Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox speak to 24Matins about how they were bracing themselves for the failure of Eurythmics

“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” has become a classic in pop music and marked a commercial breakthrough for synth-pop. But before the Eurythmics wrote it, the duo feared they were finished.

“I remember that I was in a terrible mood that day. I actually thought we should give up,” Annie Lennox recalled of the 1982 recording session in London with her bandmate Dave Stewart.

“I’m sitting there feeling like I’m probably going to tell him that I’m going back to Scotland and just forget it,” said the Aberdeen native, whose first album with Stewart as the Eurythmics had been a commercial failure.

Suddenly, Lennox found a deceptively simple melody on the keyboard. And Stewart, generally a guitarist, quickly came up with a beat as he tinkered with an early drum machine.

“Everything was oddly infectious and powerful, but we didn’t — and the record label definitely didn’t — choose it as a single off the album until about the third or fourth choice,” Stewart said.