Be Yourself Tonight
Eurythmics
1985: RCA PCD1-5429
“Would I Lie To You?” is just about as hot a track as I ever heard in the 1980s, and it still absolutely rocks my world when I listen to it. Next time you do, try it once on good headphones, once on powerful speakers, and once on cheap transistor-radio speakers. You’ll get a different read from it each way, and you’ll never be able to decide which is best because they’re each capable of conveying a different style the recording contains. On headphones you’ll hear the intense studio precision of Annie’s vocals and the subtle escalation of the horn section’s firepower…you are privy to the overall design of the song. On speakers you’ll feel the drive, the power, the attitude of the song’s content, with Annie’s voice grabbing your collar and dragging you further along verse by verse. And on a cheap radio you’ll hear a great hit that just won’t quit; that’s the way I first heard it and I was floored.
This is part of how Eurythmics would test their songs’ mixes, at least that’s what Annie indicated in an early interview. Regardless of the playback method, each successive appearance of that wonderfully weirdly chorded “believe me!” cluster gets more obscured in the increasingly macho/sexy onslaught of horns and bass, but the first attack is striking and baffling and leaves you wanting to know what the hell is going on, so you listen closer each time even though it’s harder to hear each new time. And on top of all that, Annie’s fanned-out vocal chord hugely ushering in the fourth (and strongest) chorus has the G-forces effect of a carnival ride shifting up a notch.
The video for “Would I Lie To You” has a bunch of pluses and minuses to consider, the minuses being mostly its stagey nature (with fake backup singers and horn section in particular being a sore point for some of the actual players, according to one source) and the pluses being how smouldering Annie is despite the generally constrained context. My favorite part of the video didn’t register as such until several years after I’d originally seen it, and that is where she does the British equivalent of the American “one-finger salute,” a moment that was captured in a video still to become one side of the LP’s inner-sleeve. A hilariously subtle touch.
This is a mighty, mighty recording from beginning to end, and I remain supercharged and dazzled by it to this day.
The whole album’s like that, but “Would I Lie To You?” is the strongest multiplatform performer of the bunch. Although I must add that in 1986 I heard them perform “Conditioned Soul” in concert and I was completely blown away—they turned it from the tense moody piece it was on the album into a powderkeg of emotions that barely held back its explosion throughout and didn’t disappoint in the end. That was a song I had no idea could be a rocker, but it really was a knockout.
The rest of the album, well, I can’t rave THAT much for it all, but I could come close. It’s tight and strong throughout, with the exception of “Adrian” and the final track, both of which suffer from bombastic production overkill (so much so that worn-out ears are likely to miss the fact that the latter ends with a musical quotation of the “Sweet Dreams” riff…and is the “here it comes, here it comes again” bit of “Here Comes That Sinking Feeling” a reference back to “Here Comes the Rain Again”?). The songs are all masterfully crafted, again with the exception of the final track (but “Adrian” makes the cut on this call, as it’s really quite lovely to sing along with). One thing that determines whether I consider rock songs “masterfully crafted” is their flexibility to translate into different contexts, a flexibility Eurythmics first demonstrated to me: does “I Love You Like A Ball and Chain” work as an acoustic R&B concert tune? Hell yeah…they did it as recently as 1999’s Peacetour and it held up just fine. (My favorite extreme example of this is their Mississippi Delta blues rendition of “Missionary Man,” available on the Angel single.)
Anyway, it’s a fine, fine record. No fluff songwriting, no filler (just a couple of overloaded productions)…instead we get staight-ahead Eurythmics in full Rock mode with various guest artists (most notable being Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and Elvis Costello) gilding the lily.
Comments © 2005 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.