The record in context

It is the happiest song Eurythmics ever made, and it almost didn’t have its most famous three minutes. “There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)” was the second single from Be Yourself Tonight, released in June 1985, and it became the duo’s first — and to this day only — UK No. 1, reaching the top on 27 July 1985 for a single glorious week. It also topped the charts in Ireland, Norway, Finland, and Poland, went Top 10 across Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, and reached No. 22 on the US Billboard Hot 100. But the story everyone remembers isn’t the chart position. It’s the harmonica solo — played by Stevie Wonder, in one take, around midnight, after Lennox and Stewart had given up waiting and gone home.

Stewart had invited Wonder after hearing his harmonica work on Chaka Khan’s “I Feel for You” from the previous year. The session was booked at a Los Angeles studio; Wonder was supposed to show up at a reasonable hour. Hours passed. Stewart and Lennox waited, and waited, and eventually concluded he’d forgotten — they left. Wonder arrived several hours later, deep into the night, walked into the studio, and nailed the entire solo in a single take. Then, as the legend has it, he vanished back into the night. There is something perfect about that: the song is about an angel appearing out of nowhere, and its most transcendent moment was played by a man who materialized at midnight, delivered perfection in one pass, and disappeared. You couldn’t script it better, which is probably why nobody had to.

The song itself opens with an astonishing a cappella intro from Lennox — just her voice, unaccompanied, before the gospel-infused pop rushes in at a hundred miles an hour. It was a deliberate statement after the R&B grit of “Would I Lie to You?”: Eurythmics could do joy, too, and they could do it bigger than anyone. The single edit ran 4:32 against the album version’s 5:22, and the full five-minute version wouldn’t appear on an album until the US Greatest Hits in 1991. In a delicious chart irony, the single spent two weeks at No. 2 in Montreal, held off the top spot by Stevie Wonder’s own “Part-Time Lover” — the angel’s employer blocking the angel’s song.

What makes “There Must Be an Angel” endure isn’t just the chart-topper status or the Wonder cameo. It’s the sound of a duo at the absolute peak of their powers, confident enough to be unabashedly, unironically happy. After years of ice and alienation — the very qualities that made them famous — Lennox and Stewart let the sun in. The gospel influence wasn’t decoration; it was a genuine embrace of American soul tradition, the same tradition they’d been channeling since the breakfast-table riff of “Would I Lie to You?” The song remains their only British No. 1, which feels somehow right: Eurythmics were always slightly too strange, slightly too severe, to be chart-toppers by default. When they finally got there, it was with the most joyful record they ever made — and a harmonica solo played by a genius at midnight.

The chart story has a delicious footnote: in Montreal, the single spent two weeks at No. 2, held off the top by Stevie Wonder’s own “Part-Time Lover.” The angel’s employer was blocking the angel’s song — a chart irony almost too perfect to be true, and a reminder of just how dominant Wonder was in the summer of 1985. Elsewhere the record swept all before it: No. 1 in the UK, Ireland, Norway, Finland, and Poland; Top 10 across Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. And the full five-minute version — the unedited original — wouldn’t appear on an album until the American Greatest Hits in 1991, another case of Eurythmics’ definitive texts hiding on singles while the albums carried the edits.

What the song’s success obscured, slightly, was how much of a departure it represented. Eurythmics had built their fame on ice — detachment, artifice, control. “There Must Be an Angel” is all warmth: gospel chords, a vocal that soars instead of slicing, a lyric without a drop of irony. It was the first proof that Lennox’s voice could do unabashed joy as convincingly as it did cool menace, and it opened a door the duo would walk through repeatedly — toward soul, toward gospel, toward the big American songbook they’d spend the rest of the decade mastering. The angel wasn’t just in the title. It was in the permission the song granted them to feel things out loud.

Listen closely

Start with the a cappella opening, because it’s one of the bravest things Lennox ever recorded. No instruments, no safety net — just her voice, alone, singing “No one on earth could feel like this.” In 1985, opening a pop single with unaccompanied vocals was practically an act of defiance; radio wanted hooks in the first five seconds, not vulnerability. But Lennox understood that the nakedness was the hook. Listen to the control in those opening phrases: the pitch is perfect, the tone is warm, and there’s not a trace of the ice queen. This is Lennox the soul singer, the gospel singer, the singer who grew up on Aretha and meant it.

Then the band crashes in, and the song becomes a runaway train of joy. The tempo is relentless, the horns are blazing, and Lennox rides it all with a kind of exhilarated precision — she’s not being carried by the arrangement, she’s driving it. Listen to the way she attacks “must be an angel”: the phrase leaps upward, and she lands it with total commitment, no hedging. This is the opposite of the cool detachment of the early singles. The Eurythmics of “Sweet Dreams” observed emotion from a distance; the Eurythmics of “There Must Be an Angel” dive straight into it. The transformation is thrilling because you can hear how much it costs her to let go — and how glad she is to pay it.

And then, at the song’s peak, the harmonica. Listen to Wonder’s solo not as a guest spot but as a second voice entering the conversation — it doesn’t decorate the song, it answers it. The phrasing is pure Wonder: those bent notes, that rhythmic daring, the way he seems to be laughing and crying at the same time. Knowing it was one take, at midnight, after hours of waiting, only deepens the miracle: this isn’t a constructed solo, it’s a visitation. It arrives, it transforms everything, it leaves. The song’s title turns out to be literally true — there must be an angel, because no human planning could have produced this moment.

Finally, listen to the whole thing as the centerpiece of Be Yourself Tonight, sequenced between the R&B punch of “Would I Lie to You?” and the soul summit of “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves.” The album is Eurythmics’ love letter to American music, and “There Must Be an Angel” is its most euphoric chapter — the moment the duo stopped analyzing soul and simply surrendered to it. That it became their only UK No. 1 feels like the charts briefly, accidentally, rewarding the right thing: not the coolest record, not the strangest, but the one with the most joy in it. Angels are rare. This one stayed for four minutes and thirty-two seconds.

Listen to the gospel underpinnings — the piano and organ figures that churn beneath the pop surface, giving the song its churchly lift. This isn’t gospel as decoration; it’s gospel as engine. The chord changes have that unmistakable lift-and-resolve quality of the Black church tradition, and Lennox sings them like someone who grew up inside that music rather than visiting it. Which, in a sense, she did — her love of Aretha and soul was the worst-kept secret in synth-pop. “There Must Be an Angel” was the moment she stopped hiding it.

And listen to the a cappella technique itself, because it’s harder than it sounds. Singing unaccompanied exposes everything — pitch, breath, nerve — and Lennox’s opening is flawless, but more importantly it’s inviting. She isn’t showing off; she’s opening a door. Compare it with the icy precision of the “Sweet Dreams” vocal: same singer, same control, completely different temperature. The range between those two performances — from reportage to rapture — is the full measure of what Annie Lennox could do. Most singers get one temperature. She had them all.