‘My friends have long Covid, so I’m not taking any chances’
As she turns 66, Annie Lennox tells Craig Mclean about moving to LA – and why she won’t be hosting Christmas
When I first spoke to Annie Lennox about the release of her festive album 10 years ago, she was typically… single-minded. Yes, she conceded, A Christmas Cornucopia featured cockle-warming orchestral covers of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Silent Night and O Little Town of Bethlehem. But we were not to be lulled into an eggnog fug, thinking this was simple seasonal syrup.
“Isn’t it ironic,” said the former Eurythmic turned women’s rights activist, “that Christmas is a time of celebration, in memory of a child – the celebration of the divine, sacred event of birth – and yet in this day and age, one in eight women die giving birth in developing countries? And they’ll die not even on the floor of a hospital, they’ll be outside in the road. So I’ve brought something of that into the recording.”
Speaking to Lennox a decade on, about the same collection (reissued today with a new bonus track), everything has changed – and yet nothing has changed.
Her age-defying vigour and cropped silver hair remain. But the 65-year-old is Zoom-ing in from the Californian home she’s occupied in the canyons above West Hollywood since March.
The album now features Lennox’s take on Dido’s Lament, a classical piece inspired by The Aeneid and written by Henry Purcell in the 1680s.
It was recorded during the original sessions but Lennox somehow forgot about it. Her producer rediscovered it during a lockdown clearout.
Now Lennox can see the timely reason for dusting off a cover of a 350-year-old composition based on an epic verse by an Ancient Roman poet. “This is a lament for the world,” she says of the spectral, chillingly beautiful piano ballad. “The whole thing is synchronistic in every single way.”
For an artist who blazed a trail as a synth-pop pioneer with musical partner Dave Stewart, today the technology is getting the better of her.
“Some weird s---’s going on with my laptop. Ach,” says a frustrated Lennox, sounding very Scottish as her video link goes blank. “Don’t you hate it? Jesus, if I only was any good with this, but I’m a bloody Luddite!”
Back in her pop star days, she e adds, she was never the technological al one. “I sat and gave guidance from the sofa at the back of the studio. But I never ver put my hands on the [recording] desk.” esk.”
As for her relocation to the United States – at the height of the pandemic’s first wave – she explains: “My daughter Lola has as been living here for a few years, trying to develop her career in music. My stepson also lives here, and my husband’s spent a lot of time in Africa.”
Dr Mitch Besser, an obstetrician, gynaecologist and charity chief whom she married eight years ago is, she he explains, “one of those people e that really needs the sun, otherwise he just feels miserable”.
Nonetheless, at this stage in her life, she never would have ve expected to be doing a transatlantic flit.
“And it’s certainly not because I love Los Angeles,” she explains. “We just needed d to be closer to family, and London wasn’t doing it for us s any more.” Her arrival on US soil coincided not only with the Covid-19 pandemic and a simmering general election, but also devastating Californian w wildfires.
“We lived for two weeks with toxic air,” she say says. “You couldn’t open the doors or w windows. If you had air-cond air-conditioning, you were grateful for that, because it kept the heat out of the house. But you just felt s so dysphoric, like it was the end of days.”
I It’s been no better down th the hill, in the urban heart o of Los Angeles.
“If I drive eight minutes down the road on to Sunset Strip, it’s Orwellian. All the b buildings, more or less, are boarded up because of the election. There’s a sense of a potential for civil war, for vigilantism,” she says soberly as we speak in the m midst of still-unresolved W White House transition c chaos.
“The political divide, the po polarity, is so palpable.” D Division, she’s come to under understand, is also intrinsic to the fem feminist cause for which she was a stadium-sized st standard bearer in the Eighties. “I’ve realised it’s a multifaceted issue. Feminism is expressed and felt and perceived by men and women everywhere. But if you’re driven by anger, it’s just going to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat,” she says, rhythmically snapping her fingers.
Were things simpler in the Eighties, when Lennox flew the flag for what used to be called “gender-bending”, and Boy George on Top of the Pops was confusing the nation’s dads? Then, such political statements seemed more straightforward.
“I didn’t just arbitrarily choose to put on a man’s suit, cut my hair and become a gender-bender. It’s not as simple as that. That was never the intention. It’s something that evolved,” she says.
“And George was so flamboyant, like a creature from outer space. But it was super-brave of him to do that, because he was a gay man who would get beaten up. But you know what? He’d punch the living daylights out of anybody that tried to assault him! He was tough.
“So it’s easy to think retrospectively and put it in some neat box and categorise it – there’s so much more to it than that. Back then, it was something different, and was completely on the cutting edge. But after a while it becomes normalised. That’s the way society and culture and attitudes evolve.”
I’m interested in Lennox’s views on the battle between those championing women’s rights and LGBTQ+ activists promoting trans rights. Just look at the boiling water JK Rowling plunged into. What are her thoughts on that? A
‘I’ve had my fingers burned rather badly from things I’ve said off the cuff’
pause. “I’ll step back from that. It’s too hot a subject. I got my fingers burned rather badly from some things that I said off the cuff, or even with humour, and it got into a situation not quite as bad as this one,” she says, in an apparent reference to her description in 2014 of Beyoncé as “feminist lite”.
“It’s become absolutely paralysing,” adds Lennox. “I agreed with political correctness at the beginning. It’s right to say: listen, be aware.
“The word, and how you frame it, is a very powerful thing. You can’t un-say what you just said, you can’t un-ring that bell. But now we’re so hyper-vigilant, hypercritical, we’ve come to this point where we’re censored in a way.”
She is reminded of her own reaction to the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaigns of a few years ago, when statues of colonialists around the world were targeted by protesters.
“I had an idea: maybe the solution is to turn those statues on their heads. Every one of them. Don’t destroy them, because they are part of history – and at the bottom on the plinth, we have an explanation as to who this person was, how they affected and impacted society… and how much damage they did to the slaves under their thumb.”
Despite Covid restrictions, she and Besser are managing “quite well”, she says. “As both of us are introverted people, we appreciate, almost, an opportunity to disconnect. But I’ve been very, very strict.
“My brother-in-law was running the CDC [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta] a few years ago, [during] swine flu. And he’s now a commentator here – at one point, he was daily on the news. He’s incredibly informed about epidemiology, and so we speak with him.
“But I have a couple of friends who are experiencing Long Covid, right from back in the day, and they are struggling. They are both not old people, they’re far younger than me. So I just think: you can’t take risks. For someone of 65-plus, you can’t afford to be exposed to it.”
Christmas, then, for Lennox will be a sensible affair, despite the happy confluence of her album’s new lease of life, and her turning 66 on December 25. Yes, she’ll be in LA, but with no plans as yet to host the family.
“We just have to be really careful at any kind of celebratory coming together. You take one day at a time, don’t you?”