The cathartic rush of the songs was inspired by some bleak hours following the break-up of her 12-year marriage to the film-maker Uri Fruchtmann three years ago. The tabloid press blandly blamed the pressure of work and the pressure of fame. It's clear from her album that she blames herself, blames everything.

The studio where she is adding the finishing touches to the album is very dark, which gives her smile and eyes a curious luminosity. She's as tall and as bony as you think she's going to be, but altogether much brighter, much more accessible. She's wearing brown pinstriped trousers, her hair in the famous blonde crop that seems to encapsulate her boldness and her vulnerability.

She tells me straight away that she doesn't mind talking about her emotions — either in her lyrics or to me now. 'I want to deal with them. For me it's something about a kind of exposing. I think if I go through that pain, I'm not the only one, I want to become a mouthpiece. Music is the touchstone for a lot of emotions, it's just so fantastic. I always wanted to make music that people would go, 'Yeah, I connect with it musically, sonically.' It then gives me a purpose.'

Oh, you think it's necessary to go through great suffering to produce great songs? 'It seems historically that most artists have suffered in life, but suffering is a coin with two sides: within it you have moments of great joy and peace, and then there are times when it's terrible, but it will all pass. Happy is temporary; you have to ride the theatre of life.' Is the ride easier? 'I don't know if I'm better at it. I used to think as you get older you mellow out, but because I'm such a seeker I get through a certain thing and then something else comes along.'

Her life reads like an opera of high passion and high despair. She was born on Christmas Day, 1954, in Aberdeen in the northeast of Scotland, a quiet city she was always too vibrant for. She won a place at the Royal Academy of Music but was perhaps too arty, too unconventional for it. Her relationship with Dave Stewart has been a bewildering entanglement, fed both ends of the pain-pleasure spectrum. First they were lovers, then they were a creative partnership, finding success with Eurythmics. He was always a shadowy mentor, someone upon whom she both depended and needed to get away from. Outside of Stewart her love life had a few rollercoaster rides. She yearned for children, and when her baby Daniel was stillborn in 1988, the experience of course changed her entirely. She chose to speak out about the pain, to extend comfort to anyone else who had suffered this kind of loss.

Everyone seemed to regard her life with Fruchtmann and their daughters, Lola, 12, and Tali, 10, as peaceful and secure until it fell apart three years ago. Maybe she always needs to be hard on herself and give herself challenges. Maybe the intensity of the experience is her connection with the world.

'I don't know honestly if it's the chicken or the egg,' she says. 'I don't know if one needs pain in order to express oneself. I think for me, definitely the stronger songs have come in a cathartic way, as an expression of something that has been distilled over the years.'

What, it gets distilled and distilled and then it just pops out? She laughs. 'Well, it does seem to pop out, because you can't do it any other way. You can't think, 'I'm going to sit down and write a great song,' and do it to order.I used to think that's what you had to do. A censor in my mind would go, 'That's rubbish, throw it in the bin.'

So, obviously, she was so self-critical that she talked herself into writer's block. 'And the answer had to be, 'Just write it anyway, no holds barred, and shut the door on the censor.' It's about being free enough to have the confidence. It's like a pathway — if you are a painter or a writer or a musician, it just comes and you voice it.'

Bare is all about that pathway. Never before have you been so aware of her sense of alienation — her need to belong and yet be alone probably comes from her being an only child. 'I probably would sometimes like to fit in, but then realise it's always been that way,' Lennox says.

Her voice is very soft, almost a whisper. Of course the complete opposite to her singing voice, which delivers you her whole soul. She's all about extremes. 'As human beings, we all are. We all have the capacity for terrible destructiveness and creative possibilities.'

Do you think the most creative people are also the most destructive? 'Not necessarily,' she says, which surprises me. And then she says cheerily: 'It's all about the balance.'