Launched Jan. 4, 1983, Eurythmics’ second album, Candy Desires (Are Manufactured from This), launched the band to superstardom – however solely after an extended string of disappointments and failures.
When Eurythmics’ two members first met in 1975, every had taken radically completely different paths.
Guitarist and keyboardist Dave Stewart grew up within the British metropolis of Sunderland, the place he started taking part in in rock bands and dwelling a hard-partying life-style as a youngster. By 18, his band Longdancer had signed with Elton John’s label Rocket Data, which was a blessing in addition to a curse. “It was completely undisciplined,” Stewart remembered in a 2016 interview with The Guardian. “The folks operating his label simply handed us a bundle of cash. Then we’d simply go and take some mescaline.”
The band predictably fell aside, and Stewart occurred to fulfill a younger singer named Annie Lennox, who was on the time working as a waitress in London.
Watch Eurythmics’ ‘Candy Desires (Are Manufactured from This)’ Video
Lennox had come to music via a wholly completely different route. After rising up in Scotland, she had been accepted into the Royal Academy of Music in London, the place she studied classical music. However Lennox realized that path wasn’t for her, and he or she determined she needed to be a singer in a rock band, an uncommon aspiration for a lady within the ’70s. “A feminine artist was a rarified creature in these days,” the singer famous throughout a 2017 dialog with The Unbiased. “It didn’t take a lot for someone to be inquisitive about me as a result of there wasn’t a lot competitors. It was very uncommon.”
Stewart and Lennox hit it off instantly. They started a romantic relationship and fashioned a short-lived band known as the Vacationers, which had a small quantity of success and introduced them a substantial amount of hassle. “We had been moving into a sure path and the file firm we might signed to did not need us to try this,” Lennox informed The Herald in 2013. “So we had been in litigation for an entire 12 months and we had been caught. While you’re younger, you are bold, and we could not do something for an entire 12 months.” Making issues worse, the duo was “left with the money owed of the entire band.”
The stress of all of this was sufficient to finish Stewart and Lennox’s romantic relationship, however their musical partnership was too fruitful to desert. So that they fashioned a brand new band, Eurythmics, and went to Germany to file an album known as Within the Backyard that pushed their new wave pop sound within the path of the German electronica type rising on the time.
The album flopped.
Watch Eurythmics’ ‘Love Is a Stranger’ Video
Starting to put on down, however undeterred, Stewart and Lennox toured England as a duo, taking part in over digital backing tracks and doing virtually all of their setup and roadie work themselves. Nonetheless broke, Stewart took out a private financial institution mortgage, and so they constructed a small studio in a manufacturing unit part of North London the place they started to file songs for his or her second album.
The stress on the time was so excessive that Stewart was hospitalized with a collapsed lung, and Lennox suffered what was rumored to be a nervous breakdown. “I by no means really had a breakdown,” the singer clarified in 2013. “I used to be by no means below any medicine. I used to be by no means below any physician’s orders or put in an establishment. … In a way it was a type of struggles the place issues break down and a part of you is damaged, so it was very onerous.”
These struggles had been compounded by the truth that the duo’s first three singles from the recording periods – “This Is the Home”, “The Stroll” and “Love Is a Stranger” – barely made a ripple on the U.Okay. charts. So, as 1983 dawned, Eurythmics had been at a crossroads: a band with expertise, and desires of creating it massive, but with nearly nothing to point out for practically eight years of creating music collectively.
Watch Eurythmics Carry out ‘The Stroll’ Dwell in 1983
After which, within the blink of a watch, every thing modified. On the finish of January 1983, the band launched the title monitor from the album as a single. It reached No. 2 on the U.Okay. chart the next month, and in Might it was launched within the U.S., the place it climbed to No. 1 by early September. On the identical time, the music video for the music – which featured Lennox in all her androgynous glory – was in fixed rotation on MTV, not solely establishing Eurythmics as superstars however opening new doorways for feminine artists.
It was an odd second, notably for Lennox. “I used to be in mattress one morning in a lodge in San Francisco on a Eurythmics tour. I used to be very nervous and all I may take into consideration was, ‘When is there going to be an earthquake?’ Then I acquired this cellphone name to say we had been primary within the Billboard charts in America,” she informed The Unbiased in 2017. “I bear in mind strolling down the road and realizing that everyone knew I used to be strolling down the road. It was then that I learnt to stroll with my head down, not making eye contact with anyone. I’m a very quiet particular person and I felt weak.”
Regardless of these new difficulties – now arriving with fame, as an alternative of failure – the band by no means appeared again. They launched one other six albums earlier than happening prolonged hiatus in 1990, with each members pursuing solo tasks after which reuniting briefly to launch the album Peace in 1999. They had been inducted into the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame in 2022, the fruits of an extended, and hard-earned, profession.
Prime 100 ’80s Rock Albums
UCR takes a chronological take a look at the 100 finest rock albums of the ’80s.
