To Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Eurythmics Savage Album, each day we are publishing items from our archives from photos, memorabilia, featuring rare records and much much more!
Over the next 30 days we’re going to show a whole selection of videos taken from the Savage era, or where Dave and Annie have performed a track from Savage at a later date.
Where better to kick of other than the video for Beethoven, for most of us, it was the first imagery we saw for the new album, and in true D&A style, it certainly wasn’t what we were expecting.
The decision to create a video album to accompany the record was based upon the fact that the band did not want to embark on another full length tour that year (having completed the worldwide “Revenge Tour” some months earlier). Another factor influencing the project may have been the band Blondie, who made a similar video album for their 1979 LP Eat to the Beat, which also featured a combination of straight performance as well as more conceptual clips.
Dave Stewart’s only prominent appearances on the video album are limited to three tracks (and some archive concert footage in a fourth) though these particular clips do not appear to be directly related to the recurring theme. The running order of the tracks on the video album differ from that of the original album, making for a more cohesive concept piece.
This is both the first song on the album and the video album. In it, Lennox begins by portraying a conservatively-dressed, middle-class housewife alone in her apartment. She is seen obsessively performing her “domestic role” by cleaning, cooking, and knitting. Also seen in the apartment are a little girl wearing heavy make-up, a blonde wig and a Shirley Temple-style dress, and a bald man – also wearing heavy make-up and a low-cut evening gown.
Neither of the little girl or the man are actually noticed by the housewife character, even though they appear in the same room as her. Whilst the little girl proceeds to run riot and tear up the apartment that Lennox’s prim housewife character has so diligently tried to keep in order, the bald man stands quietly in the background. Unable to cope with this turmoil in her neat, orderly little world, the housewife character finally breaks down and proceeds to undergo a transformation into an overtly sexual blonde vamp character.
Now heavily made up in a low-cut gown, she effectively merges the three personas of the little girl (blonde, wild and attention-seeking), the man (uninhibited sexuality), and the housewife into one. Free of the constraints of her housewife persona, she then proceeds to trash the apartment herself and brazenly sashays out onto the street outside. Eurythmics’ “Beethoven” video was ranked number 98 in a Rolling Stone magazine chart of the Top 100 Videos of All Time, published in the mid-1990s.