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Staying power

Annie Lennox and Sting credit their longevity to artistic wanderlust.

Annie Lennox likes being something of a chameleon.

The Scottish singer, who comes to the Ford Amphitheatre on Friday with Sting in a concert rescheduled from Sept. 9, said she wants to explore music that makes her happy. What she doesn't want is to be remembered solely for the distinctive 1980s new wave sound of her old band, the Eurythmics.

"People who are very closely associated with movements become dated, because it's something that's fixed or rigid," Lennox said by phone from Atlanta last month. "I've never thought that I need to do this or I need to do that. I do what's natural with me, and what's gone is gone. . . . If anything has contributed to (my) longevity as an artist, it's that slightly chameleonic quality."

This is the first time Lennox and Sting have toured together, but their careers have had lots of parallels.

Both hail from the United Kingdom. Each graduated from world-beating success with a popular group - Sting with the Police, Lennox with former companion Dave Stewart in the Eurythmics - to a successful solo career.

Both released albums last year, Sting's Sacred Love and Lennox's Bare.

And there's that identification with the sound of the late 1970s and '80s. The Eurythmics' pulsing, hypnotic hit Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) was one of several tunes that marked the duo as a synth-pop subset of new wave.

The Eurythmics, which also hit big with the ballad Here Comes the Rain Again, the rocker Missionary Man and the soulful Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves (with Aretha Franklin), called it quits in 1991.

Lennox rapidly emerged as a solo artist with 1992's Diva, pumped up by the hit singles Walking on Broken Glass and Why.

Three years later, her collection of covers, Medusa, included the Lover Speaks' No More "I Love You's"; Bob Marley's Waiting in Vain; the Temptations' I Can't Get Next to You; and the Blue Nile's Downtown Lights.

Then Lennox, who will be 50 on Christmas Day, waited almost a decade before releasing Bare, although she contributed to film soundtracks.

"(I was) living my life," she said. "I don't want the music industry to ever dictate to me what I should do. I want to be a human being on the planet. I don't want to be celebrity."

Her priority, she said, is mothering her daughters, 13 and 11. "That's my main duty on the planet now. I don't need to make music for money. I want to make art for art's sake. I want to be respected."

Hollywood lauded her this year with a best song Oscar, for co-writing the haunting Into the West from the soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (Sting lost in the same category, for his You Will Be My Ain True Love from Cold Mountain.)

The film's producers sought her out.

"It wasn't like a deal done where there was some agent who was pitching me," she said. "They thought me up, and they approached me. I met (composer) Howard Shore last year in New York City. We spoke about the kind of song they had in mind, about what was the quality that they wanted brought out in my voice."

The recording was done in London's Abbey Road Studios, where she sang on a microphone last used by Paul McCartney and John Lennon.

"It was a really special moment," Lennox said.

Sting and Annie Lennox, 7 p.m. Friday, Ford Amphitheatre at the Florida State Fairgrounds, U.S. 301 N at Interstate 4, Tampa. Reserved seats $47-$87 (plus service charge); festival seating on the lawn, $32 plus service charge. (813) 740-2446.