Eurythmics 'There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)'

Chart Peak: 1 (1 week)

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The first UK Number 1 single for Annie and Dave - it made the top in July 1985. 'There Must Be An Angel' featured the magic harmonica of Stevie Wonder as did Chaka Khan's 1984 Number One 'I Feel For You'.

I suppose at the time it wasn't obvious that their first chart-topper would also be their last, nor that this would prove to be their final appearance (together) on a Now album. It's not such a loss, though, as I've long felt this to be roughly the point where they lost what was initially interesting about them and went almost entirely mainstream. I can't claim to have been capable of, or interested in, such sophisticated analysis when I was seven, but it's an easy judgement to make in hindsight. It's even carried over into the video, where Annie Lennox abandons her former androgyny in favour of an admittedly OTT femininity. 

Of course, there's nothing wrong with making pop music, but the song itself isn't strong enough really. It's apparently supposed to be blues-influenced, and you can hear that especially in the middle eight, but it's not an idiom they seem able to write in naturally - Lennox's overuse of melisma in the verses feels especially forced. And as well as being the third track in a row with the word "Heart" in the title, it's the second in a  row overproduced by Dave Stewart. The track only really comes alive when Stevie Wonder shows up and plays his solo, and even that suffers from seeming dropped into the song rather than an organic part of it. It was probably a mistake to mention 'I Feel For You' in the sleevenote, actually, it just reminds me how much better that was. 

Also appearing on: Now 2, 4
Available on: Ultimate Collection (2 disk set)

Eurythmics 'Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)'

Chart Peak: 4

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This is probably as good a time as any to come clean and admit that doing Now 4 at this stage was a bit of a mistake. I had an undisclosed plan to do one album from every year from 1983 to 1999, so I was about to do Now 5 for 1985, but then forgot myself and made a last-minute switch to this 1984 album. Oops.

Still, it's one of the few times I get to write about the Eurythmics here, presumably for contractual reasons; the soundtrack to a film of 1984 was on Virgin rather than their usual home at RCA, and so presumably more easily obtainable. I haven't seen the film and I don't think I'd heard the song before either, although I do remember the "Doo-do-do, boom-boom" middle section from a VH-1 trailer. The rest reminds me oddly of Queen somehow. They made worse records than this, but it feels like it loses a lot out of context.

Also appearing on: Now 2, 6
Available on: 1984 for the Love of Big Brother

Eurythmics 'Here Comes The Rain Again'

Chart Peak: 8

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Another scratch on the disc here, although the repeated six-note loop of the intro I get there sounds like the sort of thing you might hear on Radio 1 late at night. Anyway, I have to admit to growing up hearing Eurythmics as an act of seemingly increasing blandness, and it's been interesting to revisit some of their music as an adult and hear how much there was to it, particularly at this stage.

'Here Comes The Rain Again' is from their third album Touch which followed some of the template of their breakthrough set Sweet Dreams but with slightly more expansive ideas, and presumably a bigger budget. That's made very clear on this track, with the epic string arrangement (using plenty of pizzicato to represent the rain, of course!) balanced against the minimal electronic instrumentation spread over the stereo spectrum. All this supports one of Annie Lennox's better vocal performances: powerful singing but from the days before she started really overdoing it. It sets up an interesting, if hard to define, mood on the track too; as much as the lyric appears to be about unrequited or lost love, the expression of desire is "want to dive into your ocean", and of course oceans and rain are the same substance, which couldn't exist without each other. Perhaps there's a lesson in there somewhere.

What spoils this record a bit for me is when the drum machine comes in, depriving the track of some of the sparseness that it seems to need. I suppose they didn't want to make a record with no rhythm on it at all, but perhaps something more subtle might have been better. Well, as I finished writing this the sun has come out, so there goes the rain again. Perhaps now's the time to move on to the next track.

Also appearing on: Now 4, 6
Available on:The Ultimate Collection