1984
(for the love of Big Brother)
Eurythmics
1984: Virgin CDV 1984
One of my Absolute Musts. “For the Love of Big Brother” is probably my favorite Eurythmics recording, because it touches on many of their styles in the course of the song (for reasons which I’ll have to elaborate on later), and Annie’s vocals are amazingly haunting for being delivered in such an almost-offhand manner. It is exceptionally hard to picture that this album was recorded at Compass Point studios in the Bahamas. The harmony arrangement of the “choruses” comes so close to being positive that it fools you at first...then the darkness frames it again and brings you back to seeing it as the furtive glimpse of remembered hope that it was…“meyeayea….”
Much of this album’s music is not featured in the actual film, possibly thanks to a much-publicized (at the time) battle among the film’s production/directorial teams. And much of it wouldn’t be appropriate for the film as presented on this album. Certainly “For the Love of Big Brother” seems to have preceded the soundtrack composition by some time, even being tried out in a concert (the Tony Jasper book Eurythmics, while being pretty dismissable, mentions this and refers to the song as being called “Meyeayea” in a concert debut around 1984). And, goob that I am, I even love hearing that track played backwards…it has a certain bad-dream-sequence quality to it that way, of course, but the harmonies and breathy phrasing take on a curious twisted life of their own that way. Also, while I’m already making a fool of myself by going into that much detail, I might as well note that, although the song’s rhythm is a very dark bossa-nova at heart, with the exception of the end of the final chorus the entire song can be counted with its downbeat on the half-beat after the actual downbeat (i.e., with the “meyeayeas” coinciding with the downbeat instead of straddling it as they actually do), giving it an entirely different and not unenjoyable feel. Then again, the weirdly offbeat wavering intro keyboard stuff on “I Did It Just The Same” is a keyboard sequence run backward, so I tend to wonder how much of the album was concocted with such trickery in mind….
I actually get a great kick out of “Sexcrime,” especially its climactic delivery of the final chorus sequence: when Annie finally lets it rip with that GIMMEGIMMEGIMMEGIMME bit, it’s like an unexpected sonic machine-gun, far more than the buildup implies is coming—ferocious and mighty!
If I could recapture a moment of musical innocence it would be the one just prior to hearing this album, because there is something marvelous about the way even that first track, “I Did It Just The Same,” unfurls with no warning from something sorta-ambient, sorta-techno, into something ferociously soulful and funky with no lyrics at all. When I hear Annie loosen the vocal from held-back scat to fluid exuberance as the dam bursts and the song enters its third and final phase, I get a terribly smug smile on my face that says “yeah, I knew THIS was coming, baby, let me have it!!!” But I didn’t, and I didn’t know it would end that way, and sometimes I wish I were still ignorant of that playing out of this stealthily marvelous track.
I only like “Room 101” in three ways: first of all its ending, which is great; second, its general horrific background being evoked by Annie’s lingering wails throughout; and third, how it plays as a standalone track *after* you’ve heard its themes playing in the film itself (where Annie’s vocals linger more hauntingly than they do on the album track). Beyond that, however, is one simple fact that’s easy to miss until the first time you notice it: structurally, “Room 101” is just “Sexcrime” in a minor key, with no lyrics and a different rhythm track.
Comments © 2005 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.