and went to see a bank manager. His pitch was that most bands spent a fortune recording a single album, but with their own gear they could make as many as they liked. By Stewart's own later admission he was high on speed during that meeting, and Annie was not. The bank lent them the money anyway. In 1982 they set up a small eight track studio in the attic of a picture framing factory in Chalk Farm, north London. Three singles that year, This Is the House, The Walk and Love Is a Stranger, all flopped. Love Is a Stranger peaked at number fifty four.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Sweet Dreams

The song that saved them came out of a low moment. The duo had just had a terrible row, and Annie was lying curled up on the floor, deeply depressed. Stewart, who had just come through surgery on his lung and felt oddly manic, finally got a new drum computer working and hit on a beat and a riff. Annie jumped up, asked what on earth that was, and started playing a second synthesiser against it. From those two duelling machines came Sweet Dreams, Are Made of This. Annie improvised the words almost on the spot, drawing on the misery of the Tourists years. Stewart felt they were so bleak that he added a hopeful section to lift the song a little.[1] [2] [3]

The equipment behind it was modest. The bank loan bought a second hand eight track tape machine and a rare drum computer, one of only about thirty ever built. The pair slept for a few days at the maker's flat in Bridgwater while their unit was assembled. Their only microphone was a cheap model usually used for a hi hat, and it recorded everything, including Annie's vocal. Milk bottles were bashed together for percussion. Annie played a borrowed Oberheim synthesiser for the string sounds. The song was finished at the Church in Crouch End, an old chapel whose upstairs room they rented from the animators Bob Bura and John Hardwick, and later bought.[1] [2] [3] [4]

RCA was not convinced. The label said the song had no chorus and did not see it as a single. Then a radio DJ in Cleveland kept playing it from the album, and his studio phones lit up. The album, also called Sweet Dreams, Are Made of This, came out on the fourth of January 1983. The single entered the UK chart at number sixty three in February and reached number two in March, and it became the eleventh best selling single of the year in Britain. Released in America around the end of April, it crept up the Hot 100 for months and reached number one in the first week of September 1983.[1] [2] [3]

The video made Annie Lennox a star overnight. Directed by Chris Ashbrook and shot in January 1983, it put her in a man's suit, with close cropped hair dyed orange, brandishing a cane in a mock record company boardroom in Soho. Stewart wanted it weird and dreamlike, a comment on the music business, so they brought in a cow to represent reality. It wandered around them while they lay on the table, and by Stewart's account it urinated everywhere. Annie said she was trying to be the opposite of the cliché of a female singer, as strong as a man and equal to Dave. The BBC later said the clip broke the mould for female pop stars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

MTV played the clip constantly, and it arrived at the perfect moment. On the sixteenth of July 1983, eighteen British singles sat in the American top forty, beating the record set during the first British Invasion in 1965. Eurythmics were part of that second wave. The earlier flop Love Is a Stranger was reissued and reached number six in Britain, with a video in which Annie pulls off a blonde wig to reveal her cropped red hair. Some American viewers were convinced she was a man in drag. MTV blacked out part of the video, and the channel's producers even asked RCA for a copy of her birth certificate.[1] [2] [3]

Touch, Elvis and Big Brother

They moved fast. Touch was recorded and mixed in about three weeks at the Church and released on the fourteenth of November 1983. It became their first number one album in Britain and reached number seven in America. The lead single, Who's That Girl, went to number three in the UK. In its video Annie plays both a blonde nightclub singer and a male Elvis lookalike, and at the end the two versions of her kiss. The guests in the audience included Bananarama, among them Siobhan Fahey, Stewart's future wife. Then came Right by Your Side, a joyful calypso flavoured song that Stewart said took about ten minutes to write. It gave them four UK top ten hits in a single year.[1] [2] [3]

Here Comes the Rain Again was written in a room at the Mayflower Hotel in New York on a grey day, as Stewart played melancholy chords on a Casio keyboard and Annie looked out at the rain clouds over the skyline. Back at the Church, the orchestral parts were arranged by Michael Kamen, who had been recommended by Stewart's ex wife Pamela. The studio was so cramped that cellists sat in a line along a corridor, violinists played in the kitchen and violas in the bathroom. Released in January 1984, the song reached number eight in Britain and number four in America. The video was filmed on the cliffs of Orkney, with the Old Man of Hoy in the opening shot.[1] [2]

At the Grammy Awards in 1984 Annie turned up dressed as Elvis Presley, the kind of gender bending gesture that fascinated and confused the press. She and Boy George had already shared the cover of Smash Hits, and in January 1984 Newsweek put them together on its cover to announce that Britain was rocking America again. Eurythmics won the MTV award for Best New Artist that year. Behind the image, life was chaotic. In 1984 Annie married Radha Raman, a German devotee of the Hare Krishna movement. The marriage lasted about a year. Meanwhile the band played something like a hundred and seventy five concerts across four continents during 1984.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Richard Branson then asked them to score Virgin's film of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four, and they recorded the music in Nassau in the Bahamas with no other musicians involved. Stewart described the sound as Kraftwerk meets African tribal music meets Booker T and the MGs. Sexcrime reached number four in Britain, while the fragile, almost unaccompanied Julia stalled at number forty four, ending a run of six straight top ten hits. The film's director, Michael Radford, had commissioned his own orchestral score and said the Eurythmics music was forced on him. The duo said they had been misled too, and the album was withdrawn for a time while the matter went through the courts.[1] [2] [3]

The film had a sad footnote. Nineteen Eighty Four was the last film Richard Burton appeared in before he died. The soundtrack also left a long legal shadow over the band's catalogue. It was released by Virgin in Britain, the only Eurythmics album not issued there by RCA, so when their records were remastered and reissued in 2005 it was left out, and Sexcrime was missing from the Ultimate Collection hits album. One American pressing of the soundtrack even carried a sticker announcing that it had been censored by the thought police, a joke borrowed straight from Orwell.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Be Yourself Tonight and Revenge

By 1985 Annie's voice was in trouble. The endless touring had left her with nodules on her vocal cords, and she was forced to pull out of Live Aid that summer. There would be no tour that year. Instead the duo made a sharp turn. Be Yourself Tonight, recorded mostly in Paris with extra sessions in Detroit and Los Angeles, swapped cold synthesisers for real drums, brass and Stewart's guitar. Annie swapped the orange crop for bleach blonde rock and roll glamour. Released on the twenty ninth of April 1985, it went to number one in Australia and top five in Britain. The first single, Would I Lie to You, reached number five in America and topped the Australian chart.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The next single became their only UK number one. There Must Be an Angel, Playing with My Heart, reached the top on the twenty seventh of July 1985, with a harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder, one of Annie's childhood idols. Stewart told Wonder to improvise freely, and Wonder broke up the session by playing sea shanties as a joke. The video, shot at the New Wimbledon Theatre, cast Stewart as King Louis the Fourteenth watching Annie as a heavenly diva. Then came Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves, a duet with Aretha Franklin. It had been meant for Tina Turner, who was not available, so the duo flew to Detroit to record with Aretha instead.[1] [2] [3]

Stewart was fast becoming one of the most wanted producers in the world. In 1985 he co produced Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' album Southern Accents and co wrote Don't Come Around Here No More. He produced Feargal Sharkey's A Good Heart, a song passed to him via the producer Jimmy Iovine, and it went to number one in Britain. He won the Brit Award for Best British Producer in 1986, then again in 1987 and 1990. Annie was less keen on his growing list of outside projects. Stewart later said he could not help himself, because Annie was more reclusive and he was always out in the field.[1] [2] [3]

Revenge arrived on the thirtieth of June 1986 and pushed further into big rock band territory. Thorn in My Side reached number five in Britain, their last visit to the UK top ten. In America the stomping Missionary Man reached number fourteen and hit number one on the rock radio chart. It won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and Annie said part of its meaning came from her own past, a nod to the Hare Krishna marriage. A long world tour followed, with Blondie's Clem Burke on drums, and a concert from the Australian leg was released on video.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Stewart has told a grimly strange story about the record business in those years. After the duo finished Be Yourself Tonight, a new boss arrived at their American label who had previously run Hertz car rental. Stewart remembered him praising the album by comparing it to Ghostbusters, and planning to put their faces on Coca Cola vending machines. That man was José Menendez, who had become a senior executive at RCA. A few years later Menendez and his wife were murdered by their own two sons, in one of the most notorious cases of its time. Stewart only made the connection when he saw the trial on television, and said he had always sensed something scary and odd about the man.[1] [2] [3]

Savage, loss and the quiet split

In 1987 Dave Stewart married Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama, the woman who had walked through the Who's That Girl video. Their son Samuel was born on the twenty sixth of November 1987, and a second son, Django, followed in 1991. That same November saw a sharp change of direction for the band. Savage, recorded at a chateau in Normandy with only the drummer and programmer Olle Romo alongside them, was built on samples and drum loops. Annie's lyrics turned darker and more openly feminist, and Sophie Muller directed a video for every song, following a repressed housewife who transforms into a vamp. It was a top ten album in Britain but reached only number forty one in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The man who had first guided them, Conny Plank, died of laryngeal cancer in Cologne on the fifth of December 1987. Some of his very last work had been for Eurythmics, recording concerts on the Revenge tour and supplying samples used on Savage. For Annie, 1988 brought a far heavier loss. She had married the Israeli film and record producer Uri Fruchtmann, and in December 1988 their first child, a son named Daniel, was stillborn. She later described photographers and reporters trying to get into the hospital to interview her. She said it showed her how low people could go, and she resolved to protect her family from that life.[1] [2] [3]

Annie's father Thomas had died of cancer in 1986, and her mother Dorothy would also die of the disease in 2003, so the late eighties were a time of real grief. There were bright spots. In 1988 Annie sang Put a Little Love in Your Heart with Al Green for the film Scrooged, a number nine hit in America, and she appeared at the Nelson Mandela seventieth birthday concert in London. Eurythmics returned in September 1989 with We Too Are One, which entered the UK chart at number one. They toured it on the Revival tour from September 1989 to late January 1990. It would be the last Eurythmics tour for almost ten years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

After eight studio albums in eight years, something had frayed. There was no announcement and no farewell. Eurythmics simply stopped in 1990, and from 1991 to 1998 the two barely spoke. Annie said later that she had been very isolated through the eighties, calling it almost a lost decade for her emotional life, and that touring suited egotistical men far better than her. Stewart said the two of them had spent years untangling a complicated relationship in public, joking that they had been in psychotherapy with journalists for eight years. The stillbirth of her son, Annie said, marked the start of her withdrawal from the celebrity front line.[1] [2] [3]

Apart, the nineties

Stewart moved to France and threw himself into new projects. His band Dave Stewart and the Spiritual Cowboys released an album in 1990 that reached number thirty eight in Britain, followed by Honest in 1991. His biggest hit of the decade came almost by accident. While scoring the Dutch film De Kassière, known in English as Lily Was Here, he jammed at the end of a long day with a young saxophonist named Candy Dulfer. According to her father, the take was a one off never meant for release. Stewart put it out anyway, and Lily Was Here topped the Dutch chart for five weeks, reached number six in Britain and number eleven in America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Meanwhile a Eurythmics Greatest Hits album spent ten weeks at number one in Britain in 1991. Annie gave birth to her first daughter, Lola, and began working with the producer Stephen Lipson. Her first solo single, Why, came out on the sixteenth of March 1992 and reached number five. Stewart later said the song was about their relationship, and that he could hear every piece of pain in it. Diva followed on the sixth of April 1992, entered the UK chart at number one and went quadruple platinum, outselling every Eurythmics studio album. Walking on Broken Glass came with a period costume video starring John Malkovich and Hugh Laurie.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

In April 1992 Annie joined David Bowie and the surviving members of Queen at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley to sing Under Pressure. Diva won the Brit Award for British Album of the Year in 1993. Stewart, meanwhile, had helped his wife Siobhan Fahey turn her new project Shakespears Sister into a duo with Marcella Detroit. Under the pen name Jean Guiot he co wrote their ballad Stay, which spent eight weeks at number one in Britain in 1992. The success hid real strain. The duo split in 1993, and that year Fahey admitted herself to a psychiatric unit with severe depression. She and Stewart divorced in 1996.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Annie's second album, Medusa, came out in March 1995. It was made up entirely of songs first recorded by men, from Bob Marley to the Clash and Neil Young. Her version of No More I Love You's, originally by the duo the Lover Speaks, went to number two in Britain, her highest solo chart position, and won her a Grammy. Medusa went to number one in the UK. She did not tour it, playing one big concert in Central Park instead. Her manager Simon Fuller later revealed that around this time she quietly coached a new girl group he had signed, pushing each member to exaggerate her personality. They were the Spice Girls.[1] [2] [3]

Stewart's own solo albums, Greetings from the Gutter in 1995 and Sly Fi in 1998, sold poorly, though Sly Fi was first made available on the internet, which was unusual at the time. He also turned up as a computer hacker in the 1995 film Hackers. Then came the news that brought the old partners back together. In 1997 Peet Coombes, their friend from the Catch and the Tourists, died after years of alcohol and drug abuse. His death became the catalyst for Annie and Dave to repair their friendship. In 1998 they performed together for the first time in eight years, at a record company party, and began writing songs again.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Peace and a second life

The reunion gathered pace after a benefit concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London for the family of Ruth Picardie, a journalist who had died of breast cancer. Afterwards the pair went back to the Church studio to write. By the time they heard they would receive the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 1999, they had half an album. Peace was released on the eighteenth of October 1999, their first album of new songs in ten years. They launched it with a concert aboard the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior Two. I Saved the World Today reached number eleven in Britain, and a remix of Seventeen Again gave them their first American dance chart number one.[1] [2] [3]

The Peacetour opened at the Kölnarena in Cologne on the eighteenth of September 1999 and closed at the London Docklands Arena on the sixth of December, and every penny of profit went to Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Critics were mixed. The Los Angeles Times praised the renewed power of Annie's voice, while others felt the old urgency had gone. The reunion did not last long, and Annie's own life was changing again. Her marriage to Uri Fruchtmann ended in 2000, and her 2003 album Bare was later described by the Guardian as an unflinching dispatch from a divorce. It reached number four in America, her highest chart position there.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Stewart married the Dutch photographer Anoushka Fisz on the fourth of August 2001 in the south of France, at a beach ceremony conducted by Deepak Chopra, with Bono and Mick Jagger singing. The following year he took on his proudest project. Asked to help Nelson Mandela's campaign against HIV and AIDS, he came up with the idea of turning Mandela's prison number, four six six six four, into a phone line where callers could hear new songs by artists like Paul McCartney and Bono while donating. In November 2003 Eurythmics played at the 46664 concert in Cape Town. The next morning, Stewart recalled, Annie told him the night had given her a new purpose in life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That purpose soon defined her. Annie also found an unexpected award winner. With Fran Walsh and Howard Shore she wrote Into the West for the final Lord of the Rings film. The song was inspired by Cameron Duncan, a sixteen year old New Zealand filmmaker who was dying of cancer, and it was first performed at his funeral. In 2004 it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, along with a Golden Globe and later a Grammy. Stewart had a Golden Globe of his own that year, for Old Habits Die Hard, written with Mick Jagger for the film Alfie. In 2005 Eurythmics were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Eurythmics came together once more in 2005 for Ultimate Collection, released on the seventh of November. It included two new songs from the Peace era, and one of them, I've Got a Life, reached number fourteen in Britain and spent three weeks at the top of the American dance chart. All eight of their RCA studio albums were remastered and reissued with rare extra tracks. After that, the duo went quiet. In 2009 Annie said that although she and Dave remained friends, she did not foresee any more Eurythmics projects. Musically, at least, the partnership had become an occasional thing rather than a working band.[1] [2]

Separate paths and a lasting legacy

Annie's activism took centre stage. After the 46664 concerts she founded the Sing campaign in 2007, recording a song called Sing with twenty three female artists including Madonna, Céline Dion and Pink to raise money for HIV treatment in South Africa. In 2008 she founded The Circle, a charity for women's projects around the world. She wore an HIV Positive T shirt on stage and on television, criticised the Pope's stance on condoms in Africa, and was made an OBE in 2011 for her humanitarian work. In 2012 she married Mitch Besser, an American doctor who had started an AIDS charity in Africa. She sang Little Bird at the closing ceremony of the London Olympics that summer.[1] [2] [3]

Stewart kept collecting famous collaborators. He produced Ringo Starr's Liverpool 8 and Stevie Nicks's In Your Dreams, co wrote No Doubt's Underneath It All, and in 2011 dreamed up SuperHeavy, a supergroup with Mick Jagger, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A. R. Rahman. He wrote the songs for Ghost the Musical with Glen Ballard, which reached the West End in 2011 and Broadway in 2012, created the NBC songwriting show Songland, and later wrote The Time Traveller's Wife musical with Joss Stone. In 2019 he sold his entire song catalogue of more than a thousand songs to the Hipgnosis fund. Along the way, he admitted in 2013 that he and Annie barely spoke, and that he had not even been invited to her wedding.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Still, the pair kept reappearing for special nights. In January 2014 they sang the Beatles' The Fool on the Hill at a Grammy tribute to the Beatles. On the ninth of December 2019 they played Sting's Rainforest Fund benefit at New York's Beacon Theatre and, by Rolling Stone's account, stole the show. In 2020 they were voted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Then in 2022, on their third nomination, Eurythmics entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, inducted by U2's the Edge. At the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles they played Would I Lie to You, Missionary Man and Sweet Dreams, with Annie holding a glittering cane.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Around that ceremony, Annie made clear that a full reunion tour was unlikely. At sixty seven, she said, she had physical issues, and the rigours of the road were not compatible with the life she had chosen as a mother. Stewart admitted he would love to play for the fans one last time, and Annie acknowledged how frustrating it must have been for him that they had not toured more. Both insisted there was a deep bond between them that nobody else could understand. Stewart compared it to a marriage in which the two of you are strapped to a rocket ship fired at the moon.[1]

As of 2026 Eurythmics exist as a legacy and an occasional reunion rather than an active band. Annie became the first woman to be made a fellow of the Ivors Academy in 2015, served as chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University, where a building now bears her name, and in March 2025 played her first headline show in Britain since 2019, a concert at the Royal Albert Hall for The Circle. That September she published Retrospective, a visual memoir of her career, and she recorded The Skye Boat Song as the theme for the final season of Outlander. Sweet Dreams, added to the US National Recording Registry in 2023, remains the song everyone knows.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Eurythmics

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart. They were lovers for about three years in the late seventies, split as a couple as Eurythmics began, and then spent a decade making hits together. The strain of being partners, exes and a band at once pushed them apart in 1990, and they barely spoke until 1998. Since then they have reunited for an album, a hits collection and a handful of special shows, and both describe a deep, private bond.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart and Peet Coombes. Peet Coombes was Stewart's friend from the band Longdancer and the chief songwriter in the Catch and the Tourists. His heroin addiction and drinking helped sink the Tourists in 1980, and he drifted out of music. His death in 1997, after years of drug and alcohol abuse, pushed Annie and Dave to rebuild their friendship.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eurythmics and Conny Plank. The German producer had worked on the Tourists' last album and produced In the Garden at his studio near Cologne, taking a third of its royalties. He taught Stewart to layer found sounds into tracks, which shaped his whole career as a producer. Plank recorded concerts on the Revenge tour before dying of cancer in December 1987.[1] [2] [3]

Dave Stewart and Siobhan Fahey. Siobhan Fahey of Bananarama appeared in the Who's That Girl video and married Stewart in 1987. They had two sons, Sam and Django. Stewart encouraged her to turn Shakespears Sister into a duo and co wrote their number one hit Stay. The marriage ended in divorce in 1996, though they remained on friendly terms.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Annie Lennox and Uri Fruchtmann. Annie married the Israeli film and record producer in 1988 and they lived in Highgate, London. Their first child, a son named Daniel, was stillborn in December 1988. They went on to have two daughters, Lola and Tali, and Annie stepped back from fame to raise them. The marriage ended in 2000.[1] [2] [3]

Annie Lennox and Mitch Besser. Annie met Mitch Besser, an American doctor who founded an AIDS charity in Africa, while fundraising in 2009. They married at a private ceremony in London on the fifteenth of September 2012. Dave Stewart later admitted he had not been invited and did not even know where the wedding was.[1] [2]

Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin. Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves was first intended for Tina Turner, but when she was unavailable Annie and Dave flew to Detroit to record it with Aretha Franklin. Released in October 1985, it reached number nine in Britain and appeared on both Be Yourself Tonight and Aretha's own album, Who's Zoomin' Who.[1] [2]

Dave Stewart and Tom Petty. Through the producer Jimmy Iovine, Stewart ended up co producing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' 1985 album Southern Accents and co writing Don't Come Around Here No More. Three Heartbreakers then played on Eurythmics' Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves. Petty became one of Stewart's many famous friends.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dave Stewart and Mick Jagger. Stewart co wrote and co produced songs for Jagger's 1987 solo album Primitive Cool. In 2004 they wrote the soundtrack for the film Alfie together and won a Golden Globe for Old Habits Die Hard. In 2011 Stewart's idea for a genre mixing supergroup became SuperHeavy, with Jagger, Joss Stone, Damian Marley and A. R. Rahman.[1] [2] [3]

Annie Lennox and Simon Fuller. Simon Fuller managed Annie from the start of her solo career in 1992. He later revealed that she quietly helped shape the Spice Girls, meeting the group after he mentioned them on a flight and pushing each member to exaggerate her persona, which gave the band its sharp identities.[1] [2]

Dave Stewart and Candy Dulfer. Stewart invited the young Dutch saxophonist, who had not yet released any music of her own, to play on his soundtrack for the film Lily Was Here. Their instrumental duet became an international hit, and its success encouraged her to make her debut album, Saxuality.[1] [2]

Dave Stewart and Anoushka Fisz. Stewart married the Dutch photographer on the fourth of August 2001 in the south of France, with Deepak Chopra officiating. They have two daughters, Kaya and Indya, moved to Los Angeles in 2004 so he could concentrate on film work, and renewed their vows in 2013.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Eurythmics

• Annie Lennox played a Vox keyboard in the Tourists that had once belonged to John Lennon. While Dave Stewart played guitar in the Tourists, Annie sang harmonies and played keyboards. Her instrument was a Vox keyboard previously owned by John Lennon.[1]
• The band's name comes from Dalcroze eurhythmics, a way of teaching music through movement that Annie studied as a schoolgirl. The method was developed by the Swiss composer Emile Jaques Dalcroze. Annie took classes at school and attended a Dalcroze course in 1974. In 2023 she became patron of Dalcroze UK.[1] [2]
• Producer Conny Plank took one third of the royalties from Eurythmics' debut album, In the Garden. Plank helped the duo secure their record deal after a jam session at his studio and produced the album. His reward was a third of the royalties it generated.[1]
• On In the Garden, microphones were hung in a barn and dangled over a well to capture unusual sounds. Conny Plank encouraged the duo to experiment with microphone placement at his farmhouse studio near Cologne. Stewart later credited Plank with teaching him how to be a producer.[1]
• Markus Stockhausen, son of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, played brass on Eurythmics' first album. In the Garden featured a surprising cast of guests, including Can's Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit, Blondie's Clem Burke and D.A.F. drummer Robert Görl, as well as Markus Stockhausen.[1]
• On their first tour, Eurythmics sounded so clean that some fans thought they were miming. They skipped amplifiers and ran everything through a mixing desk on stage and out through the PA. Stewart compared it to a giant hi fi turned up, and the lack of stray noise confused audiences.[1]
• The drum computer used on Sweet Dreams was one of only about thirty ever made. The Movement Systems drum computer cost two thousand pounds. The duo slept for several days at the maker's flat in Bridgwater while their prototype was being built.[1]
• Annie Lennox's vocal on Sweet Dreams was recorded with a cheap microphone normally used for hi hats. The home studio had a single utility microphone, and it captured every acoustic part on the track, including Annie's lead vocal.[1]
• The percussion on Sweet Dreams includes the sound of milk bottles being bashed together. Lennox and Stewart were constant experimenters. Another track, This City Never Sleeps, features Stewart's dictaphone recording of the London Underground.[1]
• A cow was brought into the Sweet Dreams video to represent reality, and it urinated all over the set. Stewart wanted the video to feel like performance art. The boardroom was mocked up in a studio on Wardour Street in Soho, with the cow wandering around the duo.[1] [2]
• A radio DJ in Cleveland talked RCA into releasing Sweet Dreams as an American single. The label thought the song had no chorus. When the DJ kept playing it from the album and his phones lit up, RCA relented, and it went to number one.[1] [2]
• Stewart has said the original Sweet Dreams master tapes went missing as RCA changed hands over the years. In 2017 he told the BBC he was trying to track them down, remembering about sixty experimental versions made before the final arrangement.[1]
• MTV once asked RCA for a copy of Annie Lennox's birth certificate. After the Love Is a Stranger video, in which she pulls off a blonde wig, MTV producers suspected she was a man in drag, blacked out part of the clip and demanded proof.[1]
• Annie sang her lead vocal on Love Is a Stranger in a single take. Stewart said the backing track already sounded eerily complete. He then added guitar overdubs and some grunts and breathing sounds because it seemed like a good idea.[1]
• The strings on Here Comes the Rain Again were recorded with violinists in a kitchen and violas in a bathroom. The Church studio was too small for an orchestra, so players were spread around the building, with the cellists lined up along a corridor.[1]
• Stewart's former wife recommended Michael Kamen to arrange the strings on Here Comes the Rain Again. Stewart was visiting Pamela Wilkinson while parts of the Church were being built, and she suggested Kamen, who went on to work on several Eurythmics records.[1] [2]
• The famous Touch cover photo was first taken for The Face magazine. Peter Ashworth shot Annie in a warehouse above King's Cross station in 1983. Ashworth was also an ex boyfriend of Annie's, according to Rolling Stone.[1] [2]
• Right by Your Side was built around the very first sound Stewart coaxed out of a new synthesiser. After hours of getting a Voyetra synth working, the first noise resembled steel drums. He and Annie wrote the song around it in about ten minutes.[1]
• Stevie Wonder played sea shanties as a joke during the session for There Must Be an Angel. Stewart told Wonder to improvise freely. His joke shanties lightened the mood, and Stewart recorded the moment on a cassette.[1]
• One American pressing of the 1984 soundtrack came with a sticker saying it had been censored by the thought police. The album's titles were drawn from Orwell's novel, including Sexcrime and Doubleplusgood, both words from the book's invented language, Newspeak.[1]
• RCA once suggested throwing Annie and Dave a publicity wedding party on a cruise ship. The offer came after the Tourists split, even though the couple had just broken up. They turned it down.[1]
• Stewart made his mother stamp on gravel on a Paris rooftop to create a sound for a Eurythmics song. The track was I Love You Like a Ball and Chain. He said she ended up red faced and exhausted, but it sounded amazing.[1]
• Jack Nicholson once told Eurythmics to stand silently facing the audience for two minutes. Near the end of the band's run, Nicholson watched from the side of the stage for three nights, then gave them the advice. The crowd went wild.[1]
• The headdress on the cover of Annie Lennox's Diva had already appeared in the James Bond film Octopussy. It came from the London costume company Angels. Annie said the album title was meant ironically, like putting a crown on her own head with a smile.[1]
• A B side from Annie's Diva era later became a hit for Whitney Houston. Step by Step, written by Annie, appeared on the B side of Precious. Houston recorded it for the 1996 film The Preacher's Wife.[1] [2]
• Dave Stewart co wrote the Shakespears Sister hit Stay under the pen name Jean Guiot. The idea came from the film Cat Women of the Moon. The song spent eight weeks at number one in Britain in 1992.[1] [2]
• Lily Was Here was a one take jam never meant to be released. According to Candy Dulfer's father, it was recorded at the end of a day's work on the film. Stewart decided to put it out anyway.[1]
• Stewart had a cameo as a computer hacker in the 1995 film Hackers. In 1993 he also appeared in an Apple advert for the Power Macintosh, riffing on the word power.[1]
• It was Dave Stewart's idea to turn Nelson Mandela's prison number into a charity phone line. Callers to 46664 heard Mandela and new songs by artists including Paul McCartney and Bono, with the calls raising money in the fight against HIV and AIDS.[1] [2]
• Into the West was first performed at the funeral of a sixteen year old filmmaker. Cameron Duncan, a young New Zealander whose work impressed Peter Jackson's team, was dying of cancer, and his story inspired the song that won Annie an Oscar.[1]
• Annie scolded David Gray for not replacing the tartan carpet she and Stewart laid at the Church studio. Gray bought the studio in the 2000s. When Annie recorded a duet with him there in 2009 she was outraged the carpet was still down.[1]
• In 2019 Dave Stewart sold his whole catalogue of 1,068 songs to the Hipgnosis fund. The deal included Sweet Dreams, Would I Lie to You and There Must Be an Angel, covering his writer, artist and producer shares.[1]
• Annie Lennox was the first woman made a fellow of the Ivors Academy. The honour came at the 2015 Ivor Novello Awards. Eurythmics had earlier won Ivor Novello awards as songwriters of the year in 1984 and 1987.[1] [2]
• When Eurythmics played Sting's Rainforest benefit in 2019, it was the first time they had performed those hits since 2005. The three song set of Would I Lie to You, Here Comes the Rain Again and Sweet Dreams was widely judged the highlight of a night featuring Bruce Springsteen and Sting.[1]
• Glasgow Caledonian University named a building after Annie Lennox. She became the university's first female chancellor in 2018, and in 2022 the former Hamish Wood building was renamed in her honour.[1] [2]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.