Number Ones: #26

• EURYTHMICS Sexcrime (Nineteen-Eighty-Four) (Virgin)
• Week Ending 17th November 1984
• 2 Weeks At #1

 

Fresh from conquering the globe with the Sweet Dreams and Touch albums, Eurythmics were hired to soundtrack a big-screen adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. While the album itself performed only modestly (and has become almost forgotten in terms of their catalogue, partly due to not being on RCA as per the rest), the project did throw up this UK Top 5 hit.

Had my charts been in existence during 1983, there’s little doubt that Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) would have been a chart-topper, and quite possibly Love Is A Stranger too. That said, Here Comes The Rain Again was released just after I began compiling Top 40s and inexplicably only made #6 so I have absolutely no excuse for Sexcrime being their biggest hit until 1987.

It’s obviously not in the same league as all the classic Eurythmics singles, being a very-much-of-its-era workout with clunky production tricks, that s-s-s-s-s-stutter effect for the intro (evoking Chaka Khan’s I Feel For You from a month or so earlier), and a lyric which betrayed the “sheer panic” which gripped Annie Lennox when she and Dave Stewart began work on the soundtrack “confronted by a blank sheet of paper”.

It’s not even the best track on 1984 (For The Love Of Big Brother); that honour falls to the gorgeous Julia, a surprise flop single in early 1985 which ventured no higher than #44 in the UK but did make #5 on my chart.