Eurythmics – You Have Placed A Chill In My Heart

Normandy 1987, UK single 1988: UK number 16

You Have Placed a Chill in My Heart sits on Eurythmics’ 1987 album Savage, written by Annie Lennox and David A. Stewart and produced by Stewart. The pair record at Château de Dangu in Normandy, building a colder, more programmed palette than the organic swing of Revenge. RCA releases the track as a single on 31 May 1988 in the UK (fourth from the album) and earlier as the second US single. It becomes the only Savage song to reach the UK top 20, peaking at number 16. That chart fact matters: the album’s colder sound finally reached daytime radio without softening its edge.

The arrangement is taut synth-pop: drum-machine snap, keyboard hooks that stick on first listen, Lennox’s voice moving from controlled verses to a chorus that names the damage without melodrama. Stewart keeps the production dry enough for the lyric’s desert images to land. The cold sits in the mix: the drum machine and the dry vocal. B-sides vary by territory (an acoustic take in Europe; Wide Eyed Girl in North America), underlining how Eurythmics still treated singles as flexible packages in the late MTV era, each market getting a slightly different extra cut.

Sophie Muller directs the video inside the larger Savage video-album concept she built with the duo: Lennox in character, costume changes, a theatrical freeze rather than a simple performance clip. The song’s live life follows the album tour and later hits packages. On record it remains the commercial spike that proved Savage could still talk to daytime radio without sanding its edge, which is rarer than another ballad aimed at the soft-rock hour.

The UK single arrived in early 1988 as a fourth pull from Savage, after warmer radio cuts had already done the promo work. Stewart’s programmed drums stay cold and exact; Lennox keeps the vocal close and hard rather than theatrical. Continental charts treated it as a late-album specialist, not a daytime smash.