Mother superior

Auditors in, as the poet said. Annie Lennox is releasing a 14-song retrospective collection of songs gleaned from a post-Eurythmics solo career that began in 1992, and which has resulted in multiple Grammy, Brit and Ivor Novello awards, Oscars, Golden Globes, plus some 78 million albums sold worldwide. But commercial success apart, the process of reviewing the work lent the singer a sense of perspective she didn’t possess while actually making the records.

“It’s just kind of amazing, you go, ‘Oh shit, there was sooooo much went into all of that,’” she admits. “While I was making music and videos and conceiving things and working on all the detail, I was just so absorbed in the work that I wasn’t looking up. I couldn’t be objective, it was all subjective, so you look back and go, ‘Did I really do all that, and have two children? There goes my life – wow!’ It’s so concentrated. God is in the detail.”
Given that so many of her songs are preoccupied with the tragedy rather than transcendence of love (‘Why’, ‘Walking On Broken Glass’, ‘No More ‘I Love You’s’), one wonders if her view of the work is coloured by experience. In other words, if you had a bad time making a great record, does it prejudice your retrospective appreciation of it?
“(Laughs). That’s a very personal question! Listen man, it was good times and bad times, life is a bumpy ride, the ups and the downs, it’s the whole damn thing. See, I can look at somebody’s life and go, ‘Oh Christ, how can they live that way?’ Like John Martyn for example, who’s just passed. How come he had his coke days and his alcoholic days and he lost part of his leg and he made this glorious music – what was the life of John Martyn, and how did that transpire? Jesus!
“But I can’t compare myself to another creator, another individual, ’cos you live the way you live. Some people are incredibly hedonistic, but not me, I was never the one who woke up in the hotel room not quite knowing where I was, there was another thing going on. Songwriting and performance is an expression, and I think the thing that needs to be taken out is very often the painful thing. A baby opens its mouth and cries and there you have it, it’s an expression of something, and the voice is very close to the soul.”
Becoming a mother, Lennox says, was crucial in motivating her to become engaged in AIDS awareness and humanitarian work (she recently received the Red Cross Services to Humanity Award).
“Absolutely,” she says, “it made me more expansive in terms of my empathy and compassion with the whole world, and you understand, ‘Wow I’m part of this greater whole of humanity; before, I thought it was just me on the planet.’ I’m engaged in activism and I’m concerned for women’s rights and children, and that has been prefaced with my experience of being a woman and being a mother, that I feel that matriarchal protectiveness, not only for my own children but for all children, a voracious sense that children should have a fundamental human right to be protected. I cannot bear to see children being abused in any way. If I have a platform then I’d like to use it well, and it shouldn’t be wasted in some kind of narcissistic pursuit. Time will tell, looking back, if I’ve been of any benefit to anyone, but that’s what I’m interested in: engagement. And that’s what’s important – a sense of purpose.”

The Annie Lennox Collection is out now on Sony/BMG.