The Eurythmics
Memorial Drive
Last time the Eurythmics were in Australia they were Tourists. The
Tourists, it must be said, were never much chop. One of their singles scraped into the Top Ten but no one would have thought that Gorbals rocker, Dave Stewart, and the singer in the Mary Quant tat, Annie Lennox, would do more than sink without trace when the band dispersed in 1980.
Instead, with five hit albums in a row, the Eurythmics are here again on their aptly named Revenge tour. It need hardly be said that Lennox and Stewart have done very well, and it shows. The band is at the height of its box office powers and nothing has been stinted in staging the live incarnation of the Eurythmics’ particular patent on glamour.
The Memorial Drive concert was a creditable example of the trains running on time but mostly the Eurythmics were dead on arrival. The sound was both huge and clear, the lighting rig was awesome; not a gremlin, not a hiccup.
The whole show was choreographed down to the last spontaneity. But if this is revenge, then it isn’t so sweet.
The Eurythmics have always capitalised fully on the photogenic Annie Lennox. The opulent video clips· and fashion studio album covers have all conspired to establish an image reducible to few enough elements to be registered as a trade mark. Lennox, cropped, elegant, androgynous, cultured, is counter-pointed by Stewart, shaggy, proletarian, the rock and roll throwback. As in their recent clips, the band overdress in black and white outfits with the leads strutting and swanking in their familiar leather frockcoats. The Eurythmics, we are reminded, are expensive and they enjoy success.
From the moment the black stage curtain opens with a gigantic zipper, the performance is poised on ambiguity – it is zany but before we wonder if it is really striptease after all, the band has launched into “Sex Crime” in a blizzard of white spotlights. With “I Love You Like a Ball and Chain” they were well into their stride when we were treated to the first of reed player Jimmy Zavala’s magnificent harmonica solos. Then clouds began boiling on the stagescreen as Lennox moved into “Here Comes the Rain Again” and Dave Stewart got busy on his colour co-ordinated Fender, reminding us how much his riffs stitch together the Eurythmics’ sound. Ever the musical magpie, Stewart gives us what oft we’ve heard but ne’er so well expressed. The core of the set was the Revenge album- “Let’s Go”, “Thorn in My Side”, “When Tomorrow Comes” however it is the Be Yourself Tonight material that shines best in performance, notably “Conditioned Soul” and “It’s All Right (Baby’s Coming Back”). “Would I Lie to You?” came closest to making the flesh actually creep and “Who’s That Girl?” from the Touch album, had devotees swaying and crooning as Lennox steered her cordless microphone towards the crowd.
In addition to the splendid Zavala on saxophone, Chucho Merchan played bass like an insolent wine waiter, ex-Blondie drummer Clem Burke judiciously mixed acoustic and Simmonds drums and Patrick Seymour laid keyboard flourishes into every available crevice. In his solo he gave us a Bach Toccata and Fugue just to show us he learnt something at Oxford. So it was left to Dave Stewart to carry the torch for rock and roll as he unleashed solo after solo echoing Townshend and Clapton and resembling neither, although he actually quoted from other gifted eclectics.with a rousing serve of “Norwegian Wood” on electric 12 string and a few salty bars from “She’s a Woman”.
After a carefully timed encore of the unremarkable “Missionary Man”, Annie Lennox ignited the crowd with “Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves” with Joniece Johnson, who gave depth to Lennox’s lead vocals throughout the set, playing the Aretha bits. They skipped and twirled and partyed on like sisters in triumph until Dave, now in his rhinestone bodgie leathers, in a dissonant moment (just like the record) reminded us that it is the blokes who play all the loud guitars. It would have been a great moment to stop, however mixed or opportunistic, because the song has, rightly, become an anthem. But instead we got the icky “Miracle of Love” and a moment of resonance got submerged as the Eurythmics had their two bob each way.
Lennox and Stewart have assembled a potentially great stage act but we witnessed a talented band, over-ripe and almost cynically over-rehearsed. That, of course, is the secret of pop success and as the song goes: “Sweet Dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree?”
“Swanky” The Adelaide Review, No.36, March 1987, p.20.