Annie LENNOX

She's been called the voice of her generation - not just for her singing career, but also for her staunch activism. In honour of the Eurythmics' frontwoman's 70th birthday in December, we pay tribute to a living legend.

- Alley Pascoe

A Scottish vocalist and an English musician walk into a Wagga Wagga hotel room. This isn’t the start of a dirty joke, it’s the origin story of Eurythmics. It was 1980 and Brit rock band The Tourists were headed Down Under to tour Australia. When their connecting flight from Bangkok was unable to land in Sydney because of a strike, the plane was diverted to Wagga Wagga, where passengers were put up in a hotel. The band members didn’t know it at the time, but the detour would change the course of their lives forever.

Holed up in their room, then-couple Annie Lennox (the aforementioned Scot singer) and Dave Stewart (the band’s guitarist) started playing around with a portable mini-synthesiser, making “weird, experimental electronic music”. The sounds stirred something within the pair, and cemented their desire to become a duo. Meanwhile, in another hotel room, the band’s main songwriter, Peter “Peet” Coombes, was hiding a heroin addiction and riding a three-day drinking bender. Things came to a head – as they always do – and The Tourists split. In the ashes of one band, another was ignited. The band Eurythmics were born.

Five years earlier, Lennox met Stewart in a health food restaurant in London where she was working as a waitress. She was a hippie with long-ish brown hair, and he was a guitarist with a music stall selling second-hand Jamaican records at Camden Market. In the tiny bedsit where Lennox lived, Stewart heard her sing for the first time. She performed a song she’d written on a harmonium. In that moment, they became a couple. “It was like, ‘Holy shit. What are you doing as a waitress? You’re an artist,’” remembered Stewart.