Review
Genre and Mood
Eurythmics, that is Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, made Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) one of the defining records of early-1980s synth-pop and new wave. It is dark and hypnotic, a cold machine groove under a voice that sounds in control, and it has long since become iconic.
Song Summary
Lennox wrote the lyric in about half an hour after hearing the track, during an unhappy time after the end of her previous band, the Tourists; she later called it an expression of feeling vulnerable, hopeless and nihilistic, and said it is not about sex. Stewart found it too bleak and added a more uplifting line. The music began as an experiment: Stewart’s beat and riff on one new synthesizer, Lennox answering on another, the two parts playing against each other. The yearbook’s copy is the album version of Sweet Dreams, 2005 remaster: the same performance, recorded in 1982 and prepared again for the reissue.
Musical Breakdown
Intro
The track opens on a very low drum, a thud rather than a boom in Stewart’s words, and that first downbeat was a happy accident.
Verse 1
The bass sequence and Lennox’s string part lock in. Sound On Sound notes that they play completely different things, which is why keyboard players find the song confusing.
Main Section
Lennox’s vocal, recorded on the one microphone the studio owned, carries the hook over the machine groove.
Bridge
In the middle come the tuned bottles, filled with water until they matched the track’s pitch and tapped with wood or metal.
Outro
No source we found describes the ending, so listen for yourself: do the machines stop, or fade away?
Concepts in Focus
The drum machine here was a rare one: a Movement Systems drum computer, bought for £2,000, one of about thirty made. It supplied the drums and drove the bass line too, triggering a sequencer pattern on a Roland SH-101. Compare how Eurythmics – Sweet Dreams (Ibiza Deep Summer Remix 2015) keeps that sequence intact under a house beat.
remastering prepares an existing recording again for release; it does not change the performance. In 2005 the album was re-released remastered, with six bonus tracks, together with the rest of the Eurythmics studio catalogue.
The music video, directed by Chris Ashbrook in January 1983, shows Lennox with cropped orange hair in a man’s suit, Stewart playing cello in a field and a boat, and a cow in the boardroom; it became a classic of early MTV, and it is the clip embedded on this page.
Artistic Context
The album was recorded in 1982, mostly on a Tascam eight-track in the attic of an old warehouse in Chalk Farm, north London, with equipment bought on a £5,000 bank loan. RCA released it in January 1983, and the single, the album’s fourth, on 24 January.
Impact and Reception
The single reached number two in Britain and number one in the United States and Canada. Record Mirror heard a hybrid of electronic blues and soul. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2020 and the National Recording Registry in 2023. Play it loud and listen for the bottles.
