Book Review: ‘Annie Lennox: Retrospective’ by Annie Lennox

Annie Lennox

Thinking back to 1990, I can still remember the first songs where I heard Annie Lennox‘s melodious and powerful voice on the radio. My mom enjoyed playing music during our drives in the Los Angeles suburbs. Stations loved to play “Sweet Dreams” and “Here Comes the Rain Again” from the Eurythmics, the musical duo Lennox formed with David A. Stewart in the 1980s. As a three-year-old kid, I tried to sing along to the refrains. I also remember when “Winter Wonderland” cycled through the radio playlists during the Christmas season and that was easier to belt out.

I was excited when book publisher Rizzoli New York released Lennox’s visual memoir called Annie Lennox: Retrospective in 2025. Lennox reached superstar status in the music world through Eurythmics with Stewart before moving forward as a solo artist by the early 1990s. Over the last few decades, she’s achieved recognition not only in music, but also as a feminist and activist. Now in her 70s, Lennox always wanted to put a book together, and finally got her chance.

Layout

Retrospective is rooted firmly in a highly visual format, pulling in more than 200 photos from Lennox’s career. The photo album and scrapbook layout work really well here. Lennox and other popular singer-songwriters made such an impact with their music videos, live shows, magazines, advertisements and other visual media. Some of those defining artists appear in the book, including David Bowie, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and Sting.

Even before the introduction, Retrospective starts out with the oldest photos. Readers gain a glimpse of Lennox’s childhood in Scotland, long before her touring adventures in the UK and elsewhere. In the introduction, she notes that she almost returned to Scotland after years of mistakes. But Stewart “struck a compelling drum beat” that turned into “Sweet Dreams.”

The book skips to the mid-1970s when Lennox met Paul Jacobs, who introduced her to Stewart. From there, she met Peet Coombes and joined their band called The Tourists. Lennox includes detailed anecdotes about album covers, life on the road, and personal moments from the 1970s up through 2020. Song lyrics punctuate the book and accompany the photos.

Experiencing the Book

Since I wasn’t familiar with The Tourists, I went to YouTube to listen to the early albums while the book remained open on my desk. Even when I did know an album mentioned later in the book, I returned to YouTube to play a Eurythmics or Lennox track. From there, I tried to understand an anecdote or the mood of a photo. Retrospective invites you to do that because with the sheer size of the book, some photos are quite large. I suppose it’s Lennox’s way of bringing you back into those moments in time and how she felt.

The accompanying anecdotes run a wide range, from how she cut and dyed her hair that way in the 1980s to meeting other artists or going with spur-of-the-moment decisions. It’s an exhilarating ride to accompany Lennox on. There’s a running theme of intensely looking at the camera that she acknowledges, and it comes through on the page.

The photo shoots with multiple shots—I liked the one where she changes her hand placement slightly (pages 142 and 143)—really demonstrate her understanding of engaging with the lens and being playful. Bettina Rheims’ photos later in the book even have red “x” marks on some of the frames. It’s not clear who drew those marks, whether Rheims or Lennox, but it might pique your curiosity about how these artistic decisions are made.

“Back-to-Front”

Lennox says in the introduction that she does “lots of things in a ‘back-to-front’ kind of way.” I read her memoir from the front cover to the end initially, but I can see what she means. After I finished, I picked up the book sometime later and flipped around to different points. With more than 200 photos, I was bound to have moments of “Let me look at that page again.”

Retrospective makes for a perfect afternoon read on your own. Better yet, invite your friends over and throw on some Annie Lennox music. You can draw valuable insights from her story and reflections to use in your own journey, for starters. Or you can brainstorm ideas for your creative projects as a group, whether it’s rallying behind an important issue, putting an outfit together, writing a song, or trying out photography.