How pop's most toxic love affair cast a shadow over SIX marriages: Have Eurythmics' Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart finally got each other out of their systems?

By Paul Scott for MailOnline

Published: 20:04 EDT, 4 August 2013 | Updated: 20:20 EDT, 4 August 2013

To maximise the glamour factor, rocker turned celebrity photographer Dave Stewart has chosen to hold his latest exhibition of pictures of his famous friends in the ultra-chic Sunset Marquis hotel in Hollywood.

Its walls are lined with his portraits of stars such as Mick Jagger, actress Demi Moore and singer Joss Stone.

But there is not a single picture of Annie Lennox, Stewart’s former partner in the  Eurythmics and his one-time lover.

The Eurythmics' Annie Lennox and guitarist Dave Stewart. The couple were wild, having massive rows and lots of passion

The 60-year-old Stewart tried to laugh off the omission by saying he would need a whole exhibition to house the multitude of pictures of his strikingly beautiful ex.

However, fans of the hugely successful Eighties band wonder if her absence is more to do with a bitter feud that has driven a wedge between the pair.

Indeed, Stewart let slip he did not receive an invitation to the singer’s wedding last September to South African gynaecologist Dr Mitch Besser. Guests included the actor Colin Firth and comedienne Ruby Wax.

Stewart was reported to have looked upset as he admitted: ‘I don’t even know where the wedding was. I’ll have to ask why wasn’t I invited. I certainly would have gone if she’d asked me.’

He added poignantly: ‘People always think of us as a couple, and yet we barely ever talk now.’

One explanation, offered to me by an executive at their former record company RCA, is that the love-hate relationship between the pair is such that Scots-born Lennox has vowed to stay away from her former boyfriend for fear he ‘causes a disturbance in her new marriage’.

Could it really be true that three-times married Annie, 58, who once claimed she and Stewart were so close they communicated by telepathy, thinks she can’t trust herself to be around him?

Certainly, those who know the two stars admitted to me that the relationship remains intense.

Annie Lennox with Dave Stewart during a performance at the 23rd Annual ASCAP Pop Music Awards in Beverly Hills, California

The man who discovered them, Rob Gold, a former head of Virgin Music, said: ‘Their relationship became almost too much and got claustrophobic. Annie’s head is in a completely different space now and it’s not like it was. She wants to move on.’

To do so, it seems, she has vowed to keep Stewart, also married three times, at arm’s length.

Their most recent fall-out is the latest twist in the fascinating tale of love and obsession that is at the heart of the relationship between pop’s most oddball duo.

In the more than 30 years since they stopped being lovers, it’s been blamed for the break-up of two of Lennox’s marriages and their bouts of depression. Despite the troubled relationship, there remains a special connection between them, which friends believe they have never really resolved.

They met in 1976, when Lennox was a waitress in Hampstead, North-West London.

She had moved from Aberdeen to study the flute at the Royal College of Music. But Lennox, who was brought up in a two-room tenement, sharing an outside lavatory with five other families, felt out of place among her well-off fellow students and quit before her finals.

According to legend, the eccentric Sunderland-born Stewart, who had run away to London at 16, walked into the restaurant where she worked, wearing a fur coat, spotted her and asked her to marry him.

At 24, he was already married — a brief union to a nurse.

Annie Lennox with her partner Dr Mitch Besser. Stewart was not invited to their wedding

He and Lennox immediately began an intense affair and formed a band called The Catch.

Rob Gold, their first producer, told me: ‘When I met them, they were living in this little room in Crouch End in North London.

‘My office was in Covent Garden and I had to lend Annie 10p to get back home because she didn’t have the money.

‘Dave was eccentric even then. He used to come to my house wearing a space helmet. My children thought he’d just landed!’

At that time, Stewart was already addicted to cocaine and amphetamines. He later admitted that at the height of his drug-taking he had LSD every day for a year.

Desperately thin and ill, he collapsed from a punctured lung in 1977. ‘Dave, Annie and I were in a London restaurant and all of a sudden he got short of breath and had to be rushed to hospital,’ says Gold. ‘It was touch and go whether he would pull through.’

Annie nursed him back to health and off drugs, and they formed The Tourists, getting a top-ten hit in 1979. But the group broke up acrimoniously a year later, leaving the couple having to repay £35,000 to their record company.

Colin Firth (left) and Ruby Wax (right) were both invited to Lennox's wedding but Stewart was not

The stress sent Lennox into a trough of depression and anxiety. She suffered panic attacks and admitted having suicidal thoughts.

Later she said: ‘I would get palpitations and come out in cold sweats. You get such a rock-bottom feeling that either you might as well cut your own throat or you start thinking about your own self-preservation.

‘It was sheer hell and I never want to go through anything like that again. I was devastated by the traumas and dramas.’

Her four-year relationship with Stewart also fell victim to her breakdown and the pressures of working together. Nonetheless, they got back together and went on to form The Eurythmics the following year.

Their first album, In The Garden, flopped, but in 1983, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) went platinum in Britain and gold in America.

Lennox became an instant sex symbol and The Eurythmics sold 75 million records worldwide. The pair earned £30 million each with hits such as Who’s That Girl?, There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) and Thorn in My Side.

But with success came more angst. In the early Nineties, Stewart admitted experiencing ‘Paradise Syndrome’ — a psychological condition where sufferers become severely depressed because achieving great wealth and fame leaves them feeling there is nothing left to strive for.

He also became convinced that extra-terrestrials had invaded parts of his body, making him ill.

In the late 1970s Stewart was addicted to cocaine and amphetamines. He later admitted that at the height of his drug-taking he had LSD every day for a year

Once, he was admitted to hospital in Dumfries after he thought his head was swelling up. In an attempt to cool down, he rammed a champagne bucket full of ice on it, which became stuck fast.

Meanwhile, there was talk of blood-curdling rows between the pair, who would go weeks without talking to each other. It is no surprise that they disbanded The Eurythmics in 1990, though they did briefly reform nine years later.

Annie later admitted the trauma of the break-up threw her back into depression. But she went on to launch a solo career that has seen her win a record eight Brits, four Grammys and an Oscar for her song Into The West from the soundtrack of The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King.

However, her demons have never been too far away. Her 2003 album Bare was seen by fans as a cry for help. The last song, Oh God, features the lyrics: ‘Oh God, where are you now? I’m looking down at the abyss. You don’t exist.’

Lennox blamed her relationship with Stewart for the break-up of her first marriage to Hare Krishna monk Radha Raman, whom she met in 1984 after a concert in Stuttgart.

Three weeks later, they tied the knot before taking off to a tiny Swiss mountain village near a Krishna farm and temple.

Annie Lennox with her Women of the Year award at the Women of the Year Lunch and Awards 2010

The controlling Raman persuaded Lennox to give up meat, alcohol and coffee, and she enthused at the time: ‘Radha has changed my life. He taught me how to be happy. Before we met, I was terribly confused about what I wanted.’

Her parents, shipyard boilermaker Tom and cook Dorothy, were understandably worried.

Unsurprisingly, Dave Stewart, too, was vehemently against the odd union. Within weeks, Lennox realised she had made a huge mistake and a year later the marriage was over — but not before Raman allegedly demanded £100,000 to stop him publishing intimate photos of them together.

As for Stewart, the spectre of Lennox hung over his second marriage to Bananarama singer Siobhan Fahey in 1987. The couple had two sons, but divorced in 1996.

The relationship was probably not helped by Stewart insisting his  former lover should attend the birth of one of the children, with the singer urging Fahey to ‘Push!’

At the same time, he was saying, rather tactlessly: ‘We have a passionate friendship. Annie and I can revive the element of sexual chemistry between us at any time.’

Some close to Lennox blamed her decision to reform The Eurythmics with Stewart in 1999 for her break-up, a year later, from husband number two, Israeli-born music and film producer Uri Fruchtmann. The couple married in 1988 and had two daughters, now 22 and 20.

Following his divorce from Fahey, Stewart went on to marry Dutch photographer Anoushka Fisz in 2001. They have two daughters, aged 13 and 11, and have lived in Los Angeles for the past eight years.

Lennox met third husband Dr Besser in 2009 after becoming involved in his charity, Mothers- 2Mothers, which helps HIV-infected children and their mothers.

The couple live between the singer’s £10 million townhouse in Notting Hill, West London, and South Africa.

But with six marriages between them, it remains to be seen if Stewart and Lennox have finally got each other out of their systems.