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"Just don't ask her about marriage, Hare Krishna or why she isn't wearing her hair in a ponytail," said an RCA official helpfully. "Or at least wait until she's well warmed-up." The advice is unnecessary. Annie Lennox raises these ticklish subjects - the source of much media speculation - without prompting. Her marriage in March to German Hare Krishna devotee Radha Raman was a surprise - not least to herself. Yet during the course of our two-hour talk she doesn't once mention him by name and she fails to register one isotope of expression when he pokes his serious bespectacled face round the door of the North London church hall which serves as the Eurythmics' HQ. Annie's husband isn't the only interuption. The old hall is a hive of activity with no less than five persons traipsing in and out including Annie's partner and former lover Dave Stewart - he who looks like a Scots terrier crossed with a floor mop.

We're in a meat-free zone here, with copies of Vegetarian Times prominent in the waiting room. This is a sign of Annie's recent conversion, at the age of 29, to the vegetarian cause. So even if she weren't so immediately likeable or so evidently sensitive and highly strung, the journalist tends to retract the scoop-hungry incisors. For a private person she is full of gracious, good-humoured candour. Some of her more doubtful sentiments are leavened with a husky Scot's chuckle. The inner tensions which make her so compelling onstage tug at her in quieter ways. As she leans into the crook of a piano, she seems to be talking with Krishna at one shoulder and - who knows? - her parents at the other.

Annie is in Kate Hepburn buccaneer mode: Forties padded shoulders, Argyle socks, horn-rim specs. But the similarity ends there. You'll notice a total absence of salty language - a sign of gentility, sweetness and good-breeding. Once steered to the subject, she is bursting to talk about the 1984 soundtrack fiasco though she later apologised for getting carried away, saying she "didn't want to enter into a personal slagging match". Director Mike Radford was not so charitable. He chose the prize platform of the 1984 Standard Film Awards to publicly disown the just-voted 'Film Of The Year', blaming Eurythmics for "foisting their soundtrack on him and interfering grossly with "droit d'auteur". Funnily enough, the very people responsiblelor Eurythmics' involvement with the film (Virgin's Al Clarke and Robert Devereaux) sat a few tables away, unscathed and unmentioned in the diatribe and holding their tongues. At the time, Annie was installed in her Swiss mountain retreat probably milking the scapegoats in readiness.

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Interview Elissa Van Poznak. Photography Mike Laye