Two people against the world

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart met in 1975 in a London restaurant where Lennox was working. She was a Scottish flute student from Aberdeen with a voice nobody had quite figured out what to do with; he was an English guitarist from Sunderland with big ideas and no money. They played together first in the punk-era band The Catch, which mutated into The Tourists — a proper working band with three albums, two UK Top 10 hits (a cover of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be with You” and “So Good to Be Back Home Again”), and a slow-motion collapse that stranded them in Australia in 1980 when a pilots’ strike left them stuck in a Wagga Wagga hotel. Lennox and Stewart were lovers as well as bandmates, and the breakup of the band ended the romance too — though as Stewart later put it, their idea of a breakup was Lennox living upstairs and him living downstairs. That night in Wagga Wagga, messing around with a portable EDP Wasp mini-synthesizer, they decided to become a duo. Just the two of them. Nobody else permanent, nobody else writing the songs.

They called themselves Eurythmics, after the eurhythmics movement system Lennox had encountered as a child, and they meant the name as a statement of intent: rhythm as a discipline, music as something you practice until it becomes physical. Their 1981 debut album, In the Garden, was recorded in Cologne with krautrock legend Conny Plank and members of Can, and it sounded like it — psychedelic, austere, fascinating, and almost entirely unsold. Broke and undeterred, they talked a bank manager into a £5,000 loan (Stewart dressed up “like a businessman” for the meeting), bought second-hand studio gear, and built an 8-track studio in the attic above a picture-framing shop in London’s Chalk Farm. It was there, in that cramped room, that they made the record that changed everything.

“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” was born out of misery. Stewart had just survived surgery on a punctured lung and was in a manic mood; Lennox was curled up depressed on the studio floor after the Tourists’ collapse and the end of their relationship. Stewart coaxed a beat out of a new synth, Lennox leapt up — “What the hell is that?” — and played the counter-riff on an Oberheim. The deep thud that opens the track was an accident: their hand-built drum computer kept doing the opposite of what Stewart programmed, and he liked the mistake. RCA didn’t want it as a US single — no traditional chorus, they said. It knocked The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” off the top of the Billboard Hot 100. In the space of a year, Eurythmics went from an attic in Chalk Farm to the defining synth-pop act on the planet, with an estimated 75 million records eventually sold worldwide.

What made Eurythmics extraordinary was how fast they refused to stand still. The Sweet Dreams album (1983) and its swift follow-up Touch (recorded and mixed in three weeks, also 1983, their first UK No. 1 album) established the template: Lennox’s astonishing voice — soulful, severe, capable of ice and fire in the same phrase — over Stewart’s increasingly sophisticated electronic architecture. But by 1985’s Be Yourself Tonight they had torn the template up, bringing in a full band, Stax-style horns, and guests like Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder. “Would I Lie to You?” was built on an R&B riff Stewart worked out at the breakfast table; “There Must Be an Angel” gave them their only UK No. 1, with Wonder’s harmonica solo nailed in a single midnight take. Then came Revenge (1986) and a full conversion to guitar-driven rock — “Missionary Man” won the 1987 Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group, the award that formally certified the transformation.

Through it all, Lennox was becoming something larger than a pop singer. Her image — the close-cropped orange hair, the man’s suit, the stare that could strip paint — was a deliberate provocation in an era of big-haired video vixens. The “Love Is a Stranger” video got MTV demanding her birth certificate; the “Who’s That Girl” video had her kissing her own male alter ego. She wasn’t playing dress-up; she was conducting a sustained argument about what a woman in pop was allowed to be. Stewart, meanwhile, was the quiet architect — the producer, the riff-writer, the man who could hear a whole arrangement in a drum-machine pattern. Their partnership was famously volatile (by 1989’s We Too Are One, their personal relationship was at its lowest ebb, and you can hear the frost in “Don’t Ask Me Why”), but it was also one of the most productive in pop history: nine studio albums, a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and in 2022 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

They split in 1990, reunited in 1999 for the Peace album and a charity world tour for Amnesty International and Greenpeace, and have reconvened for one-offs since — including that 2022 Hall of Fame performance of “Would I Lie to You?”, “Missionary Man,” and “Sweet Dreams.” Lennox’s solo career (Diva, Medusa) and humanitarian work, and Stewart’s production career (Tom Petty, Mick Jagger, Bryan Ferry), are substantial second acts. But the duo remains the main event: two people, a bank loan, an attic, and a run of singles — ten of which are traced below — that mapped the entire emotional weather of the 1980s, from synth-pop alienation to rock swagger to orchestral heartbreak. Start anywhere; the voice will find you.

Before Eurythmics, there was The Catch — a punk-era outfit Lennox and Stewart formed in 1976 that managed exactly one single in 1977 before mutating into The Tourists with songwriter Peet Coombes, bassist Eddie Chin, and drummer Jim Toomey. The Tourists were a real working band: three albums, two UK Top 10 hits, years on the road. When it all collapsed in Australia in 1980 — the pilots’ strike, the Wagga Wagga hotel, the EDP Wasp synthesizer on the bed — Lennox and Stewart didn’t just lose a band. They lost the entire structure of their lives: the romance, the income, the identity. What they kept was each other, as friends, and a shared conviction that the next thing would be smaller, stranger, and entirely theirs. The name they chose — Eurythmics, from the eurhythmics movement exercises Lennox had learned as a child — was a private joke and a manifesto: rhythm as discipline, the body as an instrument, music as something you practice until it becomes reflex.

The imperial phase ran from 1983 to 1989, and its numbers are staggering: an estimated 75 million records sold, two UK No. 1 albums in Touch and We Too Are One, an MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist, a Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and eventually the triple crown of the UK Music Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and — in 2022 — the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where they performed “Would I Lie to You?”, “Missionary Man,” and “Sweet Dreams” at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles. The 1990 split was exhaustion, not acrimony; both needed to breathe. Lennox’s solo Diva (1992) and Medusa (1995) made her a star in her own right and launched a second career as one of pop’s most committed humanitarians. Stewart became a producer-for-hire to the stars — Tom Petty, Mick Jagger, Bryan Ferry. They reunited in 1999 for Peace and a charity world tour benefiting Amnesty International and Greenpeace, and again in 2005 for “I’ve Got a Life.” Through every reinvention, the core never changed: two people, total trust, and a willingness to torch the template whenever it got comfortable.

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