“Would I Lie To You?” by Eurythmics

"Would I Lie To You?" kicked off Eurythmics' Be Yourself Tonight in 1985, and it's the moment Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart pulled the plug on the synth lab and plugged into a live band. The pair wrote it together, Stewart produced it and played guitar alongside his electronic gear, and the old programmed chill gives way to a hot rock-and-R&B stomp: Nathan East on bass, Olle Romo on drums, Benmont Tench pumping the organ, and Martin Dobson's sax and Dave Plews' trumpet blaring like a soul revue that crashed the wrong party.

Lennox plays a woman who has caught her man cheating and is walking out the door for good, and she sells every ounce of the scorn, all brass lungs and withering sarcasm. Mary Lambert's video cast actor Steven Bauer as the boyfriend on the receiving end, MTV played it relentlessly, and stills from it ended up all over the album's sleeve.

It climbed to number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, the duo's third and final American top 10, and in Australia it went all the way to the top of the Kent Music Report, their biggest hit there.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.