The average person speaks at approximately 125 words a minute, while the not-so-average Annie Lennox manages to cram 150 words, dripping with her thick Scottish brogue, into that same space, before ending each thought with a concerned “do you know what I mean?”

For the artist and activist whose career has spanned 27 years as frontwoman of the Eurythmics and successful solo endeavours there’s no time to waste on breaths. There’s a new best-of album, The Annie Lennox Collection, to promote and simply too many things in this world that need changing for La Lennox to pause for conversational niceties.

- Advertisement -

Lennox — a drop-out from the prestigious London Royal Academy of Music — found international fame after teaming up with fellow musician Dave Stewart in the late ’70s to form the Eurythmics. The band sat like the cool kids on the playground of the ’80s music scene. Too edgy to fit in with the cool crowd and too pop to fit in with the punk and burgeoning London New Wave, they were respected and loved by all.

“Back in ’84 I got a bit tired of the labelling,” Lennox recalled of the music industry’s frustrated attempts to pigeonhole the artist who can aptly be described as an iconoclast.

“It’s par for the course that people have to use words to label others and it’s interesting because at the time I was trying to, in a way, push a boundary — do you know what I mean?

“Wearing men’s suits and the hair wasn’t about my sexual orientation. It was about saying ‘hey, what you see is not what you get, so don’t assume it’ – do you know what I mean? But then a label comes anyway, but the more you try to stretch a boundary, the more people will instantly come back with a label and I found that quite ironic.”

Together the duo produced well-known hits like Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Would I Lie to You? and Missionary Man and sold a total of 75 million records before parting ways to explore solo projects.

A move which usually spells the death knell for artists did nothing but broaden Lennox’s appeal as she went on to release four more commercially successful albums (Diva, Medusa, Bare and Songs of Mass Destruction) and entered new areas including film score writing. Her contributions to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack won her an Oscar.

Now at 54, Lennox will release The Annie Lennox Collection. The best-of album is a milestone in any artist’s career which usually marks the end, but Lennox has never been one to pay attention to attempts to stifle her creativity and is filled with enthusiasm for the future.

“The feeling is of rounding something off. It’s a nice arrival point,” Lennox explained to Sydney Star Observer.

“When I look back, most days of my working life I was creating — whether it was doing an interview or rehearsing or tours or photo sessions. Now I’m able to look back and see this as a culmination of everything, or a tie-up of all those things and begin thinking ahead.”

Creative projects aside, “thinking ahead” for Lennox means thinking about how to use her public persona to generate some good in the world by further publicising the HIV epidemic in Africa — a cause she has devoted herself to since first travelling to South Africa in 2003 to participate in the inaugural Nelson Mandela 46664 HIV benefit concert.

“Being a musician I do realise that I have this opportunity to communicate with people and more recently I’ve been more about talking as much as singing and performing. Before I didn’t engage as much, it was more about my music or whatever — but now 50 percent of what I do is activist work.

“Most people are pretty style-fixated so there’s not much content to what people are doing. It’s all about superficial things like hair styles and dress sensibilities — which is fine. I have no issue with that, but I just think, we’ve got so many resources that we just piss away and we don’t utilise.

“If we took our heads out of the holes in the ground we stuck them in and raised our heads above the pulpit we could do so much more.

“For years I’d been responding to various requests, you know, people contacting me to say would I do this or that. That was all fine but I was kind of itching to do something that was more meaningful and consistent — do you know what I mean?

“I went to South Africa and what I realised was that HIV/AIDS was devastating women’s lives. We’ve always had this assumption that it mainly belongs to the gay community or intravenous drug users and all of a sudden I understood that it was the female
population that was being devastated. Women are mothers and I’m a mother, so that went very deep with me.”

Moved by what she saw, Lennox started the SING project, a creative venture which brought together 23 leading female artists including Madonna, Pink, Melissa Etheridge, Angelique Kidjo and Sarah McLachlan to produce a charity single to raise money for the South African Treatment Action Campaign, an HIV treatment and advocacy group.

SING has grown to include an online education campaign and merchandise store. The campaign has engaged thousands of people who know what Annie Lennox means when she says she wants to change the world. It has raised 100,000 pounds for treatment and education campaigns, a figure set to grow as Lennox uses the promotion of her latest album to speak about the cause to the media and audiences who attend her live shows.

“I don’t care what anybody’s sexual orientation, what colour or creed they are. It doesn’t make any difference to me, I come from a humanistic point of view. I believe in respecting and appreciating people’s differences and in human rights.

“And all I can do is hope I can help others to realise it just takes everyone to do a small thing to change things — do you know what I mean?”

info: For more on Annie Lennox and The Annie Lennox Collection visit annielennox.com. For more on the SING campaign or to donate visit annielennoxsing.com.

Ani Lamont,
Courtesy of Sydney Star Observer