CHAPTER:12

WE TOO ARE ONE

It was 1989, and Eurythmics were slowly unraveling. Annie, or people around her, had decided we should try working with a different producer or at least a coproducer on our next album. The reason for this was unclear to me, especially after making so many successful records—I guess Annie wanted another opinion that was neutral in the studio. I was really thrown by this at first and pondered how to proceed, as we’d rarely worked with an outside producer, and when we did, in the Tourists, we hadn’t liked the process or the results.

A lightbulb went off in my head, and I suggested we should work with my old pal Jimmy Iovine, who by now was a legendary producer. Annie was unsure about this at first, as she knew Jimmy and I were best friends, but there was no denying his achievements, not only as a producer but as someone who had weathered many a complicated artist relationship to deliver great albums: from U2 to Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Stevie Nicks, John Lennon, Patti Smith, the Pretenders. The list goes on.

So it was agreed, and I invited Jimmy to Paris. Annie and I felt completely at home recording in Studio Grande Armée. We both now had homes in Paris and we both spoke French. Jimmy, however, was a complete fish out of water, but after a few days he began to love it, and we tumbled into a new and different recording process. I also had invited Charlie Wilson, from the Gap Band, to play keyboards and sing backing vocals to spice things up a bit, and he did. Charlie was a live wire to say the least—that guy would go for three days straight, then sleep for one!

The title track “We Too Are One” just tumbled out from a riff I was playing. Annie turned in a killer vocal over my chord changes—and a new classic song was born for our next tour. The song was not really about us but Annie’s lyrics turned into a mantra for all we’d been through, and when we played it at concerts, I’m sure the audience saw it as a song about two survivors that they could relate to.

“When the Day Goes Down,” another of the album’s tracks, slowly became one of my favorites to play with just me on acoustic guitar and Annie singing. We played it on Wogan, a primetime UK TV show, while being interviewed by writer/comedian Ben Elton. It was nearing the end of the show when Annie and I just started performing it, right there on the sofa. Ben was visibly moved to tears and the whole audience was so quiet that you could have heard a pin drop. In the control room the producers knew we were out of time and were getting calls to go to end credits—this was live TV—but the director and cameramen were so into the performance that after they pulled all the way out for the ending, the cameras started to move back in. We continued to play and sing two or three more songs just for the studio audience and the whole place went crazy afterward. There’s something very magical when the two of us play together; another energy comes into play—the goose bump factor. It’s very emotional and people recognize it.

The single “Don’t Ask Me Why” is also very haunting, and again Sophie Muller made a great music video using striking lighting, primary color contrast and brilliant editing. The album cover was shot by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, the legendary French photographer and video director. Mondino is responsible for many iconic shots over the years, as well as directing videos for Madonna, David Bowie and Björk, among others. The photo shoot with Jean-Baptiste fascinated me as he was using a very tricky Polaroid 35mm film, which he could instantly process and see the result—it’s very delicate film that will disintegrate if not handled properly. Mondino held the film up to the light, wearing white gloves, while Annie and I marveled at the images. Annie on the front cover with a whiter-than-white face, white hair and piercing blue eyes—and me on the back cover, black with my hair and beard dyed blue black—complete opposites that make one whole, We Too Are One.

We did our last tour and called it the Revival Tour, after one of the song titles, and we decided to wear rags and ripped clothing and just tear up the venue like an old gospel-revival atmosphere. Ten years later Annie and I did a similar thing in a tiny, secret gig, just the two of us, at the Kit Kat Klub, a tiny place in Manhattan. We played an acoustic set to a packed audience, a crazy cast of characters from the whole cast of The Sopranos and actor Kevin Spacey to Wyclef Jean and Prince. Arista Records president Clive Davis gave a speech before we played, as Annie and I were waiting on the other side of the curtain in the dark, not knowing that his speeches can go on for a very long time!

The Revival Tour ended when Eurythmics played Rock in Rio in 1990. I was hanging out with Bob Dylan, who was also playing at the festival. Bob and I went AWOL and ended up in a recording studio in the middle of nowhere, inside somebody’s house. In the house they had these little folk art figurines called spiritual cowboys, similar to the Day of the Dead figurines—all representing different aspects of spirit. I liked the sound of it, and I liked the clash of those two words together: spiritual and cowboys. Two complete, conflicting words.

I said to myself, “Spiritual Cowboys? That’s very interesting.” It made me think of a band that’s traveling constantly. A band led by a loner who sang personal, spiritual songs. I started to think, That’s a good band name. I wanted to be as far as possible from any Eurythmics-sounding thing. I could have made some sort of electronic music and been Dave Stewart “the record producer” making a kind of Electro record, but I just really wanted to go back to playing bluesy guitar and writing new songs. I wanted to have fun in a band. I wasn’t intending it to be another global brand, launching another world of Eurythmics. It was more just a matter of how I could have the most fun possible in the simplest way.

The concert in Rio was massive. Annie and I knew we needed to stop at some point, and this was it. We had rehearsed a samba band and beautiful female carnival dancers in full costume. The show was incredible and the crowd of more than one hundred thousand was going crazy and singing along. Annie and I looked at each other onstage with this massive collection of players and dancers and a gigantic audience singing our songs. We had overcome so many obstacles and been through so much emotional turmoil, it was almost as if we were dying in slow motion. Sophie Muller captured this moment perfectly on film, and you can see the emotion mixed with exhaustion and exhilaration on both our faces as we left the stage, not to be seen again for another decade.