Annie Lennox(1954–)

Ann Lennox was born in Aberdeen on Christmas Day 1954, only daughter of a boilermaker at the Hall Russell shipyard and a school dinner-lady. She played the flute and piano from eight, was schooled at the Aberdeen High School for Girls on a burgh scholarship, and at seventeen won the open piano scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London.

She left the Academy in her final term, took a waitressing job in Hampstead, and there in 1976 met the touring guitarist Dave Stewart. Over the next eighteen months they formed the Tourists, who ran from 1977 to 1980 on the London touring circuit and took a cover of Dusty Springfield's I Only Want to Be With You to UK number four. Lennox and Stewart kept working together as a duo.

Eurythmics released the first album in 1981 and the second, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), on RCA in January 1983. The title track reached UK number two and US number one, the album sold three and a half million copies in its first year, and Lennox, with the orange crop and the man's suit of the Sweet Dreams video, was on the cover of every UK and US pop magazine across the decade.

The Eurythmics run from 1983 to 1990 produced eight studio albums and nineteen UK top-forty singles, Touch, Be Yourself Tonight, Revenge, Savage and We Too Are One among them, a cumulative seventy-five million copies, making the duo the British female-fronted commercial-pop act of the 1980s. She went solo with Diva in 1992, which sold seven million copies and produced Why, and followed it with Medusa, Bare and Songs of Mass Destruction.

She has worked across the period as an HIV/AIDS humanitarian campaigner, founding the SING Campaign in 2007. She received four Grammy Awards, eight Brit Awards, the Golden Globe for Into the West from The Lord of the Rings, an Academy Award nomination for the same song, and the OBE in 2011 for the humanitarian work. The Lennox name, the locative Leamhnach or elm-tree country of the medieval Lennox earldom, she carried from an Aberdeen boilermaker's family into the international British female songwriting voice of the post-1980s pop period.