‘I’m just trying to communicate in a very weird time’
Annie Lennox on why, as a non-christian, she recorded an album of carols. By Alex Green
FEMINIST idol, d e cade-defining songwriter, philanthropist, Aids campaigner, friend of Nelson Mandela — Annie Lennox has lived many lives in her 65 years.
Ten years ago she added another string to her bow with the release of her first Christmas album.
But a decade later the Eurythmics star is relaunching A Christmas Cornucopia in markedly different circumstances.
“The winter of 2020 has been unprecedented,” she extols over video call. “People have been in tremendous pain.
“There’s loss, there’s grief, t here’s fear, t here’s anxiety, there’s instability, so people have experienced this at all sorts of different levels.
“Christmas is a really strange thing because originally it’s supposed to be the acknowledgment of the birth of Christianity.
“And I’m not a Christian, and I’m not religious but I have a sensibility for transcendent things.”
Lennox is an Eighties survivor, a shape-shifter whose political and social concerns have defined her as much as her music.
When we speak, she sports a Zoom background more glorious than most: a bright, modern cottage-cum-recording studio with an enviable view of the Californian hills.
Built the same year Lennox was born in Aberdeen — 1954 — the house operates as a sort of spiritual retreat for the singer.
It is also home to her piano, from which she has serenaded and chatted with her nearly 400,000 fans on Instagram during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I put these things out because it’s from the heart,” she says.
“That might sound a bit cheesy but it truly is genuine and I know that anyone can be watching what I’m doing.
“It could be someone who doesn’t like you, and tells you so, or it could be people who respond and say things like ‘ Your music is helping me, these little clips are helping me to get through’.
“I’m not Mother Theresa, I’m not trying to do anything like that. I’m just communicating in a really weird time, a Covid time, where there is this restriction on everything and the world is being turned upside down.”
Whilst not fully convinced by its spirituality, Lennox is fascinated with the ritual and belief behind Christmas.
As a child, she eagerly anticipated her school Christmas service, where the kids would trail in “great crocodile lines” to church to sing carols and gasp at the towering tree.
“I’m a sponge for music,” she says of those memories.
“I love melody and I didn’t fully understand baby Jesus and any of that.
“You know there’s a baby Jesus that’s in a crib with shepherds and kings and angels and then there’s the crucified Jesus, with blood and thorns and the torture and the cruelty of it.
“That’s really scary... and maybe that is a symbol for the life we enter into.
“We’re born into innocence and then we suffer and die, so maybe at a symbolic level that is what Christianity is about — rebirth and death and all of that.”
A Christmas Cornucopia features interpretations of traditional festive songs and carols, rounded out by a Lennox composition, Universal Child.
How does she see Christmas? Is she repelled by the rampant capitalism of it all or attracted by the sense of community?
“Don’t you find that your allegiances sort of float? They’re kind of amorphous,” she says.
“I see things that I love and I see things that I really feel repelled by, so it’s a whole mixture.
“With the Christmas Cornucopia, there’s a leaning into the pagan, a pre-victorian calling in some kind of more ancient thing, something to do with nature.
“That goes beyond the Christianity and Victorian concept, where these carols have come from.”
Lennox and Dave Stewart — together The Eurythmics — have staged a handful of one-off reunions for charitable causes, yet a full-blown reunion is off the cards, she explains.
“We live very different lives. He doesn’t live near me. But we’re on good terms,” she says.
“Wherever we are we become one kind of unit, that’s how people perceive it and it was very necessary for me and that time, for him too, to individuate...
“I came to the point where I was like ‘I need to know who I am’ not this thing with the two of us.
“So we went through all this stuff and then we just went ‘No.’ And people still want us to be that thing. And it’s good we do occasionally do something.”
But dashing the hopes of fans, Lennox explains she is waiting until inspiration strikes before recording her next original album. For now she is happy to sit at her piano in her idyllic retreat, playing the pieces learned in her childhood.