One of the most iconic songs – and videos – of the 1980s turned 40 in March 2024. Here Comes The Rain Again, the electronic and powerful ballad by the band Eurythmics, solidified the status of the duo, which had just come from another classic hit, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), and transformed vocalist Annie Lennox into an icon.

Composed in 1983, Here Comes The Rain Again only exploded the following year due to its music video, which was one of MTV’s favorites. The opening track of the album Touch, which was their third, was essential in transforming them into a reference in pop and electronic music.

Annie and Dave Stewart have always been very original and detailed with their Art. The extremely melancholic song was composed in a hotel room, when the guitarist tried out a few notes (today the opening of the song), and Annie, looking out the window, noticed that “here comes the rain again”.

The synchronicity of the two together is undeniable, but it was the string arrangements conducted by Michael Kamen that made the song stand out, whose keyboard gained even more prominence with this. The images of the video immortalized the romantic, tragic, and somber atmosphere of a strange declaration of support for someone who is suffering from melancholy. “All the videos express an inner world happening between me and Dave — emotional tensions”, the vocalist would say in an interview in 1991.

The music video was directed by Dave Stewart himself, with the support of Jonathan Gershfield and Jon Roseman, and filmed entirely in Scotland, Annie’s homeland, more specifically in the North, on the island of Hoy, with cliffs over 137 meters high and part of the Orkney archipelago.

Aerial shots of the location are interspersed with Annie, in a nightgown and gas lantern, walking in the rain along the rocky coast and the top of the cliff. The importance of this visual choice by the vocalist was to contrast with that of Sweet Dreams, where she is in a suit and playing with her androgynous look. By being romantically dressed in a nightgown and singing about lost love, she reappears feminine and further fuels the deliberate confusion of her visual signature.

More than one of the Eurythmics‘ greatest hits, Here Comes The Rain Again is recognized as one of the best songs of the 1980s, with different musical textures and perfection in Annie’s vocals. And no, it’s not about “love”, it’s about overcoming depression. That’s why Annie is always on the edge of the cliff and is seen playing the song in and around a sunken ship.

Before they took the world by storm as a duo, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart were both in the band The Tourists and met when she was working as a waitress in Stewart’s hometown of Sunderland. They lived together for four years before ending their marriage and forming Eurythmics, whose name is a reference to a mime performed by Emile Jacques-Dalcrose. In 2023, they were finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

“Here Comes the Rain Again is kind of a perfect mix of things,” Stewart said in an interview years ago. “The whole song was about this indecisive thing, like here comes the depression, or here comes this downward spiral. But then it says, ‘So talk to me like lovers do.’ It’s the in and out of melancholy, a dark beauty that’s like the rose that’s at its darkest unfurling and blood red just before the garden dies. And capturing that in between these oblique statements and sentiments,” he explained. One who spoke and speaks to several generations.

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