L is for Lennox

I'm happy to report my blog posting on the Kinks was picked up by a Kinks website and has received hundreds of hits today.

Other than my brief jubilation at this minor blimp in the numbers game I have little else to celebrate but a night of beers with a pal may sort this out.

Before that there's the small problem of L; more like Ell. There is a serious shortage of decent artists beginning with L. I was beginning to despair until I remembered Annie.

Annie Lennox is like the alter ego of Madonna. She's also very talented but instead of being self centered she does lots of things for good causes and everybody loves her. It's funny that when Sting talks about the rain forest and Bono from U2 bangs on about world poverty, they sound like sanctimonious gits. But Annie Lennox can never put a foot wrong.

Like many of the featured artists she was born into a degree of poverty. Her father was a shipyard worker and her mother was a nurse and the lived in a two roomed apartment with shared washing facilities. It was upstanding Scottish poverty rather than the kind of moral wasteland Jimi Hendrix was born into - see H is for Hendrix.

In the 1970s Annie joined forces with Dave Stewart to form The Tourists, She was in a relationship with him initially. That didn't stop her forming Eurythmics with her ex and the band went on to dominate the eighties with hits such as Love is a Stranger, Who's That Girl, Here Comes the Rain Again and Sweet Dreams.

As demonstrated by the video for Love is a Stranger, Lennox took on an androgynous look, at times looking like Bowie and at other times a femme fatale.

In the early 1990s Lennox embarked on an equally successful solo career that spawned hits such as Why, Walking on Broken Glass and No More I Love Yous.

Lennox has been a public supporter of a number of charities for many years including Amnesty International and Greenpeace and she and Dave Stewart donated all of the profits from Eurythmics' 1999 Peacetour to both charities.

In 2006, in response to her humanitarian work, Lennox became the patron of the Master's Course in Humanitarian and Development Practice for Oxford Brookes University. In 2006, she addressed Members of Parliament in the UK about the need for children in the UK to help their counterparts in Africa.

Curious fact about Annie Lennox - her first marriage was to  a German Hare Krishna devotee Radha Raman. It lasted just a year from 1984 to 1985.