Interview Disc & Fully Illustrated Book

Annie Lennox (with Lucian Randall)


  1. Interview with Lucian Randall

I have found over the years that Annie Lennox is an arrestingly articulate and eloquent person, and although live interviews like this are hardly her best playing-field they do give me a chance to very briefly tap into the many simultaneous flows of her thoughts, even so fleetingly and (usually) cagily expressed. It doesn’t hurt that she has a speaking voice that I find both touching and gorgeous.

I’ve got a couple of other live interviews with her or Eurythmics in my collection, but this is the only one on CD (not counting the snippets on video such as on the bonus DVD that came with her recent album Bare which have clearly been abridged with a selective eye toward the spartan). It dates from shortly after her first “solo” album, Diva, was released and had begun to gain popularity in the U.S., and that development provides one line of questioning and commentary here.

Annie in interviews is almost painfully self-effacing, which can be a little jarring when she states something acutely frank about herself that she suddenly decides could be misinterpreted as being egotistical and then backpedals furiously to clarify or simply deny that it was meant as a boast before resuming with the thread of her comments. I do appreciate that she does that, it’s humanizing after all, but it saddens me a little to see that decades of being distorted by the press have made her so necessarily jumpy about expressing herself in interviews.

She’s made little secret over the years that doing interviews is not her favorite pastime, but I for one greatly appreciate it when she does them. To hear her describe her own work, reflect on the creative process, observe the state of the world and its inhabitants, ponder human psychology, delight in music in general, and share a little of the breadth of who Annie Lennox is…it’s a great pleasure for me. And as I say, that voice is awfully nice on the ears.


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