Eurythmics fans have long hoped that the iconic 80s modern pop duo – consisting of supremely talented vocalist Annie Lennox and acclaimed musician Dave Stewart – might one day reunite and go on a major tour.
But that’s probably not in the cards, says Stewart, for the band that produced such memorable hits as “Love Is a Stranger”, “There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)”, “Here Comes the Rain Again” and, of course, “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”.
“Uh, no,” Stewart says when asked whether the Eurythmics would ever tour again. “I would. But, you see, Annie has stopped touring and has said many times she doesn’t want to tour, doesn’t like touring.”
Thus, those wanting to hear the band’s classic tunes played in concert should consider catching Stewart’s Eurythmics Songbook: Sweet Dreams 40th Anniversary Tour. Stewart is serving as the opening act for long-time friend and headliner Bryan Adams.
“The first time I met Bryan Adams, he appeared onstage with me and Annie out of nowhere in Canada. I think it was about 1984,” Stewart recalls. “That was how I met him – he was suddenly onstage with us.”
This current trek marks the first time that Stewart has toured North America in roughly a quarter of a century.
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“It wasn’t a really big tour,” Stewart remarks about the prior road show. “It was the Peacetour with Annie (in support of the Eurythmics’ last studio album, 1999’s Peace). “I think we only played three places in America.”
The tour also serves as a well-earned 40th anniversary celebration for Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), the 1983 breakthrough album that propelled Lennox and Stewart to the upper echelon of the pop charts.
The album and its title song made the Eurythmics MTV superstars and set the stage for all that would follow for the band, including being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.
Listening to that album in 2024, it’s easy to hear why Sweet Dreams remains such a favourite with fans. It’s very much a part of the era, with, in particular, the savvy synth work of the title track still defiantly waving the “I want my MTV” banner.
But there is so much else going on with the record, which bounces around through different types of instrumentation and arrangements as well as moods and feels.
“The whole album is a very sort of weird fusion of sounds,” Stewart notes.
The 71-year-old English musician has enlisted some top-notch players to help him bring those sounds to life on this tour.
“I’ve created a band with eight amazing female players and singers,” he says. “So, there’s a lot of woman power up there.”
Of course, Lennox’s superb vocal work was so essential to the Eurythmics’ success story. And trying to find any one singer to try and handle all her different vocal stylings in concerts would be a tall order. So Stewart went another direction in putting together this touring band.
“I’ve got three different singers who can all handle different sorts of tones and qualities,” he says. “When I started looking at how would I play all these different songs, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s it. You don’t have to have one person singing everything like this – but (instead) you have different sounds of singers. Then the players can cover everything within this range.’”
It’s not like a bunch of people playing covers of songs. It’s like a whole new show.
Stewart says that the musicians he’s sharing the stage with are “all brilliant, sophisticated players” and that he gives them room to shine onstage.
He doesn’t see himself so much as the star of the show, with his side musicians playing the routine role of a backing group. Rather, he views himself more as an old-fashioned band leader who occasionally steps up to deliver some guitar solos.
“It’s not like a bunch of people playing covers of songs,” he says of the production. “It’s like a whole new show.”
And what motivated Stewart to revisit the band’s songbook on tour?
“It’s because Nile Rodgers asked me if I would close the (2019) Meltdown festival in London, playing Eurythmics songs – which I hadn’t done in forever, you know,” he says. “So, I thought about it and I thought, ‘Hey, that would be good.’ That’s when I first came up with this idea of doing the songbook. It was all Nile’s fault.”
Not surprisingly, the show went over like gangbusters at Meltdown.
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“The audience loved it,” Stewart says. “I thought, ‘This is a good idea. I’ll take this on tour’. Then Covid-19 happened.”
Fortunately, the tour turned out still to be a good idea in 2023, as Stewart and company played numerous shows in the UK and Europe. Now it’s America’s turn to enjoy the Eurythmics Songbook and relive the grandeur of the Sweet Dreams album during what should be highly nostalgic evenings for the fans – as well as, most definitely, Stewart himself.
“Every single song that we start to play, it’s like – vroom – straight back to the moment I wrote that or in the middle of recording it or how it happened,” he says.
“It’s like how you can walk past a field of grass and somebody has just cut the grass and the smell of it – suddenly you’re seven years old playing soccer for a second.”