Eurythmics
Annie Lennox was born in Scotland and raised in the North Sea port
of Aberdeen. The paternal side of her family was musical (her
father even played bagpipes) and as a child, Annie took up piano
and, later, the flute.
 At
seventeen, after attending Aberdeen High School for Girls, she
went down to London's Royal Academy of Music where she enrolled in
a performer's course focusing primarily on flute, with subsidiary
studies in piano and harpsichord.
She grew increasingly restless at the Academy and finally just
left. After kicking around London for two years - writing songs
and singing with various anonymous groups - she encountered David
A Stewart.
Two years older than Annie, Dave Stewart had grown up in
Sunderland. His mother was a child psychologist with a special
interest in the relation of colour to taste. His father was an
accountant.
His early passion for sports gave way to a love of his guitar
and leather jacket, although his subsequent musical career was
motley to say the least - he played everything from folk and blues
to rock & roll.
From the moment they met, Annie and Dave lived together and
made music together. The group they put together in 1978 was a
Byrds-influenced ensemble called The Tourists.
Over the next few years they toured the world and recorded
three albums - even having a hit in 1979 with a cover version of
the Dusty Springfield classic, I Only Want To Be With You - and
yet they still found themselves penniless.
 The
Tourists broke up in 1980. Annie and Dave then created Eurythmics,
recording their first album (In The Garden) in a
studio outside Cologne, aided by an eccentric assortment of
musicians including Clem Burke from Blondie and Holger Czukay and
Jaki Liebezeit from Can.
The album sank without trace, but Lennox and Stewart built a
low-budget 8-track studio in a warehouse in Chalk Farm and
recorded a series of demos which RCA decided to release as an
album. Thus Sweet Dreams was made.
The 1983 album cracked the US Top 20, with the single
- Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) - reaching
the top of the US singles charts. Love Is A Stranger repeated
the success.
Their third album, Touch (1984), provided the
surging ballad, Who's That Girl? (a tale of
kinked-up sexual obsession), Right By Your Side,
and their biggest hit, Here Comes The Rain Again.
Annie Lennox looked like a gender-bending robot zombie but sang
with real soul. Dave Stewart, meanwhile, just hid behind his beard
and quietly masterminded the sound. Together they made divine
synth-pop.
Be Yourself Tonight (1985) featured some big name
guest stars, including Stevie Wonder on harmonica on the single There
Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) and Aretha Franklin
singing a duet with Annie Lennox on Sisters Are Doin' It For
Themselves. The album also provided the hit single Would
I Lie To You?
By Revenge (1986), both Lennox and Stewart had
branched out to bigger, if not better things: Annie as an actress,
Dave as a producer-stylist for artists ranging from The Ramones to
Bob Dylan.
Save for the singles Missionary Man, Thorn In
My Side and When Tomorrow Comes, the
album was a disappointment, and for the first time in five albums,
Eurythmics sounded conventional.
After working with outside musicians for a while, Lennox and
Stewart recorded Savage (1988) as a duo again, presenting
an album examining the world of domestically-induced insanity.
Ostensibly a concept piece, the album presented a housewife
with a split personality in a series of harrowing portraits that
shifted abruptly from Eurythmics usual user-friendly work.
Three years after her final outing with Dave Stewart, Annie
Lennox released her debut solo album (Diva) in 1992
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