COVER STORY; ANNIE'S SONG.

Being famous, says Annie Lennox, is like being crippled. You are different from everyone else. You crave to be ordinary, not to be stared at, not to be fussed over.

You want to be just another mum in the playground, just another housewife who bakes.

But at tomorrow's Brit Awards, Annie - nominated for best female singer and best British single - will be reminded, yet again, that she inhabits that strange, foreign land called Celebrity.

The career of the queen of world pop is already littered with golden awards. But she will step reluctantly from her private life into the spotlight. For Aberdeen-born Annie, whose beautiful, haunting voice set the soundtrack for the 80s and is doing the same for the 90s, is now happiest at home in London with her Israeli film director husband Uri Fruchtmann and their daughters Lola, five, and Tali, three.

She earned pounds 5million last year - on top of the many millions she made from the Eurythmics. She has all the money she could ever want. But her life is restrained, private and low-key.

"Part of me just wants to go home and bake," she says. "But I'm not your ordinary mother in the playground. It's not easy for me to integrate with others. It's almost like being crippled. It's as if I'm exiled to a foreign land."

And this intense, mysterious, chameleon-like woman - who describes herself as an `oddbod' - seeks ordinary things in little ways.

On a recent trip to New York, she sneaked out of her luxury hotel and splashed out pounds 3 on a pizza slicer and a veg scourer. And she was more excited about her purchases than she is about the 30 million albums she's sold in her career.

She does not go clubbing or rub shoulders with celebrities. She is still the loner she has been since tenement childhood in Aberdeen.

"It's difficult to make new friends, and I don't want just to hang out with other celebs. I hate that. I'm dead shy and quite daunted by other people's charisma. I don't see why we should be in a sort of fame club. That's a bad way to start a friendship.

"Many people in this profession are mystified by their own myths. They don't know who they are - they believe they are kings and queens.

"You get to the stage where the only people you see are working for you. And on tour, no one wants to upset you. So you become marginalised."

Fame came suddenly to wee Annie, the only child of a bagpipe-playing boilermaker and a gamekeeper's daughter from Speyside.

She grew up playing in the street and sleeping on the couch in the best room of the two-room tenement flat.

"The whole block was a wonderful place, beautifully built. I had a great early childhood there," she recalls. "Directly opposite us was a Victorian textile mill - a vast red-brick building with a tall chimney. The girls would all tuck their dresses in their knickers and play ball against the walls."

When Annie was eight, her parents moved to a high-rise block with a bathroom, central- heating and a fridge.

As a teenager at Aberdeen High School for Girls, she was unhappy, rebellious and boy-mad. Her relationship with her card-carrying Communist father wasn't terribly happy.

"He had a very spartan upbringing and the memory of that made him very strict with me. By the time I was 15 or 16, I wanted to leave home and live my own life. That confounded him - and we never really got over it."

Soon the brilliant-but-maverick music student fled to London, where she met an aspiring musician called Dave Stewart.

Within months Annie's pop career was on the crest of a wave - a wave that has never yet crashed.

But her 10 years of the Eurythmics, she reveals, were NOT good ones.

"I was very unhappy in those years. Unbalanced, moody, difficult, panicky, fearful, defensive. They were not easy years for me, or the people around me.

"I'm not saying I'm easy now, but I've mellowed. I've matured, I take my responsibilities, and I try very hard not to self-indulge."

Annie has also faced up to who she is. She no longer tries to be what she is not. "Eurythmics were a major live band, on stage, night after night. Your refuge is to create a persona for yourself. Then you get locked into that persona and it becomes mechanical. And you start hating yourself because it's mechanical and hating the audience because they think it's real when it's not.

"It's quite a strange dilemma. And I was in it for 10 years, because the momentum of the Eurythmics was huge, and I didn't have the guts to say: `Excuse me, I really cannot bear this'."

She has the confidence now, of course.

She gets her own way. For example, she refuses to go on exhausting concert tours any more. A documentary about her is being made, but she is a co- director and in control.

Last year she was voted "the woman most women would like to be" by the readers of Time Out magazine.

But Annie summed it all up after a rare stage performance in New York last autumn.

"It's good to dip in, but it's even better to dip out," she said.

And after the Brit Awards, while the luvvies of pop hug and congratulate and indulge in an orgy of false friendship for the cameras, she will slip quietly away, back to anonymity with her loving family and her home in Maida Vale, London.

Where people in the street may not give a second glance.

Or even ask: Who's That Girl?