By the autumn of 1983, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had a problem most musicians would kill for: they had to follow Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). The icy synth record made in an attic had turned two broke ex-lovers into the defining duo of the decade, and now everything they did next would be measured against it. The song they chose to open their third album, Touch, began in a New York hotel room on a grey day, with one of them idly playing a cheap Casio keyboard. It was finished in a London studio that was still a building site, with an orchestra scattered through the building wherever there was room — the cellists lined up in a corridor, the violinists in the kitchen, the violists in the bathroom.
Here Comes the Rain Again is a love song addressed to someone who is not there, sung as weather. Its singer stands in the rain asking an absent lover to talk to her, walk with her, like lovers do. What makes the record unforgettable is that nothing about it is quite settled — not the chord it is built on, not the feeling it describes, and certainly not the way it was recorded.
A Grey Day at the Mayflower Hotel
The song was written in New York, where Stewart and Lennox were staying at the Mayflower Hotel. It was an overcast day, and Stewart was playing what he called melancholy, A-minor-ish chords on a Casio keyboard, slipping a B natural into the progression where a stricter harmony would not have put it. Lennox came over, looked out of the window at the grey skies and the New York skyline, and spontaneously sang the line the weather had handed her: here comes the rain again. The two of them built the rest of the song out of that moment and that mood.
Stewart has explained that the stray B natural is the whole point of the song. It leaves the minor chord suspended, undecided, neither one thing nor the other — and that, he said, is exactly the feeling the lyric is chasing. The song wanders in and out of melancholy: on one side, depression, the downward spiral, the rain falling on her head like a memory; on the other, the plea to be talked to like a lover. It is a song about a feeling that will not resolve, written around a chord that will not resolve either.
Three Weeks in a Half-Built Church
Back in London, Eurythmics were no longer working in a borrowed attic. They had taken over a former church in Crouch End, North London — the building that became The Church Studios — but in 1983 it was still partly under construction. That did not slow them down. Touch was written largely on the road during their world tour, then recorded and mixed at the Church in about three weeks, with engineer Jon Bavin and the duo’s new twenty-four-track setup. Stewart produced, as he had on Sweet Dreams.
The bones of Here Comes the Rain Again were electronic: programmed drums, sequencers, Lennox’s keyboards, and Stewart adding colour on a Gretsch Country Club guitar fitted with a Bigsby tremolo arm. But Stewart wanted something no synthesizer in the building could give him. He wanted real strings — and he wanted them to sound dramatic, stabbing, alive. Getting them into the building turned out to be the easy part. Fitting them in was another matter.
An Orchestra in the Kitchen and the Bathroom
The arranger Stewart called was Michael Kamen, the American composer who would later become famous for film scores such as Die Hard and Lethal Weapon. Kamen came recommended by Stewart’s ex-wife, Pamela Wilkinson, whom Stewart had been visiting while parts of the Church were still being built. Kamen wrote the string arrangement, and the players were drawn from the British Philharmonic Orchestra.
Then came the logistics. A half-finished studio does not have an orchestral room, so the musicians recorded wherever they could be put. The cellists sat in a row in a corridor leading to a door. The violinists were installed in the kitchen. The violists were put in the bathroom. Cables and microphones were run throughout the building, all of them feeding a Soundcraft mixing console positioned at the top of a spiral staircase. Once the strings were captured, the orchestral tracks were blended on top of the synthesized backing track — a real orchestra, recorded in a kitchen and a bathroom, folded into a record built on drum machines.
It should not have worked, and instead it became the song’s signature. Kamen’s strings do not wash over the track the way strings usually do on a ballad; they jab and surge in rhythm, pizzicato lines pricking through the synthesizers while the full section swells behind Lennox’s voice. Cash Box, reviewing the single, heard “pizzicato strings and chiming, open chord guitar work” under a vocal it called “familiarly sultry and wispy.”
Five Minutes, Faded Out
The finished song runs a full five minutes, and even that was a compromise. On Touch itself, where it opens the album, the track was edited, fading out at around four and a half minutes; the complete five-minute version did not appear on any Eurythmics album until the American edition of their Greatest Hits in 1991. The seven-inch single offered an edit of just under four minutes, though the American release kept the full five minutes — and American radio stations, tellingly, often played the long album-length version anyway. It had been built as an album opener, a piece of scene-setting rather than a tailor-made single, and it behaved like one; yet it kept pulling listeners toward its full, unhurried length.
Number Four in America
RCA released Here Comes the Rain Again as a single on 13 January 1984 — the third single from Touch in Britain, but the first in the United States, where the album campaign was running behind the British one. Its B-side was Paint a Rumour. Billboard reported that in the week of 28 January 1984 it was the second most added song on American radio’s Hot 100 reporting stations, and it climbed steadily from there.
In Britain it reached No. 8, Eurythmics’ fifth consecutive Top 10 single at home. In America it did even better, peaking at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 1984 — their second American Top 10 hit — while also reaching No. 8 in Canada and Ireland and the Top 5 of Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart. The single was later certified Silver in Britain and Gold in Canada, finished 1984 at No. 38 on Billboard’s year-end Hot 100, and its parent album completed the job: Touch became Eurythmics’ first UK No. 1 album and reached No. 7 in the United States, where it was certified Platinum.
A Nightgown on the Orkneys
The video, filmed in December 1983, a month before the single’s release, was directed by Stewart with Jonathan Gershfield and Jon Roseman, and it took the song’s mood literally. It opens with an aerial shot of the Old Man of Hoy, the great sea stack off the island of Hoy in the Orkney Islands, far off Scotland’s northern coast. Lennox walks the rocky shore and the cliff tops in a nightgown, carrying a lantern, and explores a derelict cottage. Stewart follows with a video camera, filming her. The two were shot separately and then superimposed into the same frames — together on screen, never quite together at all, which is precisely what the song is about.
The rain has never really stopped. Here Comes the Rain Again became one of the duo’s defining records, the moment their synth-pop grew an orchestra and a heart without losing its chill, and its imagery has kept washing back into pop culture — Madonna even sampled it as an interlude on her Sticky & Sweet Tour in 2008–2009. It remains the perfect Eurythmics paradox: a song about emotional weather, written by looking out of a hotel window, and recorded with half an orchestra in the bathroom.
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