Annie Lennox #10 in fashion, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and the new Sade album
Three recent news bits and pieces about Annie Lennox found on the web:
Good Housekeeping magazine named Kristin Scott Thomas the best dressed British woman over 40. Annie Lennox made it onto their place #10 – congrats, Annie!
Read the full list and article here.
. . .
Sade is back with a new, already criticly acclaimed album “Soldier Of Love”. Here’s a praise of Annie Lennox’s album “Bare” to be found in an article about the comeback of Sade:
“In 2003, Annie Lennox released a gorgeous, almost unrelentingly downbeat album called Bare. In profiles of Lennox written around the time, her friends characterized her as being something of a depressive, battered and bruised emotionally but pouring her pain into her art. This background information made an album that may have been dismissed as being dreary, sound bolder and more vivid. It illuminated Bare, intensifying its beauty and giving it more resonance.”
Read the full article here.
. . .
Tony James of Sigue Sigue Sputnik talks about an early collaboration with Annie Lennox in one of his blog posts:
I used to put adverts in what was then the only place to advertise, the weekly music paper called the Melody Maker in the ‘musicians wanted’ section. People would reply and we would meet….. waiting for something that I did not know. The magic to happen.
And sometimes it does happen and you miss it.
That was one way and the other safer way was when a friend suggested someone.
Mj [Mick Jones] was busy with the Clash recording an album that was to be called Combat Rock when he called me to say he’d met this singer who he thought I ought to meet up with and so he called her to say come over to Maida Vale to meet me.
It was a sunny day in London with sunlight streaming through the windows of Pindock Mews when this girl came to the front door. I was already not sure this was a good idea – in those days rock and roll bands, well the kind I wanted to be in, were generally still fronted by effete boys with big lips in a David Johanssen kinda way and not by singers like this blonde cropped haired girl who walked in. She had been in a medium successful band called “the Tourists” and her name was Annie Lennox.
She lived just around the corner from me.
In that fumbling English way we chatted, had cups of tea and I played her a little backing track I had recorded on my Porta studio…when I listen back now it is laughably simple and Annie just started to sing over it and I just pressed the record button.
She just kinda ad-libbed, with no lyrics or idea… a kind of doo da daa daa day da tune.. soaring with an almost operatic beauty.
She truly had the voice of an angel. It as amazing.
And yet we never met or spoke again. She left me with the tape. I was still not sure, I mean I knew for sure she was great, but equally I was sure I wanted a male singer to front my band. So I just put the tape back in the drawer and thought of it as the moment one sunny day when a girl sang.
I still have that tape.
Isn’t it funny how a preconceived vision can change your destiny. I wonder what Annie remembers of that day? She was special then, Mj knew… and I saw it too.
Hard to believe two years later I chose Martin Degville to front my dream group and equally uncanny to hear Annie Lennox release a single even more years later which had that same daa daa do daa non lyric….
It was called “There must be an Angel”.
She was, and I missed her.
Tony James
27 Jan 09
Read the full blog post here.
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