In their first joint interview in ten years, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart reveal that it's really bloody-minded perversity that got Eurythmics together again.

It's all right, they're coming back

'We're a pair of misfits, really," says Dave Stewart.  "We get everything wrong."  Annie Lennox smiles as Stewart expounds his theory.  "We're the most unlikely pair to be successful as a musical collaboration.  Every time there was a certain fashion, we were not in it.  We came into our own just as the new romantic thing was happening, and we were completely out of that scene.  Just when the synthesiser was peaking with New Order, we came out with a guitar and orchestra album; and just as the guitar thing was really taking off again, we brought out Savage, which was all electronic.  At the point where we were playing the biggest concerts, we just stopped.  We were always off on our own, doing our own thing.  But that's probably why we've managed to always be around."

"We," of course, is Eurythmics.  And before you quibble over the grammar of that previous sentence, remember that, as far as Eurythmics are concerned, We Too Are One.  That was the title of the last album they made before splitting up at the very end of the 1980s, and the 1990s largely proved the truth of it.  Although both achieved a degree of solo success that would have more than satisfied many musicians, only Lennox's first solo album, Diva, matched the success of the pair's best work together.  Her follow-up, Medusa, sold handsomely but received a critical drubbing.  For the latter half of the 1990s, Lennox concentrated on raising her young family.

Meanwhile, Stewart's restless hopping from project to project suggested a rich man having fun rather than a concerted attempt to maintain his sales or profile.  He released several albums--- first as the Spiritual Cowboys, then as Vegas, in collaboration with  former Specials singer Terry Hall, and finally under his own name--- with diminishing commercial returns.  At the same time, however, he pursued his other interests as a record producer (his client list has included Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger as well as Shakespears Sister, the band fronted by his ex-wife, Siobhan Fahey) and as what Dylan described as "a fearless innovator,"  pioneering music on the web and launching Innergy, a television channel dedicated to "the human potential, mind, body and spirit." Most recently he has directed the film Honest, currently being promoted in Cannes by its stars, Natalie and Nicole Appleton and Melanie Blatt from All Saints.

Dave and Annie met in the early 1970s.  Stewart, who had dreamed of being an athlete until a knee injury killed that ambition, was in the band Longdancer.  Lennox had left her native Scotland to study classical music at the Royal Academy but quickly realised this wasn't really what she wanted to do.  They lived together for four years but had already split up as a couple before they came together in the band the Tourists.  After a brief flush of success, notably with a cover version of "I Only Want to Be With You," the pair became Eurythmics, the 1980s' brightest band, whose string of sublime albums included Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Touch, Be Yourself Tonight and Revenge.

They got back together last year, purely to play at a leaving party for a friend.  Then they were asked to play at a charity concert. Then came the news that they were to be given a lifetime achievement award at the Brits.  The record company asked if Annie and Dave could possibly produce one more song together so that the label could repackage and repromote Eurythmics Greatest Hits. The bad news was that Lennox and Stewart didn't like the idea of tinkering with their definitive Greatest Hits album, which had spent three solid years in the charts and has gone platinum six times.  The good news was that they thought they might actually have a whole album's worth of new songs.

The success of that album, Peace, and a quickly sold-out tour confirmed that, for many, the band's music is timeless.  You could, however, be forgiven for thinking that Eurythmics have gone soft.  "Peace Is Just a Word," the third single from their comeback album, is yet another ballad.  It's a good one, mind, but still... we've already had "17 Again" and "I Saved the World Today."  What happened to the band who wrote "Ball and Chain," " Would I Lie To You," and "Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves"?

They can still do it.  Peace contains a couple of great rockers, including "Power to the Meek."  "I'm just a girl with a smoking gun," sings Lennox, instantly reminding you of how she originally exploded into our consciousness with her cropped hair, cross-dressing, and aggressive singing: the ballsiest woman in the world.  The sameness of the singles threatens to underplay one of the duo's great talents--- the sheer variety of pop styles that Stewart can play and Lennox can sing.  "With certain bands it doesn't matter which track is the single because they all sound the same, but we have always been eclectic," says Stewart.  "I've never really understood the notion that you get a sound and you're meant to be that sound forever," adds Lennox.  "Music is about exploring ideas.  That's what we've done."

"I think it is easy when you have somebody who has a voice that is instantly recognisable, like Annie," says Stewart.  "You can change your style a hundred times, but everybody knows it's us the minute she opens her mouth.  It would be awful if you were stuck with one sound... even though I'm sure Status Quo fans love Status Quo."

This is the pair's first interview together in ten years.  We're talking in The Church, the Crouch End studio that Stewart owns. It's a commercial studio, but we're sitting in a vast space reserved for the pair's own use.  Huge sofas sprawl across the room.  To one side is a 24-track recording set-up; to the other side is a combination of studio and rehearsal space, where Lennox and Stewart have been running through songs prior to their appearances at many of this summer's festivals around Europe.

Stewart plays me a tape of their reworked version of "Ball and Chain," which now sounds like lo-fi blues.  For a rehearsal, the passion of Lennox's singing and the intensity of Stewart's playing are remarkable, proof of Lennox's assertion that "If we were to stand up and play now, there is something about the two of us that would make us perform as if we were playing in a stadium.  All the intensity goes into playing or singing that song."

In contrast, their attitude toward life now seems agreeably casual.  "It's not like we're back together or we're not back together.  It's just we're doing this particular thing that we'd like to do.  Luckily, because the two of us can play on our own, we can just ring each other up, so it's basically back to where you were when you first started.  You say, well, let's go 'round to someone's house, and you play the guitar in the living room."

This attitude seems to be informed by the pair's eventual disgust with the pop world, which contributed to their breaking up in the first place.  At least, that's what you would deduce from some of the lyrics to "17 Again":  "All those fake celebrities, and all those vicious queens, all the stupid papers and the stupid magazines.  Sweet dreams are made of anything that gets you in the scene."

Lennox moves swiftly to distance herself from the lyric.  "That's one take," she says.  "I have different views at different times." Stewart, however, stands by the mood of the song.  "Anybody in pop music knows you are just surrounded by a pile of crap all the time, and you have to do all these dodgy TV shows, and suddenly you're in Germany and somebody says, 'That's your stage over there.  You come out of the oyster.'  And the people around you are there because they think suddenly you are going to make them loads of money.  You are surrounded by madness, and all the time you're trying to stay on the slippery pole.  It's still going on.  We've gone off to do American music awards, and some of the people arrive with six bodyguards and 46 dancers, and we just go on with a little blue acoustic guitar."

Lennox blames the break-up of Eurythmics on two factors.  First, a loss of control.  "When you're that successful, things have a momentum, and at a certain point you can't really tell whether you have created the momentum or it's creating you."  Second, bluntly:  "I think we got sick of constantly being in each other's company."

For much of their decade apart, Lennox focused on her family life.  She had two children with her husband, the Israeli film producer Uri Fruchtmann, from whom she recently separated.  "I'm not the same person I was ten years ago," she says.  "You could say I'm better, older, or wiser, I don't know.  I feel that I am more human, but I don't want to get sentimental about it, because it's not a sentimental process.  It's a very telling thing when you have children.  You have to be there for them; you've got to set an example, even when you're not sure what your example is.  And anyway, the world is changing so fast you don't know what is appropriate anymore.

"It takes me a long time to get onstage, and I think, 'oh, I'm not really a singer or a writer, I'm really a housewife and should be shopping in Sainsbury's.'  But once I'm up there I remember what it is, who I am, what to do.  I remember that I belong there, too."