A huge shout out to music’s newest septuagenarian Ms Annie Lennox.
The first record I bought by a female-fronted act was Eurythmics’ Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four) in December 1984, kick starting an indelible admiration for her music, her strength of character and her impassioned activism. Doubling up as the latest in this website’s Fabulous Fourths series, this is For The Love Of Big Brother…
“Meet his little hussy with his ghost town approach
Her face is sans feature, but she wears a Dali brooch
Sweetly reminiscent, something mother used to bake
Wrecked up and paralysed, Diamond Dogs are stabilised”
— David Bowie, Diamond Dogs (1974)
“I’m an awful pessimist,” David Bowie confessed to NME in 1973. The thin white Dame of rock was readying his glam covers album PinUps at the time yet it wasn’t at all surprising his nihilist magpie mind was already full of his next project: writing a musical based on George Orwell’s legendary novel of totalitarian social control, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Bowie had been obsessed with Orwell’s chillingly prescient story since growing up in postwar Bromley*, in a house less than a mile away from the birthplace of HG Wells. “You always felt you were in 1984,” he said. “That’s the kind of gloom and immovable society that a lot of us felt we grew up in… It was a terribly inhibiting place.”
That November, Bowie told William Burroughs he was adapting the dystopian drama for the small screen and gave his NBC special the craftily punning title The 1980 Floor Show. During the gig, which saw the final wave bye-bye to Ziggy Stardust, the singer debuted a new clumsily conjoined track called 1984/Dodo, one of twenty he claimed to have created for the musical, although attempts to work up a script with playwright Tony Ingrassia were aborted when Orwell’s widow, Sonia Brownell, vetoed the project, considering it to be in poor taste.
Brownell died in 1980, depriving Orwell’s works of their most officious gatekeeper. However, it was good news for Bowie’s occasional pianist Rick Wakeman (Life On Mars?, Absolute Beginners), who took no time in dashing off a 1984 concept album in the summer of ‘81 as several of England’s inner cities burned under the weight of protest at the Thatcher government’s social policy. Heck, the LP’s first single was even a sweetly evocative ballad called Julia, sung by guest warbler Chaka Khan.
Three years went by before, in the summer of 1984, Richard Branson commissioned a musical soundtrack for the rookie Michael Radford’s big screen version of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Slightly belatedly perhaps but which, as per the time span of Orwell’s narrative, was shooting in and around Britain from April to July that titular year.
Despite being to signed to RCA since their 1981 debut In The Garden, Eurythmics’ resultant album was released on Branson’s Virgin Records in November of ’84, a month after the film’s premiere. The nine-track 1984 (For The Love Of Big Brother) is a mostly instrumental affair developed from the instrumental interludes Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox composed for the movie.
Alas, it does boast a trio of full-bodied sung set-pieces: the brooding title track, Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four) and Julia, with the latter pair spun off the album as 45s, albeit with markedly different commercial fortunes. Sexcrime, the lead single, peaked at a creditable fourth place on the UK charts the second week of December 1984, which happened to be the same week my mother celebrated her 36th birthday.
There is a reason for mentioning this. The world of Big Brother is essentially post-war Britain: Orwell devised the title for his most famous work from inverting the last two digits of 1948. In other words, the year the bulk of 1984 was written was the year of Mum’s entry into the decaying rubble of an exhausted former colonial power, with its bombed-out city centres, and its food and electricity rationing. Therefore, it’s entirely uncoincidental that the bleak visual landscape of the movie looks like a scene straight out of a depressingly grubby late forties broadcast on ole ‘Auntie’ BBC, the left-leaning media corporation that the author had worked for during World War II.
Most chillingly, drawing on the bureaucracy and hive-mind that he’d encountered toiling in the BBC‘s propaganda department during the war, Orwell seemed to suggest that even Clement Atlee’s Labour Party, quite busy in 1948 erecting the welfare state, would be concerned with establishing and bolstering its power at the expense of everything else. Politics, eh?
In the novel, Sexcrime was the act of engaging in sexual activity for pleasure, ie the authorities decreed the act should be limited to the act of procreation. For a gay man only coming to terms with his sexuality that year, it seemed fitting that in the last month of 1984 I purloined my slice of Sexcrime directly from a Virgin in Central Milton Keynes, a slightly soulless new ‘city’ that owed much of its growth to the true blue ‘family values’ espoused by the current Conservative administration led by Margaret Thatcher.
But for us teenage Buckinghamshire bods more interested in the arts than old farts Virgin wasn’t just a label, it was the much cooler alternative record store to HMV and Woolies, and very much MK’s music mecca in the eighties, that is until Branson sold out to the generic high street chain Our Price.
Having said that, I asked the assistant if I could try before I buy: I wanted to listen to the extended version, as I was steadfastly refusing to play this newfangled remix game if they deviated too much from the original track. How times did change. Not only was the Sexcrime single the first Eurythmics record I owned, but the twelve-inch of this stuttering sample-heavy slab of musique concrète would be the first recording I bought whose lead vocals were performed by a (gasp) woman.
That may seem incredulous reading this forty years after the event, but back then pocket money diktats were the guiding principle forcing l’il ole me to be sparing with my solitary pound a week allowance from Father. To put that into context, in my fourth year of buying music 1984 was the year I finally added albums to my collection that weren’t by my first musical love, Adam Ant. And even then, there was only two or three, headed by Visage’s Fade To Grey: The Singles Collection and Dead Or Alive’s Sophisticated Boom Boom.
Four decades on and Sexcrime is still an odd beast that divides listeners even now. When the first Eurythmics Greatest Hits compilation was issued in 1991, many reviewers seemed to parrot each other in singling out Thorn In My Side as the perfect example of coruscating, hooky pop yet Sexcrime was often a subject of derision, often lambasted as the lowpoint in an otherwise exemplary collection of gleaming glacial nuggets.
What’s curious is how Sexcrime is lyrically the least straightforward of the three songs on 1984 yet it was chosen as the first 45, probably because DnA seemed unkeen in trailing a Eurythmics album with a ballad (Are Who’s That Girl? and the allegedly scored-for-a-Bond-film I Saved The World Today totally balladeering? It’s a moot point).
Either way, the delivery of Sexcrime is deliberately scattered and impressionistic in its Burroughsian cut-up state. Its fractured narrative deploys Orwellian Newspeak (“unborn”, “unliving”), the simplified language of the Oceania superstate, to relay the scene where the dreaded Thought Police arrest Winston Smith (John Hurt) and his illicit romantic interest Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) for fornicating in his threadbare flat above a shop, leaving Big Brother’s “big hole in the wall” to spy on whoever takes over “this wintry home” next.
Forty years on, and the combined audio visual experience still, if I can paraphrase a later single, puts a chill in the heart.
With more than a future fiction echo of Derek Jarman’s most hellish work, Sexcrime’s explosive video clip was filmed on a bitterly cold night at London’s disused Battersea Power Station. With assistance from our local cable network Sky Channel aired the promo in heavy rotation and Sexcrime went on to become the duo’s sixth consecutive Top 10 hit in Britain, and holds up as an outrageously unconventional, cacophonous, but vitally important release.
It was less plain sailing across the pond, where the track met with resistance and was banned from many American radio stations’ playlists due to its speciously perceived song title, which would surely have amused Orwell himself. Ample opportunity for paranoids to claim he was right after all then.
As for the rest of the album, it’s by all accounts a wholly Lennox and Stewart-performed affair. Dave’s sonic soundscapes really are a thing of beauty, and back when the focus was largely on Annie and, in tabloid talk, her ever changing hair colour and “secret“ marriages, taking up residence in the producer’s chair the one and only David A. Stewart rarely received the credit he richly deserved.
When Eurythmics first formed as a duo, it was with the intention of taking pop music in a more experimental direction, and 1984 is about as experimental as they ever got. Rich with imagery and sonic textures as an illustration of how wide the duo‘s influences go Stewart boldly described the music as being like “Kraftwerk meets African tribal meets Booker T and the MGs,” which in a strange way anticipates the next Eurythmics project, 1985’s “sort of a rock ’n roll album” Be Yourself Tonight, ie LP number five.
Kicking off the set, I Did It Just The Same starts with a kind of hum, a malevolent scene setter that evokes a dark alley feel, punctuated by a loop of Annie’s chest-derived “huh!” that immediately recalls Grace Jones at her most terrifying. Though it‘s not used in the piece, the title refers to a line in Winston’s diary after realising the prostitute he was about to hire was nowhere near as young as she looked (“But I went ahead and did it just the same…”).
As if to illustrate a melodic protest of speech censorship, as the track progresses it becomes apparent there are no proper words — unlyrics, you might say — just Annie’s blue-eyed soul inflections future-scatting her way through a stunning vocal performance, which truly exemplifies Hans Christian Andersen’s adage: “Where words fail, music speaks.”
Post-Sexcrime, the set shifts downtempo with the haunting semi title track, For The Love Of Big Brother. It’s altogether more mellow, with a hypnotic mix of swirling keyboards, ominous piano and sitar-like strains overlaying ambient atmospheric synth lines and an icy syncopated rhythm. The sinister subdued reality of totalitarian futurescape is present as Lennox sings, plaintively “I still hear the sound of conversation down the hall, look to see who’s coming but it’s nothing and there’s no one there at all.”
At just over a minute long, the Winston’s Diary interlude continues the gloomy glacial freeze, but with a warm Eno-esque undertone reminiscent of the former Roxy Music synthesist’s contributions to Jarman’s Jubilee. One wistful high note — it sounds like a lonesome harmonica but may be a treated keyboard — wails along with the warping, morphing synth tones, and appears to represent the lonely pages of the illegal diary in question, as Winston’s thoughts are poured out as a solitary sound in the distance.
However, this moment of tranquility is swiftly vanquished by the industrial chug of Greetings From A Dead Man, the title of which refers to a diary entry Winston pens as the realisation of his horror takes hold. A nod to the soundtrack’s recording in the far from chilly Bahamas, Junkanoo Drums pound in funereal fashion and the voodoo shuffle emphasises the creepiness brilliantly. Punctuating the doom, there are stabs of icy synth and Lennox intoning further scat-like “ba ba bam ba ba ba bam” vocals with increasing melodic urgency.
With its soaring synth line and rhythmic incantation of “plusgood, doubleplusgood”, the naggingly insistent Doubleplusgood is the most blatant example of Newspeak, a contraction of the English language enforced by the regime to further simplify thought. Stripped of its Orwellian overtones, it essentially means “very, very good” in colloquial Oldspeak.
Predating “Trannie Annie”, the batty schizophrenic housewife of 1987’s Beethoven by three years, the spoken word narrator is Lennox in BBC RP mode, taking over the mantle of a buoyant female announcer in the film by reciting an array of statistics and “news” of impending victory in an unending manufactured war. Her crisply detached delivery is so unnervingly precise it makes you wonder why Annie never seriously entertained a career in movies — she would have been unquestionably brilliant.
Track eight, and the Ministry Of Love is the slightly mismonikered title of Oceania‘s ministry of police and crime, including torture. A disorienting high synth line bleeps about through the mix, but the pulsing piece of electronica really takes off when some very spooky ethnic chanting courtesy of Annie takes over. It‘s a little frightening, but exciting too. Cue Richard Burton in what turned out to be his last movie role.
By the ninth and final Cut, synth weirdness gives way to an expansive, punishing industrial beat, and Lennox’s voice flails, like an operatic diva in the background, while a slowed down, phased out male-sounding voice enters the picture, with a warning that “It’s the worst thing in the world.”
As the door slams shut on Room 101 (where your worst nightmares come true), this powerful long-player leaves an indelible mark, expertly fomenting the machination and dehumanisation described in the novel. Despite the dispute between Eurythmics and the unmentionable director of 1984 who claimed that the music was “foisted” upon him by Virgin, there is no disputing its resonance.
Indeed, Stewart’s star as a producer was growing by the minute, and this contribution as the score of a much-pored-over film paved the way for future opportunities to come. Dark, brooding and sample-laden, 1984 is the connective tissue that links In The Garden to Savage, the duo’s late period masterpiece.
That the 1984 LP missed the Top 20 pulls the project in two completely different directions in terms of its reception and perception: controversy over whether the work was “official” and “canon” in terms of the movie hardly helped, but also, conversely, many casual observers didn’t approach it as a soundtrack or side project at all but as a regular Eurythmics album. Sadly, this hoo-ha fed into the lack of chart worthiness of Julia, the second single, which slipped out, almost apologetically, in January 1985.
The 45 stalled at 44, the first Eurythmics release to miss the Top 40 since their breakthrough. After all, it was a time when, as Wham!’s epochal album implored, you were supposed to Make It Big, right?
No matter, because far from being a flop 45 on the footnote of a forgotten album, Julia is striking for a number of reasons. It’s an autumnal vocal ballad with Lennox’s multitracked, heavily processed voice the star of the show, so distraught, so despairing. Devoid of beat and percussion, it’s all shimmering, shifting phases, as though her voice has been turned into a synth itself: “Julia / When winter leaves and branches bare … My darling, will we still be there?”
The lyrics reflect Julia and Winston’s first illicit rendezvous in the manicured countryside, away from the all-seeing surveillance eye of the telescreens, the Party and Big Brother. It’s fantastically melancholy, with a Yazoo-esque wintery piano, a staccato synth part buzzing away in the background, and very Vangelis-like electronic piano doing the same. The synth tones shine through like rays of the morning sun, and there’s even horns in here adding a plaintive lightness of touch midway through.
And still it goes on, with some lovely Spanish style guitar playing a fanciful dance around the synths as the six-and-a-half-minute song fades into the mournful distance. The video too, is a quiet revelation, featuring just Annie, bare-shouldered and pensive, predating both Eurythmics’ own slick-backed Shame and, in spirit at least, Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U, a song Lennox covered in tribute in 2024.
Happy birthday Annie.
Steve Pafford
*As the infamous leader Big Brother in the 1984 movie, the tyrannic Lenin-like face presented on a still photograph replicated on multiple screens and banners presented throughout the film and indeed on the cover of Eurythmics’ album cover was a portrait of Bob Flag aka Bob Evans, who‘d been in a band called The Riot Squad with Bromley resident David Bowie in 1967. With special thanks to Alan Bumstead