CHAPTER:6

HOLD YOUR HEAD UP, MOVING ON

Annie was now living on her own in a tiny bedsit again and feeling very lonely and emotionally down. She was curled up one day on the floor of the studio in a kind of fetal position, saying, “Oh, nothing works. Nothing will ever come of what we’re doing. It’s just no good. I don’t know why we’re here. . . .”

Though I felt sorry for the way she was feeling, I was also excited because I started to get a rhythm going on this drum machine we’d found in Bridgwater. It was a weird prototype that we’d heard about, so Adam and I had driven two hundred miles outside of London and slept on somebody’s floor just to acquire it. I was completely fascinated and obsessed with recording and experimenting on it. This was not like drum machines nowadays; this was quite complicated to operate. It had analog and synthesized drum sounds and a tiny visual monitor. We were recording only on an eight-track tape recorder and one of the tracks had to be used to record time code to sync up to the drum machine. On the first beat, I’d tuned one of the tom-tom drums down so low, it sounded like an African drum, and it landed on top of a four-on-the-floor bass drum pattern I’d programmed in. But I couldn’t get the fucking thing to stop, and it was deafening and blasting on the first beat of every bar: “Boom dum dum dum. Boom dum dum dum.” It was like driving an out-of-control steam engine.

The sound of these drums woke Annie up out of her depression. She picked her head up, asked, “What’s that?” and went straight to the keyboard. She started playing this great riff with a string sound on the Kurzweil, and it locked in with my weird drum pattern. I grabbed our Roland SH-101 synthesizer and started playing “Um-dit-um-dit-um-dit-um” with her “Doom dum dum dum dum dum dum dum.” These three sounds together—the keyboard, the drum and the synthesizer—were the only tracks happening, yet they created this monstrous feeling. We were very, very excited!

Annie immediately started to get some ideas for lyrics and went down to this little empty room below the studio to write. Shortly after, she came out with: “Sweet dreams are made of this!” Incredible! And could there be a more appropriate title?

Very quickly the song was getting constructed, and then we realized it was just doing the same thing all the time, so I suggested there had to be another section, and that section should be positive. In the middle we added these chord changes rising upward with “Hold your head up, moving on. Keep your head up, moving on.”

When Annie was really excited about something, a lightbulb would go off in her head, and the race to the end was always incredible. She was singing, “Some of them want to use you. Some of them want to get used by you. Some of them want to abuse you.” All of these great lines she was coming up with off the top of her head. In the space of literally twenty minutes, Annie changed from being down on the floor to leaping about the room. A major hit was born!

To us it was a massive breakthrough, but I remember later some famous publishers coming to hear it, and they didn’t get it at all. They just kept saying, “I don’t understand this song. It doesn’t have a chorus.” But the thing is, it just goes from beginning to end, and the whole song is a chorus. There is not one note that is not a hook.

I was so excited about the song, I drew a storyboard of the video and marched down to the record label to show them the concept. I’d based a lot of it on Luis Buñuel– and Salvador Dalí–type surrealist movie imagery. A few people were saying, “Dave, why the cow? Annie is so good-looking.”

Those people should go buy a copy of the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin, about how to make your business remarkable. It was written twenty years after I had the purple cow in our video—which certainly did the trick and made my whole life remarkable. You can see me operating the actual drum computer we used in the recording in the video of “Sweet Dreams.” I carried it into the field full of cows, and in the boardroom, when the cow turns her head to mine and our eyes meet, it’s a very surreal moment.

When we played live, unlike the record that faded out on the riff, we always ended the song with the “Keep your head up” section. In fact we always ended our concerts with “Sweet Dreams” but the last line we always sang was “Keep your head up.”

Today, more than thirty years later, “Sweet Dreams” is everywhere. It has been recorded and performed live by hundreds of deejays, singers and rappers, including Beyoncé, Marilyn Manson, Pink, Nas, David Guetta, Avicii—the list goes on. It’s been played on just about every radio station in the world, and to this day it’s being played on the radio, in a concert, in a club, somewhere every second of every minute of every day. EDM (Electronic Dance Music) festivals around the world often feature various deejays’ versions blasting during the high point of their sets. Somewhere right now, as you are reading this, there are drunken karaoke versions being sung in Japanese, Russian, and Italian. It follows me around every day, everywhere I go. Trying on clothes in a boutique, buying organic veggies at the market, riding an elevator or driving past someone else’s car and hearing it on their radio. Sometimes it’s like that, you know? Something that took a very short piece of time to create and not even a few hours to produce becomes the lightning rod that affects the rest of your life.

•   •   •

Having the studio to create in every day, Annie and I started to become amazingly creative songwriting partners, true collaborators, and we began to write all our songs together like Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jagger and Richards, Lennon and McCartney, and Marr and Morrissey. I’m not sure exactly how these other songwriters worked together, but all I know is they must have recognized that when they did, sparks would fly. Annie and I played different roles and didn’t step on each other’s toes. I was always experimenting at the desk or on an instrument, and Annie would sit behind me with a notepad, thinking or writing furiously. It’s a kind of alchemy that occurs, a magical process of making something out of nothing. One minute a song doesn’t exist, and twenty minutes later it does. We always knew within ten or twenty minutes if it was worth pursuing an idea, and we very rarely disagreed. Once or twice I would fight for something but usually we were on the same page.

Our recording process was that much easier because by default I had become the record producer, and that meant we could do anything. We could play all the instruments between us, record ourselves, make mistakes and not care, just laugh about it.

Freedom at last!

Sometimes I would program the drums, play the bass on synth or real bass, play the guitars and other keyboard parts, engineer myself recording the sounds and Annie’s vocals and keyboard parts and then mix it all in a few hours, a magic feeling, as for once we were in full control!

Usually there was no one in the room while we were writing, as whoever was working with us would tactfully make an exit when they felt something was brewing. Then, when we recorded, there would be one engineer—someone we trusted not to break the spell; people we knew and felt comfortable with. We didn’t go looking for an engineer through the record label or a studio, and we didn’t use expensive studios or expensive equipment. We were always about keeping it close or DIY.

I also had the role as manager all the way through the first two albums, In the Garden and Sweet Dreams. This meant having to deal with the record label, figure out schedules for performing and organize how we would actually stage this strange music we were making.

We loved putting our shows together, from choosing great players to thinking about the stage set or the intro music. We were involved in every aspect, literally. A true collaborative partnership.

Most of our first concerts were very experimental. I would come up with ideas of how to play with just three people onstage, operating even the lights ourselves while performing. Adam Williams and I were convinced that we could have the mixing desk onstage behind Annie and me so we could get the same mix as the audience, and Adam could use the desk like an instrument, doing a kind of dub mix to what we were actually doing live. It sounded amazing sometimes and terrible other times. The audience was often confused about what was going on.

Annie could sing and then add a harmony to the delay coming back. It was all being performed in real time, but I remember that on a college tour, some of the students would ask afterward if we were actually playing or miming! This was partly because the sound was so perfect that it didn’t seem real.

Today artists like Björk or Lorde use prerecorded sound to augment their live sound. Even bands like the Foo Fighters or U2 use loops or prerecorded tracks along with their live sound. But back then it was highly unusual. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it would be on the edge of catastrophe.

Only Annie’s performance skills salvaged us from a perpetual train wreck. In order to play as just three people, I invented a crazy setup using a lighting boom stand and balancing my double-neck guitar and bass with counterweights on the other side. I’d use a see-through fishing line to create the illusion of the guitar being suspended in midair.

Our sound was very strange at those early shows and the songs were strange too, with titles like “4/4 in Leather.” It was all about being as free and as crazy as we wanted after being stuck in a band. We didn’t want to be put in any box and categorized in any way, so we just went slightly mental. It was a very useful creative process, and we were proving a lot to ourselves; we were not afraid of anything. After what seemed to be a long period of experimentation in our tiny rented space above the picture framers in Chalk Farm, we got this out of our system. We started to write songs, one after another, and recorded them. We wouldn’t make demos of the songs. The demos were the masters.

We never did preproduction or anything like that. We would be recording while we were writing. The songwriting, the recording, the performance—all of it was one single process.

Our work ethic became almost like a mission that only the two of us could understand, and to explain it to a third party seemed a bit pointless. I believe we were so distraught that we had separated as a couple that in a way we had to prove, to ourselves and to each other, that it all meant something. There can’t be that much love between two people that it could just vanish into thin air. That’s why you can hear it in our music. Performing live was a very emotional experience for both of us and for the audience.

Annie has a very distinctive kind of voice, very soulful and powerful, and unique. There’s something about the tone of certain voices, whether it’s Bob Dylan’s or Joss Stone’s, Bryan Ferry’s, Sinéad O’Connor’s or Mick Jagger’s. It just sounds like them immediately. As soon as Mick Jagger starts singing, you know it couldn’t be anybody else. Annie has that quality that is unmistakably Annie Lennox. You know instantly it’s them because they are not actually singing with their voices; they are singing with their souls. When you’re writing and working with people who have that quality in their voices, it’d be very easy to be lazy and just use any old song because it’s going to sound good anyway. But Annie and I were obsessed with not using any old song. We wanted it to be a great song. Unless you pair a great voice with a great song, you will never reach the world, and that’s what we always aimed for—not in a “rule the world” way; we just wanted to touch people, no matter who they were or where they were from.

The sound of music coming out of the radio or ghetto blaster or fancy sound system had to be consistent, so when I was mixing any record, I would have a little portable ghetto blaster and a crappy radio as well as some good speakers and some monster speakers, constantly switching between them. I’d even go so far as to add some compression and broadcast to a car and drive around listening as if the music was on the radio.

With Eurythmics, and with all my productions, I’m one of those old-fashioned record producers who likes to make music around the voice. Back in the fifties, if you heard a Patsy Cline record, everything was built around the singer. The musicians are great, the arrangements superb, but they’re all following the singer. Back then, or even before that, it was the conductor of the orchestra or the bandleader who was really producing the record. The music was going down on one track or two tracks in one take, so the balance between the singer and the music had to be perfect so you could hear every word, but still hear and feel those great parts those musicians were playing.

That’s the way I look at it today. People want to hear and feel the emotion in the human voice, and for me that’s the most important thing to get right. There came a point in music when you could have forty-eight tracks, then seventy-two tracks or so, and just create a giant wall of music. And not a good wall of sound, like Phil Spector’s—which was crafted always around the singer—but just a big wall with no dynamics that would overcome the voice. I believed in following the voice on its journey, and that’s still my thing. The success of Adele is no surprise, as everything is built around her voice.

Eurythmics always had a stylistic freedom most bands don’t have. We weren’t restricted to the sound of the band, whereas the Heartbreakers are going to sound like the Heartbreakers, and the Stones are going to sound like the Stones. We could sound like anything and be anything we wanted. So we’d record a song with an orchestra and an accordion, and the next thing is totally electronic, and the next one is Stax soul with a horn section. We were entirely in control.

The record label never questioned us or said, “You can’t do that,” because they’d hear it and go, “Holy shit, that sounds great!” So we had more freedom, in terms of sound and production, than a normal band. And that freedom is reflected in every album, and every song, that desire to do something different each time.

In a lot of songwriting collaborations, one person writes solely the words and the other solely the music, like Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Annie and I recorded at the same time, like making a sound collage. Sometimes I would kick off a song by starting to make a whole section of music, but Annie would sometimes come in with an idea straightaway that she’d worked out on a keyboard, and we would go from there. But usually we didn’t try to work on anything until we sat in the room together.

I must say Annie is a genius songwriter in her own right. I was a kind of catalyst in a way, a trigger to explore and explode a wealth of songs and styles. But Annie, like many songwriters, can become prone to writer’s block, and if you dwell on writer’s block, it can be torturous. When we wrote together, I thought I could break that spell and used what I would call “breaking the plane,” which could be anything from taking a walk to standing on your head. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it changes the train of thought. Brian Eno created a pack of cards called Oblique Strategies, which is useful for breaking through creative blocks.

Annie has within her the talent and instincts and ability to write some of the greatest songs ever, and she already has. But she might not necessarily feel like doing it all the time, which I understand, as there are many other things in life that overwhelm us all, particularly if you have become a mother and a known figure.

Annie is a brilliant lyricist, vocalist and tunesmith. I recognized Annie as a writer within seconds when she first played her old harmonium and sang for me alone in her tiny room in Camden Town. Those songs she played on that harmonium were astounding. I knew I was in the presence of greatness, and I was not confused about it. The clever trick of great singers, such as Frank Sinatra, was choosing the right songs to sing—even better for Annie and me was that we could write the right songs for her to sing. We would spend time making sure it was the right key for her to sing in, where the song is resonating through her whole body. We’d keep altering the key slightly, taking it down a half step, to where she didn’t have to sing powerfully, but the sound was melancholy and cutting at the same time.

An aspect of our lives that most people don’t understand is that the conversation between Annie and me, and between all songwriters, artists and musicians, never stops. It’s a constant thing. People think that we make an album or do a tour and then stop, take a break and put the music away. But it never happens. Whether it’s us or Mick Jagger or David Byrne, or whoever it is, it’s a never-ending conversation. Being an artist means you don’t have a five-day week and then stop for the sixth day. Being an artist involves every day of the week, nonstop, from the minute you wake up until you go to bed.

People also think that famous musicians—whether it’s Bono, Leonard Cohen, Alicia Keyes, Rihanna or Annie—know or believe they are great and never question it. Not true! I have never heard someone come offstage and go, “I was amazing.” No. They are all extremely self-critical, very aware of what wasn’t right, what went wrong. I think it’s the same with great athletes. They don’t finish and say, “I’ve just run the best race of my life.” They analyze what they did wrong to get it better the next time.

This close collaboration with Annie made it easy for me to write songs with many other artists. One of the secrets to my ability to collaborate with so many other talents is that I take all the pressure away. As Mick Jagger said, there’s no angst. It’s done out of joy. Stevie Nicks was very happy when she realized this, and said, “Oh, hang on. We can just have fun and not worry?”

And I said, “Yeah, you know why? Because if we don’t like it, nobody will ever hear it.”

People have gotten used to the pattern of having to make a new album at the same time they’re touring, and the record company is waiting for it, so there is a lot of pressure. Suddenly they have a handful of weeks to write and record twelve new songs. The pressure is remarkable and not conducive at all to writing good songs.

So when I come along and say, “Well, you know, it doesn’t really matter if you don’t like it. Nobody will ever hear it. We’ll just throw it away, burn it. It doesn’t make a difference,” suddenly it’s a whole new world. There is no pressure, and you’re allowed to make mistakes, and you know everything is fine. You don’t have to think everything is precious. When you’re relaxed, great things happen, and you can capture something truly amazing. And this creates momentum, because you use that energy and it leads to more ideas and inspiration. People get excited, and it becomes fun. And when you’re having fun making music, it’s infectious, for yourself and everyone around you. And it’s also much nicer for your family when you, eventually, get home. When I say nothing matters and we can burn it, it’s a kind of reverse psychology. Often your collaborator will say, “Oh, but I really like that! Let’s keep it,” or “Let’s put it on the track.”

With me and Annie, on any Eurythmics tracks, we always hit the nail on the head with this dynamic of despair and hope at the same time. It would be really dark, and then boom, it would transform musically and lyrically and in every way. And those two things together made a magic vibe.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and in the early Eurythmics days, that’s what it was all about. We had hardly any instruments or equipment and very little knowledge of how to operate what we had! We had the drum computer that I used for “Sweet Dreams,” and I was constantly messing around with it. We had a couple of monophonic synthesizers and a Vox Continental organ, and we sometimes borrowed Reynard Falconer’s Oberheim polyphonic synthesizer. When we were tourists—not the Tourists—in Japan, I bought this crazy new electronic instrument called an Omnichord made by Suzuki. It had just come out and was kind of a cross between a toy and an instrument. You could play chords by pressing down buttons with one hand and, with the other, touch or tap on another section, which looked like a flat hair comb, and hear an electronic harp sound. This toy/instrument gave Annie and me hours of fun and drove nearly everyone else mad! The only other person I met who was in love with this weird machine was Brian Eno, who carried one everywhere.

So, needless to say, the backing track to “Love Is a Stranger” is an odd mix of sounds. The track I was building had a kind of frenzied disco drumbeat with the high hat speeding along doing sixteen hits to the bar like an out-of-control train set. The Roland SH-01 synthesizer was playing straightforward pulsing notes, eight notes to the bar. The weird tinkly harp sound from the Omnichord was answering this aggressive beat with a seductive feminine type of sound, and with only three tracks being used, it sounded eerily complete. At the time it sounded urgent and exciting because we had been through walls of guitar sounds for many years, and now this was new and radical!

Annie’s sultry voice against this strange marriage of heavy drum and toy harp gave the song a different dimension, almost like an invitation to a dangerous place. Annie sounded both vulnerable and dominant and the lyrics “Love is a stranger in an open car to tempt you in and drive you far away” sounded scary and seductive at the same time.

When Annie lays down a vocal, it’s a special moment, because something happens between her mouth and the microphone, a lot like when the camera falls in love with an actress. The microphone likes her, and with the right one and a good balance in her headphones, she can play with her sound and be herself one minute and within a second flip into a character and out again, even if it’s just for one word like “obsession.” This vocal, like many other songs we recorded, was only one take and was, as always, remarkable.

We were very experimental at the time, and the Sweet Dreams album was a collection of the more normal-sounding songs. Many of our other songs were very odd and more for ourselves. I don’t think the record label ever even heard them until we gave them as extra tracks on our ultimate collection. “Love Is a Stranger” on the Sweet Dreams album was a deviation and has some very odd things about it. It never changes chords when you expect it to, and its structure is strange, with two sections that are neither verses nor choruses. As in “Sweet Dreams” there is no distinction between verse and chorus; there are just different sections that seem to fit together. I played a little guitar melody with a wibbly-wobbly sound that had nothing to do with anything else going on. All the way through, I made these grunting, breathing-type sounds— God knows why. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. We had our own little studio setup and were in our own little world, so we could do whatever we wanted.

The accompanying video to “Love Is a Stranger” was our foray into surrealist-type filmmaking, and Annie plays three separate extreme characters. The first character is a glamorous call girl (guess who is her chauffeur) paying a visit to a client at what looks like an expensive house. We actually used my mother’s apartment! Annie then rips off her wig and takes on an androgynous sneering persona, almost Mick Jagger as a gangster in the movie Performance, while spitting out the lyrics “It’s gilt-edged, glamorous and sleek by design.” She then turns into a dangerous-looking PVC-clad female in a black wig, brandishing a pair of scissors.

You have to remember that at the time videos were quite a new thing, and we were very excited about making them. We would obsess over every detail. For instance, in the “scissors” scene, there are cut-up photographs of specific dead singers on the floor and floating in the bath. Everything we did, even though it may have started out from instinct, had a discipline, thought process and reason behind it, right down to the last film frame and musical note.

The year 1983 is a blur, because we did so many things in that time. I remember Annie and I were in San Francisco the morning after playing the Kabuki Theatre, in my room in a Japanese hotel called the Mikado, and we got a phone call saying that Eurythmics had gone to number one on the Billboard chart with “Sweet Dreams.”

We really didn’t know what to do. We were ecstatic, jumping up and down and looking out the window down on San Francisco! We were so far from home.

America is a complicated place for an English person. For a start, we have a national health service in England for anybody on the street. No matter who you are, if you fall down, you can have a major operation, no charge. If your child is sick, you go to the hospital. When we arrived in America, we got insurance, and then we realized, Hang on, you have to pay on top of that and on top of that and on top of that and on top of that. It could be frightening.

Then on the TV they are selling fear constantly. They say, “Oh, have you saved up enough for your pension? You thought you were living to sixty, but you might live till ninety. That’s thirty years with no money!” And then the next ad comes on. “Are you finding it irritable to go to sleep? Why not try this drug?” We’d never seen commercials like it. In Britain the BBC was not allowed to have commercials. And on commercial TV, they were very benign: “Try drinking Ovaltine. It has a gentle chocolate flavor, and it might help you get an easy sleep.” That was probably the hardest sell you’d get.

So, for the first few years, we resisted even putting the TV on! The first time Annie and I arrived in America, we were in a really cheap hotel, and the guy came and said, “You’ve got to lock your door in your room not just with the door lock but with the bolt.”

We asked, “Okay, but why?”

And he said, “’Cause people burst in.”

And we went, “Oh, great.”

In the early days, after “Sweet Dreams” hit it big, we’d be so busy on the road—doing interviews for radio stations, playing live concerts, doing TV appearances—that we hardly had any time to think. Not a lot of people know this, but nearly every album we made took only three or four weeks, including writing most of the songs from scratch, so recording was squeezed in between all the other stuff. I would have a portable studio on the road, and we would often put down sketches of ideas in my hotel room. (We even made entire records in hotel rooms!)

Songs, like other things in the universe, will find you if you’re open. If you’re not open, they don’t find you. So we both stayed open—open to experiment, to whatever might come. I might be over in a corner strumming on a guitar or messing around with a synthesizer. I’m usually pushing things forward or monitoring the progress, I suppose. With Annie I often play the role of an enabler. I enable a song to be born.

We released two albums in 1983, Sweet Dreams and Touch. We started the writing of “Here Comes the Rain Again” when we were at the notorious Mayflower Hotel in New York, in a corner room overlooking Central Park. We used to like to stay in this hotel, I think, because of the windows looking onto the park and the fact that other bands stayed there, so you didn’t feel like an alien surrounded by a bunch of suits.

I’d been out on Forty-sixth Street and bought a tiny little keyboard—a really tiny little thing. I think it was one of the early Casio keyboards, about twenty inches long with very small keys. It was an overcast day. Annie was hanging out in my room, and I was playing some little riff on the keyboard, sitting on the window ledge, and Annie was saying, “Oh, let me have a go at that keyboard.” But I had just bought it, and a bit like a kid I said, “I’m playing with it now.” Anyway, we had this fight over the keyboard, like two seven-year-olds. I managed to win the fight and keep the keyboard. I was playing these little melancholy A minor–ish chords with a B note in it. I kept on playing this riff while Annie looked out the window at the slate gray sky above the New York skyline, and sang spontaneously, “Here comes the rain again.” And that was all we needed.

Like with a lot of our songs, we needed only to start with that one line, that one atmosphere, that one note or that intro melody. And the rest of it became a puzzle with missing pieces we filled in. That goes for many—in fact, most—of the songs Annie and I wrote. The feeling or the atmosphere was everything for us. If what we were creating didn’t have that something, we would abandon it very quickly.

The making of our Touch album was interesting, because it started with our purchase of a studio—except it wasn’t a studio; it was an old church. I always marched into crazy schemes like this, and the strangest things would unfold. I was again walking up the street in Crouch End, just like the auspicious day I met Paul Jacobs. I was passing by a church when an older guy, with white hair and beard, leaned out of the church door and whistled at me, beckoning me to cross the road. I was curious, so I went over to see what he wanted.

He said, “Hey, son, are you looking for somewhere?” The more I looked at him, the more he looked like a wizard. So I said, “Well, yeah!”

We had just been told we had to move out of the picture-framing factory because we were behind on the rent, and we were in the middle of recording the Sweet Dreams album. He said, “Come inside and look at this.”

It was getting a bit spooky, but in for a penny, in for a pound. I went in, and he said he and his mate owned the whole church, and we could use the front office to work in, if I wanted it, for free.

I was confused, but elated. He had just solved our problem in one word: free. Then I thought, Hang on, there must be a catch; but there wasn’t! By some weird chance, these guys were so thrilled that we would make music in their church that they were happy to do anything for us. They converted sections of it, with their bare hands, in the middle of the night lit by floodlights, to create a little studio for us.

The men turned out to be Bob Bura and John Hardwick, famous British animators of beloved children’s TV shows such as Camberwick Green and the very odd Captain Pugwash. So here we were set up in an old church vestry, making weird electronic noises while Bura and Hardwick were building us a recording studio at no charge. We couldn’t fathom our good fortune. We just thought somehow we’d been blessed, and I guess we were, in so many ways.

I remember one day when they were busy building the studio, I decided to go visit my ex, Pam, in her flat. It was quite early in the day, and she answered the door in a robe and said, “Ah, come in. Oh, look, you might like this guy I’m in bed with. He does music, as well. He’s called Michael.” So we went in the bedroom, and she said, “This is my ex-husband, Dave.” Michael said, “Good to meet ya.”

I sat down on the side of the bed and said, “What kind of music do you do?” He replied, “Well, I’m in all sorts of experimental bands, but I also do string arrangements and orchestrations.” I said, “Oh, shit, yeah, great! Look, Annie and I have written a song called ‘Here Comes the Rain Again,’ and I imagine a big old string arrangement on it.”

He said, “Well, how does it go?’” So I am sitting in bed with a cup of tea next to my ex-wife, and I’m going, “Hang on. Pam, do you have a guitar lying around?” And then I’m playing the chords of our new song. He said, “Oh, okay, I could probably write something up. What kind of thing do you hear in it?” I didn’t know anything about orchestration, so I said, “Well, the way I hear it is just loads of strings in the old Motown style, loads of violins.” I didn’t really know, so I said, “How about twelve cellos and sixteen violins?”

Michael said, “Well, it doesn’t really work like that. You probably have violas in the middle.” He was being really nice to me, probably thinking, This guy is nuts, but because I was this crazy sort of rock/pop–type person he seemed to be into the idea. He said, “I get what ya mean. I’ll write something and book the players.” I said, “Okay, great. We’ve got this church to record in.”

The trouble was, when the orchestra arrived, there was no room for them. The section Bura and Hardwick had built for us had a little, tiny corridor-shaped control room up a spiral staircase, and a tiny booth for Annie to sing in. The booth was built inside the giant church hall with no way to get into it. But Michael was so sweet, he said, “Well, fucking hell, we will make this work.” We had a corridor leading to the church door where the cello players sat all in a row. There was a bathroom with viola players and the violinists were in the kitchen.

Jon Bavin engineered, and I don’t know how he didn’t have a nervous breakdown while we were trying to do it. There were microphone leads everywhere, trailing down the spiral staircase, hanging down into the hall. Ambient mics in the kitchen and bathroom all leading back to our small Soundcraft desk—but somehow the string sound was incredible—the mixture of the different rooms and our limited capabilities made it sound like an old sixties Motown string sound, exactly what I’d imagined when I had no clue how to do it.

So how we made that record is a miracle. I was playing a big Gretsch Country Club guitar with a Bigsby tremolo arm, along with programmed drums and sequencers. We had a live orchestra all over the church, each with separate sections that poor Michael had to run around conducting. Yet it all came together, and the sound of it was fantastic.

A lot of people thought my guitar playing was a programmed synthesizer sequencer, but I played like that to sound like a sequencer. I’d put my right hand on the bridge and play those patterns, that kind of spot-on playing. I always had to learn spot-on guitar playing because I was playing with things that were rigidly locked in. Then I’d have to do the same thing on the bass and track it. And I basically just made it up as I went along.

While I was in New York, I’d heard of a company that made this insane device called a Voyetra, which was one of the first sampling heads that you could plug into a keyboard. I got one. Annie wasn’t into technology. But what was so great about working with her was that she would let me go and experiment, and was always interested in the sounds.

She’d come in and say, “What’s going on?” I’d been spending four hours or so trying to get the Voyetra to work. I plugged it in, and the very first sound I got on it was like a steel drum calypso. Annie said, “Oh, that’s fantastic.” She immediately began playing it, and with that sound, we wrote “Right by Your Side” in about ten minutes.

That song became another big hit. The lyrics again mixed joy with sadness. It had those beautiful lines:

Give me two strong arms to protect myself

Give me so much love that I forget myself

I need to swing from limb to limb

To relieve this mess I’m in

’Cause when depression starts to win

I need to be right by your side.

I wanted to play the guitar with it, because I’d been listening like crazy to King Sunny Adé, the West African legend. So I slowed the tape down to half speed, played a normal-speed solo slow so that when you sped it up, it sounded like King Sunny Adé.

The music was so uplifting that Annie and I started dancing around the studio. It was a really upbeat calypso thing, and then we thought, “Well, we need horns on this.” So, in London, we were starting to get musicians from all over the place.

Annie and I had had experienced producers forever restricting our creativity, stopping experiments and saying, “No, that— You can’t do that. Oh, that’s crazy.” So like me she liked to go as far out as we could. I would be just thinking of the craziest idea—the most extreme experiment—and Annie would never say, “Oh, stop that experiment.” She’d always sit there, smiling, listening to it, taking it in, and then, at one point she’d go, “Oh, that bit’s great.”

Now I would do a similar thing with her words, her journal of poetry. Sometimes when working on a song, she would get fed up and say she couldn’t think of anything. And I’d take a peek into her journal, and though she’d say, “It’s no use. There’s nothing good in there,” I would persist. And I would look and always find something brilliant and say, “Well, for a start, the first lines you have written here are fantastic.”

“What? Why?”

I’d tell her why and play it with some chords, and she’d perk up. Suddenly she’d open her mouth and start singing, and it would sound incredible. And she’d say, “Oh, it is pretty good. I’ll carry on,” and she’d sit in a corner and furiously write all of it. So it was totally true collaboration from the beginning to the end.

When it came time to mix any of these tracks we made, back then we had no automation like they have now. These days, you can do a digital mix and save it just like you save a Word document, and then go in and change it if you need to. Not in those days. Then you did a physical mix to tape—moving the faders in real time—and if you didn’t like it, you had to do it again.

Also, these mixes were complex, so it took many of us at the recording desk at the same time to move all the faders at the right moment. It would often be four of us: Annie, me, Jon Bavin and another assistant.

Often I might have three things on one track: maybe a guitar line, a rhythm part and then bass. So, with the chart in front of us, I’d say, “Annie, you’ve got these three faders, right? And at one minute, ten seconds, you’ve gotta mute that one and bring that one in.”

So we had to do this over and over because somebody would make a mistake, and we’d have to start over from the beginning again, but we never got angry at whoever made the error. We’d just laugh. The person who did it would go, “Uh-oh,” and that would mean we’d have to start all over again.

•   •   •

We were deep into the Thatcher years. Maggie was voted prime minister again, with a landslide win for the Conservative Party. It was 1983 and the music charts were full of eclectic but classic songs: Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” and “China Girl,” Culture Club with “Karma Chameleon,” the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and “1999” and the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah.”

Yes, 1983 was one long, crazy year, and the competition was fierce.

Without us knowing much about MTV and the power it was soon to have, we had already filmed many videos to go with our singles; we had videos up our sleeves for “Love Is a Stranger,” “Sweet Dreams,” “Who’s That Girl?” “Right by Your Side” and “Here Comes the Rain Again.” We unleashed an avalanche, all of which became monster MTV hits as well as global radio and chart hits. The difference before MTV was you could be hugely famous but not really recognized on the street much, but when you were on the TV once every three hours, your face became as familiar as a newscaster’s.

We had released two albums back to back, toured the world extensively and become a household name globally. In fact, we had already sold millions of albums, and royalties had just started to arrive in large amounts.