Would I Lie To You Sweet Dreams Sexcrime Nineteen Eighty Four Eurythmics

Would I Lie To You Album: Be Yourself Tonight (1985)
Sweet Dreams Album: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (1982)
Sexcrime Nineteen Eighty Four Album: 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother) (1984)
by Eurythmics

For Eurythmics third album, Dave Stewart set out to make a "killer R&B riff." He found it one morning when he was having breakfast with his acoustic guitar on his knee. He took the riff to Annie Lennox, who wasn't sure about it at first, since it didn't fit their sound.

As Stewart explained in The Dave Stewart Songbook: "When we started putting it down Would I Lie To You had a lot of energy and inspired Annie to come up with the great lyric, 'Would I Lie To You" and a melody with very odd answering harmonies, 'Now, would I say something that wasn't true.' These harmonies are very unusual and Annie is a genius at working them out very quickly in her head. The song started to be a fusion between Stax type R&B and Eurythmics."

Lennox sings this from the perspective of an angry girlfriend who walks out on her cheating lover. It was not directed at Stewart, although they were a romantic couple before forming Eurythmics, but inspired by the breakup of her first marriage, to a Hare Krishna named Radha Raman.

"I was always looking for a good relationship, and you can see it in the songs, all this unrequited love," Lennox told Q magazine regarding her songwriting during this period. "I was never in one spot, so my emotions were in turmoil."

Eurythmics recorded Be Yourself Tonight in a small room they set as a recording studio in the suburbs of Paris. Lennox and Stewart lived in apartments on top of each other while they were making the album.

Benmont Tench from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played the Hammond organ on Would I Lie To You; he and Stewart previously worked together on "Don't Come Around Here No More." Martin Dobson was brought in for horns.

In the book Annie Lennox: The Biography, Lennox explained that Sweet Dreams is about the search for fulfillment, and the "Sweet Dreams" are the desires that motivate us.

"Sweet Dreams" is a song of contrasts, with a heart-pumping beat but a lyric that carries a dark undercurrent. Listeners have adapted it accordingly. In a 2022 Songfacts interview with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, he explained: "A lot of people use it as a very uplifting dance record at EDM festivals and raves and parties. When the DJ puts that on there's always a lot of hands in the air. But it's actually a very sort of existential, spooky record asking if this is what the world has come to. Is this what our dreams are made of? And then some people want to use you, some want to abuse you. So it goes into a topic that could go massive if you want it to. Eurythmics songs always had a bit of that in it, a juxtaposition between the music and the lyric."

"I suppose it was reality, basically, what we were writing about," he added. "It wasn't a Disney kind of world."
Eurythmics are British: Annie Lennox hails from Aberdeen, Scotland, and Dave Stewart is from the Northern England city of Sunderland. They came together in London, where Lennox went to study at the Royal Academy of Music.

"Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)" is the title track to their second album and their breakout hit, but it took a while to get noticed. "We thought we'd made something really special but we had no idea, really, the impact it would have," Stewart told Songfacts. "Neither did the record label, which didn't even think it was a single."

Three other songs from the album were released as singles in the UK before their label, RCA, finally issued "Sweet Dreams." When they did, it took off, climbing to #2 in March 1983 behind "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" Bonnie Tyler.

After it became a UK hit, RCA put it out as Eurythmics' first single in America, where it shot to #1 in September 1983.
Like many early '80s British acts with synthesizers (Human League, A Flock Of Seagulls), it was MTV that broke Eurythmics in America. The duo was well equipped for video age: Dave Stewart was always coming up with concepts, and Annie Lennox had a striking look and talent for acting.

The innovative video for "Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)," directed by Stewart with Chris Ashbrook, presented Lennox with close-cropped orange hair and a tailored black suit, making it the first popular video presenting an androgynous female. The cow in the video was Dave Stewart's idea - he was a big fan of surreal artists Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel. Said Stewart: "A few people were saying, 'Dave, why the cow? Annie is so good looking.' Those people should go buy a copy of Purple Cow by Seth Dogin, about how to make your business remarkable. It was written 20 years after I had the purple cow in our video - which certainly did the trick and made my whole life remarkable."

The cow, while very eye-catching, posed a logistical problem because most studios can't accommodate them. Eurythmics found a basement studio in London with an elevator big enough to transport the animal. Lennox recalls the shoot with the bovine walking around as being one of the more surreal experiences of her life. Regarding what it all meant, she said in the book I Want My MTV: "The video is a statement about the different forms of existence. Here are humans, with our dreams of industry and achievement and success. And here is a cow."

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were a couple for about three years while they were members of a band called The Tourists. They only wrote one song together in this time (an instrumental), but when The Tourists broke up, they formed Eurythmics as a duo and began writing together. A short time later, Lennox and Stewart broke up. Stewart tells the story in The Dave Stewart Songbook: "When we broke up as a couple for some strange reason it was like we were always going to be together, no matter what. We couldn't really break that spell so we just carried on making music. This causes many problems, yet through all of this we ended up writing a lot of great songs, some were about 'our' relationship and some were about our relationship with the world around us. Whatever we wrote always had a dark side and a light side and in a way I describe it as 'realistic music,' full of the ups and downs of real relationships and life itself."

In the New York Times October 30, 2007, Annie Lennox recalled that this was written by the duo just after they'd had a bitter fight. "I thought it was the end of the road and that was that," she said. "We were trying to write, and I was miserable. And he just went, well, 'I'll do this anyway.'"

Dave Stewart came up with a beat, Annie Lennox improvised the synthesizer riff, and suddenly they realized they had a potential hit.

The first Eurythmics album made little impact, so they had to bootstrap to make their second. They were thrilled when a bank gave them a loan to buy some equipment to make it. They made the most of their meager budget, using an 8-track recorder and a complicated drum machine Stewart drove 200 miles to procure. They made the most of their eight tracks, with Stewart's Roland synthesizer and Lennox' Kurzweil keyboard added to the drum pattern Stewart created, forming the basis for the song. As Stewart tells it in his Songbook, Lennox was a bit depressed, but coming up with this track snapped her out of it and she quickly came up with the "Sweet Dreams are made of this" and "Some of them want to use you" lyrics.

In a 2008 interview with Stewart, he said: "I suggested there had to be another bit, and that bit should be positive. So in the middle we added these chord changes rising upwards with 'Hold your head up, moving on.' To us it was a major breakthrough. It just goes from beginning to end and the whole song is a chorus, there is not one note that is not a hook."
The song ends with a keyboard fadeout, but when Eurythmics played it live, they changed the arrangement and ended the song with the lyrics "Keep your head up" so it would end with a sense of hope.

In November 2007, Annie Lennox was interviewed extensively by Malcolm Bragg on The South Bank Show. In this program she said she didn't regard "Sweet Dreams" as a song but as a mantra. She added that people have identified with it over the years and that it's open to interpretation; it contains an overview of human existence; whatever it is that makes you tick, that is what it is.

When "Sweet Dreams" went to #1 in America, Eurythmics became a sensation there, appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone and playing sold-out shows. Stewart fell in with the Los Angeles music scene and bought a house there. He and Tom Petty became good friends and wrote three songs together for Petty's 1985 album Southern Accents, including the hit "Don't Come Around Here No More." Stewart's house became a hang-out for Petty, George Harrison, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne, who teamed with Roy Orbison to form the Traveling Wilburys in 1988. They recorded their first album over two weeks using Stewart's house and attached studio. Stewart couldn't participate because he was working on the Eurythmics album We Too Are One.
Hands up those of you who think Annie Lennox sings here: "Sweet dreams are made of cheese, who am I to disagree?" Relax, it's not just you. This tune's lyrics came top of a 2013 Spotify poll to find out which songs music fans most commonly hear people singing incorrectly.

Marilyn Manson covered this song in 1995, giving it a much darker tone. Weezer did a lighter version for their 2019 Teal Album. Nas sampled it for his 1996 song "Sweet Dreams."

That big computer Dave Stewart taps on in the video is actually a drum machine - that's what they looked like in 1983!
Movies to use this song include:

Ready Player One (2018)
X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)
Sucker Punch (2011)
TRON: Legacy (2010)
Under the Salt (2008)
Slipstream (2007)
American Wedding (2003)
Duets (2000)
Big Daddy (1999)
Striptease (1996)
Roommates (1995)
Bitter Moon (1992)
Portfolio (1986)

Sweet Dreams also appears in episodes of Parks and Recreation ("Telethon" - 2010) and The Simpsons ("Half-Decent Proposal" - 2002)
In 1978, Squeeze had a UK hit with "Take Me I'm Yours," which features the line "Dreams are made of this" in the chorus.
This song is discussed in the 2013 romantic comedy I Give It A Year after Rose Byrne's character angers her husband by flubbing the lyrics. She sings, "I travel the world in generic jeans," instead of, "I travel the world and the seven seas."
Pomplamoose, a band that has been sustaining themselves mostly on YouTube since 2008, mashed up "Sweet Dreams" with "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes in 2019. It works surprisingly well; the video has over 25 million views.

Eurythmics wrote and recorded this song for the film adaptation of George Orwell's novel 1984, for which they were working on the soundtrack. Just one problem: another musician (Dominic Muldowney) was also doing a soundtrack to the film, something the film's producer Simon Perry and director Michael Radford didn't tell the Eurythmics.

Perry and Radford disavowed the Eurythmics soundtrack, with Perry calling it "crass rubbish." This didn't sit well with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, who said, "Basically the producer is a two-faced rat."

Richard Branson, head of Virgin Films, insisted that the Eurythmics' soundtrack be used, so their songs made it along with some of Dominic Muldowney's work. The soundtrack album, 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother) was released ahead of the film and "Sexcrime" released as a single. Eurythmics were vindicated when the song became a big hit in the UK, where the film went to #1 at the box office.

Eurythmics wrote and recorded Sexcrime Nineteen Eighty Four for the film adaptation of George Orwell's novel 1984, for which they were working on the soundtrack. Just one problem: another musician (Dominic Muldowney) was also doing a soundtrack to the film, something the film's producer Simon Perry and director Michael Radford didn't tell the Eurythmics.

Perry and Radford disavowed the Eurythmics soundtrack, with Perry calling it "crass rubbish." This didn't sit well with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, who said, "Basically the producer is a two-faced rat."

Richard Branson, head of Virgin Films, insisted that the Eurythmics' soundtrack be used, so their songs made it along with some of Dominic Muldowney's work. The soundtrack album, 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother) was released ahead of the film and "Sexcrime" released as a single. Eurythmics were vindicated when the song became a big hit in the UK, where the film went to #1 at the box office.