Dave Stewart and strange sounds have now become synonymous. His unorthodoxy also extends to his workmates.

Let's face it, Dave Stewart's gone a bit Rock n' Roll.

You probably saw it coming. The ponytail haircut, the big earring, the leather jacket, the guitar collection, the Tom Petty collaboration. An abundance of changes that have contributed to the raunchiest Eurythmics album yet — Be Yourself Tonight.

"Well, we did 170 odd gigs in a row live so we thought we'd make an album as if we've come off the stage and just made an album. Every other one was done in a studio experimenting. There's still experimenting on the new one, but it was mainly just playing the songs."

To play these songs Dave and Annie packed the toothbrushes, clean undies and entire recording studio and moved to a warehouse in Paris.

"We took absolutely everything, right down to the chairs. I even had my mum over there cooking for us. When we got there we wrote 10 songs in a row — one every day for 10 days. I just had my acoustic guitar at first — Would I Lie To You just started with the acoustic. First of all I just put the riff on a Walkman, then went into the studio and got a 'boom crack' on a drum machine and Annie just picked up a mike and started singing.

"Then we got Olle, our drummer, and Dean the bass player, though we ended up keeping most of the drum machine with Olle doing some tom overdubs."

That was as long ago as January now, and the studio is back safely in the heart of the church he and Annie own in Crouch Hill. Not one to sit back and relax, he's already working on a new project — writing and producing an album with Feargal Sharkey.

"It's actually developed into a melee of wonderful times and visits to the pub. We always start at about 11 and finish at 7.30. In six days we've done seven tracks."

If you're surprised by the speed they're working, you're not alone.

Feargal: "I'd heard rumours about this guy but it's ridiculous. I like getting things done so the two of us together is just bedlam. The poor engineer doesn't know what's going on. The other day we sent him downstairs to the live area to mike up a grand piano, and by the time he came up we'd written another song.

"At this stage we're using things like synth bass lines and drum machines but we will be putting the real things down. I didn't want to be another solo artist with a pile of keyboards. It's easy to write on this stuff, but you can't beat a live set of drums and a bass guitarist, can you Dave?"

Dave would seem to agree on this point, but would perhaps like to add guitar to the line-up.

"I've got about 20 guitars now," he said with a smile, "and all these special favourite ones. My favourite of them all is the Gretsch, the big green one. I use it because it's so easy to get feedback. It's actually a Country Gent, but it's a bit bigger than a normal one as it was made for Scotty Moore.

"I like to use a Fender Tele live a lot. It's one I had made across the road (at John Beebys), out of old Schecter parts. I use a Bond guitar too — I used it on Adrian with an octave guitar called a Robin."

Since the Bond was first introduced it's had its fair share of both slagging and praise. As one of the original endorsees, Dave's pretty keen.

"The action's completely different — you've got to play it completely differently. On a normal guitar when you bend the note it doesn't feel the same. So you approach it differently — it's hard to describe. I play it more like an Indian instrument."

Is it faster to play when you're used to it?

"Yeah, and you can do things that you can't do on a normal guitar. You can play it like a fretless bass, except it's a lead instrument. I don't like to use it live though, mainly because of the tone controls. I find it all a bit too difficult. I do violining quite a lot live which you can't do on the Bond because it steps through the volume."

Why not use a volume pedal?

"Because I'm not very good at that. I have trouble with volume pedals because I can never get it back to the volume I want."

How could you describe the sound?

"It's got a lot of different sounds in it — it's very clean and choppy. It all depends on what amps you put it through. I find Rockmans amazing."

It's not just guitar sounds that Dave likes to experiment with, as anyone that's listened closely to Annie's voice will know.

"I've got all sorts of little tricks when it comes to vocals. Like on Sweet Dreams, because we had limited facilities, when I recorded Annie's voice on three part harmony I'd take the Bel noise reduction system out when bouncing it onto another track, even though I'd recorded the voices with it on in the first place. That way it compresses itself and that's how we got all those trebly vocal parts.

"I used to learn so much by not having the money to do things. Like Eqing the reverb and recording tracks with it on. Using the Statik reverb I might have Eq'd it drastically toppy and record a guitar solo with it on. We wouldn't be able to take it off later so we had to decide as we went along — we called it the 'Techno Prisoners Approach'.

"As for her vocals, Annie just sings live in the studio. We use a little Beyer stick mike — the M201 — that you usually use for hi hat. We had to cut off half the pop shield because when it was completely round you'd have to Eq too much top because her mouth would be further away from the mike. Now when she sings a track she'd have the monitors really loud and she'd sing behind the desk. The mike's so directional that the amount of spill we get is the same as when someone's singing with headphones on. When Elvis Costello came to Paris and sang on Adrian we were doing the same with him and he couldn't work it out."

The vocals play a very important part in Eurythmics music so they're put down very early on in the recording stage.

"She does them when there's just bass, drums and maybe one keyboard and guitar. Often she'll put down the finished lead vocal at that stage, though sometimes we'll change bits. I'd rather add musical things after I know what the vocals are going to be like. The vocal is the most important part of the song, that's the bit that everyone first picks up on."

In the case of Julia, a haunting Eurythmics single released earlier this year that failed to do big things chartwise, vocals were just about the only thing to pick upon.

"That's nearly all vocal. There's a vocoder very slightly underneath. We had the normal voice recorded and sent it to a vocoder, then kept the normal vocal loud with the vocoded vocal slightly underneath. It's meant to be a disturbing song. It's a really weird track anyway because halfway through the whole music comes in backwards but it's still going forwards at the same time."

The vocals are still a very prominent part of the Eurythmics sound, even with the inclusion of a big band.

"I really like spaces. It's that thing about listening to the vocal. In the 50s the vocal would be really loud yet you'd never lose the beat. There's more of a return to that now. That song This Is The Shirt by Two People, and The Smiths."

And also like those bands, acoustic instruments are playing an increasingly more important role in his music.

"This album I'm doing with Feargal will have loads of real instruments. We might even get The Four Tops to sing backing vocals in America, and we're getting our bass player. I was saying before, it's funny because we don't actually ring people up for sessions. People just come to do their washing because we've got a washing machine downstairs, and as they're doing their washing we go down and say 'Oh, you're just the man we want'."

Has Feargal used the Annie Lennox mike technique?

"No, he prefers to do his vocals in the booth, and the Beyer isn't right for his voice anyway. For a start he sings completely different harmonic frequencies. We'll probably end up going through three or four mikes before we get the right one. You can always tell when it's something special. Usually it's a mixture between the toppiness and the reverb. If you can hear that 'T' without it being sibilant it's going to be a great vocal sound."

For all Dave Stewart's technical expertise he and Annie are songwriters; everything else is a means to an end and they both know that.

"I've got a portable recording set up in the house and for when I'm touring. I always carry things like Walkmans around and put down any ideas. I've got this cupboard totally full of cassettes full of ideas. Some done at home, some done in the studio, on the road, some with other people. You might not actually write what you pull out of the cupboard but it might just spark off an idea. The cupboard's absolutely full of rough ideas, and if we get stuck we go to it. I got Adrian out of the ideas cupboard — it was a little demo me and Annie made a while ago."

Listening to the demo it's hard to believe that they pulled a song out of it at all. A bass line, a drum beat, a few chords and Annie singing a few random lines.

So if you ever find yourself passing a church in Crouch Hill, don't whistle. You may find yourself on the next Eurythmics album.

The making of Be Yourself Tonight

1) Would I Lie To You
How about the motorbike sound?

"It's a motorbike off a sound effects tape that sounded really puny. So we varispeeded the tape down and distorted it on the gain channel so it sounded more explosive. If you originally heard it it sounded like a Honda 50."

And the distorted Rock guitar riff?

"That's the Gretsch through the Rockman then into the desk."

Is there a Hammond in there somewhere.

"Yeah, it's a real old Hammond — one that's held together with bits of matches and gaff a tape."

2) There Must Be An Angel
What's the sequencer pattern played on?

"It's Annie holding down chords and using the Drawmer gates. It's not actually a sequencer — she's just playing the chords and the gate's making it play in time."

It sounds like a female opera singer throughout, but at one point she starts singing really deep.

"That's because it's a man who's singing really high, and then he goes through three octaves. Because he sang on that record he's now packed in Opera and started a career a bit like Klaus Nomi and changed his name to Angel Cross because of the name of the track."

It sounds like there's a real harp playing.

"No, it's the harp setting on the Yamaha DX7 and it's just all the black notes. But because it's so fast he (Michael Kaman) just used to keep playing the section and putting the repeat echo in exact time as he played it. We cheated."

3) Love You Like A Ball And Chain
What drum machine's playing the pattern?

"It's a DMX, but everything on it is gated reverb."

What about the bass sequence?

"That's actually Dean playing the bass mixed with an SH09 triggered by a CSQ1000."

What about the stamping/scraping sound?

"That's my mother and about four Frenchmen on the roof of the building in the gravel stomping. They kept going out of time and I kept saying I'll drop you in, try it again. Of course my mum will never complain and eventually half an hour later I went out there and she was fluorescent red, panting. It was like running on the spot for half an hour."

4) Sisters Are Doing It (For Themselves)
How do you mike up a gospel choir?

"Basically you just have a couple of mikes in the centre of them and just move the people around, rather than move the mikes round."

What about the shaker sound?

"That was the receptionists pencil box, all that plastic Habitat-type affair. I wanted a shaker but as soon as I used a normal one it all sounded like the DMX shaker. So I got that and gaffa-taped it all up and got Adam the engineer to play it while I Eq'd it."

And the stange solo guitar sound?

"That's a Fender Strat through a wah-wah, then an octaver and through a distortion pedal."

5) Conditioned Soul
The bells and Indian pipe sounds at the beginning?

"That's just me on the Emulator. It was the new Emulator factory sample of wind chimes and Indian flute."

The bass drum sound is very clicky — almost drum machine like.

"It isn't — it's Olle playing drums. The snare's funny too — the whole drum track's funny. We probably just Ed'd it toppier than the other bass drums. Actually we used about six different bass drums on the album. Sometimes a Simmons, sometimes drum machine, and sometimes his real kit set up in this big stone kitchen."

Yet more strange scraping sounds...

"It's the shaker of the DMX sent to a repeat echo, then you turn the repeat echo into feedback so it gets louder."

6) Adrian
Lots of good guitar sounds on this one.

"At the beginning it's the Gretsch through the Rockman again, though time it's not distorted. Then you get this click as you hit it because of compression. Dean's bass on that sounds fretless but it's not — it's just the way he plays it. Once the track's going it's the Robin Octave added with the Gretsch to make a 12-string sound."

What about the strings darting across the stereo?

"That was probably me leaning on the pan button by mistake. Actually I'm not sure what that was — probably an auto-panner."

7) It's Alright (Baby's Coming Back)
Lots more good guitar stuff.

"Right. There's that heavily damped souly guitar at the beginning, and some speeded up guitar for the solo."

8) Here Comes That Sinking Feeling
What's all that talking at the beginning and end?

"We had the mikes set up in this concrete kitchen and it's also a cafe where all these French people go, but they let us set the drums up in there. They would still carry on drinking even though Olle would be bashing away with cans on. At one point we still had the ambient mikes up when they were still talking and I told them to still record while I went in and asked a really weird question. I went up and said 'Excuse me, is this somewhere?', and because they're French and don't understand English very well anyway they all stopped and started going 'que, Somewhere?' "

9) Better To Have Lost In Love
Are they real tubular bells in the chorus?

"Yeah, real ones with Emulator strings. The guy who played the strings is a real string arranger — he does Pink Floyd and people."

Is that the Sweet Dreams melody that comes in at the end of that one?

"Yeah, that's right. I thought I'd just do that for cheekiness, because a lot of people thought we were a one hit wonder with that song. I knew this album was going to be a mega album because the songs are so good, so at the end I just wanted to bring it in as a reminder."