The record in context

“Well, I was born an original sinner / I was born from original sin” — with that opening snarl, Eurythmics completed one of the most audacious reinventions in pop history. “Missionary Man,” released in July 1986 as the lead American single from Revenge (and the fourth UK single in February 1987), is a blues-rock scorcher that bears almost no resemblance to the synth-pop duo of “Sweet Dreams.” It became their biggest rock radio hit: No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 (their last US Top 20), No. 1 on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart (their only No. 1 there), No. 9 in Australia, and — the formal seal on the transformation — winner of the 1987 Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The duo that once recorded in an attic with milk bottles was now a Grammy-winning rock band.

The song’s inspiration was personal and peculiar. Lennox later said it was partly inspired by her brief 1984–1985 marriage to Radha Raman, a devout Hare Krishna — “‘Missionary Man’ had to do with my slight dabbling with Hare Krishna,” she explained. But she broadened the target considerably: the song became a broadside against “people in the media, in the form of politicians or religious speakers or philosophical people… generally trying to have some power over other people.” The missionary of the title isn’t just a religious figure; he’s any huckster selling certainty, any voice demanding obedience. In Lennox’s hands, a failed marriage became a universal indictment of zealotry — the personal alchemized into the political, as it so often was in her writing.

Stewart, meanwhile, was thinking about scale. He wanted a song that would work in arenas, and he took his cues from the concert films dominating his imagination: U2’s Under a Blood Red Sky and Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. Revenge was recorded between Cologne and Paris with a deliberately muscular, guitar-forward sound, and “Missionary Man” was its opening shot — the proof that Eurythmics could fill stadiums, not just clubs. The stop-animation music video, directed by Willy Smax, echoed the style of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” from earlier in 1986; it received heavy MTV rotation and five nominations at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards. The harmonica work of Jimmy Zavala and the backing vocals of Joniece Jamison completed the picture: this was a band record, made by a band, for the biggest rooms available.

There’s a deeper story here about artistic courage. In 1986, synth-pop was still commercially viable; Eurythmics could have kept making elegant electronic records indefinitely. Instead, they torched the template — again — and rebuilt themselves as a rock act, risking everything they’d built. “Missionary Man” was the sound of that risk paying off: a record that could stand next to anything on American rock radio without apology, sung by a woman who’d spent the early 1980s being told she was too cold, too strange, too androgynous for the mainstream. The Grammy validated the transformation. The No. 1 on the rock chart proved the audience had followed. And the song remains the definitive document of Eurythmics’ second act: louder, rawer, and just as smart as the first.

The recording stretched across two countries — sessions in Cologne and Paris between July 1985 and May 1986 — as Eurythmics chased the biggest sound they’d ever attempted. The personnel tells the story: Jimmy Zavala’s harmonica wailing through the track, Joniece Jamison’s backing vocals lifting the choruses, a full band playing live in real rooms. This was the polar opposite of the Chalk Farm attic method. Where “Sweet Dreams” was built from limitation, “Missionary Man” was built from abundance — and the abundance was the point. Stewart wanted arena-scale, and he got it by thinking like an arena act: big drums, big guitars, big voices, no apologies.

The video’s five MTV Video Music Award nominations in 1987 confirmed what the Grammy had already certified: Eurythmics were now a visual as well as a musical rock act. Director Willy Smax’s stop-animation approach — echoing Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” from earlier in 1986 — gave the song a handmade, jerky menace that matched its lyrical attack on zealotry. Heavy MTV rotation did the rest. And the chart story had its own poetry: No. 1 on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks — the only Eurythmics No. 1 on that chart — alongside No. 14 on the Hot 100, their last American Top 20. The rock audience, notoriously suspicious of synth-pop interlopers, had accepted them completely. The conversion was total.

Listen closely

Start with the riff, because the riff is a declaration of war on everything Eurythmics used to be. That grinding, blues-drenched guitar figure — all swagger and menace — announces within four bars that the synthesizers have been demoted. Stewart plays it like a man exorcising something, and the band behind him hits with the weight of a group that’s been waiting years to play this loud. Listen to the drums: they’re huge, roomy, human — the polar opposite of the Chalk Farm drum machine. This is the sound of a duo that got tired of the laboratory and wanted to feel the floor shake.

Then Lennox enters, and she’s a different singer than the one who whispered through “Sweet Dreams.” “Well, I was born an original sinner” — she spits it, all attitude and accusation, and the voice that once specialized in ice now specializes in fire. Listen to how she handles the verses: there’s a blues growl in her delivery that wasn’t there before, a willingness to get dirty. But the precision remains — every phrase is placed with the same architectural care she brought to the synth-pop records. The result is something rare: a rock vocal with a pop singer’s discipline, fury with a floor plan. When she hits the chorus, it’s not a release so much as an assault.

Listen next for Jimmy Zavala’s harmonica, wailing through the track like a second lead vocal. In the synth-pop era, a harmonica would have been unthinkable — too organic, too rootsy, too human. Here it’s essential, the blues credential that authenticates the whole enterprise. Zavala doesn’t play fills; he testifies, and his interplay with Lennox’s vocal gives the song its call-and-response gospel-blues spine. Combined with Joniece Jamison’s backing vocals, the track achieves something Eurythmics had never attempted before: the sound of a community, a band, a gang. The lonely duo of the attic years is gone. This is an army.

Finally, listen to what the song did to Eurythmics’ career arc. Before “Missionary Man,” they were brilliant synth-pop innovators with a growing rock curiosity. After it, they were a Grammy-winning rock act — a transformation so complete that younger listeners encountering the early singles sometimes don’t believe it’s the same band. That disbelief is the highest compliment: it means the reinvention was total. “Missionary Man” didn’t just win an award and top a chart. It proved that the two people from the Wagga Wagga hotel room could become anything they wanted — even, improbably, a great American rock band from London and Aberdeen.

Listen to the guitar tone, because it’s the sound of a producer who’d spent years thinking electronically learning to think in wood and wire. Stewart’s guitar on “Missionary Man” isn’t virtuosic — he’s not trying to be Clapton. It’s architectural: riffs as load-bearing walls, the whole track constructed around their weight. Compare it with the synth riffs of “Sweet Dreams”: same compositional mind, different materials. The riff still interlocks, still pulses, still refuses to develop — but now it growls instead of gleams. The method survived the medium.

And listen to the song’s structure, which is pure blues-rock orthodoxy executed with pop discipline. Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, solo, chorus out — the oldest architecture in rock, and Eurythmics handle it like they’ve been playing it for decades. That’s the quiet miracle of the Revenge era: a duo with no blues background whatsoever internalized the form so completely that “Missionary Man” sounds inevitable, not imitated. The zealots in the lyric demand obedience. The song itself is the opposite of obedient — it’s two pop experimentalists proving they can out-rock the rockers, and the Grammy on the mantelpiece says they did.