Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox planned leaving their band The Tourists while on tour (in Wagga, as it happens). What they had in mind was a more adventurous duo where they could write their own material and make it sound anyway they wanted. They named it after an old style of exercise and dropped the article (Eurythmics, not The Eurythmics, this was the '80s) and then with a satchel of song ideas went to Connie Plank and recorded this.
When you know that they were fleeing a rigidly structured band dominated by a single songwriter the record's eclecictism makes sense but the limits of its range don't. While there is a sprinkling of electronics over most of it this set sounds very like The Tourists with guitar orchestras, shimmering vocal harmonies and big bright choruses. What's left after that is songs that sound like they need the synthpop treatment but are just getting more guitar band if mixed with a little Kraut rock.The opening trio of tracks.
English Summer starts out all chorus pedal guitars and harmonies with a melting chorus but it could have been a Tourists song. Belinda definitely could have been Tourists. It's the best song on the album: massed bright guitars with shimmering harmonies and a gorgeous melody. But then the coda, a refrain of "close your eyes" is repeated over the kind of melismatic wailing that Lennox seemed to have discovered in the studio. There was a little of it in The Tourists but that was pretty whereas this is Olympic. It's the first thing on the album that is a recognisable trope of the superstar version of the band. Take Me to Your Heart has the kind of repeated minor key phrase that they would support so effectively on later hits like Sweet Dreams (also with a lot of improv wailing) and Here Comes the Rain Again. The only problem with that is that the arrangement is a guitar band and makes dull and listless what might have been insistent and compelling with synthesis. Here it sounds like the first demo recorded with a drum machine and the most basic of guitar/bass parts. I know it's meant to invoke Krautrock but surrounded by clear '60s style it has no life of its own. It needs the Sweet Dreams treatment. The slight keyboard riff does not make up for the absence. These statements can be made about the rest of the record: it's either still in new wave power pop mode or it's feeling around cautiously for something new.
That said, there are good songs here and the album is easily enjoyable without being wrung by retrospective judgements. It's frustrating that Your Time Will Come is a glorious chorus wasted a quirky verse. But then Belinda is four minutes of aural bliss, whatever the music genre. She's Invisible Now is keyboard driven but with 2020 hindsight sounds like something St Etienne or Pulp would produce deep in the following decade. That just means it sounds like the '60s with modern synthesisers. But then the closer Revenge combines a classically influenced vocal melody with disco drumming (thank you, Blondie's Clem Burke) and bass and a mix of un-rock blips on guitar with masses of delay and modulation effects. If it were more upfront it might have sat well on the following year's breakthrough.
This record is a cocoon but cocoon's are interesting. Pop music was going through one of its most profound changes in 1981. Punk's return to basics was leading not to more guitar rock but a breakdown of it. The possibilities of accessible electronics had already shown that the power of rock music could be emulated without the cultural politics of guitar heros or swaggering singers and the sounds themselves could come from the inner core of Jupiter and still make the charts. Human League had already changed from the doom boy bedroom electronica into the light of pop stardom without a single pluck of a string. See also Ultravox and New Order's emergence from Joy Division. For a while there it really did look like the outmoded guitar band unit had given way to a night sky of winking possibility. Then, a few years later up and coming teenagers still liked playing power chords and guitars came back. It would take until trip hop in the mid '90s to issue another challenge but nothing ever dislodged the old convention and still hasn't.
So, Eurythmics were foraging around, trying to replace the order of The Tourists with a launching pad and really only churning out the same kind of thing. It would take some touring (with a backing tape system they carried in a horse trailer) and their own studio to emerge the next year as one of the most enduring acts from this era of musical metamorphosis. With sharper, trimmed looks and even sharper songs that pushed their way through crowds of hopefuls the duo began to lead. They might have started by effectively swallowing their own voices and ideas but it's not hard to hear that they had the parts for their new identity right here, sometimes buried under old school rock but sometimes taking wing.
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