1983@40 : SWEET DREAMS (ARE MADE OF THIS) - EURYTHMICS

It must have been January that I heard it because I know I first saw the video in February. The song has a quiet epic feel to it, opposing tinkly electronics with atmospheric grunts and a big vocal with a varying delay and reverb. Over a drum machine kick the soundscape is restless and prying like a audience of town gossips witnessing an orgy. The vocal melody, supported by distant, sweet backing vocals, is central and modal, now plunging into the lower register now squeezing into psychedelic dissonance in the higher. Love is a Stranger, it's like addiction, a kidnapper, a seducer, or anything that takes and changes you, assuming different forms with their own effects until you, too, are transformed. The video is highly cinematic from the time that all of them were but this one delivered a kind of career building canniness that many were not. The duo both appear in various roles and costumes but the focus is on the cool beauty of singer Annie Lennox as she first sings to camera from the back of a limousine in a flouncy wig then in more of a dominatrix in a white tiled room that could be a bathroom or torture chamber, then as something more like herself with short Bowie hair, slowly removing leather gloves, androgynous in a pinstripe suit, writhing in a mass of 35 mm film. Finally, as the Thinner White Duke, she moves robotically in mirror shades beside the Chauffeur Dave Stewart, and stares down the lens.

When I head this on the radio it sounded like it was being told reverse shot, by the victim or affected, not the perp. I never heard it that way after seeing the clip. That effect is what sealed the deal on the Eurythmics, state ambiguity in no uncertain terms and keep the pop hooks coming. It was at the end of a relatively short road but one that had already involved a few drastic changes. As The Tourists, Stewart and Lennox were part of a '60s influenced power pop unit with a few respectable chart toppers to their name. Sensing the change in the wind they left to form the duo with this name but basically the same sound but with more quirk. By the time this album came around, they were possessed of their own recording studio and banks of new electronics. Their debut In the Garden sounds very old hat by comparison.

So, I'm spending a lot of time on this song on an album that contains ten. Well, for starters, as songs go, the rest of the first side is filler. Well, that's how it sounds until you listen to the next side and understand that that was where they kept the real songs. Alternatively, the first side is for dancing and the other one for listening. But we can't have everything in formula, can we, because side two begins with one of the most durable dance numbers from its era.

Sweet Dreams begins with one of the hookiest synth riffs in all pop music. You could play it on guitar but it would only sound right through the envelopes and filters of a fat toned '80s keyboard. The vocals, Lennox on thick self-harmonies but a strong stern lead line out the front really just repeats a chorus verse and kind of middle eight from go to whoa. It's a little like the person who lived through Love is a Stranger, older and worn, giving advice to a younger potential victim. "Some of them wat to use you. Some of them want to be used by you,"  as well as, "hold your head up (moving on).."

The video is far more conventional for its time. Lennox in full Bowie in a suit mode sings to camera as though delivering a business presentation while Stewart types at a computer as though playing the riff. When the instrumental comes up they frolic in a pasture with cellos and cows (hey, it was the '80s, man!). Repeat. It's not the invention of this but its confidence that grabbed everyone who saw it and then heard it on the dancefloor or the radio and fancied they heard more depth and variation in the lyrics than the song has. That, too, feels intentional. The song clocks in at about three and a half minutes, still on the longer side of the average top 40 number and most of it repeats the first thirty seconds mechanically.

This LP was released with a cousin video for the dawning of the age of home video with these clips and some live performances. That wasn't entirely revolutionary; Blondie had done it a few years earlier with videodiscs, but this time it was in a format that everybody had. Unlike the second bite of power pop previously, this one was made to sell and dominate. 

And that's why you get real songs on side two. Jennifer starts with the sounds of the seaside. The synths kick in  but you're not meant to dance along to this eerie ballad about a suicide. It could be a ghost story but it doesn't have to be. What it is is a mix of beautiful and unsettling. I miss that about early '80s pop, that it could completely ditch the boy/girl narrative and step quietly down the dark stairs with horror movie musical boxes tinkling away among the cobwebs.

This is the House is a kind of Talking Heads vignette about a burnt down house that starts with a few lines in Spanish. Somebody told Me is a fullthroated vocal workout over a soul brass riff on the lower end of the keyboards. This City Never Sleeps is a sombre reflection on a culture of isolation and resistance to stimulus. Brooding and deliberate, it steps on to the fade before a brief backwards message (from Dave Stewart, not Satan). Big and sad but it can afford to be at the end of this album that blends fun times steppin' out with the same kind of spooky big town songs on The Tourists deep cuts. 

Sweet Dreams is what happens when a reinvention is both calculated and fully embraced as a new strategy into a careerist lifestyle. The Eurythmics, from this point on, were free to dictate what they released, its musical style, video representation and what it was about. See also 1981's Dare from the Human League where the decision to join instead of futilely resist proved to be the right one. 

After this The Eurythmics could earn a living and be courted by a fickle music press on MTV or on the stage of a stadium. And if  they developed very, very little in the years that followed they were consistent and, most poignantly of all, prepared for a future that bands around them who stuck to their own cred rather than look beyond the old tribal ways and were surprised by the slowly exploding failure that changes in the environment, market, youth culture, etc. were to deliver to them. 

This album heard again now only approaches ineffectuality in that its pre-EDM dance numbers sound neo-retro-new-old rather than compelling in themselves. The singles that start each side are still immediate and strong. For a singles band that fit perfectly into the new multimedia demands of their era without hesitation, they endure.