Ahead of her birthday Annie Lennox got her first tattoo; two small black birds hovering around a pulsating crimson heart.
It was a nod to Little Bird, a song from her first solo album about casting off self-doubt and finding the courage to soar.
Little Bird reflected seminal moments in her life; shedding the grey granite confines of a childhood in Aberdeen to spreading her wings in London; overcoming her crippling shyness to become a powerhouse performer and global diva.
Four decades have passed since Lennox was propelled to super stardom with the Eurythmics’ hit single Sweet Dreams; when she arrived onto the world stage an androgynous disrupter in a tuxedo suit and blazing orange cropped hair.
She was to become one of the most universally renowned female artists of musical history; selling 83 million albums; winning an Oscar, a Golden Globe, four Grammies, four Ivor Novello awards and eight Brit awards – the most wins of any female singer, songwriter.
On Christmas day Lennox turned 70; the hair is now ice blonde but still in a pixie and her face has retained its sculpted beauty, albeit with a few more lines.
As a moody and pessimistic teenager, she was convinced she wouldn’t live beyond the age of 35.
When Lennox is photographed these days, she insists the pictures remain unadulterated; that they show her age which she sees as a symbol of her resilience and perseverance.
It appears that after a lifetime as the tortured artist she is at last comfortable in her own skin. ‘I just want to look as I am,’ she said. ‘I have wrinkles. So what? I’ve earned them.’
She has never been big on birthdays given they fall on Christmas and she has said she may not even celebrate moving into her eighth decade.
Of all the birthdays it’s one of her earliest that speaks of most; when she turned three and was given a toy piano which she intuitively learned to play in time with the music from the radio in her family’s two-room attic flat in Aberdeen.
‘My parents realised that I had a musical ear and by the time I was six or seven I was singing in a local choir every Saturday morning and having piano lessons at school.’
When she turned up at Aberdeen’s High School for Girls she was already a talented young musician.
On the chimes she played the theme tune from the Sixties police drama Z Cars.
At nine she won second prize in a Butlin’s talent contest, singing Mairi’s Wedding; she learned to play the flute and toured with the British Youth Wind Orchestra and the school military band, which took first place at the 1970 Schools Music Festival.
But she hated the school and its archaic discipline; its velour hat and her prim uniform, which her parents bought too big so she would grow into it.
Above all she loathed that the girls had to curtsey to the teachers.
Lennox railed against the system, turning up the brim of her hat and chopping her long hair into a modish feather cut.
She once said: ‘For years I had an inferiority complex which I think stemmed from the fact that humiliation was definitely part of the teaching process.
‘I felt picked on. I played the flute and was excused from some lessons for tuition.
‘I don’t think there was time for artistic children.’
Her father, a shipyard worker, and her housewife mother tried to instil discipline in her. They took her to church at the top of the street each Sunday and encouraged her to become a classical flautist and eschew notions of becoming a pop star.
Though her parents gave her a comfortable home and she adored them, there was not the affection she would later be sure to heap upon her own children.
She said: ‘Saying “I love you” was not part of the lexicon. There wasn’t hugging. It was a generation thing.’
Her parents were proud when she won a scholarship to study piano and the flute at the Royal Academy of Music in London but they were devastated when she quit on the eve of her finals.
After hearing Joni Mitchell on the radio she decided it was her destiny to write and sing.
Though she felt the academy had been wasted time, she was grateful it had opened up the promise of London, its bohemian vibrancy contrasting with the bleak chill of Aberdeen.
But in London she struggled for cash, sometimes only scraping by on £3 a week, and by the time Dave Stewart found her working as a waitress in a restaurant she was resigned to returning north.
Although Stewart had been signed to Elton John’s label, he had failed to fulfil his dream of making an impact on the music scene, but he was tenacious and brimming with ideas and he saw something special in Lennox.
They fell in love and moved into a dismal bedsit in Camden and spent their evenings writing songs and playing guitar. Stewart was the driving force Lennox needed.
They formed a group called Catch but didn’t make a dent until they pulled together the Tourists.
In 1979 the band got to number four in the charts with their single I Only Want to Be With You, but it was to be the peak of their success.
Bruce Findlay, a fellow Scot who had a record store in London and was manager of Simple Minds, met the couple when they came into his shop to do a signing as the Tourists.
Findlay told the Mail: ‘Annie was very serious and focused and she had strong opinions but she had a good sense of humour and could laugh easily. She was very talented and impressive.’
But Stewart and Lennox lacked the control they wanted in the Tourists and when the group inevitably split it was bitter; they were left heavily in debt and she slid into a depression.
Findlay said: ‘They felt like they had blown their chance.”
Shortly after the Tourists broke up Lennox and Stewart did too, but they missed their musical symbiosis and rather unconventionally decided that they could be a couple professionally if not romantically.
As the duo Eurythmics, they had the freedom to make the synthpop music they wanted and in 1983 their first major hit Sweet Dreams unlocked the door to superstardom.
Lennox never felt comfortable with fame; she was self-conscious and shy and Findlay recalls how nervous she was before performances.
In Berlin in 1983 when both the Eurythmics and Simple Minds were playing the city’s prestigious music festival in front of a crowd of 90,000, Findlay recalled seeing Lennox in the wings in a black leather catsuit. She was rigid with fear.
He said: ‘I thought she was going to break her manager’s hand, she was holding it so tight.’
As the first bars of Sweet Dreams started, Simple Minds were in the wings, coaxing: ‘Go on Annie you can do it.’
Findlay said: ‘She was shaking like a leaf but as soon as she set one foot on that stage and the spotlight hit her she burst into life and the confidence ran through her. She was incredible.’
Eurythmics were one of the foremost bands of the Eighties and were prolific, producing seven albums in nine years. They toured for months with a string of hits, including Here Comes The Rain Again, Thorn In My Side and Who’s That Girl?.
They fought incessantly and as their relationship grew unbearably fractious it became impossible to carry on.
Lennox was burned out and tired of touring and wanted to follow a different path; she was craving an ‘ordinary life’. ‘I needed to see how I would be if I left behind the creature with two heads we had become,’ she said.
She threw herself into a disastrous marriage to a Hare Krishna monk, Radha Raman, whom she had met after a concert in Stuttgart but the union was as short-lived as it was ill-judged.
When she met film director and Israeli human rights activist Uri Fruchtmann she found a man who was a more likely soulmate and they married in 1988, both keen to have a settled family life.
Tragically their first child Daniel was stillborn and it left Lennox spiralling in grief. She said: ‘It was more profound than I’d ever imagined, deeper in every way – an awakening. It throws your life upside down. You’re stunned, like a truck just hit you.
‘It really brings home the temporariness of life. But that is the everyday reality for so many women in the world.’
When her daughter Lola arrived in 1990 she stepped back from music, though she carried on writing songs and wondered if she could make it as a solo artist.
The success of her solo albums Diva and Medusa proved she was indeed a formidable talent on her own, but when her second daughter Tali was born in 1993 she again retreated into motherhood.
She said: ‘I didn’t want them to be thrust into the exhibitionism and voyeurism which is the celebrity industry.’
Ironically both daughters later chose to be in the spotlight; Lola as a singer and Tali as a model.
Lennox divorced Fruchtmann in 2000 and threw herself into activism, campaigning for the equality of women and girls.
She said the loss of Daniel had brought her a greater empathy and understanding for the struggles of mothers, and it was through her activism she met Mitch Besser, a Harvard-educated gynaecologist who would become her third husband.
Besser founded mothers2mothers to support families with HIV and they married in a low-key ceremony with 150 guests, with Lola and Tali as bridesmaids.
In later years Lennox has devoted herself to her activism and in March she will host a fundraising concert to support global feminist organisation The Circle.
Findlay said: ‘It is amazing to think Annie is 70 that she has been a star for so long. After all these years she has kept an aura of mystery about her.’
He believes her musical career will go on for many years to come.
He said: ‘The idea that pop music is for the young died a long time ago and you just need to look at Bob Dylan or Diana Ross for proof of that.
‘But if Annie never made another record, her place in history is intact. She is known the world over as a remarkable woman and talent.’