Annie Lennox: "My life was a bus, but I was running behind it..."

"I JUST NEEDED to reclaim my personal territory," Annie Lennox said, as she sat on a sofa in the lounge of a small hotel in West London. "I had this vision constantly towards the end of the Eurythmics period: my life was a bus, but I was running behind it. I just could not catch up with that f——- bus”.

Lennox was talking in early 1992, to Q magazine journalist Phil Sutcliffe in an interview that helped to signal a new chapter in her life. Eurythmics, the hugely successful duo in which she had starred alongside Dave Stewart, was no more. She had given birth to a daughter, Lola. And now her debut solo album, Diva, was about to be released.

Eurythmics had been one of the biggest and most influential bands of the Eighties, with a series of brilliant singles such as Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Who’s That Girl?, Here Comes the Rain Again, Would I Lie to You?, There Must Be an Angel (Playing with my Heart) and Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves. Three of their albums - Touch, We Too Are One, and a Greatest Hits selection - all went to number one. Their tours were sold-out affairs, the band won a Grammy and an MTV Video Music award, and they sold an estimated 75 million records.

Lennox and Stewart were far from the first successful act, however, to be worn out by the relentless cycle of songwriting and recording, touring and making music videos. Their last album, We Too Are One (released in 1989) and subsequent world tour had both exacted a price. Making the record was a challenge; "I was crying all the time”, she told Sutcliffe. The tour added physical fatigue to emotional exhaustion, and the duo fizzled out after a show in Rio de Janeiro.

“It didn't feel right," Lennox recollected. “We sort of left saying maybe, maybe not. But to be quite honest Dave and I had got quite heartily sick of each other. And I say that in an affectionate way … Well, come on, we had an overdose of each other, didn't we? Living together [which they had, for four years until 1981] then splitting up but staying together as Eurythmics. Oh dear”.

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After the tour, she said, ”I went home and sat in the house and I thought, I don't know how to do this any more. I didn't know how to do the shopping, I didn't know how to do anything. I was used to the five-star monastic existence of hotels. I didn't know who I was, what I was. What am I supposed to be doing? Am I even valid? But then fortunately I got pregnant and when any woman gets pregnant she has something that's... a gentle, quiet kind of purpose”.

Speaking a few years ago in a RetroSpective video (available on YouTube), she elaborated thus:  “What I understood was that I just craved some sort of independence and freedom from being with someone else. I didn’t have complete faith in myself, because I’d always worked with Dave as a partnership, and it was just to see if I could”.

In time, she began working on a batch of new songs. As for the songwriting process itself …"I know a lot of writers smoke a lot of dope, but I don’t”, Lennox told Q. “I thought maybe I should get drunk of an afternoon to get in touch with the subconscious part of my mind, away from the part that's in charge of doing the dishes and so on. All I did was drink a can of Guinness before I went to bed, though, that was the extent of it.

“Listening to artists I really love was more useful. Van Morrison, I'd put him on and realise, that's what I want. I want to speak to people like that. He'll always throw a line to you, very offhand, but your imagination's set fire, you can see the place and you can see the moment”.

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The album was recorded in a studio in Lennox’s London home, beginning in April 1991, and was released the following April. Full of consistently strong songs, including the magnificent opener, Why, it was an instant hit, and deservedly debuted at number one in the British charts. Any fears that she had lost her way proved to be unfounded.

“No female pop-rock singer explores gloomy, biting torch songs better than Lennox, who's been dubbed the Downer Diva”, observed the LA Times. “Even songs accompanied by cheery, bouncy music have morose messages, such as the striking ‘Walking on Broken Glass’, the highlight of this solo debut album and one of the best tunes she's ever had.

“But there's also a sense of freedom and expansiveness through most of the album, both in the songs … and in her interpretations - a freedom that has been missing in Lennox's work since the early days of Eurythmics”.

The Washington Post critic weighed in: “Not surprisingly, some of the best tracks … have a distinctly autobiographical slant and less grand ambitions. ‘Precious’, for example, is a gentle, uncomplicated ode to Lennox's baby daughter, and on ‘Legend in My Living Room’, the singer explores some of the emotions that led her to perform in the first place. But perhaps best of all, Lennox proves she can still get under your skin with a soul ballad when she wants to, even when it's as trite as ‘Stay by Me’.

No fewer than five of the tracks - Why, Precious, Walking on Broken Glass, Cold, and Little Bird - hit the top 30, with first-, third- and fifth-named songs all lodging in the top 10.

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Lennox wrote all the tracks on her own, with two exceptions: Legend in My Living Room — and The Gift, a haunting track written with The Blue Nile (Lennox, long a fan of the Glasgow trio, would go on to record their song, Downtown Lights, on her next solo album, Medusa).

“When I called the album Diva it was a little bit ironical”, Lennox said on a BBC2 documentary around the time of Diva’s release, “because it’s quite an arrogant thing to take that name and put it on yourself. It’s like taking a crown and putting it on your head, in a way. But I do it with a smile because the diva that you see, the person in performance, is not necessarily the person that I am. 

“It’s just that, as a performer, I’ve lived that diva-esque existence. Being in a little box, and having the box opened up, night after night, when you come out and perform and everybody sees this thing, this entity, and then you go back and disappear, and pack your suitcase… The person that’s you goes to the other town and does the same thing the next night. I’ve experienced that balance of being the public person that is this monstrous kind of diva, a personage, and then trying to maintain my life. I can make that distinction; I think there was a time when I found it difficult to know who was who”.

As she puts it in the RetroSpective video, “There’s duality in life, and the songs are full of duality”.

Diva was a genuine success. It went quadruple platinum in the UK and double platinum in the States and charted overseas. It won a Brit award and a Grammy nomination.

Lennox made several other solo albums. Eurythmics, for their part, reformed for a 1999 album Peace. In 2022, they were inducted into the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame, by U2’s The Edge. Last year the hit single, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), received the distinction of being added to the US Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

* Next week: Nazareth, Loud 'N' Proud