When Annie Lennox was a child, growing up in working-class Aberdeen, her parents and teachers were concerned she might not amount to much in life. “They would say, ‘If you don’t stick at it at school, you’ll end up in a factory,’” she says. “My teachers were quite mean and very strict. And those voices are still in my head.”
Scratch the surface of a hugely successful artist and you’ll often find the needy, self-doubting child within. Yet Lennox – one of the great divas of British pop and formerly one half of the 1980s synth power duo Eurythmics – puts her feelings of general anxiousness mainly down to being neurodivergent. She was diagnosed in September last year after being tested for ADHD and passing with “flying colours”.
“I veer off on tangential roads, down rabbit holes,” she tells me, describing her tendency to daydream, lose her keys, or forget where her phone is, alongside difficulties with numeracy and… “what’s that word I’m looking for… this is typical… procrastination, yes! But I’m not interested in taking Ritalin or whatever people take,” she adds. “I don’t want to add more chemical pharmaceuticals to my system. Instead, by understanding it, I can be less hard on myself.”
Lennox is talking over a video call from her home in LA, where she has lived with her third husband Mitch Besser since 2019. The signature close crop that graced so many album and cult fashion magazine covers in the 1980s is still, fabulously, in place, and although she is dressed down in a khaki shirt, she’s sporting a dramatic slash of red lipstick. Now 70, she looks barely unchanged from the coolly androgynous pop star who soared to No 2 in 1983 with Eurythmics’ breakthrough single “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, though she puts her youthful glow down to a bit of “slap” and a ring light on a tripod at her side, “held together with tape”. She’s unfazed about getting older. “At this stage in life, although it might sound hackneyed, ‘health’ is the main thing worth aiming for,” she says. “Nothing is ever guaranteed from one moment to the next.”
We’ve met because Lennox is about to release a coffee-table-style memoir of her life, Annie Lennox: Retrospective; a lovingly curated collection of photographs spanning her seven decades. There’s an early picture of a six-year-old Lennox singing with her class at school – “You can tell which one is me: I’ve got the big mouth,” she tells me – and one of her as a baby. “What really intrigues me is the look in that baby’s eyes,” she writes. “Very intently staring at the camera.” There’s Lennox in a silver boiler suit signing her name on a fan’s arm, “an early dip into fame”, at her first ever record signing at a store in Oxford Street with her band The Tourists, which she formed in 1976 with her future Eurythmics bandmate and sometime boyfriend, Dave Stewart.
And of course there are many, many photographs from her defining Eurythmics-era pop career. “At first, I would bleach my hair as white as it would go,” she writes, describing the day she dyed her hair red for the video of “Sweet Dreams”. “Then I’d make up a thick paste with hot water mixed with henna powder, which I’d layer all over my head. It was a messy process, with the unwieldy globs of henna paste dropping everywhere. But the striking effect made it all worth the effort.”
It’s easy to forget just how groundbreaking an artist Lennox was when Eurythmics arrived in the early 1980s. Their achingly beautiful synth-pop hits, “There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)”, “Love Is a Stranger” and “Here Comes the Rain Again”, have sold more than 75 million albums. Yet it was her impassive masculine style that really broke the mould, changing for ever the way we think about female pop stars. Her boyish pixie cut, studied poise and habit of wearing men’s suits, which she would buy from “cheap gentleman’s outfitters”, broke with the tradition of glossily made-up, very feminine pop stars that had dominated the 1970s, and became a defining part of the gender-queer 1980s pop scene alongside the contributions of artists such as Prince, Grace Jones, David Bowie and Boy George.
Yet she says her style was not primarily about gender ideology. “In terms of feminism I was somewhat unevolved,” she says. Instead, she and Stewart were predominantly influenced by visual art. “[The suits] were a casual decision. We thought, let’s be identical twins. You know, let’s be Gilbert & George. Their philosophy, ‘Art is life and life is art’, was very inspiring for us because we were living for our art.” She admits, though, that subverting the male gaze was also part of it. “I wanted to perform as a woman, but I didn’t want to be regarded as a piece of meat,” she explains. “But the press rhymed ‘gender’ and ‘bender’ – and I was, ‘Oh, now I’m a ‘gender bender’. But that really wasn’t who I was. I found the label somewhat reductive.”
Lennox, who went on to have an extremely successful solo career in the 1990s, has resisted reductive labels all her life. She has also always resisted the pop industry machine that tends to regard young female stars as bait. In 2013, she spoke out against the oversexualised state of the music business, condemning in particular “pornographic pop videos”. What does she think about the landscape now, which has arguably become even more sexualised thanks to the explicit provocations of artists such as Sabrina Carpenter and Charlie xcx? “I was originally objecting to the fact that [it was the] record companies [who] were promoting this hypersexualised look,” she says. “They were like, ‘Whoa, we’ve got soft porn with a musical background. That’ll make a ton of money.’ And it did.
“Now these artists, the ones you’ve referenced, they’ve found their niche, and I’m not saying it’s all soft porn. But hypersexualisation has become so normalised. I would say that if you want to do that, then you just have to live with whatever comes from it. That will be your life experience.”
Lennox herself found the music industry in the late 1970s to be very “male-led”. “They certainly would have wanted to exploit my female side more,” she says. “And that was never said explicitly, but it was there. And so doing things in the way we did was always like a bit of a rebuff.” In 1986, she famously took off her top to expose a red bra while performing “Missionary Man” at a Eurythmics concert in Birmingham. “That had less to do with exploiting my sexuality than sticking a middle finger to the male gaze. I was saying, ‘I will do what I like on my terms.’”
All the same, she acknowledges that having Stewart alongside her made her less vulnerable to being exploited. They met in a health food restaurant in Hampstead in 1975, where she was a waitress; in Stewart’s 2016 memoir, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, he describes her back then as a mix of “Laura Ashley dresses and longish brown hair”. They were a couple for three years before breaking up and then founding the Eurythmics in 1980, and collaborated intensely for the next two decades with the odd break in between (Lennox was briefly married in the mid-1980s to her first husband, Radha Raman). Their bond has always been both complex and fierce: Lennox’s 1992 debut solo single “Why” was about Stewart; Stewart once said that he knew “just about every tiny molecule of Annie”. “So I was not a separate entity,” she points out. “All the way through The Tourists and Eurythmics, I had a partner with me.”
There was never a formal announcement of a Eurythmics split, but the pair largely went their separate ways in 1990. That same year Lennox gave birth to her first daughter, Lola, with her second husband Uri Fruchtman, then three years later had another, Tali, a year after the release of her first solo album, Diva, which had entered the UK charts at No 1. From the outside she looked to have the world at her feet. Yet a few years previously, in 1988, she had lost a son, Daniel, also with Fruchtmann, to still birth – an experience she describes as “horrendous”.
At the height of her solo career, in the early Nineties, with a young family to bring up, she took a break from touring, citing in her new book “exhaustion, guilt, anxiety, and insecurity”. She was finding the conflict between motherhood and her career overwhelming. “Of course I suffered from mum guilt. I love being a mother, and I have a very strong maternal instinct,” she tells me. “But then there’s another aspect to me, which is the artist, that I didn’t really want to die.”
She met her husband of 13 years, Besser, an American doctor who founded the charity Mothers2Mothers, in 2009; they married in 2012. Life in the US has brought her unexpectedly close to “great things” like coyotes, hawks, and hummingbirds, which surround her home tucked away in the Hollywood Hills. Next door is what she calls her “creative space” – a cottage where she can retreat to play her Steinway grand piano; it also features a mirrored wall and a sequinned Annie Lennox diva doll with orange and pink feathers, given to her as a gift by Joni Mitchell after she and Mitchell performed at the Hollywood Bowl. It was the eve of the 2024 US elections, and Mitchell memorably let rip at Donald Trump from the stage.
“It’s extremely affecting living under this regime,” Lennox says now. “The USA has always thrived on a reputation of ‘success’, and the concept of the American dream is like a glittering prize. Many US citizens evidently felt that the dream had been stolen from them, so they turned to an extreme right-wing agenda to find it again. I suspect that dream has probably left the building.”
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Lennox has been a campaigner all her life, raising millions for Aids charities. She’s very vocal on human rights and has spoken out many times in particular against Israel’s treatment of Gaza. Both of her children, singer Lola, 34, and model Tali, 32, are half-Israeli. All the same, she was accused of antisemitism in 2010 after she criticised Israel, which she said really “hurt her”.
“Tens of thousands of Palestinians over two years have been slaughtered in front of our eyes,” she says. “And then if you speak up about that, you’re antisemitic? It doesn’t make sense to me. I know from my own lived experience, I don’t have one ounce of antisemitism in me. I love my Jewish family. I love my Jewish friends.”
The artist in Lennox certainly shows no sign of slowing down. She has been writing and recording songs recently, although she doesn’t yet have a clear plan as to when they’ll be released. She finds the pressure of being in the public eye difficult. “The money is nice, I’m not going to pretend it isn’t,” she says. “But the fame – oooh. It’s not always easy. It’s something you just have to handle.” The creating part, however, is nothing but joyful. “It’s the articulation of the Sturm und Drang of the soul.”
‘Retrospective’ by Annie Lennox is published on 16 September by Rizzoli, £50
