| Mojo | The performance benefits the Lavender Trust Fund, a breast cancer charity founded by family members of late journalist Ruth Picardie. Picardie's sister Justine and brother-in-law Neill MacColl planned the concert with Lennox, who first suggested commemorating Picardie's 34th birthday.
"Annie read Ruth's columns every week and was very moved by them," Picardie told JAMTV on Thursday. "Annie suggested that we have a concert as close to her birthday as possible. Ruth would have been 34 on May 1."
"THE SCOOP was the one-night-only reunion of Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart. On the other hand, the pop thrill was more than muted by an intimate awareness that the night was dedicated to Ruth Picardie, the Observer columnist who died of breast cancer last September....
Remarkably, there followed two hours of acoustic music which somehow contrived to embrace the aching emotions of the occasion without sentimentality. Annie Lennox, all jolie laide in NHS specs and, for old time Eurythmics sake, "gender-bending" pinstripe suit, stomped through her celebratory Gig Mamma - "She's a large woman!" - to reassure the audience that long faces were not required. Then the MacColl brothers got through The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face...
When Kirsty MacColl, solo, had concluded her leavening of acid humour about love and such, on sidled the night's coup, Lennox and Stewart. She grinned fit to bust. He looked like a man whose soul had been through a hurricane backwards. However Stewart's professionalism prevailed and Eurythmics delivered a brilliant duet set, as they occasionally would in the '80s. Lennox responded to the thrill of a rare relaxe from children and home studio by pouring herself into every syllable of Eurythmics' finest, highwiring deliriously between manic and depressive with There Must Be An Angel and Here Comes The Rain Again, then enveloping allcomers in the wonderfully kind and gentle Miracle Of Love.
After which effusion, decent, buttoned-down Englishman Dave Gilmour was rather up against it...
Aptly, Lennox sang the farewell, Wild Mountain Thyme, unaccompanied. Newcomers to the Picardie story could only conclude that she must have been quite a woman to inspire such clear-eyed mourning."
- Phil Sutccliffe, MOJO magazine
The Lavender Trust, which plans to provide "Help, advice and support for younger women with breast cancer", is at Kiln House, 210 New Kings Rd, London SW6 4NZ. Tel 0171 384 2984, fax 3387, freephone 0500 245 345 |
