And you start hating yourself because it's mechanical and hating the audience because they think it's for real when it's not It's quite a

And you start hating yourself because it's mechanical, and hating the audience because they think it's for real when it's not It's quite a strange dilemma. When you go on stage, you have to be convinced that it's for real. Doing it night after night, it becomes abstracted and fictional And your refuge is to create a persona for yourself. "The trouble is, what starts off very memorable becomes like The Mousetrap. For Annie Lennox, this is both a leap in the dark and a return to a life she knows well - too well Eurythmics were a major live band. "He's my man," she will say, but not like that.The plane is laid on by the promoter, who has also issued home-made guidebooks, listing our names and roles ("Mrs K Chua - grandmother") and telling us that the show, now in its 32nd year, is broadcast live "to countries in the old Communist sphere of influence". For chapter three, she has worked with Lipson, who engineered the Frankie Goes to Hollywood records and has produced acts from Simple Minds to Paul McCartney.

For the first two chapters of her career, Lennox's partner, and sometime lover, was Dave Stewart, an oddball genius, somewhere between Prince and Eric Morecambe. She also has the bigger sunglasses.On the plane, Lennox sits next to a tall man with big eyes, a grey beard and a Powerbook: Stephen Lipson, her producer. She wasn't born when Annie Lennox landed on Top of the Pops, with the Tourists, in 1978 But her entourage is the same size Vanessa brings the family: father, mother, even grandmother. "Prepare yourself," she says, "for a surreal experience."SECOND on tonight's bill is Vanessa-Mae, the classical violin prodigy who is now a pop star too.

And she is "utterly, utterly nervous". Annie Lennox's group shuffles towards the plane She shakes my hand. She is Britain's best-selling female singer, and she is going to a country she doesn't know, to give her first public concert in six years - her first ever as a solo artist. General, here, means particular: the terminal for chartered jets It was Bank Holiday Saturday. We were making a 24-hour trip to Gdansk, for a pop festival, Sopot 95, and top of the bill was Annie Lennox.

She was standing with her managers, talking rather animatedly for 8.45am. Slight, ageless, classless, with cropped brown hair, little tinted glasses, open-toed sandals and striped grey trouser-suit, she could be from the record company But she isn't. Fifty people were milling about at the General Aviation Terminal, Heathrow. Rory and Wendy want not only to make the film of Armageddon, but also to help bring it about !. AT FIRST I didn't recognise her.

Cecil B de Mille was content merely to make a film of The Ten Commandments. "Jeremy Irons, someone like that, being the anti-Christ in the European Union, and a journalist, the Tommy Lee Jones character, unveiling it... There is going to be a confederacy of 10 nations in the last days out of the European Mediterranean area, and out of that comes the anti-Christ, and there will be a unified monetary system..."Rory butted in: "This is in Daniel, in Revelation, in Ezekiel - basically a confirmation of many different areas of prophecy in the Bible." And then he changed the subject.The arrival of Christian Channel Europe, then, is, as the Alecs see it, both a portent of "the last days", and, because it will win more adherents to the cause, one of the events that will help to precipitate them No one could accuse them of being short of ambition. "It's a thriller, a prophetic thriller, a sort of Die Hard based on what we believe," Wendy had said.