The Tourists Explained

The Tourists
Landscape:yes
Background:group_or_band
Origin:London, England
Years Active:1976–1980
Spinoffs:Eurythmics
Past Members:Dave Stewart
Peet Coombes
Annie Lennox
Eddie Chin
Jim Toomey

The Tourists were a British rock and pop band. They achieved brief success in the late 1970s before the band split in 1980. Two of its members, singer Annie Lennox and guitarist Dave Stewart, went on to international success as Eurythmics.[1]

Early history

Guitarists Peet Coombes and Dave Stewart were members of the folk rock band Longdancer,[1] which was on Elton John's Rocket Records label.[2] They moved to London, where they met singer Annie Lennox, who had dropped out of a course at the Royal Academy of Music to pursue her ambitions in pop music.[1]

Forming a band in 1976, the three of them initially called themselves The Catch. In 1977, the band released a single named "Borderline/Black Blood" on Logo Records.[1] It was released in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal, but was not a commercial success.

The Tourists

By 1976, they had recruited bass guitarist Eddie Chin and drummer Jim Toomey (without exception, billed throughout his time with the Tourists as Jim "Do It" Toomey), and renamed themselves The Tourists.[1] This was the beginning of a productive period for the band and they released three albums: The Tourists (1979), Reality Effect (1979), and Luminous Basement (1980), as well as half a dozen singles, including "Blind Among the Flowers" (1979), "The Loneliest Man in the World" (1979), "Don't Say I Told You So" (1980), and two hits, the Dusty Springfield cover "I Only Want to Be with You" (1979)[3] and "So Good to Be Back Home Again" (1980), both of which reached the top 10 in the UK.

"I Only Want to Be with You" was also a top-10 hit in Australia and reached number 83 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Coombes was the band's main songwriter, although later releases had the first compositions by Lennox and Stewart.[1]

In 1980, the band signed to the UK branch of RCA Records.[1] They toured extensively in the UK and abroad, including as support for Roxy Music on their 1979 Manifesto Tour.[4] [5] [6] The group disbanded in late 1980.[1]

After the break-up

Coombes and Chin began a new project named Acid Drops[7] but this met with little success, and Coombes, despite originally being the main artistic force behind The Tourists, drifted out of the music business after the disbanding. Lennox and Stewart soon split as a couple, but decided to continue working as an experimental musical partnership, under the name Eurythmics.[8] They retained their RCA recording contract and links with Conny Plank, who produced their first album In the Garden in 1981. Coombes' death in late 1997 acted as a catalyst for Lennox and Stewart to revive their friendship and musical partnership, after they had previously disbanded Eurythmics in 1990. Drummer Jim Toomey (no longer using his "Do It" nickname) published the book We Were Tourists in 2018, describing the band's career.[9]

Bassist Eddie Chin died in 2023

Members

Discography

Albums

YearTitleUK
[10]
AUS
[11]
SWE
[12]
Certifications
1979The Tourists72
1979Reality Effect2362 45
1980Luminous Basement75
1984Should Have Been Greatest Hits
1997Greatest Hits
"—" denotes a recording that did not chart or was not released in that territory.

Singles

YearTitleUK
AUS
CANIRE
[13]
USA
[14]
CertificationsAlbum
1979"Blind Among the Flowers"52The Tourists
"The Loneliest Man in the World"32
"I Only Want to Be with You"46501383 Reality Effect
1980"So Good to Be Back Home Again"89
"Don't Say I Told You So"40Luminous Basement
"From the Middle Room"[16] Promo single
"—" denotes a recording that did not chart or was not released in that territory.

Notes and References

  1. Book: The Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music. Colin Larkin. Colin Larkin (writer). Virgin Books. 1997. Concise. 1-85227-745-9. 1186.
  2. Web site: Farber . Jim . Dave Stewart: 'What Annie Lennox and I went through was insane' . The Guardian . 2 October 2018 . 13 February 2016.
  3. Web site: Mason . Stewart . The Tourists: Artist Biography . AllMusic. 2 October 2018.
  4. Web site: Tourists - Support For Roxy Music. Eurythmics-ultimate.com. 29 September 2019. 8 November 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/20191108024646/https://eurythmics-ultimate.com/tourists-support-for-roxy-music/. dead.
  5. Web site: Tours: 1979 Roxy Music Manifesto . VivaRoxyMusic.com . 2 October 2018.
  6. Book: Ellis . Lucy . Annie Lennox: The Biography . 2001 . . London . 0711979863 . 109 .
  7. Web site: Rose . Cynthia . Eurythmics: We're Not Tourists, We Live Here . NME. TI Media Limited . 2 October 2018 . 7 March 1981.
  8. http://www.mtv.com/artists/eurythmics/photos/3002279/
  9. Web site: Search | Austin Macauley Publishers. austinmacauley.com.
  10. Web site: Official Charts > Tourists. The Official UK Charts Company. 2016-11-16.
  11. Book: Kent, David. David Kent (historian). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992. Australian Chart Book. St Ives, N.S.W.. 1993. 311. 0-646-11917-6.
  12. Web site: swedishcharts.com > The Tourists in Swedish Charts. Hung Medien. 2009-09-19.
  13. Web site: The Irish Charts – All there is to know > Search results for 'Tourists'. 2016-11-16. 10 May 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20170510064239/http://irishcharts.ie/search/placement?page=1&placement%5bartist%5d=Tourists. dead.
  14. Billboard > Artists / The Tourists > Chart History > The Hot 100. Billboard. 2016-11-16.
  15. Web site: BPI > Certified Awards > Search results for 'Tourists' (from bpi.co.uk). Imgur.com (original source published by British Phonographic Industry). 2016-11-16.
  16. [Promotional single]