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Eurythmics, Eurhonor

Eurythmics

Article from One Two Testing, August 1985

Dave Stewart in a room of his own



The facts are as follows. On the seventh of this month officers visited a property in Crouch Hill, North London, known locally as The Church. This 'recording studio', run under the auspices of a pop music band called The Eurythmics, contained a large quantity of musical equipment
of origin and application unknown to our officers.


To assist in our enquiries, we contacted Mr David Stewart of said pop duo to give evidence as to the purpose and background of the aforementioned gear.

Mr Stewart maintained that he had collected all the items — varied as they may be — during his career in music. Several had been utilised in the production of his latest rock and roll waxing 'Be Yourself Tonight', on which Mr Stewart was also interrog... er, questioned.

Mr Stewart was later encouraged to speak into a hidden microphone the words: "It's a fair cop guv, I did the murders. It all started when I stowed away in the tour van for Amazing Blondel when I was 15 and they taught me how to play guitar."

Your witness.

EXHIBIT A: TEAC 80 EIGHT TRACK TAPE RECORDER



"That's the original one. I went to the bank manager when Annie and I didn't have a bean and said, 'Look, we've got an idea to do our own recording; honest guv, we'll pay it all back', and they lent us £6,000 — it was surprisingly not all that difficult. But I think it was because I really wanted it. I even pretended I was normal — wore a suit, had my hair pushed right back, carried a briefcase. I took a few snippets and cuttings along so he knew we were a real group, not just pretending — that's an important thing to do.

"So we went straight to Don Larking's audio equipment place and we bought the TEAC and a Soundcraft series II, 16-channel mixing desk. At the same time this guy John Dickinson demonstrated a prototype of his drum machine [the Movement, seen in a Eurythmics' video for Sweet Dreams], which was all made out of wood and we bought that as well. It's still upstairs.

"We set up in a warehouse in Chalk Farm Road, above a picture framing factory, not far from where the London Rock Shop is. It was an attic, you had to bend down under the roof all the time. We said you could always spot people who'd been to Dave and Annie's by the big lumps on their heads."

Your honour, Mr Stewart then admitted to me that many of his earliest recordings had been "strange, experimental stuff", and that he retained the evidence of all of these sessions, however short, in a catalogued, cassette library several feet thick at his premises in Crouch Hill.

And that in moments when he was short of inspiration he would replay some of these tapes to examine the 'ideas'. Whilst I was operating in plain clothes, the defendant confided in me that one of the first of these recordings had been entitled, "'4/4 In Leather', a very peculiar sadomasochistic thing", and that his partner, Miss Annie Lennox had been "going for Indian singing and organ lessons".

It was not for myself to pass judgement on what 'Indian Singing' might mean in the street patois of the pop-star, I leave that to the jury. However, I did become suspicious when Mr Stewart mentioned that a flute playing friend of his, a Mr Tim Wheater, was skilled in "playing those funny instruments with onion skins on that they make in Thailand." I pressed him on what appeal such instruments might have, and again refer to my notes...

"I think it's like, if you go to an Indian restaurant, the music takes you to another place. There's something about the sound because it's not in the norm of all the instruments you usually hear. That's the thing about music. You're sitting in a room, and it's the same room you've been sitting in for years, but suddenly one piece of music can make you feel as if you're somewhere else. Those sorts of instruments can do that.

"Like in the middle of 'Conditioned Soul' — not the sound at the beginning which is wind and chimes, me playing that on the Emulator — it's in the middle, an acoustic guitar with a bottleneck and it's the last thing you expect to hear. That song is strange because it starts in the East and ends in the West. The very end is like a B. B. King record with guitar solos.

"I read a review the other week which said 'Would I Lie To You' had references from the Beatles, the Kinks and half a dozen others.

"He meant it to put us down, but I was thinking, if you can name so many people in one song that's past the point of ripping off. You couldn't rip off that many people."

EXHIBIT B: A MARTIN UKELELE



"It's about 1920, or something, needs repairing, a friend gave it to me. We just plucked one string and recorded it in time with the bass drum and then triggered it using a gate from the hi-hat so every time the hi-hat played you could hear the ukelele string — dink-dink-dink.

"A lot of people call us a synthesiser pop duo, but half the time there are never any synthesisers — it's things like the ukelele hit, triggered from a gate so it sounds like a sequencer. But if you listen carefully, it doesn't sound like any synthesiser you've ever heard."

EXHIBIT C: A RED ROBIN OCTAVE GUITAR



"A guy came up to me after a gig in America and said, 'I bet you'll like this, I've just made it,' and I've been playing it ever since. It starts an octave higher than a normal guitar, and for some of the stuff I play on it, like the riff from 'Right By Your Side', you'd be off the edge of the fretboard on a normal guitar.

"Sometimes I do the Holger Czukay thing of slowing the track right down and record so that a normal guitar comes out much higher on playback. That's what I did on 'Baby's Coming Back' — slowed the track to something ridiculous, it was going 'greewwff... grerrr... greewwf'. It's difficult to play along to begin with, but once you do it a few times you get used to it, like anything, y'know."

EXHIBIT D: A GRETSCH



"That's my favourite. I use that all the time. That's on 'I Love You Like A Ball And Chain', and 'Would I Lie To You'. It's so easy to get it on the edge of controllable feedback because it's semi-acoustic. I did that the other day on a track I was helping someone out on; turned up to play the session and all I did was hold the guitar up to the speaker and turn it round.

"The feedback is just something I found out about on tour... then I was trying to stop it. It was okay if I was facing the audience, but if I turned towards the amp... waarrgggh.

"I've had that Gretsch for seven years. It was the original guitar on 'Jailhouse Rock' — Scotty Moore's. A friend, John Beeby from the music shop, used to play with Jerry Lee Lewis at the time when he was doing the American Air bases in Germany... '61 or that sort of time. Scotty Moore was doing the same circuit and they met and swapped guitars."

The defendant was asked how he succeeded in getting such a biting, raw sound from this instrument while in the studio.

"I was using it through a Rockman headphone amp, just the chorus and the first edge setting, not distortion, and it was being Di-ed. Then once we'd recorded it, we sent it out to a little Session Amp speaker in either the bathroom or the kitchen where we were in Paris — big concrete rooms. We put up ambient mikes, and re-recorded it."

Suspecting that the defendant might not have told the full story, he was asked whether the sound of the instrument was connected with the way he played it... like... violently.

"No, it's an amazing guitar because you can just touch it very lightly and it sounds tough. I was standing right in front of the monitor speaker in the studio while I was recording, which helps. The bottom strings don't feedback, they growl. I'm not a very good player, really, so if I was to try to play fast and hard, I'd get five wrong notes out of every 20. I like to choose the notes I'll play, and play them economically. I play quite lightly, really."

Reminded that he was on oath, the defendant was asked whether he might not wish to reconsider the last statement.

"Except, I did play quite hard on the end of 'Conditioned Soul', I must admit, but that was on my Schecter Tele.

"I got John Beeby to make that for me, it's all Schecter parts but is almost knackered now because I use it live all the time — the back's almost concave where my belt's ground it out. The Gretsch is a bit delicate for leaping around on stage. It's got a moveable bridge, and you only have to catch it once with your coat and the bridge collapses, the strings stick to the fretboard. It was made for quiet people who sit down."

EXHIBIT E: THE BOND GUITAR



"I've used it for recording, but not live yet because when I first got it, I hadn't had time to get comfortable with it, and it is very different. A lot of the time I do that bowing on the volume control, and that's a bit difficult to do with switches. It's on 'Adrian' with the octave guitar in the background and 'Here Comes That Sinking Feeling'."

EXHIBIT F: A GUILD 12 STRING



"It's really beautiful. I've had it about eight years. I chose the one I wanted and Guild inlayed my name on it for me. All acoustic guitars seem to be different, even if they're all off the same production line. I've never played two that were the same.

"Have you heard a track of ours called 'Aqua' on Touch? There's a funny bass synth thing tracked with a 12 string. You know when you're using only the sub oscillator on a synth, but very tight, it usually sounds horrible on its own. But track it with an acoustic guitar and it's an amazing effect, like a double bass, because you're getting fret noise."

This was the defendant's first suggestion of an actual, physical involvement with synthesisers. In fact, far from being wary of synthesisers, as his earlier evidence had suggested (Exhibit B), Mr Stewart let slip to our officers that he had spent a large majority of the previous year closely allied to one particular machine: "Almost all of 1984 was done on Voyetras". We questioned him further.

"I love synthesisers as well, I've got hundreds, but my favourite is the Voyetra which we use a lot — it just doesn't sound like other synths. All the Juno 60s and that range tend to fizz when you turn up the filter frequency. The Voyetra has a completely different top area, really clean and zingy.

"On '1984' we had these 12 Bahamians playing these drums with fires alight inside them. As they hit them, the heat made the skins stretch to different frequencies. I used that to trigger the Voyetra through a gate, and as these drums were going in and out of time, so was the Voyetra.

"We do use some sequencers, like on the start of 'Would I Lie To You', and I often have a sequencer beginning the bass line, and then have a bass join in. But mostly I like it when men are competing with the machines.

"Olle, our drummer, played drums all the way through the album with the drum machine in his cans. We kept all his drums, but sent some things from the drum machine as well. [An Oberheim DMX, your honour.] On 'Baby's Coming Back' I kept in the shaker — not the original hit but the echoes from it which come after what Olle plays.

"It's rare to find a drummer who loves playing against drum machines, but Olle does."

EXHIBIT G: A KORG SUPER SECTION


(A machine incorporating auto chords, bass line and drum patterns Mi'Lord.)

"Ridiculous, really, because all of it comes out of the same socket, there are no individual outputs. Still good, though, I eq-ed it so that all the sections became one changing noise, and mixed it in."

EXHIBIT H: A BANJO



"From Oklahoma City. I was the most unpopular man on the tour because of this. I left my camera in the shop where bought it, and we had to turn back 100 miles down the road."

EXHIBIT I: A ROLAND SH09



"This has memories. Nightmares to be precise. When we started playing live we didn't have any money so we couldn't afford to pay people. We had Clem Burke on drums, Micky Gallagher on keyboards but I had to play the bass parts on the SH09, plus the guitar parts.

"So before each song I had to change the sounds very quickly — it's not programmable — and write the bass patterns into the sequencer, stop, fire it from the drum machine, stop, and start playing the guitar. We were still doing that even on The Tube.

"Now we don't use any tapes or sequencers on stage — we can afford the musicians, ten of them, and we transfer the sequencer parts in the studio into horn parts.

"We don't try to copy exactly what we do on record because that doesn't leave room for improvisation. 'Sweet Dreams' is the classic example. The keyboards would be playing the basic riff, then I'd be doing something different on the guitar that wasn't in the original, then the girl singers would have another part, then we'd have a 16-piece gospel choir on stage, and oh yeah, the brass was doing this really great thing that wasn't on record which went..."

At this point the court should know that the defendant proceeded to sing various lines from his arrangements in the detention room wishing to illustrate them to the attending officers. They began to dance and sway to the provocative rhythms eventually casting off their uniforms and rolling up much of the transcript of the conversation with Mr Stewart into what I believe are called 'splints'.

When the officers had eventually been coaxed down from their positions on the close-circuit TV cameras, on which they had been building nests from old truncheon cuttings, it was decided that a new investigative tack was required. A fresh team of detectives attached to the Foreign Office arrived bent on discovering what business Mr Stewart had been conducting in Paris and Los Angeles.

It is believed that instead of using already established British studios, Mr Stewart and his accomplice Miss Lennox, rented a property in Paris and equipped it with their own devices. This way they would escape from the normal routine and habits of a commercial studio and, may we suggest, stay beyond the gaze of certain inquisitive forces.

THE CASE OF STEWART/LENNOX VS FRANKLIN



"The only track we did outside of Paris was 'Sisters', which we did in LA. Chaos.

"The song started with me playing the bass riff on a keyboard, then I got the drum pattern going, and I needed a really loud shaker sound but all the shakers were too quiet, even the DMX's. So, with an engineer friend, we took the plastic pencil case from the receptionist's desk, gaffa taped it together, with the pencils still inside, and recorded it, with me turning the eq backwards and forwards, almost like a wah-wah. A strange thing, but gives it that groove all the time.

"Then I got Nathan East to play the bass part. He's got a five string Hamer bass and he tunes the bottom one down to a D... er... no, below a D. Fsharp??... no, no... er, hang on... B! yeah B, that's right, because that's the last note in the riff, sounds really good.

"Next I played the guitar part and Benmont Tench did the Hammond organ, lovely sound. After that the Charles Williams Singers put their backing vocals on, we'd worked with them the year before.

"What next? Mike Cambell's guitar, there's a story there. We wanted a sound that would be reminiscent of Hendrix's 'Voodoo Chile', and so on. That's what we were trying to get. Mike had his own Cry Baby wah-wah — he's one of these people who when he gets something like an effect pedal, really looks after it, not like me. But wah-wahs are usually very toppy; when you press them right down they take your ear off. So to give it a growl underneath we put an octaver pedal in as well, just slightly mixed in.

"By then we'd filled nearly all the 24 tracks. We bounced those down into eight tracks on another 24-track tape and flew to Detroit to record Annie's and Aretha's vocals. They did three or four versions and then we flew back to LA, picked the best vocal take and flew that back in time onto the remaining two tracks on the original 24-track. And that was it."

THE CASE OF STEWART/LENNOX VS WONDER



"The song 'There Must Be An Angel' we originally wrote for Stevie Wonder. The lyrics are about how he influenced Annie. She was a classical musician until she heard Stevie Wonder's 'Talking Book' on headphones and it flipped her out. She realised music could be anything and left the Royal Academy.

"We sent a cassette to Wonderland asking if he'd be interested and he said straight away he'd love to play or sing on it. So come the day he turned up at the studio and as soon as we put the track on, his head starts going from side to side, like he does. He's got a box of eight harmonicas, and he picks out the one in the right key and just starts playing in the control room. I said 'don't waste your first ideas, get into the booth'. He did it exactly right, first time, brilliant. We did three or four takes but used the first one, it was perfect.

"He's really funny y'know, because he cracks jokes about being blind all the time. When we sent him off to the recording booth he went the wrong way... ended up in the room where the food was. Nobody wanted to say anything... we're all thinking, 'oh shit, what do we do'. Eventually someone said... 'oh Stevie, er, the studio's the other way'. He just said 'Oh sorry... blind'. He's okay."

THE CASE OF STEWART VS GUITAR HEROES



"Charlie Burchill of Simple Minds, he's my favourite guitarist. We were together in Australia once during a soundcheck and he was teaching me the beginning of 'Waterfront'. He does these brilliant echo things, locks himself into them, says that sometimes he doesn't know how to get out.

"After him, there's Phil Manzanera on the early Roxy Music stuff and John Lennon, funnily enough. Nobody ever says that about his guitar playing but I think it's really human, he did some strange things; same goes for Neil Young."

"On the road I take round with me a box with a portable set up for writing in hotel rooms. There's a Sequential Six Trak and a Roland SH101 which I like for writing quick sequencer bass lines."

THE CASE OF STEWART



"When I'm working I often find that people try to refine sound too much, it becomes clinical. I like the mixture of the two — the height of technology and the sound of a toy thrown into it. To me that represents reality... this is purely philosophical stuff here.

"I find when I hear bands which are full of nice synthesiser sounds and 'everything's great' lyrics, they're too far from reality for me to attempt to try to listen to. Whereas, if you have a song that starts nice and something horrible comes in half way through, that's much more like life.

"Y'know, you wake up feeling good, and two hours later there's a phone call that puts you in a bad mood, then at lunch time you have a drink and feel better..."

How does the defendant plead?

"People sometimes say it must be hard work. But no. All you do is go around the world and have toys to play with. I can't think of any other job that could possibly be as much fun.

"Everything's great."


More with this artist


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Previous Article in this issue

Pocket Guitarist

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Hohner HTB1 Guitar


Publisher: One Two Testing - IPC Magazines Ltd, Northern & Shell Ltd.

The current copyright owner/s of this content may differ from the originally published copyright notice.
More details on copyright ownership...

 

One Two Testing - Aug 1985

Donated by: Colin Potter

Artist:

Eurythmics


Role:

Band/Group

Related Artists:

David A Stewart


Interview by Paul Colbert

Previous article in this issue:

> Pocket Guitarist

Next article in this issue:

> Hohner HTB1 Guitar


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