Touch
Eurythmics
1983: RCA PCD1-4917
This was the first of their albums I bought, the one that opened the door to all the rest as it arrived, with Sweet Dreams finally reaching me after I’d been hearing “Sweet Dreams” and “Love Is a Stranger” for a year or two from odd sources (usually radio, though I cannot imagine which of my small hometown’s few stations would ever have played either of those songs back then). My Junior/Senior High best friend John is the one who introduced me to Eurythmics, actually, or at least was the one who played me the first thing I knew to be theirs; he’d bought the 7” single of “Here Comes The Rain Again” and was playing it for me one day at his family’s house, and I said something like “well that’s nice, but what’s on the other side of the 45?” And he said it was some weird song and played it, and that was when I heard “Paint A Rumour” and I KNEW I was hearing something fantastic, something unlike anything I’d ever even imagined was out there, but something supremely musical, something that managed to be precise, fiery, vicious, mathematical, furiously raw, and deathly cool at the same time.
To this day, including the moment that I am writing this, 19 years later, I still rank “Paint A Rumour” as one of my absolute favorite recordings. It’s all those things, still, and it’s the first way I really heard Annie Lennox’s voice, shifting as it does there between icy, knowing understatement (“I could tell you something”), dangerously calculated soulful fury (the alarmingly sustained fourths on the manic “whoah, whoah, whoah” unravelling), and machine-gone-feral, almost-girl-group, mock-call-and-response chirps that act more as deranged threat than as filler (“promise not to sell”). I absolutely cannot imagine a video for that song, but of course I’m driven to distraction (when I think about it) to wonder what D&A would have done if they’d chosen to…and the same goes for the idea of live versions of the song. (And of course I prefer the 12” ending to the standard release, because that extra handful of robotic rhythms really seals the song for me.) And I still wish fervently that Dave & Annie would break into the “whoah, whoah, whoah” sequence in concert sometime.
When I finally decided to buy a copy of Touch, it was after this incident and that of visiting Seattle, where I saw a record store on the Ave (University Way) that had an extensive window display featuring the album’s striking cover. And, well, the rest is history…occasionally indulgent history, but history nonetheless. From this point on I knew I was witnessing the creation of excellence on a scale I had never before imagined possible. And they have rarely given me reason to think they aren’t cooking up more of that. It’s the kind of song I want to play for everyone I meet, so they can hear liquid magic in action….
As for the rest of the album, which after all precedes the one song that utterly seduced me, well it’s quite fun. At the time I considered it very good, but the years since then have made me qualify my appreciation of Touch if only because the album’s cleanliness sounds almost sterile in retrospect, given all the other sounds that have been conveyed even by this group alone…its production is just too “clean,” even when Annie’s howling an arc of a note across a bitter musical landscape. The songs themselves are generally top-notch and solid material, and Dave & Annie have demonstrated that countless times in concert by turning the songs around and reinventing them independently of their original instrumentation and pace. I’ve always wished they had released “Cool Blue” as a single, but then at the time the remix possibilities weren’t up to the potential of the song itself, I suppose….
I have a hard time with the actual “hits” from Touch because, as with many Eurythmics albums, I prefer the rest of the tracks to the singles. “Here Comes The Rain Again” never really touched me, though I appreciate it as a song (and they’ve certainly recast it a few times, especially live)…“Right By Your Side” was a strangely fun exception to many rules, and “Who’s That Girl?” was more fun from the context of its video than it was as the original recording (although drastic concert reworkings have made me rethink my stance on the song at least). But really the B-side of the album is where the serious meat is. The seventh track, “Aqua,” is the kind of thing I wish groups nowadays would concoct, and it just tastes better every time I listen to it.
“Promise not to sell….”
Comments © 2005 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted, and no claim is made to the images and quoted lyrics.