A Look Back At The Life And Career Of Annie Lennox

An androgynous icon who went solo at the height of her band's fame and won an Oscar making music for Middle Earth, Annie Lennox is a bonafide pop music legend. According to Annie Lennox the Biography, Annie Lennox was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, to Tom Lennox, a shipyard boilermaker, and Dorothy Lennox, a homemaker and occasional school cook. According to Lennox, the family's financial situation wasn't exactly solid. My family didn't have a lot of money to go around. We weren't absolutely poor, but every penny had to be accounted for." As Lennox's family friend June Smith recalls, "[Lennox was an only child, and this meant that her parents were a little stricter with her than most families at the time.] Also in comparison to other working-class families, the Lennoxes could afford a little more as they didn't have several mouths to feed. Tom Lennox was an active communist, having learned all about left-wing politics from his working-class parents. Annie remembers her father as an authoritarian figure in her life, something that damaged their relationship at times. Dorothy Lennox, on the other hand, was a softer presence. But despite financial hardship, both parents supported Lennox in her pursuit of music. Annie Lennox was three years old when she touched her first piano, albeit a toy one. According to Annie Lennox The Biography, the Lennox parents decided to encourage her musical talent and buy her a real piano, after they noticed she would effortlessly replicate TV tunes on the toy piano. From then on, Lennox knew she wanted to make music, and not just on the piano. Her career has seen her experiment with various genres, ranging from classical to pop. These reflect in the music she enjoys, too. Lennox told MSNBC's Ari Melber that among the eclectic mix of music she loves, Gregory Porter and Bob Marley are among her favorite musicians. Annie Lennox wasn't always headed for the pop star life. She started out with a classical route, in both senses of the word. She was just 17 years old when she passed a flute exam and an interview at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Over the summer, Lennox worked at a smelly fish factory in order to put some cash aside for the very expensive London, saying in the book, "...I used to wrap my work clothes in a plastic bag each night and fall flat on my face when I opened it the next morning." But it wasn't the same when she actually got there. As she recalled in 2010 on Al Jazeera's One on One, "...I swiftly realized that, when it came down to my personality and motivation, the classical scene wasn't really going for me." Lennox also found living in London tough, as a young student with zero connections and little to no cash. Her motivation seemed to decrease over the three undergrad years, which was evident in her class attendance. "...I actually hadn't been to a history of music lecture in the whole time that I was at the academy. I don't know how I got away with it." The final exams were three days away when Lennox decided to skip them and pursue a career in the pop music industry, without a classical music diploma. Who doesn't dream of being rich and famous every once in a while? Annie Lennox certainly dreamed of it as a young child, as Annie Lennox, the biography reveals. "...When I was a child, I had a lot of fantasies. The wigs, the videos with flash cars, even seeing myself on magazine covers." When she paired up with her lover-turned-bandmate Dave Stewart and created Eurythmics, Lennox achieved her dreams. Their 1983 global hit, Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, became a No. 1 hit in the United States, and the song would be heard on the radio across the globe. But, as she told MSNBC's Ari Melber, fame came with a cohort of negative after-effects. "...So I had this incredible feeling of vulnerability, and any moment now some terrible disaster was awaiting me." Lennox continued to find fame emotionally distressing throughout her career. Long after the Eurythmics hit, commenting, "...If you want to be in a pop group, you either become completely debauched and die of a drug overdose, or else you renounce everything and live like a nun. I think I've straddled them both." Lennox told Al Jazeera that nowadays, she tries to stay out of the spotlight, and notoriously shuns tabloids and personal life questions. Perhaps one lesser-known fact about Annie Lennox's complex musical career is her film score venture from the early 2000s. As SongFacts explains, Lennox teamed up with Fran Walsh and Howard Shore to create a song for Lord of the Rings Return of the King. Titled Into the West, their song became an immediate sensation, and she performed it during the 2004 Oscars. However, the true highlight of the night must have been when she, Walsh, and Shore won the Oscar for Best Original Song. In her speech, she thanked Peter Jackson, director of the award-winning trilogy, and her collaborators, saying, "...You were extraordinary, you were very inspiring, and I hope you enjoyed the song when I sang it tonight." Into the West was actually inspired by the untimely death of New Zealand filmmaker Cameron Duncan. His funeral was the first time the song was performed in public. During the 1980s, Annie Lennox became quite a famous figure for cross-dressing and sporting an androgynous look. But interestingly enough, she never aimed to be a gender-bender, as she told MSNBC's Ari Melver. The Eurythmics was in partnership with Dave, who's a man, and the sense of being equals — almost like twins — on the stage. At that time, Lennox was experimenting with a variety of costumes, all of which were designed to convey a powerful image that made songs more memorable to the audience. They were also able to help communicate the underlying messages of the songs, including her most famous appearance in the Sweet Dreams video. "'Sweet Dreams' is a statement about the existential nature of the human condition, if you like." Her masculine energy and fashion apparel weren't meant to paint her as a gay icon, let alone a gender-bender. Lennox actually told Pride Source she never liked that label, saying, "...I really felt it was diminishing in a way. I wasn't bending gender. I was saying, look, as a woman I can be equal to a man." As she explained in a 2010 TED Talk, Lennox became seriously involved in the HIV-AIDS campaign back in 2003, when Nelson Mandela invited her to South Africa. Lennox participated in a concert for Foundation 46664, which was the prisoner number assigned to Mandela at the Robben Island Prison. During a press conference, Mandela commented that AIDS was taking 1,000 lives every day, and that women and children were the most vulnerable. Lennox later spoke about what she had heard, saying, "...This was a huge impact on my mind, because I am a woman and I am a mother, and I hadn't realized that the HIV-AIDS pandemic was directly affecting women in such a way. When I left Cape Town, I told myself, this is going to be something that I have to talk about. I have to serve." As Lennox's official website states, she is now involved with the U.N. AIDS Campaign, which seeks to end AIDS as a public threat by 2030. Lennox is also involved with Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and has even started her own organization, The Circle. As per The Circle's website, Lennox founded the organization in 2008 with one goal — to bring together women and their allies to fight for rights and equal opportunities. But for Lennox, activism is not at all separate from her musical career. Both her pursuits seek to bring people from around the world together and unite rather than divide. "...Music is the gift for everyone, and that is the beauty of music, that it is really something that we can all enjoy." When she spoke to Al Jazeera in 2010, Lennox explained that she has always been pretty skeptical of organized religion, and various moments in her life contributed to her views. Her first experience was a religiously divided family. While her mother had some ties to the Church of Scotland, her father and the rest of his family were atheists. Then, as per The Irish Examiner, Lennox's first husband, Radha Raman, was a Hare Krishna devotee. They got married in 1984 and divorced a year later. She commented that, apart from the marriage being a mistake, she also became disillusioned with and critical of the Hare Krishna movement. Lennox also remains disappointed in organized religion, explaining to Al Jazeera, "...I think that religion should be the highest moral and ethical example of the best of humanity. And sadly, I see that, for me, organized religion most often creates division." It's a well-known trope that art comes from struggle. In Annie Lennox's case, this is quite true. In addition to telling The Times that she suffered from seasonal affective disorder as a child in Scotland, Al Jazeera confirmed that Lennox lost both her parents to cancer. The Herald reports that Lennox's father died in 1986, while her 73-year-old mother died in 2003. The Telegraph reported that Lennox had another devastating moment in 1988, when her son Daniel was stillborn. Commenting on the death of her child, she said, "...you have to be in pain before you write something of any value. But it's almost like you're a potter, and that's the clay you use." If it wasn't for Dave Stewart, Annie Lennox would not have become the world-renowned Eurythmics star. The two met in the late 1970s, and they became romantically involved. According to Annie Lennox, The Biography, Lennox and Stewart were a couple for four years, breaking up before creating Eurythmics and achieving worldwide fame. As Stewart told The Guardian, "...I can't think of any other couple that did what we did, to break up and then start a band. Sonny and Cher did it the other way around. What we went through was insane." Despite breaking up as a couple, Lennox and Stewart meant a lot to each other, both on a personal and professional level. "...both of us had a tremendous belief in each other as human beings, and we had a shared dream." They were also going through different kinds of hardship. Lennox was battling depression, while Stewart had recently been in a serious car accident and had drug abuse problems. So after temporarily forming a band called The Tourists, the pair soon evolved into their famous musical duo, and the rest is history. Eurythmics broke up in 1990, but the following year, their greatest hits collection spent a staggering 10 weeks on the United Kingdom charts at number one. Following their breakup, Annie Lennox topped Eurythmics' sales with her debut solo album, Diva, which sold four million copies. Dave Stewart didn't leave the spotlight, either, going on to become an illustrious songwriter and producer. In 1999, Lennox and Stewart reunited for another Eurythmics album called Peace. It would be their last. In fact, their friendship seemed to cool down to an all-time low when Lennox didn't invite Stewart to her wedding. He spoke to The Independent about it, saying, "...it's weird, isn't it? People always still think of us as a couple and yet we barely ever talk now." But in November 2022, Eurythmics fans had a great surprise. Lennox and Stewart finally reunited as they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside Eminem, Dolly Parton, and Duran Duran. Their short but powerful performance can be seen as the culmination of an intense, inspiring project that captivated millions of people around the world.