ANNIE LENNOX

The Scottish singer has sold in excess of 80 million records world-wide as part of electro duo Eurythmics and as a solo artist – gathering Brit, Grammy and Academy Awards in the process. A prominent voice in the continued fight against HIV/AIDs, Lennox acts as an ambassador to the UN, touring the world to give speeches and presentations on the subject, and has funded community centres in deprived areas through her charitable projects. Returning to the music charts this winter, the singer has recorded with The African Children’s Choir on a collection of personally selected carols.

Your forthcoming festive album is called A Christmas Cornucopia – can you elaborate on the title? I’ve sung these carols since I was young and I love them. Recording the songs from an adult prospective, I was looking into the words and the background of the carols and, of course, many of them are Victorian. The word ‘cornucopia’ sprung to mind because it is so old fashioned and in a way it’s a reference to that Victorian era and it’s a slightly eccentric title – this sense of abundance and each song like a veritable fruit – and it stands out from Happy Christmas Everybody or whatever other title I might have come up with.

You’ve written a song for the album as well (Universal Child). What was the inspiration behind that?
The two words – I’d been carrying around for days and I went into the studio to record and I just started to play something on the keyboard and suddenly realised that I had the idea for the beginning of the song – by the end of the day, the song was written. I’ve met children living in very vulnerable situations without parents with no resources, with nothing. At Christmas we focus on the birth of a child and I think in a reflective way it could be an opportunity for us to realise there are many children born into dire circumstances. And I’m not being prescriptive about that, but it was something I felt was a thread of consciousness running through the whole album.

So when did you start working on this album.
October last year although we [along with producer Mike Stevens] weren’t working on it every day.

So you’ve worked on the album for months and it’s now being released – won’t you be sick of Christmas when it arrives?
[Laughs] No, not at all! The whole year has been Christmas-themed for me, in terms of the songs, which has been delightful because they are beautiful songs and I don’t tire of them. I can never tire of Christmas, really. I went to a Christmas shop in Phoenix, Arizona and it is full of the most incredible decorations in the middle of the hot sun, 365 days of the year. I’d be happy to have it all year long.

[Originally published in Wonderland Magazine Issue 24, November 2010.]