Aretha Franklin “didn’t have a clue” who Eurythmics were when she recorded a hit single with them
Annie Lennox was looking for a fresh start in 1985.
After Eurythmics hit number one in the UK with their previous studio album, 1983’s Touch, Lennox and her bandmate Dave Stewart had spent much of 1984 knee-deep in, well, 1984, literally writing and recording the soundtrack to the film adaptation of George Orwell’s classic novel.
The goal with the next Eurythmics album was to shed some of the trademark synth sound of the band’s earlier work and to bring in more of the organic, soul sound of their live shows, something altogether peppier than scoring a dystopian futurescape. One of the big moments in this transitional phase came with Lennox’s idea for a new feminist anthem suited to the ‘80s.
“It’s funny, because I woke up one morning and I had the whole song in my head, and that doesn’t happen very often,” Lennox told Billboard in 2002, referring to the 1985 hit single ‘Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves’,” adding, “I still feel that women are the unsung heroines; mother, housekeeper, housewife—it’s the most important thing in the world, and it’s not given the reverence that it ought to. [It is] by women. We know.”
Lennox wrote the song almost like a manifesto; rather than asking for that overdue recognition from a position of weakness, women were going to carve a new path on their own terms: “Now there was a time / When they used to say / That behind every ‘great man’ / There had to be a ‘great woman’ / But in these times of change / You know that it’s no longer true / So we’re coming out of the kitchen / ‘Cause there’s something we forgot to say to you”.
When Lennox was developing the song, Tina Turner’s similarly themed ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It’ was getting a lot of radio airplay, and the former couldn’t help but hear Turner’s voice in her mind as she wrote the lyrics to ‘Sisters’.
“That song was written for Tina Turner,” Lennox freely admitted to Billboard.
Unfortunately, despite early indications that Turner was interested in a collaboration, schedules couldn’t be aligned, and so a surprising left turn was taken. After some strings were pulled in various record company offices, the Eurythmics were off to Detroit to record their latest single with the one and only ‘Queen of Soul’, Aretha Franklin. Lennox and Stewart were thrilled, but the feeling might not have been 100 per cent mutual.
“Aretha didn’t know who we were,” Lennox admitted, a fact which might have been a tad surprising considering the amount of success Eurythmics had enjoyed the past few years, “She didn’t have a clue. I was quite intimidated, because how can you sing with Aretha? It’s just, ‘try to stay on the bicycle’. I just wanted her to feel comfortable.”
Regardless of how everyone felt in the studio, the resulting single, recorded with several members of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers as the backing band, was a big success, earning a Grammy nomination and reaching number nine in the UK and number 18 in America. Lennox was praised for holding her own with the Queen, and Aretha reached a new, younger audience in the process. The only mild annoyance, considering the important message of the song, was that a lot of people seemed to think Lennox was talking about a different type of self-service.
“It’s not about masturbation,” she explained to Billboard with a chuckle, “but it could be… Everybody thought it was. Listen to it again: ‘Doing it for yourself… Ringing their own bells’. But it was never intended that way.”
