Missionary Man

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on "Missionary Man," and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know this one hits different from the synth records that first put Eurythmics on the map. Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart cut it for Revenge, the album that landed in June 1986, and it opens the record like a warning shot. Stewart wanted something that would fill a barn. He had been watching U2's Under a Blood Red Sky and Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, and he was tired of British synthesizer bands getting boxed out of the big rooms. In The Dave Stewart Songbook he later wrote that he felt like an alchemist cooking up a weird brew of blues, rock and voodoo, guitars and synthesizers and backwards noises and harmonica spiraling toward the line "Well I was born an original sinner." That brew became the lynchpin of the Revenge tour.

The words started as a poem Annie had already written. She has been plain about where some of the heat came from. In 1984 she married a Hare Krishna devotee named Radha Raman, and the marriage did not last long. Talking to Q in 1991 she said "Missionary Man" had to do with her slight dabbling with Hare Krishna. She liked that they did not care what society thought, and she still had a layman's interest in Eastern philosophy, but she also found hypocrisy and double standards, and she learned to beware of people handing out answers to everything. On the single's American release she widened the target. There was a personal meaning because of her own history, she said, but she also did not trust a great many people in the media, politicians, religious speakers and philosophical types, anyone trying to hold power over other people. The mother in the song tells you to be true to yourself, then adds the catch: you can fool with your brother, but do not mess with a missionary man.

The record itself has a few good road stories attached. Harmonica player Jimmy Zavala, the same Jimmy Z who had been around Tom Petty's Southern Accents sessions, flew in and laid his part down in one take. Joniece Jamison sang the backing vocals. RCA put the song out in the States as the first single from Revenge, and American rock radio took it all the way to number one on Billboard's Album Rock Tracks chart, the only time Eurythmics ever topped that list. It reached number 14 on the Hot 100. Back home in Britain it was the fourth single off the album and stalled at number 31, which tells you something about how the two countries were hearing the duo by then. Australia sent it to number nine. The Grammy people heard a rock band and handed them Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The clip, directed by Willy Smax, used stop-animation in the same neighborhood as Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer," got heavy MTV play, and picked up five nominations at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards.

Stewart has said that with this song he was the man with a mission, and that the quirky electro duo mutated into rock stars almost overnight. That is a little bit of stage talk, but the shift is real. Revenge sits next to Be Yourself Tonight as the stretch where Eurythmics stopped sounding like a machine in a London flat and started sounding like a band that could open a show with a harmonica and a warning. Years later Ann Wilson of Heart covered the song with Kenny Wayne Shepherd on guitar and a gospel choir behind her, forty voices, and she said she wanted it to feel like a megachurch production. Zoo Freaks who lived with the original tend to guard it. One Dallas listener wrote on a song site that this was the era when they were really a hard rock band, and that some songs should just be left alone. Fair argument. The original still carries the sermon.

None of that arena muscle shows up if you rewind to how Annie and Dave actually got started. Annie Lennox was born on Christmas Day 1954 in Aberdeen, a working-class kid who excelled at music, poetry and art and had half a mind to become a flautist. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and paid the rent waiting tables at Pippins, a health-food restaurant in Hampstead. Dave Stewart, a few years older, had already broken up his folk-rock group Longdancer and was writing songs with guitarist Pete Coombes. He walked into Pippins one night with a friend and scrawled "will you marry me?" on the steamed-up window. Annie has said she remembers it was nighttime and the manager clocked the two of them coming in. Dave went back to her tiny bedsit, heard her sing a song she had written on a harmonium, and wondered what she was doing as a waitress. They became a couple and musical partners almost at once.

With Coombes they formed a group called The Catch, which turned into The Tourists. Between the late seventies and 1980 The Tourists put out three albums and scored two British Top 10 singles, a cover of Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want to Be With You" and "So Good to Be Back Home Again." They were busy enough that Annie never even got around to seeing the Sex Pistols or The Clash. The band took them to Australia, then fell apart. Dave has told the story of ending up in a hotel in Wagga Wagga with a little Wasp synthesizer, making didgeridoo sounds while Annie sang along, and both of them realizing they might make weird experimental music together. On the flight home they split as a couple. They kept the music. They hauled gear in a second-hand horse box. One early gig drew four people, and they drove home through the night in the snow. A bank manager, looking at this odd pair across his desk, loaned them five thousand pounds for proper equipment. Dave has said they have never really had a shouting row. It comes down to respect.

They named the new outfit Eurythmics, Annie lifting the word from Dalcroze Eurhythmics, an old teaching method that tied dance movement to musical rhythm. The debut, In the Garden, came out in 1981 with help from members of Can and Blondie's Clem Burke. Reviews were kind and sales were not. Dave built a studio in a former church in Crouch End, the room that later pulled in half the famous names in rock, and the second album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), turned them into stars in 1983. By the time Revenge arrived they had already survived the couple-to-collaborators turn, the horse box, the empty rooms and the bank loan. "Missionary Man" is what that long road sounded like once they had a stage big enough to hold it.

If you want the trail straight from the source, the official home is Eurythmics, where the Revenge pages still carry "Missionary Man" at the top of the track list. They keep a presence on Facebook, Instagram and X. Fans who have been archiving the videos, the sleeves and the deep cuts for years gather at Ultimate Eurythmics and over on the Eurythmics Video Visionaries page. Spin it again if you need to. The missionary man is still out there, and the Zoo Freaks know better than to mess with him.