FEATURE:
Precious
Annie Lennox’s Diva at Thirty
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I have written about Annie Lennox’s…
1992 album, Diva, before, but its thirtieth anniversary occurs on 6th April. I am looking ahead to a phenomenal album from the former Eurythmics lead (she and Dave Stewart dissolved in 1990). Diva is her debut solo studio. It entered the U.K. album chart at number one. It has since sold over 1.2 million copies in the U.K. alone, being certified quadruple platinum. One can read into a few of the songs on Diva being about the break-up of Eurythmics or a certain pain from that split. Maybe others interpret the tracks as being about trust and relationships. Two of the biggest songs, Why and Walking on Broken Glass, seem to straddle either world. It is clear that Annie Lennox had nothing to prove as a solo artist. Demonstrating her remarkable songwriting ability, Diva sounds very much like her stepping out and doing something new – though one can still hear influences of her former group. I am not sure whether there are anniversary plans for the thirtieth of Diva. Such a sensational album that has Why, Walking om Broken Glass and Precious as its opening three tracks. One of the strongest opening trio of songs on any album in my book! Bar a couple of co-writes/credits, Lennox penned all the songs on Diva. It is such a fine and memorable album.
I am going to come to a positive review of the hugely impressive debut from Lennox. The Scottish icon’s latest work was the 2019 Lepidoptera E.P. I hope that we hear more music from her in the future. I feel she was at her absolute strongest on her debut solo album. Diva is a moment when she seemed to defy any sense of doubt. Could see go from a successful duo to making in on her own? All doubts were emphatically answered! Diffuser wrote about Diva around the time of its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2017:
“When the Eurythmics drifted into hiatus following the release of 1989's We Too Are One LP, singer Annie Lennox didn't hurry into a solo career. But as she proved with her 1992 debut Diva, she hadn't lost her muse.
Released in the spring of 1992, Diva offered an emphatic statement of independence — not only from the duo that had defined her in the public eye over the previous decade, but from many of the constraints the music industry placed on female artists in terms of marketing and image. As she'd done so often throughout her career, Lennox adopted a heavily stylized image that was equal parts fashion statement and artistic commentary; on the album cover, she wore a large headdress and heavy makeup — neither of which, she pointed out in an interview surrounding the record's release, were necessarily intended to be taken at face value.
"It's meant to be partly ironic," said Lennox. "My life is divided into the public me and the private me. In the public me, I am seen as a woman on a pedestal, an artifice, who glides from place to place, a grandiose creature with no other life. That’s the one I’m projecting. It’s not me, of course. It’s myth-making, the lifestyle of the persona I am creating."
Lennox's Diva makeover also acted as a layer of artifice between herself and the gears of the industry, mitigating what she described as the "Faustian deal" female artists strike when exposing themselves to public physical scrutiny. "It's daunting for me to be exposed in public again," she admitted. "I want to go carefully, slowly-slowly."
If she was physically guarded, Lennox was nakedly personal when it came to Diva's songs, the majority of which were solo compositions. Although she co-wrote with Jethro Tull member Peter-John Vettese on "Legend in My Living Room" and collaborated with members of the Blue Nile on "The Gift," the rest of the 10-track set was all Lennox — the beginning of a new creative phase after her lengthy partnership with fellow Eurythmic David A. Stewart. Her move into the solo spotlight was underscored with the lyrics of opening track and leadoff single "Why," which — although Stewart later claimed it had been written about him — Lennox described as a response to "feeling misunderstood."
"For me, words are very powerful," said Lennox. "One person can misinterpret what the other person’s saying so easily."
She found an eager audience for that message — and for Diva in general, which surged into the U.S. Top 40 on its way to more than two million copies sold. Although the album was a far bigger hit in her native U.K., where it topped the charts, it represented a commercial rebound in America, where the Eurythmics' fortunes had flagged later in their career. "Why" gave Lennox her first solo Top 40 single, while follow-up single "Walking on Broken Glass" peaked at No. 14. Although she'd never obviously gone out of her way to court pop stardom, Lennox admitted the warm reception offered a surprise measure of vindication after years of feeling somewhat abandoned by her U.S. fans.
"I just felt rejected. I thought, 'Look at all that crap on the charts. I can do better than that. It’s rubbish.' And then I got very blasé about it," she later recalled. "I thought, 'Oh well, they’re all f---ed up anyway. Their culture’s a mess,' and I really didn’t care. In fact, I said I’d rather not put it out in America. But I couldn’t do that, because I’m contracted. I had to put it out there."
Ultimately, Diva announced Lennox as a vital solo artist in her own right, proving her creative strength remained undimmed outside the context of her work with Stewart. Yet as gracefully as she entered the solo spotlight, she was already planning to recede; having started a family in the years immediately following the Eurythmics' split, she understood she'd entered a chapter in which releasing new music took a back seat to her life at home. In the years following its release, she'd move at a measured pace, resurfacing at irregular intervals — and almost as often as not, she'd do so as a vocal interpreter rather than a songwriter, releasing albums of covers between new collections of original material. When she hinted at retirement in 2014, it was just the latest step in a long journey away from pop stardom”.
Prior to rounding off, it is worth sampling a review. There were a couple of mixed reviews – some noting Diva’s best songs are near the top and it is a little uneven -, but the overall reaction was hugely positive. Diva still sounds remarkable and uniquely Annie Lennox thirty years later. This is SLANT’s take on a beautiful and timeless album:
“To pick apart a deceptively simple album by its musical structure, Diva opens with the simplest of chord progressions. A major fifth is sustained throughout the riff and only the descending bassline provides the tension (turning the fifth into an aroused and introspective sixth, and then resolving with a resigned seventh). That’s it. Nothing more complicated than that until the bathetically optimistic bridge. Stephen Lipson’s icy, new wave use of synthesizers—unfettered, tubular artificiality that’s poised directly between crystalline austerity and late-night Cinemax sleaziness—does very little to murk up the composition. The song, “Why,” is hardly the sort of melodramatic setting we’d imagine from an album whose very name evokes histrionic pretense. But Annie Lennox isn’t and has never been a representative pop diva. Her body is lanky and angular instead of curvaceously plush. Her exaggerated facial features (capped off with a most spectacular set of cheekbones that she wisely never allowed her hair to grow long enough to cover) are matched in androgen-fabulousness only by her tremulously guttural alto.
The first album Lennox released after the Eurythmics called it quits, Diva’s relative quietude is reflective of a woman in full awareness—if not complete control—of the occasional ostentation of her emotional whims. It’s musically analogous to All About Eve’s ferocious Margo Channing during those rare moments when she’s alone and contemplating the social consequences of her violent temper. It speaks exactly what she (Margo, Annie, every woman…) wished she could convey, but the music underneath most of the album’s tracks is filled with the rumbling turbulence that betrays her best intentions.
Practically speaking, the music video for Lennox’s baroque dance hit “Walking On Broken Glass” harnesses this stress to a T. Dressed in Amadeus boudoir finery (not to be confused with the Vegas headdress crowning Lennox on the album’s disingenuously gaudy cover), the clip’s heroine finds her flirtations ignored until she gets her paramour alone in her chambers. He mistakenly reads her interest as sexual heat and, outraged, she casts him away, banging her fist against the wall in synchronization to the song’s rimshots. “Every one of us was made to suffer,” she reasons. “Every one of us was made to weep.” One of the most brilliant singles of the era, “Walking On Broken Glass” and its video cast a suspicious eye on the deliberate façade-maintenance of modern pop by playing up the same mixed signals that equips Diva with its power.
Elsewhere on the album, the brooding “Legend In My Living Room” seems to address the false hopes Lennox experienced early in her career from the promises of fame, fortune, and ultimately self-definition (i.e. the notion that she would find her soul in her image), while the lyrics to “Primitive” (“Wipe your tears and let the salt stains dry”) almost seem to address Lennox’s performance in Amos Gitai’s Birth of the Golem, in which she personified the creature born of clay (another role played, another legend in her screening room). Ultimately, the album (well, the CD version of it, anyway) lands on its soft shoes with an incongruous cover of the 1930s MGM showtune “Keep Young And Beautiful,” which ends the introspection on a note of carefree self-parody. As befitting any diva, Lennox isn’t above a little bit of self-deprecation, but Diva glides with a rich, feminine dignity that stands tall in pop history”.
One of the finest albums ever, Annie Lennox’s songwriting brilliance, soulful and powerful voice and magnetic presence is all over an album that stops you in your tracks. Lennox followed Diva with 1995’s Medusa. An album of covers, it is a great work, though I feel Lennox is at her strongest when performing her tracks. On 6th April, we celebrate thirty years of a classic album. Diva was and still is…
ONE of the all-time greats!