Eurythmics built their reputation on ice: synthesisers, detachment, Annie Lennox’s cropped orange hair and androgynous stare. So the warmest, most joyful record of their career arrived as a kind of beautiful contradiction. There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart), released in the summer of 1985, is a gospel-tinged celebration that opens with Lennox harmonising with herself like a one-woman choir and soars on a harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder. It also did what none of their colder classics ever managed: in July 1985 it became the duo’s first — and, to this day, only — number one single in Britain.
The song came from a deliberate change of direction. After the stark electronic triumph of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) and Touch, Lennox and Dave Stewart decamped to Paris to make Be Yourself Tonight, an album that traded synth minimalism for the sounds they had grown up loving: Motown, soul and pop. “There must be an angel” is the sound of that turn, executed with total conviction.
A New Direction in Paris
Be Yourself Tonight was recorded in Paris and produced by Stewart, and everything about it breathes differently from the duo’s earlier work. Where Sweet Dreams had been assembled in a makeshift studio above a warehouse, the new album used a full band — bassist Dean Garcia and drummer Olle Romo anchor There Must Be an Angel — with orchestral strings arranged by Michael Kamen. The guest list told the same story: the album also featured Eurythmics’ duet with Aretha Franklin, Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves. Lennox and Stewart were no longer hiding behind the machines; they were writing pop songs and inviting soul royalty to help sing them.
The turn was also personal. Lennox and Stewart had begun the decade as lovers in a struggling band, the Tourists; the romance ended, and instead of splitting the act they rebuilt it as a partnership of exes — one of pop’s most famous exercises in creative stubbornness. By 1985 the thaw in their music mirrored a thaw between them: the new album sounded like two people rediscovering pleasure in each other’s company. Its lead single, Would I Lie to You?, announced the change with a full-throated soul revue arrangement and reached number five in America. There Must Be an Angel went further still, into outright joy.
The song itself, written by Lennox and Stewart, is built on a rush of pure delight. It begins a cappella, Lennox’s voice multiplying into layered harmonies before the band crashes in, and the lyric never complicates its feeling: this must be heaven, there must be an angel playing with my heart. Spin magazine, reviewing the single, placed it “in the tradition of the best MOR pop, reminiscent of Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick,” adding that it was “sweet but not syrupy, the background voices so otherworldly I can only guess if they are human or synthesized.” They were human — mostly Lennox, with backing singer Angel Cross adding to the choir. The androgynous ice queen of 1983 had written the happiest love song of 1985.
Enter Stevie
The record’s crowning touch was almost an afterthought: a harmonica solo, and not just any harmonica player. Stewart produced the overdub session himself, with Stevie Wonder — Motown’s own genius, then riding his own number one with I Just Called to Say I Love You — agreeing to play on the track. Stewart recalled the session years later, in an interview with Q magazine. At one point Wonder, characteristically modest, stopped and asked whether what he was playing was good enough. Stewart assured him that it was, and suggested he simply improvise for sixteen bars.
Wonder responded by playing sea shanties on the harmonica as a joke — a burst of mischief that, Stewart said, filled the studio with laughter and levity, and which Stewart captured on a cassette he kept. Beneath the jokes, the takes were gold: when the finished solo arrives in the middle of There Must Be an Angel, it doesn’t decorate the song so much as bless it, Wonder’s phrasing answering Lennox’s voice like a second singer. Billboard singled out “Wonder’s harmonica bridge” alongside Lennox’s “absolutely happy” lead vocal, and Cash Box praised the combination of “Annie Lennox harmonies, slick Dave Stewart production work and Stevie Wonder’s incredible harmonica.”
Context made the cameo even sweeter. In the mid-eighties, Wonder’s harmonica had become a kind of pop talisman: he had guested, uncredited, behind Chaka Khan’s I Feel for You in 1984 and sung on We Are the World in the spring of 1985, all while his own I Just Called to Say I Love You sat at number one around the world. Stewart knew exactly what he was booking — not a session player, but a blessing from the high priest of the Motown sound Eurythmics were channelling. Wonder, for his part, seems to have treated the whole thing as a lark: the most gifted musician in the building, checking whether he was good enough, then clowning with sea shanties.
Number One at Last
RCA released the single on 24 June 1985, with Grown Up Girls on the B-side. In Britain it climbed steadily and on 27 July 1985 reached number one, holding the summit for a week. It also topped the charts in Ireland, Norway and Finland, reached the top ten across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and peaked at number 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 in America. For a duo who had conquered the world with Sweet Dreams — a number one in the US that had stalled at number two at home — the Angel finally delivered the British chart-topper that had eluded them. Remarkably, it remains the only one: Eurythmics would score hit after hit for the rest of the decade, but never again stood at number one in their own country.
The numbers told a story of a band at its commercial peak: the single reached number five on the European Top 100, a special dance mix carried it onto America’s club charts, and Be Yourself Tonight produced four hit singles in all. In the streaming era the song has been certified Silver in Britain — respectable for a record whose “choir,” in 1985, had to be assembled one Annie Lennox at a time on multitrack tape.
The video matched the song’s theatrical heaven. Directed by Eddie Arno and Mark Innocenti and shot at the New Wimbledon Theatre in London in June 1985, it stages the song as a Baroque court entertainment: Stewart, bewigged and bored, plays Louis XIV, the Sun King, while Lennox is presented to perform for the court surrounded by singing cherubs and angels — among the cherubs, eagle-eyed viewers can spot a young Steven O’Donnell, later famous as an actor. The Sun King begins indifferent and ends entranced, which is more or less what happened to the British record-buying public.
The Angel Flies Again
The song’s afterlife has kept the heaven theme running. In 2001 the German group No Angels re-recorded it as the theme to the animated film The Little Polar Bear, and their version spent five weeks at number one in Germany and also topped the Austrian chart. Kylie Minogue and Luciano Pavarotti are among the many others who have performed it, each drawn to the same quality the Spin reviewer heard in 1985: sweetness without syrup, joy without irony.
Eurythmics made more famous records, and darker, more influential ones. But There Must Be an Angel is the one where the mask of cool slipped entirely — two former lovers turned musical partners, in a Paris studio, building a choir out of one woman’s voice and handing the solo to Stevie Wonder, who delivered it between jokes as if number ones were the easiest thing in the world. The angel they sang about was fictional. The one on harmonica was real, and he played sea shanties between takes.
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