CHAPTER:17

PEACE

This was exactly when Eurythmics world opened up again. Annie had been coming down to visit us at the farm in Surrey regularly, and we’d started to experiment with some songs. When we came back to do Peace in 1999, we never intended it as any kind of Eurythmics reunion, because we hadn’t broken up, but it had been ten years. So regardless of what we said or wanted, the world saw it as a reunion. It was really a continuation.

Back in the eighties, when the press said, “So is that it, then? Is that the end for Eurythmics?” Annie and I always had the same answer: “You don’t know. You can never say never.” The door was always open. Eurythmics never broke up. We just stopped. But we always knew there was going to be more.

When we started writing songs for Peace, it was almost exactly how we did it with every other album, as if we’d never stopped. One song came tumbling out after another. “Seventeen Again,” “Beautiful Child,” “I Saved the World Today” and “Lifted.”

We thought, Now we’ve got a whole thing. But how should we present it? We knew that anything we released was going to get a lot of attention, due to the fact that so much time had passed.

We called it Peace, and with that name and intention, we approached both Amnesty International and Greenpeace to work with us. As always, there were so many wars raging and so many things going wrong with the planet. We could use all the impact of our reunion publicity to shine the light on Greenpeace and Amnesty.

Simon Fuller was Annie’s manager then, and rather than having multiple managers, we had him manage the entire project. We talked with him about the best way to do this, to benefit these two organizations while at the same time launching our album and tour. We arranged to give both Amnesty International and Greenpeace all the profits from the tour, the DVD and the merchandise. We also gave them a space in every venue to set up a booth with their material and information, to take it directly to our fans.

We had one of the first giant backlit screens behind us onstage. Nowadays they are very common, but at the time people had never seen anything like it. We brought in a friend of mine, the great British artist Tim Head, to create artwork for the screen. We used an effect where cameras were filming us in real time and the footage was being converted into filmic sequences on the backlit screen, and it looked like you were watching two movies at the same time. For the tour we wore sort of guerrilla camouflage suits that we had made, quite a refined look with PEACE on the red star symbol of Eurythmics.

Our goal was to do this tour in a way that would actually make money for Greenpeace and Amnesty International. There was no point in promising a lot of cash and then building an immense stage production that used up the money. With many charities, especially when such a complex organization is created, lots of people and officers are hired and paid so that in the end only a small percentage of the money ever gets out the other side. We didn’t want that to happen, so Simon Fuller made sure that the tour would profit even though this wasn’t the biggest tour we did—but it was vast, touching down in Australia, America, Europe and Japan.

I took Sam and Django with their teacher Mardette. Annie brought her children, Lola and Tali, who sometimes joined in with Sam and Django on their Travel School. Anoushka was there too, pregnant with Kaya. So I had a big sort of posse of children, nannies and teachers. But it was a great experience, and amazing for Sam and Django, who learned lots of things, as I like to think they do when we go anywhere.

Eurythmics commemorated the start of the new millennium by doing a show at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, which is where measured earthly time officially originates, and exact mean solar time is established. It was the logical and perfect place to spark the year 2000. The whole world was waiting for Greenwich Mean Time, and we were there, with an orchestra. We played “Life on Mars” by David Bowie just before midnight, December 31, 1999. And when the song was over it was 2000.

Of course, time is an artificial division in eternity, right? My stepfather, Julian, told me, “Einstein and other geniuses have shown us that time isn’t a fixed thing. It’s relative. It stretches and shifts, like elastic. Even so, here we are celebrating with the entire world this momentous time shift.”

I always remember that my son Sam, who was twelve then, liked being on the side of the stage and helping the guitar roadies with all the guitars. He was just gradually learning to play and he was fascinated. We did a sound check in Greenwich—and there were already thousands of people out front for the show—and Sam was playing the electric guitar, and suddenly he had a go with the wah-wah pedal.

The band heard what he was doing and started to join in—bass and drums and everything. I could see the excitement in Sam as his face lit up with astonishment. When he heard the bass and drum kick in, and it was in time with what he was playing, it was a big moment—a turning point for him. Sam went on to form his own band and became a fine musician and guitarist. This was the start. Soon he was constantly in the garage with friends, jamming, trying to learn Nirvana songs and making a great noise.

The Peace Tour was really interesting because unlike other shows, when we would do meet-and-greets with record label kind of guests, this was our chance to meet great activists who worked with both Amnesty and Greenpeace. We met people who had been political prisoners around the world, from China, Tibet or Russia, who were released because of Amnesty International. It was inspiring every night.

•   •   •

Anoushka was pregnant but managed to see every show on the Peace Tour. Eventually our first child, Kaya, a baby girl, was born on February 28, 2000.

This is a day I’ll never forget. As I had been with my son Sam, I was very nervous about being present at the birth, and now I’d found out that Annie and our good friend Gina Gershon were both going to be present. I was starting to feel overwhelmed. I remember Anoushka being in labor for quite a long time, and I was downloading e-mails by her bedside. There was one particular e-mail from Carrie Fisher that just said, “Wish you were here.” I thought it was going to be a holiday photo, so I started to download it but it appeared to be a very large file that would take a long time.

I decided to go downstairs in the hospital to rest for a little bit. What happened next is probably the most embarrassing moment of my life. I went back in the elevator to check on Anoushka, and when the doors opened, I was met with a very large, irate Jamaican midwife, who previously had been the sweetest person ever. She glared at me. I was in shock and didn’t know what had happened.

I ran to the room, and Anoushka was staring at me. She pointed to the laptop. The lid was shut. I said, “What?” Then she explained that when the file downloaded, it was a movie that burst into action with loud gasping and screaming sounds. The laptop was facing away from her, so she didn’t know what it was but the midwife could and it was the most extreme pornography that Carrie had sent as a joke. To Anoushka and the midwife, this was far from funny. Fortunately there were another twelve hours to go before Anoushka went into real labor. By that time I’d been forgiven, Annie and Gina had arrived, and I became the useless guy again watching another miracle.

With our little one in tow, we settled in back at the farm in Surrey, which again became a meeting place for all kinds of artists. We would have everybody from Liam Gallagher and Quincy Jones to Joe Strummer and the sisters Natalie and Nicole Appleton from the band All Saints, who had become great friends since I’d directed them in a feature film called Honest, a caper, a black comedy set in swinging London, in the late sixties, written with my good friends Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement. This may have been the only film that started getting bad reviews before we had even finished filming! My friend Lou Reed said a funny thing about all of the negative reviews: “Dave, the British press, first they want to fuck you up the arse, but then they want to piss in your face.” That made me laugh at least enough to attend the premiere. Lou sat by me all the way through, and afterward we went for a stiff drink. I got completely slammed and felt shaken. A small reprieve came the next morning however, when The Sunday Times gave the film four stars and called it a “Cult Classic.”

It was also at the farm where a young Katy Perry came to visit. She was writing songs for an album, and her producer Glen Ballard—who had produced Jagged Little Pill with Alanis Morissette—suggested she write songs with me for a week. During this time Katy stayed with us in the barn in Surrey, and we talked about many aspects of songwriting. I advised her to write down all the things she was going through to draw from her personal experiences, good or bad. Katy later revealed in an interview on UK TV that her career was kick-started as a result of our chat. Not long after that session, Katy wrote her first big hit, “I Kissed a Girl.” I think she felt a bit freed after that.

Watching her grow from that week in Surrey into the global megastar she is today, pouring out her life story through her lyrics and eccentric videos, has been a wonder to watch. We wrote many songs together. One of them called “I’m Still Breathing,” which is on her album One of the Boys, has the most beautiful chorus; it’s a twisted song about a dead relationship, but with the beautiful melody and its juxtaposed lyrics, it reminds me of Eurythmics. Of course, one of the other songs we wrote together, “All I’m Selling Is Sex,” didn’t make the record but somehow it’s all over the Internet.

•   •   •

Anoushka and I were married in August 2001. It was a secret wedding, and the most wonderful one you can imagine. Everybody who was there still talks about it; they had never seen anything like it.

Our friends suggested a beach café in the south of France, Mooréa Beach. And we held our wedding there. Tony Quinn organized the wedding with Annie’s assistant, Tara Goldschmidt, in this extremely strict, high-security way, almost like a presidential event, so as to stop the paparazzi from coming to the wedding. We needed real security, because our guests would include Elton John, U2, Liam Gallagher and Nicole Appleton, Mick Jagger, Liam Howlett and Natalie Appleton, Dennis Hopper, Eric Idle and many others.

It was a beautiful wedding on the beach, with everybody glowing as the sun set. We stood on a small platform above the sea covered in leaves and flowers. Deepak Chopra performed the ceremony, and our vows were written especially for us by Neale Walsch, the author of Conversations with God. Paul Allen was my best man and gave a hilarious speech. We served a drink that Bono, the Edge and I used to drink a lot when we hung out at Mooréa Beach: a rum base with South American organic hallucinogenic drug properties in it. So everybody at the wedding drank this drink, and it is a very up drink, sort of like organic Ecstasy.

Suddenly everyone was dancing and singing and loving each moment. We had an amazing band playing, and we all jammed. Bono and Mick Jagger both got up to sing, and I remember Mick doing an amazing version of “Little Red Rooster.” Bono actually wrote a twenty-minute song, on the spot, dedicated to me and Anoushka, with me and the Edge backing him on guitar. The whole song was based around something the Irish poet Brendan Behan said: “Friendship is higher than love.” Bono’s performance was an amazing finale to our wedding, with all of our friends, from all over the world, joining in and singing along with the chorus he had come up with.