Every time Annie Lennox touched down at Heathrow after one of her many humanitarian trips, she would be overcome by a very specific feeling. “These projects gave me a passport in. I had an opportunity to go directly to rape crisis centres, orphanages, to be taken to hospitals and schools and clinics – I had a real deep dive into the world of poverty,” she says, talking over Zoom from her home in LA. “It was deep, I can tell you. Every time I would come back to the airport in the UK I would have this sort of inner sense of… I want to wake everybody up.”
Is it slightly agonising for a multimillionaire to tell the masses to open their eyes to the real world? The past couple of years have seen several incidences of celebrity do-gooding miss the mark – from Gal Gadot’s tone-deaf stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict last year, to Thandiwe Newton’s tearful apology to dark-skinned women, or unsought celebrity videos decrying racism during the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement. More often than not there’s something very Geri Halliwell at the UN in 2009 about the whole thing; something that doesn’t quite add up or, at least, is laced with a particular brand of cynicism.
