Annie Lennox was probably born old and pensive. Even as a child, she felt ancient, world-weary and dreadfully bored. Those stultifying, playless Sunday afternoons in north Scotland, listening to All Our Yesterdays on her great-aunt's small black and white television set, filled her with ennui and a passion to escape provincial life. When she asked herself: "Is this it?", she knew it wasn't.

"At 14, I felt melancholy, full of dark things," she says. "I thought the world was so heavy. But it was. And it is. I would
never have thought of myself beyond 35. By now, I'm sure I thought I would be dead."

The rock diva is occupying a small corner of a very large sofa in a room recently vacated by her make-up artist. Though
mushroom pale and dressed all in black, she is very much alive, talking at speed, smiling her beautiful, vulpine smile and reflecting on her turbulent journey to singing stardom, motherhood, and a position of such influence and affluence that she can begin to save the world of which she despairs. Who'd have thought it?

Miserable

At 17, she was living on £3 (Dh22) a week in a succession of miserable London bedsits, trying to be a classical flautist.
Stifled by the precious atmosphere of the Royal Academy of Music, she dropped out just before her finals and turned to
waitressing to avoid having to crawl back home. One day in 1976, Dave Stewart walked into the health-food restaurant where she was working and, so the story goes, asked her to marry him.

They became lovers, they became the Tourists, they formed Eurythmics, and then they parted. Lennox went on to be a great singer-songwriter in her own right, winning a stack of awards, including eight Brits. She has sold more than 75 million records. "It is a bit of a miracle, like salmon swimming up-river, isn't it?" she says. "I think it's miraculous how anyone ends up being anything."

But two marriages failed and a baby was stillborn before the birth of her two daughters, Lola, now 17, and Tali, 15, by the
Israeli film and record producer Uri Fruchtmann. She knew what it was to feel suicidal. All the pain was poured into her
songs. You gasped at the intensity projected in that powerful, sweet voice, but you feared for her sanity as well.

Of her fourth and most recent album, Songs of Mass Destruction (including the track Sing, which she's using to raise money for HIV/Aids), my colleague Neil McCormick wrote: "It all suggests its creator is not in a happy place."

"Dark? My music hasn't been as dark as it should have been," she says. "It could have been a hell of a lot darker. It could get darker. Artistic people are sensitive, tuned differently. Maybe they have a finer skin. I was processing all that Celtic melancholy. Now, in my elder years [she's 53], I've got to find a joy in things because, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you stick with darkness you end up jumping out of the window or being found in some room, hanging. I don't think that makes a great ending."

Daily challenge

Still, it sounds a daily challenge to live by small joys and not dwell on what she calls "the woe-is-me place". Does she ever wake up feeling: this is going to be another good day? There isn't even a pause. "No, no, no. Never."

Her platinum cap of hair is glossy above a pair of soaring eyebrows. The full-on androgynous look has gone, but her clothes, mannish waistcoat over satin, puff-sleeved top, are characteristically ambiguous. Physically, she seems barely changed since her days as the better half of Eurythmics. But two interlocked things have deeply altered her, she says: becoming a mother, and going to South Africa to see for herself the effect of HIV/Aids on women and children.

The deepest cynic wouldn't mistake her for just another bored celebrity, flitting lightly from one good cause to another in
an attempt to burnish her image as much as to fight injustice or poverty. It's a shame that her natural fluency is throttled
by words like potentiality, impactful, facilitate, denialist, as if she has swallowed a self-help manual. Lennox doesn't
dislike something; she has an issue with it. But there's a sincerity about her concerns that rings true.

There is real disgust in her voice when she dismisses the celebrity industry as "cannibalistic", insisting she's kept herself and her daughters "under the radar" so they could lead normal, well-grounded lives. Yet, she acknowledges that a Faustian deal sometimes has to be struck: if she wants to draw attention to causes she is passionate about, she has to exploit her profile.

"It would be a missed opportunity and almost criminal if I walked away. I'm at a time of life when I have jumped over a lot of hurdles, paid a lot of dues. Now what? What do I do with this voice? How can I make a difference? Music has given me a platform I can use. I'm not being Lady Bountiful or saintly in any way. What right do I have to have an issue with celebrity?
Perhaps none. But I handle it with gloves. I see myself as a woman with many roles and celebrity doesn't come into it for
me."

Poem

Lennox was brought up in a two-room tenement in Aberdeen, opposite an old textile factory and "down the road from a stinking slaughterhouse". Her father was a boilermaker and her mother a cook. An only child, Ann Lennox went to a "posh" school, Aberdeen High School for Girls, where they wore velour hats in winter, panamas for summer. "Every day you were supposed to shake the teacher's hand and curtsey before you left the class."

At 11, she was asked to write a poem about violence, a familiar sight on the streets of Aberdeen in the Sixties. "Something almost chemical happened to me," she remembers. "Like vomiting. I almost started to hyperventilate. Within five minutes, I had written the poem." It was her first political statement.

From an early age, Lennox had an exalted sense of her destiny as a poet-artist, and a parallel feeling of not fitting in.
When she heard Joni Mitchell's early albums she realised it was possible to make a living as a singer-songwriter. Dave
Stewart showed her how. After her hugely successful 20s and early 30s, performing became a treadmill and she longed for "a life outside".

Watershed

Having children was the watershed in her life. "It was more profound than I'd ever imagined, deeper in every way, an
awakening." When her first child, Daniel, was stillborn, it was not only a personal tragedy. "It made me very human. I
realised in that moment that millions of children don't come to full term and millions of women lose their children. It was a wake-up call. I realised I was not in control, that there are no certainties."

People who know her say she has a light side, and she hates being seen as a tragic figure, but she's conscious that crusading doesn't lighten her image. "There's nothing worse than someone who takes themselves terribly seriously." She hopes to avoid becoming a parody of herself and adds: "Maybe I am already and I don't know it."

Money

Rich people are seldom as straightforward and unapologetic as she is about wealth (hers is estimated to be £30 million, which is Dh224 million). What good will it do the starving masses if she wears sackcloth and ashes? She stays in nice hotels, she lives in a fine house and travels first class. "Compared with people I have seen in Africa, I live like an absolute empress. But then, we all do," she says.

"I don't feel bad about my money. I didn't do anything criminal. I paid my taxes. I have a lot of it and I enjoy it. I have lived very simply and I could do it again, but I'm not going to. There is no need. My own fortune is not going to be the solution." Instead, she has decided to use her time and influence to hasten social and political change. "Philanthropy is a fantastic thing, but it is not the answer."

Annie Lennox feels she is entering a new phase, maybe a permanent one, where music is at the service of higher things. And I think only a fool would mock her, despite the messianic tone. "I've planted some seeds and I think they are starting to come through. It's weird, but it's almost like my ultimate calling. It feels like I've waited a long time for this."

'No more marriage for me'

Annie Lennox has pledged she will never wed again, because she doesn't understand the point of marriage. The 53-year-old married Hare Krishna monk Radha Raman in 1984, only to divorce him a year later, and in 1988 she wed Israeli film producer

Uri Fruchtmann, the father of her two daughters, Lola, 17, and Tali, 15 before splitting with him in 2000. After two
failed marriages, and a long steady relationship with her band member Dave Stewart, the Scottish star has sworn off matrimony altogether.

She explains: "No more marriage for me. I don't see the point of it. It's not that I'm such a cynic. To share one's life with someone is a beautiful thing.

"But for the moment, I'm a single person. That's not to say I wouldn't like to have a special relationship with someone.

"But I haven't made a great job of it in the past. It would be pretty challenging to share my world. Life is pretty full."

Awards
Annie Lennox has received a variety of major awards during her career:

Grammy Awards

1987 - Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal (Eurythmics) (for Missionary Man).
1992 - Best Music Video - Long Form (for Diva).
1995 - Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (for No More I Love You).
2004 - Best Song Written For A Motion Picture, Television (for Into The West).
BRIT Awards
1984 - Best British Female Solo Artist.
1986 - Best British Female Solo Artist.
1989 - Best British Female Solo Artist.
1990 - Best British Female Solo Artist.
1993 - Best British Female Solo Artist.
1993 - Best British Album (for Diva).
1996 - Best British Female Solo Artist.
1999 - Outstanding Contribution to British Music (Eurythmics).
Golden Globe Awards
2004 - Best Original Song - Motion Picture for Into The West.