“They’re just so fucking boring,” the oddly-accented writer’s voice is informing a novice eddy-tor over the phone. “One hit wonders all the way.”

“But Iman,” asks the panic-prone Eddy (eddy: a current of water or air running contrary to the main current) in a quivering voice, “they’re on their second hit right now!"

Pause.

“So they are,” admits the writer. “Well, I meant to say two hit wonders.”

Nooooooo, the silly Eddy mutters to himself, shaking his over-rated thinking device sadly, it’s gonna be one of thoooooooose. He recalls other disastrous CREEMares that’ve plagued him in his brief stint in eddy-torial, like the stupid move of assigning—in udder desperation—half an issue to J. “Fingers” Kordosh and hassling him daily (half-hourly by deadline time) with quaint-but-powerless 11 Where’s my copy?” phone calls and written threats starting out, if you ever wanna see your wife and kids alive again...

“Well,” he would reply calmly, “the kids maybe...”

Almost as good was breaking the #1 unwritten law of big shit eddytors: “Better you should use cadavers for speed bumps or seriously ask yourself, ‘What is sportswear?’ than let a writer (of all people—ptoooie!) talk you into anything. ” This episode involved the infamous Annene “A.O.” Kaye selling the stoop a totally useless story about video games with crafty I’ve-never-played-onetherefore-it’ll-be-great logic. The said authoress has since left the country, only partly due to the ramifications of her devil worship.

Nqw, we know ydli’re all sweating bricks and shitting bullets in eager anticipation of a Eurythmics interview that Rock ’N’ Roll News last month promised was “incisive, startling.” Either that, or you’re waiting for the right moment to file a wrongful death lawsuit.

And we’ve been reading your complaints about stalling in certain interviews, where the subject speaketh not before the 15th paragraph.

Tuff Titty, readership! Oh, all right— here’s something to chew on while you’re waiting for the good stuff:

Dave Stewart: What do you want us to do? Do you want to talk about the Eurythmics or something?

First, your and Annie’s old group, the Tourists.

Dave: It was me and Annie and a guy called—

Boo?

Dave: What?

Never mind. Go on.

Dave: We first played together at Pastal Comic Kleiner Studio in Germany, and it was there that we first had to play without a drummer.

What were you doing there?

Dave: We were playing on somebody else’s record and we managed to put something of our own down. We were like the Byrds or Jefferson Airplane, kind of a bit more underground. But we did that for fun, actually. There are times, you know, when you do something for fun and it suddenly starts happening. People take it seriously and you end up having to talk to interviewers about it.

This is the time of punk?

Dave: Yeah, it was about 1978. It was very much like the underground, only done a lot faster.

Are you starting to get the picture, little campers?

Iman Lababedi is quite a guy. He’s from Lebanon—hotbed of rock criticism—but he grew up in England. Although he looks like someone you can’t quite recall from your third least memorable luau, he sneaks up on you in his unmarked personality and Pow!—you’re on Lebanese Camera.

Really, Iman’s a great guy. It wasn’t his fault he inherited all that money. Oh. You hadn’t heard? Yeah, he got all these rubles from the sale of some land somewhere and then went and bought his own rock magazine! The ultimate writer’s revenge!

Trouble is, while all this cash flow was going on, he was supposed to be writing “up” the interview he did with England’s Newest Hitmakers, the Eurythmics. But instead, he calls up novice eddytor and gives him an assignment for his own new mag instead! Is that the Ritz or what? Made poor Eddy feel humiliation akin to that which X-rayed luggage must experience.

So anyhoo, big-time publisher Iman sends only the transcript of the interview and the tape itself. Great transcript, typed by his new secretary, F.N., who, he admits, “does not have superior command of the English language.” Command, nuttin’— she couldn’t even ask it for a favor!

But at least Eddy now knows why the entire transcipt appears to have been written in some obscure pidgin rasta Thai tongue that’s practically poetry:

How did you pick that one up?

Dave: What was the it? That was the early in America, oh, eh...oh the um, a cover version.

You must be sick.

Dave: Pete—right obliviously.

Do you feel besides the fact that you know that now you do write the songs that in a way one is a continuation or oven?

Dave: Nah...

TURN TO PAGE 62

EURYTHMICS

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 31

Was it a pint the Eurythmics obviously, to toss great here?

Dave: I don’t know.

So listen to the tape, stupid! That’s what Eddy thought too. Unfortunately, the tape sounds like a herd of beanbag reindeer in WWI-vintage biplanes strafing a crowded RV resort while the Third Little Pig pounds on his brick piano in the background. Not to mention the fire engines...

But does Eddy get mad? Get even? Like when he himself sent in a grammatical disaster to which then-Eddy Sue Whitall could only sputter, “Have you ever heard of periods?” Or the now legendary one-act play he inspired way-back Eddy Robert Duncan to write and perform: Next Time You Decide Not To Do A Story, Call Meeeeee?

’Course not! In time-honored CREEM tradition, he passes the buck on to the readers!

IMAN vs. ANNIE

“What does she look like in person? Well.. .I’d have to say very ordinary, ” sez Iman when Eddy tries to pump some info out of his indolent-rich brain. “She was getting ready for a photo session, so she had on all this whiteface shit.”

“Whiteface shit.”

“Yeah, you know, that kinda speedy halfdead look like the punks used to. Lemme think, what color was her hair that afternoon? Uh, you know, it was reddishorange, kinda skinhead.”

“Yeah, thanks Iman,” sez Eddy snidely. “That’s real dogfood for thought. Did she make any kind of impression on you at all?”

“Oh, you know, that condescending popstar-intensity kinda stuff.”

“One more thing,” Eddy leads innocently, preparing for The Big One. “Do you think she’s...uh...she’s...you know—”

“Yeah, I bet she’s not a dyke. 100 percent heterosexual, if you ask me,” he asserts with a hint of slyness in his voice.

“No shit. Now, how in the world did you figure that out?”

But there’s no reply. Iman’s already hung up...

How do you feel your success is going to change you?

Annie: It makes you an awful lot more busy, very much more demanding on your personal life. It means the projects that we do are far more ongoing than they would have been without the success. It means that people who normally would never, have Hstened to us are now saying that they always liked us anyway. It means being a public face, people knowing you who you didn’t know before.

Do you enjoy it?

Annie: Yes. I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it.

Why?

Annie: Because I didn’t work all this time to be a failure. This kind of success has come totally from our own resources. We recorded our album ourselves on an eight-track tape recorder. And we produced ourselves, arranged the music, engineered it, wrote the music, designed the sleeve, everything. We did it ourselves when nobody wanted to know us.

You can understand Duran Duran selling because there are lots and lots of young girls all wanting something like that. But with you, one gets a sort of ambiguous image. Where does that come from?

Annie: From me. I mean, not from anybody else. Totally from me, and probably from the fact that I really didn’t want to be classified along with any other cult or fashion. One of the reasons is because I like to wear trousers. They’re very good to wear onstage, so it developed into something more. Also, I have a way of not just being a pretty-pretty girl. I thought there was more to me than just being a pretty girl in a dress. I never wear dresses.

I think it’s a little bit more extreme than a matter of one wanting to wear trousers or dresses.

Annie: It isn’t extreme to me. It may be ambiguous to you, but it’s just...me! The media always want to put you in a category, because it’s easier to sell something you know. But as a human being, I tend to defy all these categorizations.

Your function is to entertain?

Annie: That’s one of my functions, as an entertainer, but hopefully also a provocateur. My object is to find the part in myself that says something very true.

As a youngster, were you a heroworshipper?

Annie: Never. I never experienced it. There were people I admired, but never in a dramatic kind of way.

Do you think that’s unhealthy?

Annie: No, I think it’s very human. I think that human beings have a lot of weaknesses and a lot of strengths. Some people go through a phase in their life where they need to do that, like the Elvis thing where you used to see people kind of living their life through him. For most people, it’s just a phase, especially in their teens when they’re going through an identity crisis. When you get right down to it, 1 like anything that leads to a social life that isn’t just watching TV. Maybe that explains the attraction to you for the moment.

Annie: Well, I don’t know. The society we live in is so ruined. In a way—in a funny kind of naive sense—it’s possible that the situation of being at a gig is a little bit more than just sitting in your room watching television. It’s a little more real, something that’s happening at this moment when I’m on the stage. I’m faced with a song, the minutes tick by and I really have to be there in that moment entirely for that hour I’m onstage. I can’t run off the stage, I can’t stop in the middle, and you can’t switch it off either. Which is why live concerts are healthier than video.

Annie: Everything can be unhealthy. People see you as being very calm, very stand-offish, apart from everybody else. Is that you?

Annie: Very much a part of me, but I can also be warm. When people come to see us and I perform, they usually say they didn’t expect me to be so warm and so human. When I’m on stage, I feel so vulnerable, but I also feel very powerful. It’s sort of a mixture of those two things. I feel compassion for all people. There is a whole range of different emotions you feel, being able to perform.

How pleasing is all your success after going and making the album all on your own?

Annie: It’s very different being in the public eye. It’s very satisfying when we have a holiday and you can actually think about it. We are a little bit on the track at the moment. We’re like a big train going full speed ahead. But our concern is with our music. Making great records?

Annie: Yeah. We can’t be responsible for things like product and longevity. I really would go crazy trying to satisfy everybody’s needs.

You need somebody else to go out and sell it.

Annie: Somebody else has to do that. It would be untrue to say it isn’t great when people actually can sell something.

IMAN vs. DAVE

“Hello, Iman?” hollers Eddy.

“What’re you hollering for?”

Eddy looks resignedly around eddy-torial, where his fellow hacks are harmonizing on a medley of David Clayton-Thomas tunes.

“You make me so, so doggone happy, baby...” they sing.

“Never mind. I just wanted to ask you how Dave struck you close up.”

“That’s easy—he’s a hippie! Lots of hair all over. Looks like maybe he was heavy into drugs at one time. Nice guy, though, not like with Annie.”

“But is he interesting, or strictly minimum security?”

“No, he’s boring. Except when he talks about Annie.”

What sort of common denominator with any popular music do you have?

Dave: Well, I think one of the strongest things is Annie’s voice, ’cause she’s a singer’s singer, you know. It’s that, and it’s also our imagination, directing and producing our own videos and being so visually arresting. Good melodies too.

Is it rock w roll, or is it new wave?

Dave: I don’t think it’s rock ’n’ roll, like hey hey rock ’n’ roll, get down and boogie! It’s a bit more severe, especially with Annie being a very domineering type woman.

In comparison, obviously, is Grace Jones.

Dave: Well, image-wise, yeah. If Annie could eventually have blacked-up, she definitely would’ve. Also, music-wise, there’s that sense of androgyny. There is, however, some humor involved in what we do which people don’t see at first. We just know when we do a certain image and put it a certain way to certain music, we get a certain reaction. In England, I mean, Annie was always being rumored in the scandal sheets to be a man who had a sexchange operation. It really frightens some people. You see lots of men in drag, but to see a woman actually denying all that femininity can be disturbing.

The sexual undertones...

Dave: I think it’s more like assertive undertone. Females are always trying to assert themselves through a funny kind of way. It always seems to be lesbian-oriented to certain groups, whereas Annie is an individual.

She seems to be such a powerful figure.

Dave: Yeah, but she’s a fun person too. I’m thought to be the sort of back door, although it’s really all my ideas. The video, the music, the production and the whole thing is my idea. Annie is the tour front person.

IMAN vs. ANNIE & DAVE

There’s much speculation as to the exact nature of Dave and Annie’s.. .friendship. Some say that if the pair got any closer, they’d have to be considered clothing. Others insist it’s like the relationship between the clownfish and the sea anemone. That is, the fish hides amidst her poisonous tentacles.

In the most interesting—and comprehensible—portion of the interview, Iman got ’em talking about “it” like they were finalists in Mary Ellen’s Hint Off.

Do you consider yourselves extremists?

Annie: I don’t think I’m really an extremist. I am an emotional extremist in a way.

Dave: She doesn’t think she’s an extremist but she is.

Annie: Then it must be subjective.

Dave: Other people think she has a great personality!

Annie: Well, I’m not excessive, let’s put it that way.

Dave: It’s not like she goes around in an extreme way, say, in a punk way. But as a personality, she’s into extreme doses.

I don’t mean to be too personal, but are you two married, or mixed-up in an emotional way?

Dave: No, we have lived together but we don’t anymore.

Do you feel now you’ve settled down into something?

Annie: No!

Do you want to see it change again?

Annie: I don’t know if I want it to. It does change...

Dave: It changes every half hour..

Annie: We have a very strong bond between us, there’s no question about that. Sometimes it hurts. Like any friendship, it’s not just which ever way the wind blows. There are lots of stresses and strains, but sometimes you really get to know a person much better that way. If you really come to have a proper relationship with somebody, you can’t pretend you’re a nice person, because after a few hours or days or weeks, eventually the real person comes through. Then it’s a matter of how well you can handle the other person, how prepared you are to change or develop according to the other one’s needs.

Do you find that it comes through in the music?

Annie: Yes, definitely. If it were left to me, I would not have been able to complete the album. Because I’m hot and cold. One day I thought it was the greatest thing we were doing on the Earth, the next day I wanted to cut my throat because I’m like that. I’m emotionally extreme but I’m not excessive. I don’t go on drug binges. I don’t go on food binges. I don’t go out and get abusive physically with people. I am contained. But within myself, there are a lot of extremes. And you let them out in your music?

Dave: That’s right.

Annie: And he knows that. He’s the closest to me.

Is he your best friend?

Annie: Yes.

“Any last words on the subject, Iman?” asks Eddy needlessly.

“Yeah. Ambiguity means not being able to make up your mind.”