- Published Date: 08 April 2008
- Source: The Scotsman
- Location: Edinburgh
Pop stars and politics don’t always mix, but Annie Lennox is not interested in being seen as worthy. She’s only interested in doing something that matters to her, trying to make a difference, discovers CLAIRE BLACK.
TUCKED in a corner of the grand drawing room of a Kensington hotel, Annie Lennox looks astonishingly small. Perched on one end of a cracked green leather sofa, her elbows on her knees, hands clasped, she looks a little tired, almost frail. This is the same woman who has commanded packed stadiums, performed with and for legends – both musical and political – sold 80 million records and picked up dozens of accolades for her songwriting, not least an Academy Award in a career spanning three decades
But nothing is as it seems when it comes to Annie Lennox.
Just as I’m adjusting to this subdued, serious character, she changes – fixing me with a piercing gaze, flashing a smile that’s goneas quickly as it appeared. At one point, she swings her legs up on to the sofa, extending her cowboy-booted feet and crossing her ankles. So far, so confounding.
We’re meeting to talk about Lennox’s new campaign, SING, to raise awareness of the impact of HIV/Aids on women and children in South Africa, where one in three mothers-to-be is believed to be carrying the virus. It’s a cause about which Lennox is passionate. “I don’t have a mentor,” she says. “No-one saying this is what you have to do. But if you have a platform and you’ve got an opportunity to talk about social injustice, then why not? Why not use it to benefit others?”
Pop stars and politics don’t always mix – tokenism or perceived self-aggrandisement are tricky to avoid. But there’s no doubting Lennox’s commitment to humanitarianism, not least because she’s long worn her political heart on her sleeve. The Eurythmics supported Amnesty International and Greenpeace decades ago and Lennox has supported charities as diverse as Children in Need and Hear the World, a campaign to spread awareness about deafness, as experienced by her late father, who had worked in Aberdeen’s shipyards.
SING emerged from her involvement with Nelson Mandela’s 46664 campaign and work with the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in the Eastern Cape. Through handwritten requests to 23 women artists, Lennox assembled a unique line-up including Madonna, KT Tunstall, Gladys Knight and Celine Dion, among others, to record the single Sing. And the star-studded track is only the beginning.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that I am the SING campaign,” she says with a wry laugh. “It is me. And whatever I have to say, whoever I’m saying it to and in whichever capacity I am saying it, the issue essentially boils down to the same thing, which is to do with human rights, injustice, poverty, women, and with women come children.”
If you want a single-word definition of Annie Lennox, earnest is the one. The conversation ranges over existentialism, Buddhism and, of course, the scourge of “chronic and endemic poverty in Africa”. The topics aren’t surprising: what jars is Lennox’s intensity, which at times verges on evangelical.
Lennox speaks in sentences that are so long she doesn’t always manage to finish them, as she wrestles with the problems of poverty and disease. Her most recent album, Songs of Mass Destruction, is resolutely dark and that, coupled with a cancelled appearance on Andrew Marr’s Sunday morning show in December 2007, raised questions about Lennox’s well-being.
At the time she wrote on her blog: “I’ve spent the past two days in bed. It’s as if I’ve completely run out of energy. Every time I get up, I end up having to go back to bed again. Feels like I’m spent… for the moment. But that’s OK… It’s time to hibernate anyhow.”
After spending an hour in her company I can see that being Annie Lennox isn’t easy. “Once you’ve understood poverty then – at least for me – there’s a need to engage with the issue as opposed to being silent and passive about it. It’s nothing to do with being worthy,” she almost spits this final word clearly aware of her tabloid tag, ‘tragic Annie’. “It’s nothing to do with that. It is to do with feeling that the value of life, that one values life, that there’s something profoundly unethical about the barbarity of the existing planet.”
Lennox’s conversation is peppered with campaign-speak. She has a habit of repeating words to reinforce meaning as she talks, piling words on top of each other, listing term after term. Sometimes she clarifies meaning, but sometimes it sounds a little odd, as if it’s not quite meant for whoever’s listening, but for Lennox herself.
“Artists don’t just ease through life,” she says. “You’ll find that all the artists that are worth anything have come up against some difficulties. It’s part of the grist for the mill. But it’s not enviable, it’s not something that’s easy to live with. I don’t think it’s easy being a person who is somehow engaged in this very finely-tuned sensitive place that is slightly outside of things. That’s what an artist, a writer, a creative person is, they’re outside, on the perimeter, looking in and recreating through their art what they see.”
Lennox is 53 now. Divorced for the past eight years and currently single, she lives in west London with her two daughters, 15-year-old Tali and Lola, 17, from her marriage to Israeli film producer Uri Fruchtman. “I love my kids,” she says. “They’re pretty grounding for me. They’re like, ‘Oh god, I’m so stressed out I’ve got to do my homework,’ and it’s kind of wonderful. I observe them and I see their lives and the good bits and the bad bits and the complaints – ‘Oh my hair’ or ‘Oh I just saw this great top in Topshop’. Their very presence around me is something really quite special. I just sit in awe of them, actually.”
She herself was an only child, raised in post-war Aberdeen, and I suggest to Lennox that her daughters’ upbringing must be very different from what she experienced? She lets out a snort of agreement. “Kids are contextual,” she says. “They come into your context and my context is very different from the one that I grew up in. It’s a planet apart. Being a mother is a great equaliser, though. You can be walking in the park with your kid in the buggy and it doesn’t matter what culture, what strata of society or financial bracket you come from, if you’ve got kids, that’s it, you’re all in it together. And I really love that. Suddenly you get a bit of a wake-up call, a bit of perspective and I think that’s really healthy. That’s how we should look at the world.”
On Annie Lennox’s website, there’s a selection of photographs called Shadow of Me. A series of images, taken by Lennox, of her shadow on the ground, against wooden boards, tiled floors, concrete pavements and walls and green grass, some of the photos are beautiful, but what’s more interesting is that in each Annie Lennox is both present and absent. It’s a dual position she’s cultivated throughout her career, disappearing from view to raise her children and recording and releasing records only when she’s ready.
“I’ve tried to keep my head down for many years and I think I’ve done a fairly good job of that,” she says. “I think it’s possible. There are people who play into publicity and make their whole career out of it and I think that’s …” she trails off. “Well, it wouldn’t be my choice,” she concludes diplomatically.
Lennox may have left Aberdeen in 1971, but her Scottish accent is undiminished. How much time does she spend in Scotland? “Very little,” she says. “My parents are dead, I have no brothers or sisters and I’m based in London. My relationship with Scotland is very distant, really. But it’s odd: I say that, but then there’s not a day goes by that I’m not Scottish. I am dyed-in-the-wool Scottish and I always will be, but I’m kind of ‘reinvented Scottish’. It’s my roots, but it’s the place I left. It informs me immensely but it’s more the poetic side of me that’s Scottish.
“It’s the sky, the sea, the cliffs,” she says gathering pace. “It’s Dunnottar Castle, Aberdeen before oil, it’s the fields, the mountains, the streams. It’s my grandparents’ cottage up near Speyside, it’s the River Spey, the village of Aberlour, it’s everything and it’s all in me. It never leaves me and it never will.”
Lennox bridles when I suggest that her childhood in Aberdeen was tough. “There are different degrees of tough,” she says. “Let me put it in perspective for you. I think it was tough for my father being a shipyard worker getting up early every morning. I think it was tough for him being a 14-year-old boy serving his apprenticeship in the yards and not knowing whether he was going to be employed. I was protected from that, but I was aware of the worry, aware of the anxiety, aware of the injustices of life. I was told that life is tough and if you don’t stick in at school you’ll end up in a factory. I was told that.”
She also learned that hard work was vital and says that she still struggles to get rid of the voice in her head telling her that she doesn’t work hard enough. “Don’t ask where that bloody well came from,” she says. “It hasn’t gone away – that bloody voice – and I would really like to get rid of it because it doesn’t serve me very well.”
Lennox says that she is striving to get a balance in her life between her art, her family and her activism. It sounds like a busy life, so I ask her what she likes to do to relax and for the first time she looks stumped. “I’m such a nut, I’m constantly thinking about things and the easy-osey part of me … Yeah, you do have to be easy-osey don’t you?” she asks. “I suppose, erm, I don’t know. Just sitting quietly I guess.” She runs dry again. “I’ll be really honest with you. I’m very happy with a laptop in my bed, because I can pursue any subject that I want. It’s like this incredible encyclopaedia where I can find anything. I feel so cosied up, with no other distractions.” Sensing I might not be satisfied, she smiles and says, “Maybe I’m just afflicted.”
• For further information visit the web at www.annielennoxsing.com or see www.annielennox.com
GIRLS ALOUD
MADONNA, Celine Dion, Shakira, Gladys Knight and KT Tunstall are among the 23 artists who responded to Lennox’s invitation to record with her on her track Sing in order to draw attention to the HIV/Aids pandemic.
The SING campaign ( www.annielennoxsing.com) is focused particularly on South Africa, where women and children are most badly affected by HIV/Aids. Estimates suggest that as many as one in three mothers-to-be are infected with HIV.
Sales of the track will be used to support the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). TAC ( www.tac.org.za ) was founded on 10 December 1998 in Cape Town, South Africa. A grassroots organisation, it exists to campaign for access to treatment for people with HIV and the reduction of new HIV infections.
As well as running a country-wide mother-to-child transmission prevention and antiretroviral treatment programme, TAC also runs a literacy campaign on the science of HIV treatment and prevention.
In July 2007 Annie Lennox spent two weeks in South Africa with TAC, recording the daily lives of the people struggling to cope with the HIV/Aids pandemic. She has documented the work of TAC online, on TV and in the print media.
At least £1.50 from the sale of each CD purchased will be donated to the Annie Lennox Foundation towards Treatment Action Campaign charitable projects supporting and educating women and children in Africa with HIV/Aids.
The full article contains 2137 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
Last Updated: 07 April 2008 7:57 PM
