Annie Lennox: “I Don’t Buy Into the Game”

TRANSCRIPT

Annie Lennox: This thing of fame and exceptionalism can be very, very destructive. I think it’s such a powerful force, that people actually almost sell their souls in a way. I just don’t believe in it. I believe in the music and I believe in the magical aspects of music, but for me personally, that doesn’t work. I have to keep a part of myself. I don’t buy into the game. And so the shiny side that is popular, that is famous, that has screaming audiences and all of, I don’t think that’s healthy.

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein, and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour through the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well-lived life. And welcome to the first episode of Season 14, if you can believe it.

I hope you all had a great summer. We have a fantastic season planned for you that will take us up through to the holidays and with the smash success of our first print issue, I’m happy to announce that in 2026, we’ll be going biannual. We still have some super limited copies left of the first issue, so snag them online while you still can at thegrandtourist.net.

My first guest of this fall season is someone who literally needs no introduction. Singer, songwriter, pop icon, activist, and just about the coolest Scottish mom you can imagine, Annie Lennox. Lennox was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, and after showing some aptitude for music as a young woman, she went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music.

Her first success came from the rock band The Tourists, love the name by the way, before starting Eurythmics with fellow Tourists member Dave Stewart. On today’s episode, you’ll hear the story of her career from the viewpoint of visual culture and how her work helped spur the no-rules look of the 1980s. Wild clothes, MTV, and bigger than life personalities. It’s all chronicled in her visual memoir, Annie Lennox: Retrospective from Rizzoli, coming out later this month. In the book, you’ll discover some of the stories and origins behind the looks and images that helped to make her a star. From the men’s androgynous tailoring look of Sweet Dreams to the leather mask of her third album cover that instantly became iconic.

I found Lennox to be just exactly as you’d want her to be. Curious, insightful, and incredibly warm. But then after the interview, something curious happened. I started to come across some stories from my friends in various creative industries. When they heard I had interviewed her, they each told me their own tale of how they crossed paths with this living legend. In one, it was about how incredibly generous she was without anyone knowing it. And in another, it was about her guidance that helped transform someone’s musical career for the better. 

In other words, she’s the real deal and I think you’ll feel that authenticity comes across loud and clear. I caught up with Annie Lennox from her studio in L.A. to chat about her days as a child playing the flute, how an unplanned trip to a pawn shop changed her career forever, the formation of Eurythmics, the time she sang with David Bowie in a now-unforgettable pop moment, how she first caught the activism bug, and much more.

So I’d love to start at the beginning. I read that you were born on Christmas Day in Aberdeen. Is that true?

That is true, yeah.

And it seems that both of your parents were sort of working-class folks. I was wondering if you could share with me maybe one of your earliest memories of life as a young girl.

Oh my. I mean, when I think back to my childhood, now I’m 70, I’ll be 71 this year, I feel as if it was such a different time. You know, I was brought up in the ’50s and ’60s really. Technology still had so little to do with general life and we were in the post-industrial age. Now my father went to work in the shipyards. He followed his father. And, you know, we all lived in this town that was on the northeast coast. It’s Aberdeen. It’s on the northeast coast of Scotland and it’s a coastal town.

And it has had a massive shipping industry. And so shipbuilding, which is very common to Scotland, was very prevalent in those days. And it was a very hard life. And so, unbeknown to me as a child, I lived in, looking back on it now, in quite a hardcore neighborhood. I mean, it wasn’t rough. It didn’t feel dangerous, but it was dark. There were factories around. I passed a slaughterhouse on the way to catch the bus to go to school, you know. And in those days I could walk to school and I’d be like six years old walking to school by myself, you know. Such different times, yeah.

Would your parents have described you as a well-behaved child?

Yeah, I think as a little kid I definitely was very well-behaved because I was an only child and there was a lot of attention put on to me because there was nobody else to, no other siblings to distract my parents, you know. And there’s a lot expected of me in that regard. The school that I went to had a sort of motto, you know, and it was “By learning and courtesy.”

So, girls from Aberdeen High School—I got into a posh school that wasn’t in the local districts. I managed to get into this school when I was very young.

And so, it felt, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the film called The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie, but it’s a classic. You have to see it. It’s very entertaining.

It has Maggie Smith playing a Scottish headmistress. It’s absolutely brilliant. Anyways, what it really shows is a very old-fashioned Scottish school where the girls all have to be very well-behaved. And part of my background is that. So, I’m very well-behaved. Until I’m not!

And when did music first enter your life? Because I believe that you studied some, you know, locally before you went on to the Royal Academy in London. So, what did music mean to you in those, growing up outside of a slaughterhouse and in an industrial part of Scotland?

Just down the street. Well, music, you know, when I think back, I can’t imagine a time when there wasn’t an element of music in my life. And when I see little children being pushed in their buggies and this music comes on and they nod their heads or they rock back and forth, I understand how incredibly receptive little children are to music. It’s a fundamental thing. And I mean, if, you know, everybody loves, well, not everybody, maybe, but most people, I think, identify with music and have their favourite songs and pieces of music. And I mean, we did have a radio then. My father played the bagpipes, believe it or not. My father played the bagpipes very well. So, he used to practice on this practice chanter. So, there was that. 

And I think I was about three and there was a little toy piano bought for me. And I was able to pick out little tunes on the piano. So, my folks noticed that I could do things like that. And yeah, I loved music. I was singing when I was about six or seven in a local choir and learning about rhythm and about singing in tune and keeping time and just the fundamentals of music making. How to observe, how to listen. It’s a skilful process. You know, making music is not just, it doesn’t just come overnight. It takes years to learn how to play an instrument quite well.

And did you, I believe you played the flute, correct?

I did eventually, yeah. I started off playing piano when I was seven. And then when I was about 11, apparently there was a flute available. There was a school orchestra, again believe it or not. There was a school orchestra and I didn’t pay much attention to it. And then a music teacher said, would you be interested in playing flute? Because she heard there was a flute available. And I never thought about it, but then I thought, “Yeah, I’d love to learn how to play flute.” And so I asked if I could do that because I think we had to pay a little extra for lessons. And apparently that was fine. I had this old flute that they gave me. It had elastic bands instead of springs with two or three elastic bands to stand in for the spring. So it was a poor, poor ancient flute that was half broken.

But I got so interested in how to produce the tone, the sound, you know, and you can actually just practice with them for those budding flute players out there. You can just practice flute by just taking off the head, what they call the headpiece, and just blowing across. You have to learn how to make this thing called an embouchure. And I mean, it’s crazy that these sounds come from, you know, a tiny little opening between both lips and how you have to learn how to take in air and how to put it out in a certain way so that it sustains itself through a phrase and then take in enough air to do it again for the next phrase. And I guess singing follows on from there, in a way, from flute playing. They’re connected in some way.

And would you think that your dad kind of connected with it in some way, if he played the bagpipes or a wind instrument and the flute is also wind in a sense?

I think he was probably, yeah. I mean, it was very different to playing bagpipes, but that’s a reed instrument. My God, I mean, I can’t think of a harder instrument for anybody to play. It’s a very difficult instrument in all kinds of ways. I mean, the fingers have to do all these complicated what they call trill notes, and you have to learn how to sort of move your fingers back and forth to create these ornamented trills. And they’re so beautiful, but it’s a skillful thing.

And when did the idea of going to London to study music first come to play?

That’s interesting. Gosh, I mean, it’s funny. It’s hard to bring up instances exactly when you had a thought, I had a thought, “Oh, I think this would be something I could do.” I mean, obviously, when I was handed the flute, I must have thought, “I think I can try this. Why not?” And so I knew that there were places to study. 

So I could have gone to the Scottish Academy of Music and Performing Arts. I could have gone to the Royal College. There’s another one in Manchester in England. There’s various really good colleges and academies of music all over the country. And I got quite good at the flute, and I felt like, “Oh, I think I can master this instrument. I think I could do it.” And I had a picture in my mind because I always visualise playing in a small chamber orchestra. That would have been my picture, I guess. There I would have been playing in a chamber orchestra, but I didn’t really understand it. Coming from my background, I wasn’t really exposed to many other… I hadn’t gone to many classical music concerts, really. I didn’t listen much to records. I couldn’t afford them. So, I mean, it’s quite a random thought really, but maybe, I think my teachers must have encouraged me with this idea that if I practice hard enough and if I pass the exams, you have to pass exams, you have to pass editions. And I did that, and I got into the Royal Academy, and I just didn’t know what it really was all about. You don’t know about things until you start doing them.

And while I don’t think you finished the studies at the Royal Academy, soon after you were in a couple of bands, and then comes, especially in the book, you kind of lead into your time with The Tourists. A fantastic name for a band by the way, of course, I’m biased. For your fans that only know you from the Eurythmics days, from the beginning, tell us about The Tourists and what that was like and how that started.

Well, I mean, probably a lot of people that have heard Eurythmics music remember Eurythmics music at our peak when we were in the ’80s. They probably think we just arrived there, successful everywhere, but it wasn’t like that. There were years of… I had an ambition, so I knew… I mean, when I went to the Academy, I knew that wasn’t the right place for me. So that was devastating because I knew I’d have three years to spend there, and where was I heading? Into a place I didn’t want to go.

So I did drop out, and it was very devastating for my parents because they had an idea that at least you get a certificate and you have something to prove that you’ve been there. But I dropped out, so they were very upset about that. But I knew eventually… It took me a while, but eventually I realised, “Ah, I think I could be a singer-songwriter. Yeah, that’s what I want to do.” I’ll take the poems that I’ve been writing and I’ll adapt them and they could become lyrics for songs. I’ve been taught so much that I was rebelling against being taught. 

So singing… I went back to singing because I really hadn’t been taught, overtaught, and I felt with classical music it was just too much. I didn’t have that kind of discipline. So I went around with this notion that I wanted to be a singer-songwriter. I wanted to record songs. I wanted to perform songs. I wanted to make records. But I mean, how do you do that? It’s still difficult to know how you begin. In those days, there were so few female singer-songwriters or people that performed.

I mean, my heroines were people like Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark and Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross and all the female singers of the ’60s and the ’50s, ’60s. I loved all of those people, but I never… They were not role models to me because I never…

They were so beyond anything that was possibly achievable. They were stars. But then I met Dave by complete happenstance. He just happened to know someone that I knew. And this is the way things happen. I met him and I had been offered a publishing contract and I had no clue as to what a publishing contract even was.

I had this piece of paper and I was asking people. I was working around Dingwalls in Camden Lock Market. I was selling secondhand clothes and waitressing and doing all sorts of stuff like that to feed myself.

And Dave was a friend of a friend of mine that had a record stall in Camden Lock Market. And he, Paul Jacobson, he introduced me to Dave. And we just got on and we just had everything to talk about. I finally felt I met somebody that understood me because I didn’t understand myself at all. I just didn’t.

How so? What did he see in you that maybe you didn’t realize?

I played him a couple of my songs. I had an old harmonium in a bedsit that I had living in Camden Town. I played him a few songs and I sang to him. And immediately he’s like, “Whoa, you’ve got a really good voice. You can do this. Wow. I haven’t heard this very often.” And so that was a piece of recognition.

And he said to me, “You’re an artist. You don’t need to be waitressing.” Because I didn’t want to be waitressing, but I had to put food on the table.

So, like a lot of musicians, you have to work doing odd jobs. It’s quite interesting in a way that I’m talking about this because this background as to “How do you become successful?” “How do you establish yourself in any kind of way?” These are all funny stories and all of it is synchronistic. And there was never really a plan or a plot, except we just have to take opportunities as they might come our way. 

So, Dave was working with his friend, Peet Coombs, and they were writing songs together.

And Dave took me to meet Peet. And we didn’t really discuss it very much, but we just ended up assuming that there’d just be three of us. Actually, at the very, very beginning, we called ourselves The Catch.

And again, we went into—So many long stories. I don’t want to bore anybody who’s listening!—but I met Dave. I therefore met Peet, who’d been writing loads of songs. We ended up calling ourselves The Tourists. We got a record deal, bizarrely enough, with a new record label called Logo Records.

And at that time, punk was starting. And we both felt very drawn towards it. The hippie thing was kind of fading off. And I was too young to be a hippie, but I was a little bit too old to be a punk. So I was kind of caught in between the two things. But in the end, your age didn’t really matter. It’s more about your attitude, really, and the quality of the work that you do. But anyway, we ended up with this band called The Tourists, and we actually did quite well in a way, that we toured. And we went all around Europe and we recorded three albums.

These are all like chapters. And I put them all down to experience for me, because all the lessons that I needed to learn before Dave and I created this notion of just the two of us, nobody else, just the two of us. And we’re going to focus on creating a sound, creating a style, creating an ethos, an identity as to who we are that really expresses who we are musically and expresses our attitude to life and to the world.

And so when Dave and I finally ended up just the two of us and we decided to call ourselves Eurythmics, we had a whole set of experiences behind us that stood us in good stead, actually, in a way. There’s always lessons to be learned, you know. When you’re a neophyte at anything, you have no clue.

I mean, Dave knew a bit more than me because he’s a little bit older and had had more experience than me, but I was catching up really quick. We were both very determined because we had nothing to lose. And when you have nothing to lose and you have everything to gain, you just go for it 100%. And I think it’s part of that energy that we sunk into Eurythmics, you know.

(SPONSOR BREAK)

And there’s a lovely story at the end of The Tourists and the beginning of The Eurythmics in the book involving a pawn shop camera. I was wondering if you could tell us about that and sort of how Dave’s impulse purchase had such an effect on that next dramatic phase of your life.

Things sometimes fell into place and sometimes things just went from bad to worse. But we were in Australia, for our sins, and The Tourists had split up. Peet went back to England and I was left having to sing the songs. We had to finish a tour. We had to do this tour. We were contracted to do it.

So even though you’d broken up, you had to finish the tour?

Yeah, we had to. And so I just stepped in and sang. I think maybe Dave might have done a bit of singing. I don’t know. But we were just on this club and pub tour and it was hardcore. It was very Spinal Tap, really. 

Anyway, we were in Sydney, Australia. I love Sydney. It’s a great city, actually. And we were in a certain area of the city where there were a row of cafes in the street and we’re just walking down the street and Dave spotted a solid gold charm bracelet on the pavement. And he picked it up. He said to me, “Look at this.” I said, “Oh my God, it must belong to somebody in the cafe.” So we went in and we asked for the manager and we said, “We found this gold bracelet, has anybody come and said that they’ve lost a bracelet?” And he said, “No, but I’ll take it.” And we said, “No, give us your number and if anybody comes, we’ll bring it back.”

Good point.

So anyway, nobody called us, nothing happened and we had this gold bracelet. So it was in those days of poverty. So we were like, okay, well, it must mean it’s ours then. So Dave went off to the pawn shop and he pawned this bracelet which belonged to somebody. And my God, thank you very much to whoever it belonged to. But he bought a little video camera.

And this is back in the day when you were just about to have Sony Walkmans. I mean, we have technology now that’s way beyond anybody’s dreams. But back then to have a little portable camera… We had little cassettes that you would film on these little cassettes. And so he was like, “We can do our own filming.” So the visual element of Eurythmics was very important to us because it was like, not only did we have these songs, but we had to say something visually. And we loved it because it was like storytelling and you could create scenarios. 

Like the most significant one of all, which is “Sweet Dreams,” I think, as far as people know that song, everybody knows “Sweet Dreams” more or less. And the video, which was Dave’s concept of having a board table with a cow walking around freely while he types on a prototype computer. I mean, it’s gold. This is an amazing picture that Dave had in his mind. And it was so left field. It was so utterly surreal, but I totally understood what he meant by it. I understood the symbology in it and all of the elements in that video are deliberate. There’s nothing that is just random and it doesn’t matter. It’s all a statement about modernity and future and success and the natural world and so many things. As human beings, we’re only here for such a brief period of time.

And yet, if you live to be as old as I am, you see these changes taking place. I remember hearing The Beatles for the first time. I mean, that, as and of itself, is a remarkable thing.

When you were experimenting with things like visuals in that early camcorder and things like that, this was around the time when MTV and the sort of the video killed the Radio Star, all that stuff was happening.

It was just very early stages.

Just the early beginnings. When you were talking to managers and people about the Eurythmics and everything, was that a part of the conversation at the time? Like, “Oh, you’ve got to be on TV and have video and what are you going to do?”

There were all kinds of things going on. There were all kinds of things that had to be taken care of. There was equipment that had to be accessed. There was a place to record with this equipment. There were albums that needed to be made. There were time schedules. There were tours that needed to be done. There were interviews that needed to be done. Radio, press, TV. There were performances on television. There were videos to be made. What needs to be done, what goes on behind the scenes of any sort of aspiring musician or successful musician is much, much more than anybody that’s not in the music industry can possibly imagine.

And was there any part of that kind of new compared to when you were at The Tourists? Because the times were changing and you were kind of…

Yes, it was. It was very new because here was the thing. The one element that was so remarkable was that you could purchase for, you know, if you had some kind of budget, you could purchase a drum machine. Do you remember those wonderful pads that people like Phil Collins always used to play on? “Do-do-do-do,” like this. Everybody was like, that’s the sound.

Oh my God, we can afford that sound! Or maybe we’ll use milk bottles and we just won’t bother about technology, you know. But it was all about creativity and scheduling and trying to come up with this. And so we were just running.

And in the book, there’s some mention that a little bit of this early kind of androgynous look and what people identified in the press as androgyny actually kind of came from you pulling menswear from vintage shops, and that that was kind of what you could afford in a sense. Or that overlapped with it a little bit.

Or is that… am I giving too much emphasis on that?

No, not so much. But it’s more that actually Dave and I had been in lots of photo sessions with different photographers over the years. And finally, you know, we had our autonomy, just the two of us. So we didn’t have to ask other people, like, “How about this?” We just kind of knew. We were very, very in tune with each other.

So that was a great thing at the time. And we came to “Sweet Dreams…” “Sweet Dreams” was the convergence of all the things that we’d learned. It became like a very, very clear statement over time. And so before we did this photo session with Louis Zolcik, actually, the cover of the book is just a portrait. It’s just a headshot. And that was the day when Dave and I had brought two cheap men’s outfitter’s suits that fitted us. They were cheap. We went into a store and we bought them for about 30 quid or something. And we both wore them. And I put makeup on, so I wasn’t trying to look like a man—I wanted to be an equal.

That was more the thinking behind it. I didn’t want to be an objectified pretty girl. It just wasn’t part… I didn’t feel comfortable in it. It’s like I’m not much of a…I do wear dresses from time to time, but you’ll very rarely see me in a dress, just because I’m more comfortable in trousers and pants, you know. So it’s like, “What is comfortable for you?” “What looks good on you?” “What do you feel good in?”

And after I cut my hair like that and coloured it like that, it was quite radical at the time. You know, nowadays, radical… we’ve seen everything, almost. So nothing is shock-worthy anymore. And I wasn’t really trying to shock. It was just… that was how I felt. I felt radical. I felt like making a statement.

When you have been through the mill and you don’t have much access to means of any kind, you have to make it up yourself. And I saw, as a performer, I thought, “It’s a statement.” What you wear is a statement. You have to be this person. Dave and I discussed this and he said to me one day, “You know, you have to look the way you are all the time.” And I was like, “What do you mean all the time? I just wear what I want to wear.” He said, “No, we’re stepping it up now. You have to become.”

And I thought about this and it didn’t take me too long. Once we had the music and everything was going together… Unquestionably, I knew what Eurythmics looked like. I knew how I felt. I just knew what was right for me and I knew what was wrong. So stylists at that point, I don’t even think there were any. I honestly don’t think that was a job.

Did anybody in a music label kind of be like, “What are you doing? Why are you doing this?”

Oh yeah. People were confounded by us. They just didn’t know what to make of us at all until we had success, i.e. selling lots of records. And then it’s easy, then they’ve discovered you and they always knew you all along.

And speaking of the video or the visual part of it, there are some adventures in acting that are covered briefly in the book, namely the film Revolution, which I’m fascinated by because I’m sad to say I wasn’t familiar with the film. And I watched a trailer on YouTube and Al Pacino’s in it and it’s mid-80s and it’s this amazing cast and crew that was part of this historical film. Did someone come to you and say, “You should be an actor?” Or is it you wanted to act? Or how did that happen?

People came to me very often actually. And at one point I even did have an acting agent and people said to me, “You should…” You know, people often say, “You should do this, you should do that. You should be an actor or an actress.” But I always felt I wouldn’t mind trying, you know, because it seems like it’s something I could do. Certainly I could be a character actor. I think I could do that. I kind of know myself, you know, I know what I can’t do very well, certainly, but the things I think I can do, I usually can. 

So I think acting could have been it. But then I realised that actually when you’re on stage as a singer and you’re a performer, you’re expressing the song through your body, through your entire body, you know, you’re, you’re standing there, you’re moving. The sound is coming from your body. You’re exhaling breath that is going out to the audience. It’s amplified through a microphone.

That’s a very intense physical thing to be doing. And acting is a different set of skills. And I’m not sure that I want to be somebody else. I think when I’m performing the songs that we wrote and I wrote, I’m actually being me, you know, really at the core, at soul level, that is very much who I am. It’s not the average person that you sort of sit and have a coffee with or, or have a conversation with. It’s not.

It’s really embodying the deepest aspect of your being. That’s honestly the way I see it. And it might sound a bit odd to some people, but I’ve always understood music to be a very profound experience, you know.

And of course, I would be totally remiss. One of my favourite parts of the book is your performance with David Bowie for the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert, which is now the look that you had. And there’s sort of like an eye makeup, kind of like a bandit’s sort of mask, in a sense, that was so performative and was a one-off, if I’m not mistaken.

Can you tell me about that and how that came to be? This sort of one, one-off thing that just kind of became so… 

Yeah, I mean, I’ve done a lot of one-offs like that, and I kind of have loved to do them in a way, because they’re challenging. And I was invited, you know, simply, they asked me if I’d like to sing a Queen song. You know, obviously, they were Freddie’s songs. I mean, I think he wrote that one with John Lennon, if I’m right. 

It’s a very complex song to sing. Once I’d said, “Yes, I’d love to do that. That sounds like a perfect thing to do.” And to perform with David Bowie, I mean, it was… No, I hadn’t met David before.

It was the first time I really met him, I think. I think it was the first time I met him. I get muddled up there with time. But the rehearsal was really, you know, being sort of dropped into the deep end of the pond, really. Because the song is difficult. It’s not, I can’t say it wasn’t challenging.

It’s under pressure, correct?

Under pressure, yeah.

Yeah, because that was what he sang with him. So you were really kind of standing in for…

I was standing in for Freddie, which is, yeah, okay. Some people would say that’s quite a challenge, you know, because all the Queen fans and the Freddie fans would be like, “No, it’s rubbish.” But I took it on.

And everything was very of the moment. So, you know, we did our run through. I think we only played the song once or twice together, and they filmed it.

So there’s part of that rehearsal that you can find on YouTube, which is wonderful, really. And I think I just had a baby as well. So, you know, I was a mother, and that’s a completely different role to play. Being a rock…stepping in for a rock legend, standing next to a rock legend.

And I remember it’s a big billowy dress, maybe that was…

Yeah, well, that was the point was that he said to me, “What are you wearing?” And I said, “I don’t know yet. I have no idea.”

And he said, well, he was very camp and very funny. And he said, “Well, why don’t you go to Anthony Price and get yourself a frock?” Now, Anthony Price at the time was a legendary, incredible film, excuse me, a dressmaker.

When I say dress, it was very sort of high, high. And I’d never ever gone to Anthony Price for a frock. And it would have cost in the region of a couple of grand, you know. So I never spent money on frocks like that. But I decided it was such an important thing to do. I would go to Anthony Price.

And I had to be fitted specially. And I had something in mind, you know, that frock that I wore. I thought, “It has to be like massive black. And it needs crinoline underneath to make it flare out. And it should be like armour, like Joan of Arc.” So we found the silver material. And so it just fitted the body very simply. And then when I was in the dressing room, I remember I was thinking, “Oh, I think I know what I’m going to do.” Because I sat in the dressing room for about seven hours before that performance, which was quite intense. And I just sat there and I was just playing with makeup, you know. And I thought, “Yeah, that does it. That’s exactly what it is.” And it’s almost like funereal. I feel that figure is death, and because it was about AIDS and HIV. And I could enter into this persona of imminent sort of darkness and almost seduce him. But it was all intuitive.

Was that seduction part of it? Kind of just intuitive on the moment?

Absolutely. Absolutely intuitive. I was just like, “Huh, maybe I can just go up to him. Maybe I’ll just…” I’d never even gone near him. I mean, when we rehearsed, we were standing apart from each other. But then, yeah, it just worked. And he was such a showman that he got it instantly. You know, he knew what to do.

And I felt him just stand, stock still and just look out unflinchingly. And I thought, “Oh, he gets it. He’s playing with me now. That’s great.” And you can see it happening. That’s what’s so thrilling about it. You see this exchange. It’s a silent exchange between two performers and everything just fell into place. I get goosebumps talking about it now to you. It just fell into place. And I think he was a bit stunned. I was stunned.

I was stunned we’d actually done it. And it felt so good because Queen was just like this quintessential, brilliant band. I mean, the drums, the bass, the guitar, everything was just brilliant. And they were on their game because, you know, they probably hadn’t played that song since they accompanied Freddie. So it was very, very highly charged stuff.

And there is a New York Times review of your New York City debut that I kind of looked up, which was at the Ritz. 

Oh, my gosh.

Where they connected your look with Bowie and they mentioned Bowie and they mentioned Grace Jones, of course, amazing people to be compared to, but it felt like very ’80s, and described your performance as having a, quote, ominous feline intensity.

I don’t know if you remember that quote. Now that I think about the performance with Bowie, there is a kind of that silky, nimble—maybe a feline may not be what I would choose—but there. And in that era of these megastars of, you know, everyone being compared to some other big giant ’80s megastars.

Oh, always, always compared to somebody else.

Did you find it hard at the time, you know, in that era of Bowie and Michael Jackson and Grace Jones and these bigger than life personalities, to kind of carve your own path? Were you annoyed by these comparisons?

Oh, no, no, no. I mean, I’d be honored and flattered to be compared to anybody as brilliant as that, you know. But I think I understood very early on, I need to be myself.

You know, I can’t be sort of half this and half something else. Because people always compared the voice, you know, to other singers until I had my own voice and my own vocal sound that was very identifiable, you know. And I was working on that all the time, just kind of trying to find it’s like trying to find the voice.

But it’s also the voice to who you are. It’s not just the singing voice, but it’s “Who am I as a person and as a performer?” And all the rehearsals I ever did, all the performances I ever gave, they were all like lessons every time in perfecting it and making it stronger. What could be improved? What could I do differently? Which ideas could we bring into this? How do we present this? You know, everything was very much thought through. But ultimately, as a performer, you have to be you.

No question. I mean, Grace Jones, how could anybody? No one can be Grace Jones. No one. It’s a standalone. David Bowie, standalone. Michael Jackson, standalone. This is the level that these artists were on.

Do you think you stand alone? I think you do.

I think I do. It’s different. I don’t see myself. You see, I’ve been through so much and I’ve been exposed to being famous and well known, you know, that everybody knows your name and everybody recognises you and all of that. And I’ve rebelled against that too, because in a way, I don’t buy into it. I think it’s my Scottish background.

I think that as much as I worshipped music and certain kinds of music, I’ve always thought, where’s the human being in all of this? You know, they can’t just be the starry star 24/7. And I think what happens is that this thing of fame and exceptionalism can be very, very destructive. I think it’s such a powerful force that people actually almost sell their souls in a way. They may not realise it at the time, but, you know, it’s like, imagine, if you will, people from tribal places telling photographers, “Don’t take our picture.” This is our souls that you’re taking now.

And I think in a way, the photographic image, in a sense, takes an aspect of your soul. It’s a representation of who you are each time. And you have to be very careful what you’re saying in those photographs. And if it’s just, “Oh, now I’m going to sell this product and I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that.” For me personally, that doesn’t work. I have to keep a part of myself. And I’ve tried to do this over the years. Just, I don’t buy into the game. You know, I just don’t believe in it.

I believe in the music and I believe in the magical aspects of music. But that aspect when, you know, many, many gifted people have died, right? If you think about it. And they died too young and they died because they were expected to be superhuman and they were human after all.

And so the shiny side that is popular, that is famous, that has screaming audiences and all of that and driven off in limousines and living from five-star hotel to the next five-star hotel. I don’t think that’s healthy. So I think it’s good to make your own bed. It’s good to go do your shopping. Good to have your feet on the ground. Good to know that you’re a human being as well. The other stuff is projection. It’s all projection from my perspective.

And obviously, this is probably a good point to bring up the role that advocacy has played in your life and you’ve been so impactful in that. Was there a genesis moment where this kind of began? And obviously, I’m thinking of the ’80s and the AIDS crisis. Was there an aha moment or a genesis moment of that in your life?

Well, there have been many. There’s just been many.

Or the first.

It could be one or it could be the first. But I’ve got activism in my blood. It’s in my DNA. My father’s side of the family were very socially and politically very active. And even my grandparents, particularly in between the First and Second World Wars, they were out on the streets fighting fascism. Actually, literally fighting fascism at the factory gates in Scotland.

So that activism is in my Lennox blood. Although I don’t necessarily see myself as aligned to any political party. I just don’t. I’m very disillusioned with politics, but that’s my own personal thing. 

Yes, one time I was—and this is a good story, actually—Sting, and I’m dropping a name here. I’m sorry, guys. But Sting is a friend. I consider him to be a good friend and he very kindly—well, him and Trudie—allowed me and my husband to stay in their… Well, they had a loft on Hudson Street.

And they were very, very generous and said, “You can come and you can just stay there.” So we were staying there anyway, and he had a music stand, as you would expect, in his living room. And on the music stand, there was something—it was a letter from Amnesty International thanking him for his involvement in the Amnesty International tour with Tracey Chapman and Youssou N’Dour and Peter Gabriel.

I don’t know that you’re maybe too young to remember that.

I remember those names, of course.

Yeah, but it was a very significant tour, and they went to different countries, and it was on behalf of Amnesty. And I had a bit of FOMO. That’s fear of missing out, because I honestly thought, that’s the kind of gig I want to play.

And we did. Eurythmics had opportunities to get involved. I mean, Live Aid came, and unfortunately, I had a nodule on my vocal cord at the time, and I was being told not to speak, not to sing, and I had to rest my voice. And that happened around the time of Live Aid. So we weren’t on Live Aid, although we were invited to take part. So that was another disappointment.

So I was having these kinds of opportunities, but then I couldn’t do it. So I always had this thing like, music is so strong. It carries messages. It inspires people. It tells stories. It goes deep to the heart and to the mind.

And I thought, “Oh, I want to do something.” And eventually, the craziest thing that really got me hooked into it was, I mean, again, this sounds like a crazy story, but there was a concert held in Cape Town in 2004 in South Africa. And it was to launch Nelson Mandela’s HIV AIDS programme at that time. And it was a foundation, do excuse me. And well, anyway, I’ll try and cut it short, but I had the opportunity through the performances and all the other artists that came. We were all introduced to Nelson Mandela, and he took us to Robben Island.

And his focus at that time, it was the post-presidential era in his life, but he started to focus on HIV AIDS because he hadn’t been able to do so in his presidency. And actually his son had died of AIDS. So there was a personal reason for bringing it out of the stigma and bringing it out into the air for people to stop being ashamed of it. Because there was one in five people dying of AIDS at that time. I mean, imagine that. And then he said, “Especially women.” Women are mothers who are carrying babies and the virus is transmitted to the babies. And I thought to myself, “Well, I’m a mother. I have that in common.”

And I know what it’s like to have lost a child because I did lose a child. And I thought it doesn’t matter my skin colour, my culture. It doesn’t make any difference. I’m a woman on this planet and all women deserve to have decent maternal healthcare so that they don’t die when they’re giving birth. The babies don’t die. That you have a successful outcome.

And then I discovered that actually there is a process that can happen immediately after the baby’s delivered, where the mother doesn’t have to pass the virus onto the baby. So the baby can be born free of AIDS. Basically, a child born with AIDS will last until their fifth birthday, unless they’re given some intervention.

And nobody knows, nobody talks about women and AIDS. But in Africa at that time, so many young women were affected with AIDS and young men and old people and everybody, everybody through the whole society, right from the topmost rung all the way down to the poorest people, or I should say all the way up. But politicians, teachers, doctors, nurses, people working in the bureaucracy, people serving you in the shops. One in five, just imagine that, you know, and they’re dying.

And now it’s going to go back again to those awful days because, you know, there have been massive cuts in aid. So unfortunately I dread to think, you know, what is going to be the future quite soon in the countries that are affected with HIV. We’re going to go back to the awful days of the pandemic.

And, you know, putting a book like this together from all these different phases of your career, you know, can be kind of a cathartic experience and give you a new perspective because you can look at everything in one little volume.

True, true.

All your whole life in one little book. 

Absolutely. 

What now, when you look at these previews before the book’s been printed, now that you can see it all in one place, does it give you a new perspective on any element of your life looking back?

Oh, that’s a good question. I spent my time as a shapeshifter, really. I mean, I was always thinking of the next thing to do and how I could present myself through music and performance to an audience. That I could share a humanity through music, you know. And the videos certainly were very powerful statements in their way. 

And I wanted to embody different aspects of being human. So, you know, the songs, let’s say, might have rage in them. They might have anger in them. They might have jealousy in them. They might have love or unrequited love. There’s so many aspects. There’s so many aspects of humanity that were expressed through these songs and visually through the performances and the movements. There’s a lot of irony in a lot of what our statements are. They’re beautiful, beautiful melodies with really dark messaging behind them. A sort of existential angst that runs through many of these songs. You know, they’re dark.

And people that really are familiar with them will appreciate the different layers that exist there. So, looking back, I was just like, “How the hell did we do it?” I mean, how did we have such an output?

I mean, the thing is, there were over 6,000 images in the cloud that were just captured in this whatever cloud looks like. I don’t know if it looks like anything. You know, I always imagine this puffy, cumulus cloud filled with content. Isn’t that funny? 

But, you know, music’s invisible. Ideas are invisible. They have to be manifest in some way. And so, it starts with an idea. It just starts with one idea. 

And I thought, wow, everything, the looks, the characters, all of it. I mean, there’s so many layers to all of it. There’s so many things that had to be done. And arriving at this Eurythmics, the two of us in front of Louis Zolcik’s camera is very, very reminiscent. That’s why there’s a lot of images from “Sweet Dreams,” because that was the point. That was the moment that we became empowered, really.

And, you know, the book pays a lot of tributes to these photographers that you mentioned and artists you’ve collaborated with over the years. And if a young musician came to you today and said, “Annie, I’m about to do my first big shoot for an album cover and I’m going to be staring at some, like a really big name photographer from Vogue,” or I don’t know, something, “we’re doing an album cover.” What is your advice to them when they step into the studio to kind of create something?

Well, you know, if you’re working with a top class photographer, you’ve usually got some experience already in working with them, because the top class photographers don’t come to new artists. But, maybe sometimes they do, because they want to experiment or they want to find sort of fresh subjects. But very rarely, usually you’re working with people that are aspiring.

So give me that one again, because are we talking about somebody that’s experienced or someone that is inexperienced that’s working with a great photographer?

Well, let’s say it’s a young musician doing their first shoot.

Okay. So the record company, they’ve given them a deal and they’ve got some budget.

First time they go into a studio in front of bright lights and strobe lights and they’re about to immortalize on film or digital what their look is and what they’re saying to the world. And they’ve got to do this with the photographer that, you know, whoever it is.

I think I would ask: “Who are you, and what do you want to say?” “And is there a way that you want to say this?” “Are the things that are your boundary that you will not cross?” “Or are the things that you would like to experiment with?”

Talk to the photographer and explain to them how you want to be perceived. I mean, they need to have a sense of you. If you just come on like a blank slate and you just stand in front of the camera, you can do that. But then maybe the photographer will try to make something of you. 

I mean, for a woman back in the day, I was always feeling that, you know, they want something more sexual from you. If it’s going to be sexual, make sure that that’s okay with you. That’s an aspect of yourself that you want to show. I mean, Cardi B has no problem with her sexuality being shown and she uses it to the max. You know, that is who she is. That’s part of her identity. It’s not part of mine.

You know what I mean? It’s not like one artist is different to another artist. How different are you? How would you ideally like to be presented? But I don’t think you can know that until you’ve experimented a bit. So those early days with those friends that you might have that are kind of aspiring to be a photographer, those are golden days, because you can experiment with them and you can figure it out.

And so that by the time you get to the really great photographer, you can know not to be intimidated by that. It’s about you. So don’t be scared. Don’t just be a puppet, you know. You don’t have to be a puppet to anybody.

And because of this book and all the memories that it brings up, if you could write an email to yourself, in 1983, that would be received by you in the heyday of tourists leading into the Eurythmics, what would the email say? What would you tell?

I would say “Don’t worry so much,” because I was very, very worried and I was very anxious. And going on stage, even when you’re used to it, it’s still an element of, you know, I suffered from stage fright for years and years. And now I decided just to take it under control and just not to be nervous anymore.

I’ve had so many things that were strong experiences in my life that I thought, “Well, why are you so afraid when you’ve been through so much?” Just don’t be afraid anymore. The audiences are not there to, they’re not out to get you.

You know, your fear doesn’t have to get in the way. My intention in making this book was basically that I just have been through so much and my life story is so unusual coming from my background. And so many things went wrong. So many things went wrong. And yet magically somehow some things went right. 

And so it was a question of like snakes and ladders, you know, you’re going down the snakes and up the ladders and you never know what’s going to happen. And “Oh my God, I’m right back at the beginning again.”

What are we going to do? It’s hopeless. And then, “Oh, I just got a double six. Huh, how did that happen?”

You know, we really lived on the edge. We lived as artists and we knew that it had to be in our destiny somehow or another. And we made that happen. So in a way, I just want to share that this is not the whole story. I always think, “Oh, I could do another book.” There’s so many books. I could do a series of books. I’d love to do it. It was such fun to make.

So it’s just, it’s got to be nice that I can have conversations with people and I’m not performing. You know, I’m just talking about a life lived through performance and what that entails. And, it’s even performance in the photographs because it’s a frozen moment and all these frozen moments are—that’s what your life is made of from day to day, creating a photo session or video or doing this or doing that. And that’s my life. Not bad.

Thank you to my guest, Annie Lennox, as well as to everyone at Rizzoli for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net. And follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. And don’t forget, you can purchase the first ever print issue of The Grand Tourist online now on our website. Just a few copies left. And follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Til next time!

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