In 1984, at the peak of their powers, Eurythmics were handed one of the most prestigious assignments in film music: scoring the big-screen adaptation of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” released in the very year of its title, a once-in-a-century alignment of art and calendar. What should have been a triumph became one of the messiest public feuds in soundtrack history. The film’s director didn’t want their music. The studio used it anyway. An awards ceremony turned into a public detonation. And somehow, out of the wreckage, came one of the duo’s greatest singles. This is the story of the soundtrack nobody wanted and the hit nobody could stop.
The Commission
The logic was impeccable. Eurythmics were coming off “Touch,” their second straight smash, and Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were the most exciting sound in British pop: cold, sleek, futuristic, and just unsettling enough to feel dangerous. They had already proven they could work to a visual brief, and Stewart was fast becoming one of the most sought-after producers in the business. Virgin Films, which was financing director Michael Radford’s adaptation of Orwell’s dystopia, wanted music with contemporary voltage, and Richard Branson’s company saw the commercial logic clearly. A film called “1984,” released in 1984, scored by the defining electronic duo of the moment: it practically marketed itself.
So Virgin commissioned Eurythmics to write the music. Lennox and Stewart took the assignment seriously. They immersed themselves in Orwell’s world and built a soundscape to match: pounding electronic percussion, stabbing synthesizers, fragments of Lennox’s voice processed into ghostly textures, Stewart intoning the title year like a transmission from the Ministry of Truth. It was some of the darkest, most claustrophobic music they had ever made, and they delivered it in good faith, believing they were giving the film exactly what it needed.
The Film
Whatever the music dispute, Radford’s film was a serious undertaking. John Hurt starred as Winston Smith, the hollowed-out civil servant who dares to keep a diary and to love, and Richard Burton, in his final film role, played the chilling O’Brien. Radford shot with a fanatical fidelity to the novel, filming in the actual London locations Orwell had written about, on the very dates the fictional events were supposed to occur, with Roger Deakins’s desaturated cinematography draining the color out of Airstrip One. It was the kind of painstaking literary adaptation that wins awards and respect, the opposite of a pop vehicle.
That context explains Radford’s fury. He hadn’t made a film that needed a hit single. He had made a monument, and he believed the monument needed silence, strings, and dread, not synthesizers. Whether he was right about the music is a separate question from whether he was right about the process. On the process, it is hard not to sympathize: imagine spending years building a cathedral and arriving to find someone has installed a neon sign.
The Director Who Said No
There was one problem. Nobody had told Michael Radford.
Radford, making his feature directing debut, had a completely different vision for the film’s sound. Months earlier, he had commissioned a traditional orchestral score from composer Dominic Muldowney, all strings and solemnity, the kind of music a serious literary adaptation was supposed to have. He had no interest in synth-pop, however distinguished its practitioners. When he learned that Virgin had hired Eurythmics without his approval, he was furious.
From Radford’s perspective, the situation was an outrage: the money men overriding the artist, commerce steamrolling cinema. From Virgin’s perspective, it was business: they had financed the film, they held the right of final cut, and a Eurythmics score would sell tickets and records. The two sides were never reconciled. They were simply overruled, one by the other, and the film became a battleground with a soundtrack.
Final Cut
Virgin exercised its right of final cut and did exactly what Radford feared. Muldowney’s orchestral cues were stripped out and replaced with the Eurythmics material across much of the film. One Eurythmics song, the haunting “Julia,” was heard in its entirety over the closing credits. Only fragments of Muldowney’s score survived in the theatrical cut, most prominently the diegetic state anthem of Oceania, the patriotic music the film’s totalitarian regime plays for its own citizens.
The result was a film at war with itself, or at least with its own director. Radford’s bleak, faithful, Deakins-shot vision of Airstrip One now pulsed with cold electronic music he despised, every synth stab a reminder of the battle he had lost in the editing room. Audiences, for the most part, didn’t mind; many never knew about the dispute. But the people who made the film knew, and the resentment festered all the way to awards season.
The Awards-Night Detonation
The feud went public in spectacular fashion. At the Evening Standard British Film Awards, Radford used his acceptance speech to denounce the Eurythmics music, declaring it had been forced on his film against his wishes, and aiming his fire directly at the Virgin executives who had forced it. The film’s producer, Simon Perry, went further, dismissing the music as rubbish in the press.
Stewart’s response was dignified and, by all accounts, sincere. The duo, he said, had acted entirely in good faith. Virgin had commissioned them, they had done the work, and they had no idea Radford already had a score in place. They assumed, reasonably, that everyone was on the same page. They were the last to know they were the villains of someone else’s story. It was a bewildering position for two musicians at the top of their game: celebrated by the studio that hired them, denounced by the director they had tried to serve, and caught in a corporate power struggle they had never signed up for. Behind the scenes, the dispute turned legal, and the soundtrack album was even temporarily withdrawn from the market while the lawyers sorted out who had the right to do what to whom.
“Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)”
And then there was the single. Released in October 1984, “Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four)” was Eurythmics’ electrifying distillation of Orwell’s nightmare into four minutes of pop confrontation. The title came straight from the novel’s vocabulary: in Oceania, unauthorized desire is “sexcrime,” and the song’s pounding repetition of the phrase felt like a Thought Police broadcast you could dance to. It was harsh, strange, and deliberately uncomfortable, built on electronic drums, slashing synths, and sampled fragments of Lennox’s voice.
It was also a hit. The single reached No. 4 in Britain, earned a Silver disc for more than 200,000 copies sold, and became one of the duo’s signature songs, its promotional video intercutting the duo’s icy performance with clips from the film. American audiences heard it differently, the word “sexcrime” kept it off some radio playlists, but on the dance floors it was unstoppable. In a delicious irony, the song was ultimately dropped from the film itself before release, surviving only as background music in the trailer. The soundtrack’s most famous piece of music never actually appeared in the soundtrack’s film.
“Julia” and the Album
The full album, “1984 (For the Love of Big Brother),” arrived in November 1984, and it was a strange artifact: a soundtrack album for a film whose director disowned it, featuring considerably altered versions of the music heard on screen. Most of it was instrumental, all cold atmosphere and dread, with only two real songs. “Julia,” the aching ballad for Winston Smith’s forbidden lover, was released as a single and peaked just outside the UK Top 40, a modest showing for a song that closed one of the year’s most serious films.
The album’s odd status has only grown more fascinating with time. Multiple versions of the film now circulate: some dominated by Eurythmics, some restored to Muldowney’s orchestral score, some mixing the two. The credits, in a compromise that pleased no one, read “Music by Eurythmics and Dominic Muldowney,” two names joined by lawyers rather than by art.
Heard on its own, away from the courtroom drama, the album is one of the oddest and most compelling records Eurythmics ever made. The instrumentals, with titles like “Ministry of Love” and “For the Love of Big Brother,” are pure atmosphere: cold, metallic, genuinely unsettling, closer to a film score in the modern sense than to anything else in the duo’s catalog. Lennox’s voice drifts through the machinery like a ghost. It is the sound of two pop stars deliberately abandoning pop, and it has aged far better than anyone in 1984 had a right to expect.
The album has enjoyed a strange afterlife. When Eurythmics’ eight studio albums were reissued on vinyl in 2018, the “1984” soundtrack sat among them without apology, no longer a footnote but a chapter. New generations of listeners, encountering it without the baggage of the Radford feud, have heard what the duo intended all along: a sincere, skillful attempt to score a nightmare. The controversy made it notorious. The music made it last.
Who Was Right?
With forty years of hindsight, the verdict is gloriously unsettled. Radford had a point: a director’s vision matters, and the high-handedness of the studio was indefensible as a matter of process. No artist wants to learn from the newspapers that their work has been replaced. But the music itself has aged remarkably well. Critics revisiting the film have called the Eurythmics score timeless and otherworldly, a perfect complement to the movie’s altered reality, and argued that its cold electronics capture Orwell’s dread better than any orchestra could.
Perhaps the real lesson is about what happens when commerce and art collide at full speed. Virgin got its hit single and its marketable soundtrack. Radford got his film, sort of, and the satisfaction of saying so in public. Muldowney got a raw deal, his careful orchestral work reduced to fragments. And Eurythmics, caught in the middle through no fault of their own, walked away with one of the defining singles of their career and a story they would tell for the rest of their lives. Nobody won the fight. The music, stubbornly, survived it.
In the end, Big Brother got his soundtrack, whether he wanted it or not. The telescreens of Airstrip One were supposed to watch everyone. For one strange year, they were playing Eurythmics, and the sound of the dystopia turned out to be a synthesizer. Orwell might have appreciated the irony. He certainly would have recognized the power struggle, the Ministry of Truth rewriting the credits, the artist crushed between the state and the market. Some soundtracks are remembered for how well they fit their films. This one is remembered for the fight it started, and for the hit single that outlived the fight entirely.
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