Alison Moyet – Is This Love?

The co-writer of Alison Moyet’s biggest solo hit was hidden behind a fake French name — and she kept up the lie in interviews until journalists revealed the truth was a member of Eurythmics.

Look at the songwriting credit for Is This Love? and you’ll find a name that doesn’t exist: Jean Guiot. There was no Jean Guiot. The mysterious co-writer was Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, hiding behind a pseudonym to sidestep a conflict with his music publisher — and Alison Moyet played along, insisting on the fake name in press interviews until reporters finally told her they knew, because Stewart himself had let it slip. It’s a fittingly offbeat origin for what became one of the defining hits of Moyet’s solo career.

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The song was born in Los Angeles. After her chart-topping 1984 debut Alf, Moyet had relocated to LA for nearly a year to make her second album, Raindancing. One day Dave Stewart wandered into the studio where she was working, and producer Jimmy Iovine suggested the two of them write together. Stewart sketched out some chords and a melody idea; Moyet took it from there, writing the lyrics and shaping it into her own — a song built on a steady, almost hypnotic bassline and shimmering synths that swell as her voice climbs into the chorus. The lyric turns over a question anyone who has ever fallen for someone knows by heart: is this really love, or something I only want to call love?

A slow climb to the top five

Released on November 17, 1986, as the lead single from Raindancing, Is This Love? didn’t rush up the chart — it crept. It entered the UK singles chart at a modest No.46, climbed to No.8 by late December, and then, in the first week of January 1987, jumped unexpectedly to No.3, where it held for three weeks. It became a Top 5 hit across much of Europe and beyond — No.2 in South Africa, No.4 in Norway, No.5 in Ireland and Belgium — and topped the European Hot 100. The one place it never connected was the United States, where, despite heavy MTV rotation, it failed to reach the Billboard Hot 100 at all, continuing the curious pattern of an artist adored across Europe but stubbornly cult in America.

The music video matched the song’s emotional openness. Directed by Nick Morris and filmed over two days in December 1986 at the Cornwall Coliseum at Carlyon Bay and along nearby Crinnis Beach, it placed Moyet against wide, windswept seaside backdrops, costing a little over £35,000 to make. The visuals were unfussy by design — they gave Moyet room to carry both the power and the vulnerability the song demands.

The voice that outlasted the synths

By 1986, Moyet had already lived a whole career. She’d first broken through as the soulful, blues-soaked voice of Yazoo, the synth-pop duo she formed with former Depeche Mode member Vince Clarke, scoring hits like Only You, Don’t Go, and Situation before the pair split in 1983. Is This Love? showed how far she’d traveled from those electronic beginnings — a bigger, more polished pop sound, yet still anchored by that extraordinary contralto. The album it launched, Raindancing, reached No.2 in the UK and helped earn Moyet her second Brit Award for Best British Female Solo Artist. Decades on, with album sales certified past 23 million and a career that has wandered through jazz, standards, and electronic pop, Moyet remains one of British music’s most distinctive voices — and Is This Love?, fake songwriting credit and all, one of its most enduring.