(#294: 4 February 1984, 2 weeks)
Track listing:
Here Comes The Rain Again/Regrets/Right By Your Side/Cool Blue/Who’s That
Girl?/The First Cut/Aqua/No Fear, No Hate, No Pain (No Broken Hearts)/Paint A
Rumour
“I believe you only experience love with strangers, so it
doesn’t last long. You’re usually just in love with the idea of somebody. Many
of my own love affairs were projecting my own ideas onto others. Like the
relationship between the junkie and the drug, what destroys the person is what
they crave most.”
(Annie Lennox, October 1983)
The idea of the mask came from Blade Runner, or possibly an article she read about Blade Runner in The FACE, but it was enough to send out its own signals. There was
a woman, and there was a man, and the woman is on the cover, in the centre of
pure white light, raising her fists as if to make both embrace, her right eye
looking warily at the camera; am I being brave enough? Can you believe me? And
there was a man, not on the cover but on the inside, dressed in black before a
background of grey, looking full on at the camera, and looking slightly
fearful. Were it not for the beard you could believe he was Bowie.
So there are these two separate people, working together
but being strictly professional about it, and yet you would know by just
looking at them, without knowing anything about their history, that once they
had something going. But neither seems particularly comfortable about being in
close proximity to the other, even if they are not, as such, together. Nor are
they really together in their music, other than the woman’s voice is the clear
centre around which all of the man’s music revolves, or orbits. There are
periodic encounters with the elements on their songs; the rain, the sun (“No
Fear, No Hate, No Pain”), water (“Aqua”) – the woman could almost be singing
from the centre of the world, preventing the rest of it from falling apart. The
music swirls and circumnavigates around her.
But this is their third record together, these Eurythmics,
and the mutual discomfort is starting to become a little jarring. The title
itself – Touch – could be deadly
ironic, given that one of its songs (“Aqua”) repeatedly warns “Don’t touch me.”
Nothing on the record is settled or welcoming. Even its most outwardly jolly
song, “Right By Your Side,” is performed as though it were an extended exercise
in self-denial; she craves love, protection and warmth, extols the ability of
love to solve all pain and uncertainty, but she overplays the song – her performance
is a little too happy, like Julie
Andrews as your geography teacher doing the Twist to Einstürzende Neubauten; so
exuberant that it becomes restless. You wonder how much she really believes
what she is celebrating.
For much of the rest of the record, Lennox’s voice – and there
is less of her voice on Touch than
you might imagine – carries a hardness, even at times a severity, which creates
an immediate emotional barrier, as though erecting its own “TRESPASSERS WILL BE
PROSECUTED” signs. Even when it is superficially softer – “Here Comes The Rain
Again,” “Regrets,” wherein she sings of her fist colliding against “your
furniture” – it continues to act as a veiled threat. This in itself does not
make Lennox a great singer; too often on “Who’s That Girl?” and elsewhere, she
seems slightly scared of silence, so must fill the space with worn pub-soul
tropes – which is a shame since “Who’s That Girl?” is otherwise a finely tuned
performance, her restrained exasperation only coming to the boil at key
rhetorical moments (“But there’s JUST ONE THING!”).
Otherwise, “Who’s That Girl?”, with its Gartside-like hanging
on the question of “the language of love” and the paradoxes that it is likely
to create in reality – who, in truth, would desire anything “cooler than ice
cream” or “warmer than the Sun” or both? It is the old (by early 1984
standards) New Pop theme of “love” being different from, and perhaps more
desirable than, love as a real and existing thing, since Lennox seems doomed to
be eternally disappointed by the latter. On “Here Comes The Rain Again,” where
she is palpably unhappy, she even encourages her lover to use the language of
love – “Talk to me like lovers do,” “I
want to kiss like lovers do” – with, again, the elements, the “open wind,” the
metaphorical “ocean” – while speaking, or singing, of the way things are as
being “like a tragedy/Tearing me apart, like a new emotion” (and this imagery
is echoed in “No Fear, No Hate, No Pain”: “And when the sun comes up/It’s like
a new commotion”).
Hence “Regrets,” if it’s not about Thatcher, which it
might be (“I’m an electric wire/And I’m stuck inside your head”), it is about
somebody protecting herself against hurt and harm, to the point of hurting and
harming anybody who approaches her, and this could apply to Lennox in terms of
protecting her image against the world; in the FACE interview I quoted at the top of this piece, Lennox goes on to
mention that: “I went to a Music Therapy luncheon last year, the kind of ‘do’
where they invite record business bosses and if you’re very unlucky you’ll sit
next to a Radio One producer like I did and have him fondle your knee all
through the main course.” Who wouldn’t want to defend themselves against this
kind of world? “I’ve got a delicate mind,” she hisses, “I’ve got a dangerous
nature.” Likewise, the lyric of “Cool Blue” could exist on the same level of
allegory as Fine Young Cannibals’ “Blue” (“Blue again, it’s a lasting chill/To
keep you cold as winter”), though could also, of course, refer to death; the
ruminative vocal is broken up by mock-exasperated cries of “How could she fall
for a boy like that?”
Whereas “Aqua,” which Lennox has said is about a junkie (“I
saw you put the needle in”), could almost be a cold rationalist sequel to the
Shangri-Las’ “Past, Present And Future” – “Don’t touch me/Don’t talk to me EVER
AGAIN” – except that this protagonist will slowly sink under the metaphorical
water of oblivion. “No Fear, No Hate, No Pain” could be set in the protagonist’s
afterlife – Lennox’s voice now reduced, in the choruses, to Fairlight siren
triggers, while in the verses she sings of sex and death as though they were
the same thing. “The First Cut” could be a prequel to all of this, with its
references to “the cold, cold ground,” while “Paint A Rumour” is a most
disquieting album closer, Lennox repeatedly whispering “I could tell you
something” without ever telling us what it is, other than stray lyrical sparks
which may or may not have a political undertow (“See the place go red,” “Promise
not to sell”).
Much of the record concerns itself with its singer not
really wanting to be “here,” and one has to ask what, or who, has caused this
willingness to be absent. Musically, Touch
is less straightforward than its singles might suggest; it is as if the wary pop
of Sweet Dreams is now being made to
cohabit with the experimentation of In
The Garden. “Rain” and “Girl” proceed like a more measured Depeche Mode,
while the opening onomatopoeic synthesiser line of “Rain” itself helped pave
the way to Acid House, as it will later recur as one of two underlying cyclical
figures in Frankie Knuckles’ “Your Love.” Michael Kamen’s strings are present
on “Rain” and “No Fear, No Hate” but are unobtrusive enough to make the listener
forget that they are there.
“Regrets” is terrific counterfeit Grace Jones, with some
unhinged cornet work from Dick Cuthell at its fadeout (Cuthell was also a
regular associate member of the Specials/Special AKA, and I wonder whether
Rhoda Dakar’s 1982 collaboration “The Boiler” was on anyone’s mind at the time
of recording this album – Cuthell’s playing is nearly as troubled on the
latter, which is too upsetting a record to be listened to more than once, but
must be listened to once – for repeat playing, there is an instrumental B-side)
and indeed points the way to two groups of future importance who both benefited
from Dave Stewart’s patronage. One is Underworld – their anxious yet patient
techno paradigm is also very evident on “The First Cut” and especially the long
“Paint A Rumour” (which latter also presages Belgian New Beat) – and the other
is Curve, which is hardly surprising since half of that duo, Dean Garcia, plays
bass throughout Touch, and is especially
prominent and creative on “Cool Blue.”
“No Fear, No Hate, No Pain,” on the other hand, musically
sounds like the end of everything, more The
Final Cut than “The First Cut,” slow and declining and circular. And so one
can usefully listen to Touch and
trace a line of influence which would eventually lead us to Goldfrapp, and to a
lesser extent Portishead, and perhaps even Sinéad O’Connor and Polly Harvey,
both of whom would have been young enough in the early eighties to take Annie
Lennox’s pain to their hearts. But that is the final problem with the record;
here we have this woman, and this man, and once they were, and now they are,
but what they are isn’t what they once were, so love can never be readmitted,
but there is so much protectionism and abstraction busily at work that it’s
hard to detect a heart.
