Annie Lennox celebrates her 70th birthday: from pop star to global feminist

From the beginning, Annie Lennox (70) was more than just another pop singer. While she wrote music history with the revolutionary synth sounds of her band Eurythmics, she took the game of gender roles to the extreme with her androgynous looks like no other artist before her. In recent decades she increasingly withdrew from the music business and used her fame to make the world a little better as a political activist and women’s rights activist.

It was anything but foreseeable at the time of her birth that Ann Lennox, born on December 25, 1954 in Aberdeen, Scotland, would one day become a global pop icon. As the daughter of a shipyard worker and a cook, she grew up in humble circumstances.

However, the musical talent that lay dormant in the working-class child emerged in her early childhood years; as a little girl she took flute and piano lessons, sang in the choir and took dance lessons. Her open-minded parents supported her talent as best they could. As Annie Lennox would explain in later interviews, her father, who was a member of the Communist Party, particularly influenced her general view of the world.

In the BBC program “Who Do You Think You are?” She said in 2012: “There was a lot of discussion around the dinner table about injustice, exploitation and human rights.” And added: “Of course that must have rubbed off on me a little bit. My values ​​probably don’t differ much from those of my father, but he came from a different time.”

With this moral compass and a scholarship under her belt, the highly talented working-class child moved to London in 1971 at the age of 17 to study classical music with a focus on the flute at the renowned Royal Academy of Music. After three years, however, she stopped studying shortly before the final exams in order to free herself from the tight constraints of this training.

Speaking to Harvard Business Review magazine in 2010, she said: “I didn’t feel connected to the whole cultural aspect. That wasn’t who I was, and so the challenge was to find my own voice and mine to find your own way”. A challenge that she was to meet with some thoroughness in the following years.

After dropping out of her studies, she kept herself afloat with jobs as a waitress or as a temporary assistant in bookstores. In the evenings she went to the London clubs with musician friends and tried out singing for the first time at small gigs. She met the guitarist Dave Stewart (72), with whom she would later form the Eurythmics, in 1975 while working in a restaurant. Legend has it that the musician simply came up to her and asked her if she wanted to marry him.

As Lennox describes in the Arte documentary “Annie Lennox – Pop Icon with Commitment”, her future musical partner was in a pretty hopeless state at the time. “When I met Dave, he had two shopping bags, two plastic bags that had all of his belongings in them,” she said. “He was shaken up pretty bad and spat out again.” Stewart herself describes the moment of their first meeting as follows: “There was something about her that made it immediately clear to me that I would spend a lot of time with this person. A kind of deep sadness, but a beautiful sadness.”

Stewart and Lennox became a couple and started their first music project together with the new wave band “The Tourists”, which, however, was only moderately successful. After all, they managed to make it into the top 10 of the British charts in 1979 with a punky cover version of the Dusty Springfield hit “I Only Want to Be with You” before the band finally broke up in 1980. At this time, Stewart and Lennox were no longer a couple, but they decided to start a new project together: The Eurythmics.

But even with this project, success was a long time coming. Their guitar-heavy debut album “In the Garden”, which they recorded in the studio of the legendary German music producer Conny Plank (1940-1987), turned out to be a commercial flop, much to their dismay. The avant-garde duo responded to this failure with a radical new start.

Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox equipped themselves with the latest digital recording equipment and set up their own studio called “The Church” in an old Victorian church. Here they finally found the opportunity to develop their own style without time pressure and to fully exploit the new possibilities of digital music production.

The new album “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, created in these historic spaces, presented a radical electronic sound that the world had never heard before. Annie Lennox’s multi-faceted vocals and her razor-sharp lyrics came into their own much more clearly here than on the heavily rock-oriented predecessor.

The Eurythmics finally achieved their breakthrough in 1983 with the titular single “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). The huge success of the single was not least helped by the fact that it was included in the “heavy rotation” of the music channel MTV at the time In the clip, Annie Lennox appeared for the first time in a brand new look that immediately made her one of the most influential style icons of the 1980s With razor-short hair dyed carrot red, she wore primarily classic men’s clothing and appeared radically androgynous in her overall appearance.

With other hits like “Here Comes the Rain again”, “Who’s that Girl?” or “There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)”, the Eurythmics regularly catapulted themselves into the top 10 of the charts in the following years and became a global pop wonder. A special highlight was the feminist anthem “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves”, published in 1985, which Lennox recorded as a duet with the US soul queen Aretha Franklin (1942-2018).

Accompanied by increasing tensions between Stewart and Lennox, the Eurythmics’ commercial success also noticeably declined from 1986 onwards – the melancholic song “Thorn in My Side” would remain the band’s last top ten hit for a long time. After the album “We Too Are One”, released in 1989, the two ended their collaboration for the time being, but without officially dissolving the project.

In the following years, Annie Lennox released two highly acclaimed solo albums, “Diva” (1992) and “Medusa” (1995), but then increasingly withdrew from the music business. The focus was now on her daughters, born in 1990 and 1993, and she also developed into a tireless political and feminist activist who also used her world-famous name for her numerous activities.

Lennox has been an ambassador for the development aid organization Oxfam for many years and is passionate about campaigns such as “Make Poverty History”. She also founded the organization “The Circle” with other women, which describes itself as a “global feminist organization” and aims to combat “gender-based violence and economic inequality throughout the world.”

On March 6, 2025, Annie Lennox will reunite her political activism with her music at a charity concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall under the theme. Together with other musicians, she will perform many of her world hits on stage; the proceeds will go to her organization “The Circle”.