Blimey. Imagine that from the woman who, 20-plus years ago, redefined pop femininity with her arch style — mostly by embroiling it in the gender confusion that marked the moment.
A forthcoming retrospective exhibition of Lennox’s visual work with the Eurythmics, curated by their long-term design companion, Laurence Stephens, includes an array of high-octane pop aliases that would give Simon Cowell and his mob a minor heart attack. It is the very definition of X Factor, as the world of pop once understood it. Lennox looks splendid in these pictures — if occasionally demonic and deranged. There she is dressed as Truman Capote, with a carrot-orange crew cut. There, in leather perv-mask, lippy and clenched fists. There as a South American dictator. There in a floor-length leather dust coat and eye-searing bleach. You’ve got to give it to her: she certainly knew how to bust a look.
“But that was just me, then. I was — still am — interested in ...” she lingers over the word, “Eros ... and his divisions. And that was us as the Eurythmics. We were slightly scary, but we were always approachable.”
Eros himself has played an even hand with Annie, though she thinks people are wont to linger on her romantic failures. Her first big love was her Eurythmics partner Dave Stewart. Then there was marriage to the Hare Krishna devotee Radha Raman, and to the film producer Uri Fruchtmann, the father of her daughters, Tali, 13, and Lola, 15. She’s currently single. “I think people do imagine I have been through hard times. My edges tend to be sharper than other people’s, and I have always been given to melancholia.”
Sitting opposite me, in a fancy members’ club, Lennox has lost none of her rock’n’roll spirit. She doesn’t seem to have aged: in fact, her seriousness is wearing well, as if she was always meant to be 50. Dressed in a slim-fitting green V-neck, worn denims and good jewellery, you would take her for at least 10 years younger.
I had imagined her well-documented intensity to translate as rather cheerless in the flesh — “Is that what people think? That I’m cheerless? Ha!” — but, actually, she’s a complete hoot. Crackers, obviously, and not so much allowing the weight of the world onto her shoulders as actively inviting it on board — she’s noisy on a host of big issues, from female poverty to Aids — but she speaks as she finds.
And “as she finds” tends towards the complex, the political and, yes, the morose. It can translate badly into print. Unlike her old mucker Sting, with whom she toured America last year, Lennox has neither a reputation for carnal gymnastics nor a love of red-carpet living to counterbalance her charitable instinct. It can all look a bit worthy. “People can say what they like about Live 8, but it was anti the me culture,” she says. “It tapped collective consciousness. There wasn’t a school that didn’t teach about the G8 summit as a result.” So there.
She looks fabulous for 50, without any of that tacky, Sharon Osbourne gothic plasticity (a woman not au fait so much with hair straighteners as face straighteners). “Do I look fantastic?” she says, aghast. “Oh my God, nobody ever tells me that. I don’t diet. Never have done. I just have a quick one of those things ...” Metabolism? “Aha.”
She really cares about stuff, Annie. She thinks the “cheerless” thing, if it is true — and maybe it is just me — comes from people not spending enough time with her to uncover “my rather warped sense of humour”. At one point, I ask her if she envies Kate Bush the second-coming-type hushed reverence that is greeting her comeback. She knocks me off my perch with her response. “Hushed reverence?” Again, she practically spits out the words: “Hushed reverence?” She repeats it incredulously. “F*** hushed reverence! F*** that! I cannae imagine anything worse than being greeted with ‘hushed reverence’.
“I want people to interact with what I do. I want it to be seen and heard. I am not a prostitute for publicity, I don’t believe in the fame culture — I believe in doing something worthwhile — but I want people to know that I am here to perform what I do. I am not in the business of encouraging hushed reverence. Not a bit of it.” She stops just short of calling me sonny Jim. I cannot help but love her for it.
Lennox has a new single out tomorrow, and a Eurythmics greatest-hits package out next week, so it’s as good a time as any for a bit of dewy-eyed nostalgia. This being Annie Lennox, though, there is less of the dewy eyes and more of a harrumphing, “that was that, really, wasn’t it?”
I ask her what London looked like to a 17-year-old girl from an Aberdeen tenement who arrived carrying the hangover of the stifling small-town mentality she had been brought up with. She recalls only the smell of the place, and pressing her nose up against the plate glass of things that other people took for granted, wondering why she didn’t: “Buying clothes in posh boutiques, going out for dinner, or the theatre, or to nightclubs. Even just having your hair cut somewhere nice.”
She couldn’t have timed the greatest hits thing any better, to be honest. By track two, the phenomenal, icy electronic ballad Love Is a Stranger, you are reminded, with something of a jolt, of its modernity and emotional depth. By Sweet Dreams — track three — it is literally a case of: Alison Goldfrapp, pack up your retro-futuristic horse’s tail and buzz off; the maestro of pervy electronic pop is back and, quite frankly, there is not a track on your hyperbolically received recent album that comes within an airstrip’s radius of this stuff. Lennox became her own kind of feminist icon by making the weak look powerful. She’s still doing it.
As the world comes back to the idea of pop subversion, I wonder if Lennox’s daughters are ready to embrace their cool mum, as she crops up on phone boxes and billboards again. “Cool?” I’ve struck a defence position again. “That is so not my job, my dear. Perhaps one day, they will be interested in my past. But a mother’s job is to be an embarrassment. I do that very well.”
The Eurythmics’ new single I’ve Got a Life is released tomorrow (Sony BMG). The album Ultimate Collection is released on November 7. An exhibition of iconic Eurythmics pictures runs for a week from tomorrow at the Air Gallery, W1
