On a New Year's Eve at Conny Plank's studio in Germany, a band that had just fallen apart started a new one. Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, the British duo who would call themselves Eurythmics, were not there to form a group. They were at a party, and the party turned into a jam session with Robert Görl of Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, while Yaki Liebezeit and Holger Czukay of Can played records nearby. By the end of that night, the producer Conny Plank had pushed them to record a demo, and that demo helped them land a contract with RCA Records. Eurythmics released In the Garden on October 16, 1981.
From The Tourists to drum machines
Eurythmics had only existed since 1980, after the collapse of The Tourists. Lennox and Stewart had been a couple, then they were not, but they kept working together. The Tourists had ended badly, with the main songwriter Peet Coombes struggling with drug addiction. Stewart wanted as much distance from that sound as possible. He sold two guitars and bought a Roland TR-606 drum machine, a Roland Space Echo and a synthesizer in their place. Punk, he said, had killed off interest in guitar albums in England.
The album they made was In the Garden, released on 16 October 1981 on RCA Records. The recording sessions ran from January to May of that year at Conny's Studio in Wolperath, near Cologne, in a farmhouse. Plank produced the record with the duo, and he took a third of the royalties for it. He had worked with them before, when they were in The Tourists, and now he became something more: a teacher. Plank and the musicians from Can showed Stewart how to capture different sounds and build them into tracks.
Invited players and a studio as instrument
The sessions were full of invited players. Clem Burke, the drummer from Blondie, came in for extra drums after Lennox met him in a New York club where the Blondie album Autoamerican was playing, and persuaded him to travel to Germany. Robert Görl also played drums. The studio itself became an instrument. Plank encouraged experiments with microphone placement, hanging them in a barn and above a well. In 'She's Invisible Now', a typewriter serves as a musical counterpoint, its clatter working against the melody.
The record was a deliberate break from rock convention. Stewart and Lennox built the sound around machines and atmosphere, mixing new wave, synth-pop and experimental electronics. Plank taught Stewart how to record unusual sounds and place them inside a song, a skill Stewart later credited as preparation for his own career as a producer. The album was a workshop as much as a debut, a place where failure was possible and ideas were tested in real time.
No sales and a strange tour
But In the Garden did not sell. It missed the charts entirely, and RCA gave it little promotional support. Two singles came out of the album: 'Never Gonna Cry Again' reached number 63 in the UK Singles Chart, while 'Belinda' did not chart. The duo responded by doing something strange on tour. They abandoned amplifiers, plugging their equipment into a mixing desk placed on stage next to the drummer. The sound came through the PA system and studio monitors. Stewart called the setup 'a giant HI-FI turned up full'. Some audience members assumed the band was miming, because there was no noise coming from the speakers.
In the Garden was not a hit, but it was the record where Eurythmics learned what they did not want to be. It was a turning point disguised as a debut, an album made by two people leaving a broken band, a failed romance and a dying guitar scene behind them. The farmhouse near Cologne became the place where Lennox and Stewart rebuilt themselves around machines, strange sounds and a producer who believed in the experiment more than the market.
It was a turning point disguised as a debut, an album made by two people leaving a broken band, a failed romance and a dying guitar scene behind them.
The album was reissued on 14 November 2005 as part of RCA's Deluxe Edition series, with bonus tracks added. In 2021, Classic Pop placed In the Garden at number 40 on its list of the best debut albums of the 1980s. It remains a record that matters less for its sales than for what it set in motion: a duo learning to build songs out of drum machines, typewriters and microphone placements, long before anyone knew their names.