The House Of Annie Lennox May Visit Annie’s Native Aberdeen

Source: The Scotsman

  

AN EXHIBITION celebrating the life and inspiration of Aberdeen-born music icon Annie Lennox could visit her home city next year.

The show, titled The House of Annie Lennox, is designed to capture the “image and creative vision” of the singer and humanitarian, and features a host of memorabilia from her long career.

Due to receive its premiere at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) later this month, talks are under way to take the exhibition to Aberdeen Art Gallery next summer.

The exhibition includes costumes and accessories worn by Lennox, photographs, her personal treasures, and ephemera from the political campaigns she has championed, such as the Sing campaign for HIV/Aids.

Created in collaboration with the former Eurythmics singer, more than 50 items will go on display, including the Union flag suit she wore at the 1999 Brit Awards and the sequinned dress worn in her Little Bird music video.

Handwritten lyrics and music manuscripts spanning her four-decade career will also be on show, alongside a selection of awards, including a Grammy and an Oscar.

Music videos of the 56-year-old’s solo work and those created and performed with Dave Stewart – with whom she enjoyed international success in the 1980s – will help create what organisers describe as a “visual journey through the different facets of Lennox’s creativity”.

Victoria Broakes, curator of the exhibition at the V&A, told The Scotsman: “Annie is the perfect subject for the exhibition as she is someone who connects so perfectly not only with music, but fashion and popular culture.

“It’s a very exciting exhibition as it’s not a retrospective of her career. It’s part installation, and part display of objects related to Annie.

“Aberdeen Art Gallery have contacted us and we are hoping the exhibition will go there. It would be more than a bit special to take it to the city, and I know from speaking to Annie that would be very happy for it to go to Scotland.”

Deirdre Grant, head of public programmes at Aberdeen Art Gallery, said: “We’re working with the V&A to bring this major exhibition to Annie Lennox’s home city, and we are certain it will have enormous interest to people in Aberdeen and further afield.”

The exhibition will open its doors on 15 September at the V&A, where admission is free. It will run until 26 February, before going to the Lowry in Manchester until June, after which it is hoped it will head north to Aberdeen around July.

In an interview with the V&A team, Lennox said: “I just hope that people coming to see the exhibition will enjoy it and get a sense of what I’ve offered to the world, just as I enjoy coming to the museum and taking a moment to look at something and give it some thought. I hope people come away from it thinking, ‘Oh, that was lovely’.”

Born in Aberdeen on Christmas Day 1954, Lennox spent her early years in a two-room tenement flat in Hutcheon Street. A prodigious pupil, she attended Aberdeen High School for Girls and took piano lessons at the age of seven, progressing to a place in the school orchestra, playing a flute held together with elastic bands, when she was 11.

She moved to London after being accepted to the Royal Academy of Music in London at the age of 17 and started on the path to international stardom with her first band, The Tourists.

She has since sold more than 80 million records worldwide.