Alison Moyet, singer, songwriter
I’d left school at 16 and kept getting sacked from jobs in shops because I was so easily distracted. I was singing in punk bands and my only ambition was to headline at the Hope & Anchor in London. Then Vince Clarke answered my advert in Melody Maker and suddenly I was a pop star with Yazoo.
After Vince split the band up, I was subject to a record company injunction that meant I couldn’t record for a year. My lawyer stopped taking my calls, I became agoraphobic and I couldn’t even listen to music because it hurt too much. Eventually, I got back to working and made the Alf album but I felt so disconnected I gave up trying to take control and was happy to be led.
For my second album, Raindancing, my new manager suggested I record in Los Angeles with Jimmy Iovine, who’d produced U2, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen’s The River and so on. His track record was eye-watering. But I went out there on my own and it was a really lonely time. Often, Jimmy wasn’t there. I’d be put in rooms with engineers and big session musicians, then suddenly have to get out of the studio because a bigger act was coming in.
When Dave Stewart from Eurythmics came in, it was a big relief. He was warm, eccentric, excitable, daft and full of energy, everything I liked. Jimmy put us together to write a song, which wasn’t a normal way of writing for me – I’d never done it before – but I wasn’t intimidated because I liked Dave a lot. We were together for the shortest time but enough for him to come up with a chord progression and a melody idea. I took off to the room I was renting and wrote the lyrics for Is This Love? that night.
The lyrics are basically me being in quite a dark place but trying to subvert it, in a very GCSE English kind of way. The first line – “In a fleeting moment of a restless day, driven to a distraction, I was captured by the game” – is a sort of mix-up of the game of love and more personal stuff going on in my life. It’s become my most popular song. Forty years on, I sing it with a more Twin Peaks vibe now, but there’s an innocent joy to it – which I think came from Dave’s energy – and a universal simplicity. You don’t have to struggle to get the meaning. You can just sing along.
Dave Stewart, songwriter
I became friends with Jimmy when Eurythmics first toured America. We had the same sense of humour and I ended up living in his house. People would come over and I was always being asked to produce records or write songs, but not in the way of having six people trying to write a hit – it was more happenstance. I hadn’t written songs at all until I was involved in a huge motorway pile-up in Germany and punctured my lung. In the hospital, coming round from a very painful operation, I had an epiphany, and embraced the idea of a vortex of chaos as a way of life and a means of songwriting.
When Alison came in Jimmy just said: “Hey, this is Alison Moyet. You should get in a room together and write a song.” Before I knew it, having never met, we were sat in a room with nothing in it. I had an acoustic guitar and Is This Love? just tumbled out between us really quickly. The words are all great but Alison came up with one of my favourite lyrics: “Let our bodies be twisted but never our minds.”
The original hit version has an electronic feel, because it was the 80s. To tell the truth, I prefer the version she does live now: the slower, moodier, atmospheric version with strings suits the words much better.
Is This Love? has always been credited to Alison and “Jean Guiot”. I used a pseudonym because I didn’t want to dilute the songs written by Annie Lennox and me for Eurythmics and it wasn’t important to me to announce to the world: “Whoo hoo, I wrote this!” I actually used three or four pseudonyms back then. Some years later, my management company were looking at my statements and said: “We’re confused. Who are all these people?” I had to admit that they were all me.
• Key, Alison Moyet’s album of reworkings and new songs, is released on 4 October. She tours the UK in February and March 2025
