Annie Lennox(1954–)

Ann Lennox was born at the Pittendrigh Maternity Hospital in Aberdeen on Christmas Day 1954, only daughter of Thomas Allison Lennox, a boilermaker at the Hall Russell shipyard in Aberdeen, and Dorothy Farquharson Ferguson, a school dinner-lady. The household was lower-middle-class Aberdeen working-class: the family lived in a two-bedroom council flat at the Pittodrie Place tenement block, the boilermaker shifts at the shipyard ran the daily timing of the household, and the daughter was, by family tradition, the bright one. She was schooled at the Aberdeen High School for Girls on a Aberdeen Burgh scholarship from twelve, played the flute and the piano from eight, and at seventeen won the open piano scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. She moved to London in 1971 at seventeen to take up the Academy place.

She left the Academy in her final term in 1974 (three months short of her final-year piano examinations) on the grounds, she later said, that the formal piano-and-music-theory curriculum did not match the popular-music interest she had been developing on the side. She took a waitressing job at a vegetarian restaurant in Hampstead, was working there at twenty-one in 1976 when she met the touring guitarist Dave Stewart of the Sunderland band Longdancer at a Hampstead dinner, and over the next eighteen months the two of them, alongside the bassist Peet Coombes and the drummer Jim Toomey, formed the Tourists. The Tourists ran from 1977 to 1980 as a UK touring band on the post-pub-rock pre-new-wave London circuit, took the cover of Dusty Springfield's *I Only Want to Be With You* to UK number four in 1979, and broke up at the end of 1980 in the standard small-band-touring-life dissolution of the period. Lennox and Stewart kept working together as a duo.

Eurythmics, as the two of them named the new project in late 1980 (from the Dalcroze method of music-and-movement teaching the Royal Academy had used in her undergraduate piano-training years), released the first album *In the Garden* in 1981 on the UK Boy Records label to no commercial response, and the second album *Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)* on RCA in January 1983. The title track, with the synthesiser-loop motif Stewart had been working with on a Movement Industries MC-202 and the monotone Lennox vocal that had been refined across the late Tourists tour year, was released as a single in January 1983 and reached UK number two and US number one across the spring. The album sold three and a half million copies across the first year. Lennox, with the orange-buzz-cut and the man's-suit-and-bow-tie stage costume she had introduced on the *Sweet Dreams* video (filmed at the Camden Lock cattle-market with the boardroom-table-and-cow imagery that became the signature visual moment of British 1980s music video), was on the cover of every UK and US pop magazine across 1983 and the rest of the decade.

The Eurythmics run across 1983 to 1990 produced eight studio albums and nineteen UK top-forty singles. The major Eurythmics records (*Touch* 1983, *Be Yourself Tonight* 1985, *Revenge* 1986, *Savage* 1987, *We Too Are One* 1989) sold a cumulative seventy-five million copies across the period and made the duo, by 1990, the British female-fronted commercial-pop act of the 1980s. The relationship had been continuously professional rather than romantic across the period (Stewart and Lennox had broken up romantically in 1981 before Eurythmics began); the dissolution of the duo at the end of 1989 was on the fatigue-and-direction-difference grounds of long professional-partnership work. Lennox went solo with the album *Diva* in 1992; *Diva* sold seven million copies and produced the *Why* single that has been her most-quoted post-Eurythmics solo record. She has produced four further solo albums (*Medusa* 1995, *Bare* 2003, *Songs of Mass Destruction* 2007, *A Christmas Cornucopia* 2010) and has worked across the period as a HIV/AIDS humanitarian campaigner alongside the Treatment Action Campaign of South Africa and the SING Campaign she founded in 2007.

She has been married three times (Radha Raman 1984-85; Uri Fruchtmann 1988-2000; Mitch Besser 2012-present) and has two daughters. She was awarded the OBE in the 2011 New Year Honours on the recommendation of David Cameron's first government on the strength of the humanitarian work, and received eight Brit Awards, four Grammy Awards (including Best Pop Vocal Performance for *Why* in 1995), the Golden Globe for *Into the West* from *The Lord of the Rings* in 2004, and an Academy Award nomination for the same song. She has lived between London and South Africa since 2008. The Lennox name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the locative *Leamhnach* (the elm-tree country, the Lennox earldom of the medieval west-central Scottish Highland-and-Lowland border), the foundational Stirlingshire-Dunbartonshire surname of the central Lowland tradition; she carried the Aberdeen boilermaker's-daughter variant of it into the international British female songwriting voice of the post-1980s pop period.