Who’s That Girl?: Eurythmics’ Touch Turns 40
Reflections on the group’s quickly crafted third album
The annals of popular music history are full of albums with tales of tortured backstories and long, difficult recording.
Eurythmics’ Touch, released 40 years ago today, is not one of those albums.
Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart came up with some ideas during the tour in support of their breakthrough second album Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), which had been released that January. They finished them and wrote other songs in the studio, finishing it all in three weeks.
The pair had tasted a little success as members of The Tourists, who’d hit the UK Top 10 twice in 1979-80 with a cover of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want To Be With You” followed by the original “So Good To Be Back Home Again.”
VIDEO: The Tourists “I Only Wanna Be With You”
That group broke up by the end of the year, in no small part due to problems with management that pocketed too much money and failed to promote them. Lennox and Stewart also both had musical leanings that didn’t fit with The Tourists’ power poppy sound. They hadn’t a full outlet creatively, as guitarist Pete Coombes was the main songwriter.
The two broke up as a couple around that time, but wanted to continue their musical partnership. They formed Eurythmics as a duo, wanting to explore electronic music. Their choice of producer for their first album, Conny Plank, indicated their intentions as he’d worked with the likes of Kraftwerk, Neu! and Ultravox.
In the Garden, released in the Fall of 1981, didn’t do much commercially due to it being a little avant garde. But their time with Plank would have a huge impact moving forward.
“Working with Conny, it was like the whole world of sound opened up with us,” Lennox said on the Greatest Music of All Time podcast in 2020. “That we could be experimental and we could go far. And we could use sounds where people would say, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Oh, you can. Let’s do it. Let’s get excited about using these kinds of wild sounds. You know, let’s go and bang some glass bottles or tinker with this and let’s see what, you know, let’s capture it. So that’s Conny. That’s Conny’s influence.”
The pair went back to work, spending several months putting together new material. They kept the electronic feel, but brought stronger songwriting with more pop sensibility and brought Lennox’s voice more to the fore. Both of these were wise decisions.
“That’s when we decided to take even more control by actually getting second hand equipment and stop using traditional studios,” Stewart told Super Deluxe Edition in 2019. “We spent months working on the Sweet Dreams album without the cost hanging over our heads and I think that allowed us to get lost in sound and find our way to what I used to call electro-soul.”
It didn’t hurt that the tools to make the particular brand of pop they were interested in were more accessible.
“Those synthesized sounds were becoming more available, you could access computers and very early prototype drum machines. The power of a synthesized bass – there was nothing like it. It was such fun, making tracks with those sounds,” Lennox told Classic Pop in 2018.
Aided by music videos which highlighted Lennox’s strikingly androgynous appearance, Sweet Dreams spawned two hit singles in the title track and “Love Is a Stranger” (the latter a successful re-release after the former became a smash). The album went platinum in the U.K. and Canada and gold in the United States.
Lennox has long preferred short hair, but in the videos, it was severely close cropped and dyed a bright orange-red that would have suited Ziggy Stardust (or highway workers’ safety vests). For “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, she paired it with a black suit and tie. She played both the man and the woman in the “Love is a Stranger” video. Striking imagery to go with an even more striking voice.
The look wasn’t planned as a way to mess with gender, but as a defense against catcall-spewing, leering men in audiences.
“This is a more androgynous visual portrayal, but it isn’t meant to be butch,” Lennox told Rolling Stone in 1983. “No way. It is very useful in transcending the bum-and-tits thing, though. That’s a very vulgar thing to say, but I have received that kind of abuse onstage, and one has to find a way around it. Of course, you’ll never find a way around it. But this helps.”
Many years later, she appreciated how the look meant something to a portion of the audience. “That’s so interesting now because the term ‘gender fluid’ comes in and I’m like, ‘Wow, all these young people see things in a far less boxed-in way,'” she said to Rolling Stone in 2022.
The newfound fame was a little disconcerting for Lennox. “It was like beyond the walls of this room, is a world out there,” she told the Independent in 2017. “A world that hasn’t known me, but now there is nowhere to hide. We had been asking for this and now the doors are wide open to us, I was going from anonymity to full exposure.
“I remember walking down the street and realizing that everybody knew I was walking down the street. It was then that I learnt to walk with my head down, not making eye contact with anybody. I’m a really quiet person and I felt vulnerable.”
The duo had their own studio facility, The Church (in a building that was still part actual church at the time), which helped things come together without much difficulty.
VIDEO: Eurythmics “Here Comes The Rain Again”
Touch had three strong singles to anchor it, starting with “Here Comes the Rain Again.” It was the best of the three and the second-biggest U.S. hit they’d have (behind “Sweet Dreams”). They wrote in a New York City hotel on a rainy day, with Lennox’s meteorological observation becoming the title and the song’s starting point.
Stewart built the song around minor keys. Melancholy and depression weren’t just emotions in Lennox’s toolkit, but things she experienced. She owns the song, aided immeasurably by Stewart’s well-chosen synth tracks and strings from the British Philharmonic, the latter done under less optimal conditions.
The Church was fine for a duo, but, with only four mics available, tight for an orchestra. Eventually, they jerry-rigged a set-up where cello players were positioned in the bathroom with violinists in the hall and arranger Michael Kamen conducting from a spiral staircase.
It worked, as the song remains a quality example of the period’s incorporation of synthesizers into pop and remains one of Lennox’s favorite Eurythmics songs due to how well it incorporated beauty and melancholy.
“Who’s That Girl?” dove right into the obsessive pain of a partner who’s been cheated on. She sings the verses in sultry fashion like it’s a torch song Bond theme (“Dumb hearts get broken just like china cups/The language of love has left me broken on the rocks”), but the chorus is pure synth pop as she just wants to know who the other woman is.
VIDEO: Eurythmics “Who’s That Girl?”
The video featured Lennox in a ’60s blonde wig, complete with flip, as Stewart is seen out on the town with various women (and ’80s pop culture blip Marilyn). The last bit of gender-bending appears at the end, with Lennox in male drag “kissing” her femme self in a primitive split-screen effect before she gives a knowing smile at the camera.
“Right By Your Side” changed things up by tossing calypso into the mix. Its sunny pop and joyous lyrical disposition are a 180 from the previous single. It’s perfectly pleasant, if a little too chipper for its own good. And I’m not sure that a woman who grew up working class in Aberdeen, Scotland and a man who grew up in wealth in Sunderland, England are the first two to put me in mind of the Caribbean. Rather, it sounds like something you’d hear at their version of a Margaritaville restaurant.
Elsewhere, “Cool Blue” was a showcase for Stewart, someone who wasn’t just all about synths, as it relied more bass from Dean Garcia (who’d become more known as one half of Curve in the ’90s) than it did the keyboards and drum machines.
“No Fear, No Hate, No Pain (No Broken Hearts)” pulled things back, more reliant on sparse atmosphere and Lennox’s vocals, with lyrics that could be about gun violence or heroin, depending on how you looked at it. Lennox could sound soulful or distant, and she was both here.
There’s no dual interpretations for “Aqua,” certainly not with lyrics like “I don’t feel anything/All sensation is closed to me/I saw you put the needle in Set to quasi-African rhythms,” it explored dark places in the psyche.
There’s no iciness in the slinky “Regrets”. One can picture someone like Prince tearing into the music and making it funky. Lennox sings it in a manner that would become more familiar to Eurythmics fans in 1985.
“The First Cut” goes right for the dancefloor, driven by Stewart’s guitars. He wasn’t going to get a call to join the JBs, but he got the job done.
“Paint a Rumour” ends the album emphasizing bubbling synths that, at times, play notes that will sound familiar to people who’d remember M’s No. 1 hit “Pop Muzik” from a few years prior. The electrodisco song crams its share of sounds into its seven-and-a-half minute run time, but it frankly could have been trimmed.
Eurythmics next move to the dancefloor came from their label, RCA, which remixed four songs — “The First Cut”, “Cool Blue”, “Paint a Rumour” and “Regrets”, presented them in vocal and instrumental remixes. Touch Dance, the result, sounds every bit the pointless cash grab without the band’s involvement that it was. Lennox, for one, was understandably displeased.
The album proper needed no such artificial goosing, as it was well-received and sold more copies than Sweet Dreams.
Eurythmics wouldn’t stick with synthpop much longer. Their next project would be a less pleasant experience. After David Bowie wasn’t interested because of the money offered, they wound up making music for a film adaptation of 1984. There was behind-the-scenes wrangling with director Michael Radford not wanting them involved at all while Virgin’s Richard Branson was trying to hedge his bets by having a successful act involved. His company had final cut and inserted some Eurythmics music into the score Radford had in mind before they were approached.
In the end, the sense was that the two, who’d put together music in good faith, weren’t wanted. “The only way we found out it wasn’t on,” Stewart told Spin in 1985, “was when our office wasn’t sent any invitations to the [UK premiere] screening. But they still didn’t tell us that Michael Radford, Simon Perry [producer], and Richard Branson were arguing amongst themselves.”
1984 (For the Love of Big Brother) was the two being experimental again, mostly full of instrumentals. There was no hit single in the U.S. Radio stations and MTV, apparently having never read the book, thought “Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)” was some sort of filthy song about screwing or even an actual sex crime. It was Top 10 in many other countries and still a dance hit here.
The two shifted direction, moving towards soul-flavored rock on 1985’s Be Yourself Tonight. The album was a critical and commercial success, even without an accompanying tour. Lennox had to rest her voice to recover from vocal cord nodules, which kept them from performing at that year’s Live Aid.
They had momentum and kept experimenting to interesting effect. 1987’s Savage, which was sort of their own Berlin Trilogy album, has undergone a critical reappraisal over the years since it flopped commercially in the U.S. But by decade’s end, Eurythmics were effectively done.
The working relationship between the two had become frayed. Lennox was burnt out by their steady recording/touring pace through the ’80s. She’d also experienced horrible grief, as her son Daniel was stillborn in 1988.
In the end, Lennox wasn’t going to give up her career, but she would be on her terms — making the albums she wanted when she wanted to make them (1992’s classic Diva being the best of the bunch). She made sure to prioritize family in the process. She also spent more of her time on charitable endeavors and activism, which have been more of her focus over the last 20 years.
Stewart would go on to do more film and production work as well as form a band called Dave Stewart & Spiritual Cowboys that put out a pair of albums.
There was a 1999 reunion album — Peace — informed by concern for social issues. But they went their separate ways after that tour. Aside from occasional short one-off appearances, most recently performing at their 2022 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, that’s it.
“As much as I love Dave – and I truly do – I don’t know that I want to… it opens up a whole bunch of stuff,” Lennox told Classic Pop in 2021. “I’ve got so used to having the freedom to just do and not do what I want. I’m very spoiled in that way. It’s really important for me to do things for myself, and not have to refer to another. When Dave and I were making things back then, we had that very deep connection and understanding, but we’ve both lived lives since then. I’m not sure it could work. It could, but I’m not sure I want it to.”
Touch may not be a perfect album, but it’s still a solid slice of the two still exploring who and what they could be as a group. Stewart was getting a greater grasp of what synths and programming could do for him. Lennox was always committed vocally, unable to sing something that didn’t work for her. At that point, they were able to quickly come up with song ideas and goals and, just as importantly, where they didn’t want those songs to go.
A well-done bookend to their full-on synth pop period, it showed Eurythmics as forward thinkers who could also put enough melodies and appealing ideas in to be more than a fringe band.
Not bad for three torture-free weeks’ worth of work.
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