A hit that no one believed in was created by accident. “This cow peed everywhere”

Eurythmics are Dave Stuart and Annie Lennox. They met back in the 70s, when they both belonged to the rock band The Tourists. They were also a couple, but this relationship, like their first musical group together, did not stand the test of time. However, when their private paths parted, they still followed the same musical path.

The difficult beginnings of Eurythmics

In the early 1980s, they became interested in electronic music and bought themselves some synthesizers. They worked on new music in a small London studio. Lennox does not hide that at that stage of her life she was in a hole. Not only did their previous band break up a few years earlier during the tour, but the first attempts to break through with Eurythmics’ music were very unsuccessful. The duo’s debut album went unnoticed, and the industry experienced them painfully, as the singer openly talked about in numerous interviews.

The first beat and riff of the big hit was created when Dave Stuart was fiddling with his new synthesizer in the studio. At the time, Annie Lennox was curled up on the floor, deep in depressive thoughts. She was snapped out of her numbness by the sounds Stuart put together for a test. “What the hell is this?” she asked, then got up and began to pluck something on the keys. As the musicians said years later in an interview with “The Guardian” – this is how the striking beginning of the song was created. Lennox also quickly began to write the lyrics of the song on a piece of paper.

In the text, she expressed all her frustrations and fears that tormented her at that time. Therefore, in the song, she sang about how she felt like in a dream – not necessarily a good one, because everything they were trying to achieve as a band seemed impossible to achieve. “Look at the state we’re in, can it get any worse?” – she explained” her train of thought and added that the words of the hit song, as it later turned out, were an exact reflection of her state: she felt hopeless and very nihilistic about life at the same time. However, she bluntly denied that the line in which she sings that some “dreams want to use you, others want to be used by you” refers to sex or S&M practices. “It’s a text about something completely different,” she emphasized. Stuart recalls that, unlike Lennox, he was in a manic state at the time – he had gone through surgery after a punctured lung, so he felt he had been given a new chance at life.

When the song and album were ready, the musicians also had to go through the industry’s health path. The label did not want to release the title track as a single, because, according to the producers, it was supposedly missing the chorus. As Stuart himself wrote in the text for the “Guardian”, fortunately, a radio DJ from Cleveland did not stop playing the song on the air at home. As soon as the song came on, the radio’s phones were ringing.

The producers finally gave up. “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” was released as the fourth and final single. According to the proverb “three times the art, the fourth the science”, the decision-makers found out how wrong they were. It quickly turned out that the song became an international hit and hit the first place of the American Billboard Hot 100, and in his native Great Britain it reached the second position of the UK Singles Chart. Rolling Stone soon after its premiere called the song a synthpop masterpiece, and proclaimed Lennox and Dave Stuart MTV superstars.

Well, listeners and viewers were also delighted with the music video for the song, which was almost constantly shown by the still fledgling MTV music television. This one was created in January 1983 – shooting was finished shortly before the release of the album. The bold and already distinctive image of Annie Lennox made a great impression. The singer, as we remember, had her hair cut almost to a hedgehog and dyed a fiery red color. Added to this was expressive eye makeup and a men’s suit.

I wanted to be the opposite of the cliché, the stereotypical image of a singer. I wanted to be as strong as a man, equal to Dave, to be seen that way. Wearing wigs and taking them off was a reference to the expectation of women to be beautiful to men, as well as a metaphor for taking off the masks and the fact that nothing is real

the artist later explained. The BBC itself was delighted – it was even written about the “powerful androgynous image”, thanks to which the clip “crashed the drawers in which pop singers were stuffed”.

“People went crazy over the video that was on MTV all the time. I wanted to make a mockery of the music industry, but also do something like an artistic performance – strange and dreamlike. So we made a mockery of a music company conference room in a studio on Wardour Street. and we put a cow in there to make it real, so Annie and I were laying flat on the table and the cow was peeing everywhere.”

The success of the song was so great that the re-released song “Love Is a Stranger” also quickly became an international hit. “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” after 20 years was included by “Rolling Stone” in the list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, and in 2003 the song was officially admitted to the Grammy Hall of Fame. To this day, the statistics look impressive. In 2010, the music video was uploaded to the group’s official YouTube channel and gained 753 million views there. On Spotify, the song has already been played over 975 million times and is close to a billion.

“This song doesn’t get old”, “It may have been 40 years, but this song has never gotten old and will never get old. Timeless lyrics and Annie continues to amaze. What a moment in music history,” listeners wrote in the comments.

In fact, 1983 was exceptionally successful in this regard. Because it was then that such albums as “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie or “Synchronicity” by The Police hit the market – it is on this disc that there is a hit “Every Breath You Take”. U2 released the CD “War” from “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. Metallica entered the market with their debut album “Kill ‘Em All”, Slayer released his first “Show No Mercy”. The first albums were also released by Marillion, Sonic Youth, and the Swedish band Europe, which later gave the world “Final Countdon”. In 1983, Madonna’s first album was released with her first global hit “Holiday”.

Bonnie Tyler topped the charts with Total Eclipse of the Heart. More hits from the album “Thriller” by Michael Jackson, released at the end of 1982, hit the charts. It was also good in Poland: Republika released its first album “New Situations” (there we have such hits as “Śmierć w Bikini”, “Halucynacje” or the title “New Situations”), Bajm released his debut album “Bajm” (this one contains such memorable songs such as “Józek, I will not spare you this night”, “What will you give me, sir”, or “There is no water in the desert”). Also debuted on the record market were: Lady Pank, Lombard, Branch Closed, Reserve and Urszula (“Ddandelions, kites, wind”). The band Turbo released “Adult Children” (who have regrets), and TSA released the album “TSA”. Was happening.