The Tourists
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The Tourists (1977 - 1980) were a moderately successful British pop band, however are better known due to two of their members (Annie Lennox & David A Stewart going on to achieve superstardom as Eurythmics.
The band formed around a nucleus of two musicians from Sunderland in north-east England, Pete Coombes and David A. Stewart. Coombes was a guitarist singer-songwriter with a folky style. As a teenager, guitarist Stewart had been a member of folk band Longdancer, who were signed to Elton John's Rocket Records label.
The two moved to London and encountered Scottish singer Annie Lennox, who had dropped out her course at the Royal Academy of Music where she had been studying flute and keyboards, to pursue her ambitions in pop music. Lennox & Stewart quickly became lovers.
The three of them initally called themselves The Catch, and released a single Borderline under this moniker in 1977 on Logo Records, which failed to chart.
By 1978, they had become a viable live gigging band, recruiting Malaysian bass guitarist Eddie Chin and drummer Jim Toomey, re-christening themselves The Tourists.
This saw the beginning of a productive two years for the band - they recorded three albums (The Tourists, Reality Effect, and Luminious Basement) and half a dozen singles, including (minor) hit Blind Among the Flower and two major hits So Good to be Back Home Again and the Dusty Springfield cover I Only Want to be with You.
Coombes was the band's main songwriter, although later releases saw the first fledgling compositions by Lennox and Stewart. The bands music expanded upon their folk roots, demonstrating some punky energy (often termed power-pop at the time) and also reggae and 1960s pop influences. A key development was their decision to record later material with legenary German avant-garde producer Conny Plank.
The band were unhappy with their Logo contract (which saw their management, song publishing and recording contract all owned by the same company), and legal wranglings secured a transfer to RCA Records in 1980.
The band toured extensively in the UK and abroad, but despite modest chart success, they tended to be given a critical savaging by the punk-championing UK music press. This, combined with the legal wranglings and also some personal tensions led to the group disbanding in 1980 whilst on a world tour.
Coombes and Chin reputedly began a new project, but this met with little success and Coombes, despite originally being the main artistic force behind The Tourists, drifted out of the music business into obscurity.
Lennox and Stewart split as a couple, but decided to continue working as a experimental musical partnership, under the name Eurythmics. They retained their RCA recording contract and links with Conny Plank, and by 1983 had achieved global success with their hit single Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).
Perhaps due to contractual complications between the former Logo & RCA, and a lack of artistic enthusiasm for the idea by Lennox & Stewart, the Tourist's back-catalogue is largely unavailble at present on CD, with only a compilation album being issued by BMG on its Camden imprint.sv:The Tourists