It is Annie Lennox weather outside – the bruised clouds, the chill, the darkness at noon – and we are contemplating it from under a long skylight, in the empty café of a north-west London art gallery. ‘I come from a place in Scotland that is very grey and flat,’ the singer says as she gazes upwards. ‘Bleak atmosphere, pretty much like today. Granite buildings. I think it informed my character. As an only child growing up in the tenements of Aberdeen, I had a lot of time with my own thoughts. All my reports said, “Ann could do better if she stopped daydreaming,” but I couldn’t help it. Growing up, I knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want normality.’

Her skin is the colour of a mushroom; her short hair is equally pale, in contrast to the dark brown of her fake-fur coat. Scotland is still there in her breathy, rolling vowels. ‘Aye,’ she says when I ask if pessimism is her defining characteristic, ‘you’re not wrong. I’ve been a pessimist most of my life and it doesn’t always serve me well. The black dog. That cycle that takes you down.’

Has that pessimism been the price of her creativity, though? For being able to write such dark and potent lyrics? ‘It has. How perverse. Then again, I’m not a total nihilist because if I were I would have done myself in long ago. Killed myself. There is a part of me that is still quite like a kid. I meet some people my age and think they seem older, because they are stuck in convention.
My spirit sees things just as I did when I was a kid. I get enthusiastic about beautiful things, like berries in autumn. The colour of leaves in the spring. Colour and beauty. It’s in contrast to my dark side.’ She gives a rictus grin and shakes her head. ‘I’m a fairly intense person, as you have probably gathered. Everything affects me. I’m not detached. I have a lot of empathy. When I was little if I saw someone or something suffering I would cry.’

She finds mass suffering equally unbearable, hence her crusading work on behalf of HIV/Aids sufferers in Africa, for which she won a Red Cross Services to Humanity Award last year. She has various other charity commitments, but one that is especially close to her heart is Hear the World, a campaign to spread awareness about the deafness that afflicted her late father, a boilermaker in the Aberdeen shipyards. More recently she was seen leading the protest marches against the Israeli attacks on Gaza. As she talks about it I can see she is blinking back tears. ‘Yes, I find it hard to detach myself. It’s there on my surface. The Gaza protest was because a million and a half people were trapped in a relatively small space. When I saw the bombs dropping, I knew what was going to happen. The Israelis could say that they weren’t targeting civilians but there was nowhere for the civilians to go. They were trapped.’

I take it she rules out the possibility that Hamas was using them as human shields? ‘Aye, I do. There was nowhere for the civilians to hide. Even when they went to UN buildings they were attacked.’

She was limping on those protests, and she still has that limp today. But she is grateful to be walking at all, because last August she had surgery on her spine. Sounds scary, I say. ‘Didn’t have time to be scared because it happened so quickly. I had a bulged disc and I went to see a chiropractor who popped it out and damaged a nerve. I’ve never had so much pain. A thing called drop foot. My left leg was paralysed, basically. I couldn’t move my toes. I was in Mexico City attending the international HIV/Aids conference. Had to cancel everything and get home. Got an MRI scan and at the end of that week I had surgery. They had to scrape the bone to make more space. Some people were, like, “Don’t do the surgery. It’s too risky,” but I thought, “I don’t want to be disabled.” I was warned the surgery could go wrong and had to sign a liability waiver. I made a decision to just do it and not freak myself out.’

I imagine there was a psychological toll, though. ‘To be honest with you, it has taken a lot of my self-confidence away. My physicality, my limping has made me feel vulnerable. It’s shut me down a bit. My foot is numb all the time. Pins and needles. Like it’s in an icy bucket of water. I’m dragging my foot and… this is boring.’ She grins again, short and tight. ‘This is the sort of thing you talk about in your sixties. I looked at my toes and was saying, “Come on! Come on!” And then I thought, “Heigh-ho, I’ve had 53 years of very good service from these toes so I’ll have to accommodate them.” I’m hoping it will get better eventually. Maybe in a year’s time.’

Meanwhile, Lennox has a new collection of her solo work out called… ‘The Annie Lennox Collection’. After dropping out of a degree course at the Royal Academy of Music, she spent the 1980s as one (androgynous-looking) half of Eurythmics. Her solo career, which began with the album ‘Diva’ in 1992, has been even more successful, to her surprise. She has sold 80 million records, all told. ‘I look back on “Diva” and think that was when I was expecting a baby. My whole adult life seems to be measured in albums, and album covers – all those images of me down the years.’

I tell her that I have fond memories of ‘Diva’ because it came out the year I got married. We listened to it again and again on our honeymoon and, to this day, I find its gorgeous melodies and Lennox’s velvety, contralto singing voice intoxicating. It was only when I was listening to some of those tracks in the new collection that I heard, almost for the first time, how haunting and melancholy her lyrics are. Walking on Broken Glass is a good example: an upbeat tune overlaid with dark lyrics, such as ‘I’m living in an empty room/With all the windows smashed’.

Her high-boned face lights up. ‘Albums can mean different things at different times in your life,’ she says, nodding earnestly. ‘All my lyrics are dark, and the darkness is concealed behind the beauty of the music and the production. I am very aware of that irony. My lyrics have always expressed my melancholy, actually. While the music has always expressed my deliverance from the melancholy. I see it like that. Life is about the balance of the two. Positive and negative.’

Her first marriage, to a Hare Krishna monk, was short-lived. Her second, to the Israeli film and record producer Uri Fruchtmann, ended in divorce in 2000 after 12 years. Her two daughters from that marriage are in their late teens now. She took a break from recording and touring when they were young. Had they left her feeling fulfilled creatively? ‘It is quite challenging to do both, and I have done both. I sort of stepped back, but I found I had that schism – when I was with my kids I missed being in the studio and when I was in the studio I missed being with my kids. You are never quite 100 per cent focused on one or the other.’

One thing she didn’t miss when she stepped back from her career was the attention that comes with fame. ‘Some celebrities like to stoke the fire and like to be in the papers all the time because that is their currency, but I have no interest in that kind of attention. What would I want that kind of attention for? People sometimes forget that I am an ordinary person and I want to walk the streets and sit in cafés and mingle with the crowds.’

In person, partly because of her fragile appearance and her whispery voice, there’s a vulnerability to Annie Lennox. She doesn’t do glib or frivolous. And when she smiles, which she does quite often, it can look more like baring teeth. I ask about the chemistry between her and Dave Stewart, her partner for many years and the other half of Eurythmics. Was she drawn to him because he was an extrovert? ‘And I was an introvert? It kind of works like that with people. We had different qualities certainly and it worked for a decade. I was drawn to him because he was a sweet, funny, eccentric person that I got. Completely out of the box. When it works it’s a great thing because you get strength from a relationship, but after a while you want to do different things and it starts to feel restrictive. I needed to stretch myself on my own terms, to find out where I was without Dave. I was very surprised to sell any solo records at all. I didn’t even go on tour with “Diva” because I was having babies.’

Three more solo albums followed, but only three. She likes to write songs at her own pace, ignoring commercial pressures. And she finds the touring that comes with a new album mentally and physically exhausting. ‘When I come off I am always exhausted. I need to rest. I’m full of adrenalin and fear, because it’s not normal to face a crowd of people. When I walk on stage I feel that flight-or-fight instinct, this nervy energy. I want to run off. I used to feel that a lot and I had to fight it. The night before a gig I would be quaking and would sleep badly. Things going round my head.’

Does she have anxiety dreams? ‘Oh, yes. Had one a couple of nights ago. Forgetting my lyrics. The whole thing about performance is rehearsal, though. I know I can do it on demand. My voice is like a secret I carry around with me. If I suddenly burst into song now I’d be embarrassed and you’d be embarrassed, because there is a time and a place. That’s why it is so ritualised. It’s a very physical state and very disciplined. I’m not with you when I’m performing. I’m somewhere else. You can’t walk up to me and start chatting. I get transported and want my audience to be transported, too.’

She tries to avoid reading about herself in the press because, she says, she finds it painful. Quite what she has in mind I cannot imagine – most of her press seems to be pretty much reverential. Perhaps she is thinking of her activism, for which she does get teased a little. I guess she is sensitive. That vulnerability again. Her alabaster skin is not thick. ‘You feel you want to retaliate. If you are attacked you want to fight back. If I had been a man I know I would have got in fist fights all the time. I have that anger in me. I love the idea of peacefulness but I don’t trust people. I can find myself fighting back, losing my temper.’

Do her daughters share her temperament? ‘Not in that respect. They are both articulate and big-hearted. Thankfully, I don’t think either of them has my melancholy.’

Has she ever tried therapy? ‘I dabbled but, to be honest, I’m not convinced it worked for me. It can be a crutch for some people.’

Actually, it is her political campaigning that she finds most therapeutic. ‘I want to engage with the world at a deeper level. I can’t bear cocktail parties and lunches and superficial conversations. Can’t stand that. Cannot. Stand. That. Cannot stand being in a room full of strangers with a glass of wine in my hand trying to make light conversation. That never was who I was. I’m never going to be that person. I feel more comfortable when I am politically engaged. More dignified. I don’t have to feel guilty about the frothiness and the privileges of my life – not so much my wealth, but Western wealth in general, our whole Western society. I want to use my fame to facilitate others.’ That quick and tight smile again. ‘As banal as that might sound, that’s a good feeling. I can grow old well with that.’