By Toby MacDonald

ANNIE Lennox has hit out at the exploitation of young female stars by the "vile and unscrupulous" record industry. The 54-year-old singer claimed the welfare and well-being of vulnerable female artists was being sacrificed by uncaring executives in their pursuit of profit.

In an interview ahead of a concert in Johannesburg on Wednesday to raise funds and awareness of her work with women and children with HIV and Aids, she took the male-dominated music industry to task.

Lennox said: "People are very nice, they are all smiling, and everybody's interested in you, but basically they are looking for the profit margin, looking Where can we make the money?' and not necessarily with your best interests.

"Without naming any names, because everyone knows who they are, there are a lot of young female artists out there who have problems and people with a vested interest in keeping them going.

"But it might not really be to their best interests as a human being.

"I have encountered things in the industry that were vile, people were unscrupulous, people took advantage, people betrayed and let down, people who were just in it for themselves.

"It was a wake-up call and sometimes it was really nasty."

Lennox, a multi-Grammy award winner, admitted that as a young artist she was saved from the destructive excess of her contemporaries by her Scottish work ethic.

She said: "Bacchanalian excess is not a great bedfellow, excuse the pun, for a singer, a performer.

"It is incredibly physically draining and you have to have tremendous physical stamina. So to smoke and drink and go and party, unless you are a very unusual person, it does not bode well for sustainability.

"I was never drawn to it. I can be quite extrovert, especially during performance, but as a person I am quite shy. I spend a lot of time alone, I am a really quiet person, so I was never that one, and I was always thinking, If I lose my voice we have to cancel tomorrow's show' and the pressure on me as the front person, or on any front person is huge."

Lennox has enjoyed a successful recording career which has spanned more than three decades, producing more than 80 million record sales from her collaborations with Dave Stewart in bands The Tourists and Eurythmics and from her solo career.

In March she launched her latest album, The Annie Lennox Collection, a compilation of tracks from her four solo albums combined with new songs.

She said: "You have to be very focussed, and you have to be really, really motivated to do it. You have to have a yearning, a passion for that, and there are pitfalls, huge pitfalls.

"I have noticed over the years, and it's almost to a fault, that the ones that come up really quickly are the ones that will come sliding down, so rapidly.

"And you will forget about them. So when it comes down to longevity, that's a different thing."

A campaigner on humanitarian issues, Lennox became involved in Aids fund-raising two years ago after a trip to South Africa in which she met and performed for Nelson Mandela.

She persuaded 23 top female acts and artists, including Dido, Celine Dion, Anastacia, Joss Stone, Sugababes and KT Tunstall, to record the single Sing. The Sing fund, managed by Comic Relief, aims to provide money for projects aimed at women sufferers.

In August, Lennox, who has two teenage daughters, Lola and Tali, by Israeli film and record producer Uri Fruchtmann, will be in Edinburgh to headline the Scottish Festival of Politics where she will discuss her Sing campaign and raise awareness of the HIV/Aids crisis in Africa. She was forced to pull out of the event last year after injuring her back. Lennox later underwent surgery to release a trapped nerve.