Annie Lennox has always been visually striking, but the cover of her current album, Bare, offers her most startling image yet. Lennox, a 48-year-old mother of two, faces the camera, apparently devoid of makeup.
It is an appropriate image: since her divorce from film-maker Uri Fruchtmann, honesty has become Lennox's mantra. She has given honest interviews. The album contains honest songs "that are deeply personal and emotional". The stage is honestly lit with bare light bulbs. Indeed, you occasionally wish she would ease up on the honesty. The souvenir concert programme, written by Lennox, informs us that she dreams "something could be done" to solve cancer, child abuse and racism - a cataclysmic shock to those fans who believe that Lennox, like the rest of us, thinks cancer, child abuse and racism are marvellous ideas.
Tonight's audience - tending towards middle age and heavy on female couples whose severity of countenance and dress sense makes Lennox's close-cropped image look as bling-bling as J-Lo - go for the honesty in a big way. They have read the interviews, they know about her private upheavals, and, what's more, they've paid £60 a ticket to see her. They don't just applaud, they behave as though the successful completion of each song represents a personal triumph over insurmountable odds.
Of course, it's nothing of the sort. Whatever has been going on in her private life, Lennox is devastatingly professional on stage. She slinks around - looking fantastic, makeup or not, even when she dons a woollen cap and glasses - ripping through old Eurythmics songs and early solo hits. Wisely, she has not based the set entirely on Bare, just peppered it with the album's songs. Their musical touchstone is the glossy, muted melancholia of Scotland's champions of crepuscular AOR, The Blue Nile: they are glacial rather than show-stopping.
It doesn't really matter when your back catalogue is this heavy with hits and your voice is in such remarkable shape. Not everything works: Neil Young's bleakly ironic Don't Let It Bring You Down does not survive reinvention as a bombastic self-help anthem, and the hen-night feminism of Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves is ghastly however much you pile on the vocal acrobatics. But as slick, adult-oriented pop shows go, this is largely triumphant stuff.
