Pop stars are not supposed to sing in Newspeak. Yet in the autumn of 1984 — the year itself — Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart took a word straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and turned it into one of the biggest European hits of their career. “Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)”, released on 22 October 1984 as the lead single from the soundtrack album 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother), is a record with a double life: a number four hit in Britain that American radio largely refused to play, and the most public casualty of a bitter behind-the-scenes war over who should score one of the most anticipated films of the decade. Few singles have ever been so successful and so disowned at the same time.
Big Brother Comes Calling
The film Nineteen Eighty-Four, directed by Michael Radford and starring John Hurt as Winston Smith, was financed by Virgin Films and timed, inevitably, for release in 1984. Virgin boss Richard Branson wanted a contemporary pop soundtrack to sell the picture, and Eurythmics were not his first call: David Bowie had been approached first but demanded a fee Virgin considered too high. Lennox and Stewart, coming off the huge success of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) and Touch, accepted the commission enthusiastically. They later said they had been asked to score other films before and had turned them down, but found the premise of Orwell’s story more compelling.
The duo decamped to Nassau in the Bahamas in August 1984, straight off the end of an American tour, and recorded the entire soundtrack by themselves — no other musicians were involved. The deal itself was pure Branson: Eurythmics were signed to RCA, but Virgin’s boss had negotiated this single album away from their label, betting, as Stewart later put it, that it would contain a huge hit for him. The music pushed their electronic style somewhere stranger and colder. Several tracks were instrumentals, and the songs drew their titles and language directly from Orwell’s text: “Julia” took its name from Winston’s lover, “Doubleplusgood” sampled the voice of the Telescreen reading Ministry of Truth memos, and “I Did It Just the Same” lifted a line from the passage in which Winston confesses to committing “sexcrime” with a prostitute in the shadow of the Party’s puritanical code. Stewart described the sound he was chasing as “Kraftwerk meets African tribal meets Booker T. & the M.G.’s”, and by his account he built some of the musical beds with the help of Junkanoo drummers in Nassau. “Sexcrime”, the album’s most commercial track, was built on a new weapon in the pop armoury: sampling. Lennox’s voice was chopped into stuttering fragments and looped until the word itself became a rhythm — desire reduced to a machine pulse, which was rather the point. In Orwell’s novel, “sexcrime” is the Party’s Newspeak term covering all sexual transgression, and the regime’s aim is to drain love and pleasure out of sex altogether. Eurythmics turned that grim joke inside out, making the forbidden word bounce.
What “Sexcrime” Means in Oceania
To hear the perversity of the joke, it helps to remember the world the word comes from. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, the totalitarian state of Oceania polices desire as rigorously as it polices thought. The Junior Anti-Sex League, whose members wear a scarlet sash of chastity, preaches that sex exists only to produce children for the Party; love, pleasure and attraction between individuals are treated as politically dangerous, because loyalty given to a partner is loyalty withheld from Big Brother. Newspeak, the regime’s engineered language, compresses the whole apparatus into single ugly words: “sexcrime” covers every forbidden act and feeling at once, just as “goodsex” means sex reduced to approved reproduction. Winston’s affair with Julia — who wears the Anti-Sex League sash as camouflage while privately despising the Party — is therefore not merely adultery but treason, the one genuinely human act in the novel.
Radford’s film, with Richard Burton in his final screen role as the Party interrogator O’Brien, brought that world to cinemas in October 1984, in the very year Orwell had imagined. Eurythmics’ single arrived the same month, compressing the novel’s sexual politics into under four minutes of synth-pop. Where Orwell’s Party tried to abolish pleasure, Lennox sang the forbidden word as a chant of defiance over a dance beat — and the stuttering edit, her voice cut up and reassembled by machine, sounded like the Telescreen itself breaking down. It was an extraordinary thing to attempt on a pop single, and an even more extraordinary thing to take into the charts.
The Score War
What Lennox and Stewart did not know was that they were walking into a fight. Radford had already commissioned a full orchestral score from composer Dominic Muldowney, completed months earlier, and he objected fiercely when Virgin exercised its right of final cut and replaced much of Muldowney’s music with the duo’s electronic contributions. Some of Muldowney’s work survived — notably his state anthem “Oceania, ‘Tis for Thee” — and Eurythmics’ “Julia” played in full over the closing credits, but the director felt ambushed. When Radford accepted an award for the film at the Evening Standard British Film Awards, he used his speech to complain publicly that the Eurythmics music had been “foisted” on him by the studio. Producer Simon Perry backed him, and the duo found themselves frozen out of the film’s promotion despite having delivered, in Stewart’s words, “almost a three-minute commercial” for the movie.
Eurythmics issued a statement insisting they had accepted Virgin’s commission in good faith and would never have taken the job had they known it lacked the director’s approval. The dispute rumbled on into the record shops: the soundtrack album, released by Virgin on 12 November 1984, was at one point temporarily withdrawn from sale while legal matters were sorted out, and the film itself circulated in two forms — the release version mixing both scores, and a director’s cut that restored Muldowney’s orchestral music at the expense of most of Eurythmics’ work. One American LP edition carried a sticker announcing it had been “Censored by the thought police”, a gag that doubled as a summary of the whole fiasco. The album reached number 23 in Britain and was certified Gold by the BPI, though in America it stalled at number 93 on the Billboard 200.
Number Four in Britain, Banned in America
None of the acrimony hurt “Sexcrime” where audiences were allowed to hear it. The single climbed to number four on the UK Singles Chart and was certified Silver for sales of more than 250,000 copies, and it reached the top ten across much of Europe and in Australia, Ireland, Sweden and New Zealand. Its video, directed by Chris Ashbrook, intercut Lennox and Stewart performing in a high-tech surveillance room with clips from the film — Big Brother watching the watchers.
America was another story. There, the title alone frightened programmers who either missed or ignored the Orwell reference; Stewart later said flatly that the song was “banned from the radio in America”. Deprived of airplay, the single’s Hot 100 run lasted just four weeks, peaking at number 81 in December 1984. But American clubs told a different story: freed from radio’s anxieties, DJs pushed “Sexcrime” to number two on Billboard‘s Hot Dance Club Play chart, one of the duo’s biggest dance hits in the United States. The split verdict became part of the song’s legend — too literary for pop radio, too danceable for the clubs to resist.
The follow-up single underlined how strange the project was. “Julia”, a largely a cappella ballad, peaked at number 44 in Britain in January 1985 and broke the duo’s run of six consecutive UK top ten singles. Eurythmics moved on quickly, returning to RCA and to the top of the charts with Be Yourself Tonight the following spring.
The British music press, at least, had judged the album on its merits rather than its backstage drama: Smash Hits awarded 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother) nine out of ten on release, and the record has steadily been reclaimed as one of the most adventurous of the duo’s career — the one album where the commercial instincts that produced “Sweet Dreams” were put entirely at the service of somebody else’s nightmare. Heard today, “Sexcrime” also catches a technological moment with unusual precision. Sampling in 1984 was still a novelty in mainstream pop, the province of hip-hop pioneers and art-pop experimenters; Eurythmics were among the first chart acts to build a hit single around a voice dismantled and rebuilt by a sampler, a technique that would define pop production within a few years.
A Thoughtcrime That Became a Hit
In Orwell’s Oceania, a “sexcrime” is whatever the Party says it is — a category designed to make private feeling itself punishable. There is a fitting irony, then, in the afterlife of Eurythmics’ song. The film it was written for disowned it; its own director campaigned against it; an entire country’s radio stations treated its title as an offence. And yet the record survives as one of the duo’s defining singles, the moment when the icy surfaces of Sweet Dreams were aimed at something genuinely dystopian. Lennox’s stuttering, sampled voice remains one of the most recognisable sounds of 1984 — a year when pop was supposedly all escapism. “Sexcrime” proved that a hit single could be built from a totalitarian vocabulary, a film nobody could agree on, and a word that was never meant to be sung.