We have known Annie Lennox in many roles since she embarked on her career as one half of Eurythmics in the 1980s: angel, prostitute, puffball princess, androgynous punk among others. Her first — and last — solo album (excluding a collection of cover versions released in 1995) was called Diva, a title which apparently referred not to her iconic status but to her need for an ever-changing front to mask her true nature. “A lot of celebrities or performers are everything they do,” she explained at the time. “They exchange part of themselves in a marketplace. So ‘the diva’ is the image I put out in front, and I’ve slipped away behind. Otherwise it’s so easy to fuse the whole thing into one and to live your life as a sort of fiction.”

Eleven years and one divorce from the film-maker Uri Fruchtmann later, Lennox, 48, is reading from a different script. “This album contains songs that are deeply personal and emotional,” she writes on the sleeve notes to Bare, which is adorned with a strikingly odd photograph of the singer, drained of colour and looking like one of the dehydrated aliens from Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth. “I have exposed myself through the work,” she continues, “to reveal aspects of an inner world which are fragile, broken through experience, but not entirely smashed.”

There is more, including references to herself as “a mature woman”, facing up to “failed expectations” and “core issues”. Any more sincere and you might mistake her musings for some sort of new Labour initiative, responding perhaps to the rising tide of angst threatening to engulf our middle-aged pop stars.

It is nothing new for singers to feel sorry for themselves and Lennox certainly does it as stylishly as anyone. From the mildly aggressive strut of Bitter Pill to the ethereal cri de coeur of Oh God (Prayer), she spells out her innermost feelings with a reckless disregard for propriety and little attempt at poetic disguise. “How can I abide/ The taste of rage and anger inside?/ How the hell will it ever change?/ Slowly drivin’ me insane/ Let me cover up this pain,” she sings in the tough, soulful voice that once inspired sisters to go and do it for themselves, but which now sounds, at times, perilously close to drowning in self-pity.

But while such searing honesty is all very admirable in theory, does anyone care enough about Lennox’s inner turmoil to make such an intimate exercise in soul-searching worthwhile? Diva was one of the biggest-selling albums of 1992, earning her Brit and Grammy Awards and propelling her to a level of international celebrity well in excess of anything that her former partner in Eurythmics, Dave Stewart, has ever achieved. But it was all a very long time ago. The pop world has moved on at a viciously accelerated pace, and any artist who stops for that length of time is bound to return with a musical model that belongs to a bygone era.

In Lennox’s case, the songs are new, but the stylistic provenance is stuck firmly in the 1980s. Like carbon dating a piece of wood, you only need to hear Stephen Lipson’s production on a track such as Pavement Cracks, with its layers of synthesized chords and carefully tethered disco bass-drum beat, to identify the vintage. On The Hurting Time, on which a synthesizer tootles away in a loose approximation of a Larry Adler harmonica solo, the sound becomes even more anachronistic, like a cabaret standard that has somehow found its way into the heritage-pop era.

Old fans of Lennox will find themselves returning to a musical comfort zone — albeit one that has lost some of its original zest — and may find plenty to muse over in her excoriating self-portrait of a soul in torment. But it is a very particular piece of work — big on personal history but low on energy and lacking the broader insight that would lend it a more universal appeal. It is nice to have Lennox back, but anyone unfamiliar with her earlier work will wonder what all the fuss is about.

Key track

On an album of sad songs the saddest of them all is called, inevitably, The Saddest Song. A ghostly electronic drone envelopes Lennox’s voice like a swirl of mist, as the elegiac, faintly Celtic air, unfolds amid a gathering sense of loss. “Now you’re no longer talking/ And I’m no longer hearing/ There’s nothing left to say/ Said it anyway,” she sings in a voice that evokes the full extent of her plight. The mood of desolation is absolute as she drifts through a world of hurt. Yet the tones are gentle and soothing — like an advert for a bath oil that will ease away the aches of a day tending the herbaceous borders. She may have been unlucky in love, but as Heartbreak Hotels go, this one is reassuringly bijou.

(BMG)

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