On her forthcoming seventh studio album, Nostalgia, Annie Lennox bravely reinterprets Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit, the chilling story of racist lynchings. A song which stunned audiences in 1939 and redefined popular music as we know it.
The live performance video below is one of many lifted from Nostalgia, out on 27 October. It’s an album which finds the Eurythmics frontwoman tackling a variety of iconic, politically charged jazz standards composed by artists such as Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin.
“I was rehearsing with Herbie Hancock’s band in America and they are consummate jazz musicians,” Lennox told Digital Spy of her shift from bombastic pop to jazz. “We were having fun noodling around and I started singing with them. I realised, ‘Oh my God. I’ve never really been into jazz, but I think I’ve got the kind of voice that could do it’. It had never occurred to me in my younger incarnations that I would ever do anything with that genre, because it wasn’t really my thing.”
Watch the video below and let us know what you make of Lennox’s version.
