More than 100 years ago, the Royal Albert Hall in London was a regular venue for women’s suffrage meetings, host Clara Amfo tells us at last night’s concert Sisters: Annie Lennox and Friends.
What Amfo doesn’t acknowledge is that the Hall wasn’t always on the women’s side: in April 1913 Emmeline Pankhurst and her Women’s Social and Political Union colleagues were banned from the venue after a series of violent run-ins. The fight for women’s rights has never been easy.
Nonetheless, the circular venue is an apt setting for an event that is not only Lennox’s first headline show in six years but also a celebration of the Circle, which the former Eurythmics member co-founded in 2008 to support women and girls facing gender-based violence and economic inequality.
Annie Lennox and friends at the Royal Albert Hall (Photo: Vianney Le Caer)To celebrate and fundraise, Lennox organised this concert, held in the run-up to International Women’s Day, as an ode to sisterhood. BBC Radio 2 Folk Singer of the Year winner Ríoghnach Connolly opens with a poignant trio of songs, complete with mellifluous flute-playing. Later it’s all guns blazing for indie-rocker Nadine Shah, who speaks poignantly of how lucky she is to have a stage career as a Muslim woman.
In between these short sets we learn more about the Circle. Amfo reminds us that one in three women experience gender-based violence globally, with the situation particularly bad in the DRC, Afghanistan and Sudan. It’s a little jarring, then, for Beverley Knight to insist that “despite the madness out there, everything’s gonna be alright”, before launching into her high-energy, R&B-infused pop.
It’s similarly strange to hear acclaimed photographer Misan Harriman, who introduces Lennox’s set, receive rapturous applause for declaring himself a “feminist ally”. Do we really still have such low expectations of men?
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It’s not that the evening should be drenched in misery. There is reason to hold tight to this community of music-making, while Lennox deserves praise for her female-dominated line-up, still too often a rarity in 2025. Her set, an hour-long promenade of greatest hits, including “Dark Road” and Eurythmics tracks “Love Is a Stranger” and “Missionary Man”, is mostly slick. The Irish singer Hozier feels like a random addition as he arrives to duet with Lennox on his 2013 break-out single “Take Me To Church”, while Paloma Faith is the surprise guest for the expected but nonetheless iridescent closer “Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves”.
Such an event is a weird one: the audience are there to see Lennox; Lennox’s aim is to fundraise for her charity. It’s a luxury to spend a night losing oneself to music – and one that should not be denied. But even these world-class performers can’t pretend music alone can cure the world of misogyny. Overall, the evening feels like it can’t decide if it wants to face up to the horrors of sexism, or escape it completely.
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