Rock star legend Annie Lennox has gathered 23 fellow female artists for a song which she hopes will give momentum to the urgent need to get South Africans, especially women and children, onto AIDS treatment and raise money for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC).

The former member of the Eurythmics and now solo singer spoke to Health-e after a recent factfinding mission to the Eastern Cape and Khayelitsha in Cape Town.

"I feel a bit at the moment like one of those astronauts that has got sent off in some kind of rocket ship and went into a whole other universe outside my own experience and I'm just coming down to land, but I haven't utterly processed it yet," says the diminutive singer, the unmistakable short-cropped platinum blonde hair still her crowning glory.

Minutes earlier Lennox had slid into the guesthouse room balancing a laptop in the one hand. Despite the typically wet and cold winter weather, her slender frame is dressed in a bright floral embroidered short-sleeved top, black jeans and biker boots.

The Scottish born singer easily goes through the motions of posing for the photographer before settling into a chair to talk about the purpose of her visit.

"Here's the deal. I realized the scale and extent of it (AIDS) a few years ago.

"It really struck me and at that point it was so devastating. I mean I thought come again, can this be real. Are there really millions of people dying? And it was Mandela using the word genocide," she says, pausing and lowering her eyes into the cup of coffee clutched in her hands.

"It was the moment that the penny dropped for me. Who would think that after liberation from the apartheid regime that tragically Madiba himself would be standing up and saying there's a genocide going on in this rainbow country of South Africa," she says, shaking her head.

"And at that point I thought I really owe it to my ethical sense of conscience to find out more about this, to educate myself, especially when I was told about the denialist stance of Mbeki and the government, it totally baffled me as it still does I'm still perplexed, I still don't fully understand how the president of this country could deny that the HIV virus translates directly into full-blown AIDS. And how a health minister could possibly be allowed to continue in their post saying that antiretrovirals are so toxic, they will kill you. That's just crazy speak, it's crazy speak" she says, laughing cynically.

Lennox said that it was hard at first to make sense of the overwhelming numbers. "Until you've had the experience, until you go into a crumbling, rural, thatched roof dwelling place where you see a child-headed household of boys as I have done whose mother and father have died because of the HIV/AIDS virus, who have been left alone to fend for themselves. Until you see a little child of seven years old who weighs no more that a one year old baby. Until you see these things for yourself, one to one, it's only then that you can start to really, really appreciate the extent of this ravaging epidemic," she says in a hushed voice.

Turning to the plight of children, the mother of two's translucent eyes flash. "Well it's just obscene you know, to be frank, it's obscene and you know unless things are pointed out as being really, really wrong, somehow we accept them as part our 'it's how it is picture."

Lennox's face lights up when talking about her new album, due for release later this year, but more specifically the single "Sing" which features the TAC choir "The Generics" and 23 fellow female artists including Madonna, Angelique Kidjo, Joss Stone, Celine Dion, KD Lang, Fergie and Gladys Knight.

"In singing we can speak out, we can sing, we can use music as a vehicle to say what is perhaps hard to say, to face things that we want to cover up."

Sing features The Generics' hit Jikelele which Lennox describes as a call to the world for global treatment and the introduction of the prevention of mother to child transmission programme.

Money raised from the single will be donated to the TAC.

How does she view reports labelling her the female version of U2 front man and anti-poverty campaigner Bono?

"I'm not the female version of Bono, or I don't want to be no, no, no, no, no, no," she shrieks and laughs at the same time.

"I am not a politician, he's Bono, Bono is Bono, I'm me. I don't want to be Bono, just want to be me and okay in sense yeah there are definite parallels - he's a singer, songwriter, performer - so am I," says Lennox before changing tack. "I think this situation with extreme chronic poverty is untenable really. We cannot really go on. I mean I'm a wealthy person, no-one ever gave me a penny in my life. There's a certain point where then you're in a position where you say now I can give back, now I'm in a place where I can enjoy my lifestyle and I certainly do. You know I have a very comfortable lifestyle and I'm not going to make apologies for that. At the same time I can put my energies and my efforts into what I'm doing. Then I can walk with a sense of self respect and dignity otherwise I'm just a tourist here."

Lennox's assistant pokes her head around the door and indicates that the interview is over: "I have so much to say, I could go on and on. I could talk for days actually. And I'm still processing. I have to not get despondent and in a funny way it detracts me from my own sense of despondency because you know I'm an artist, I'm a dark person, prone to looking at the dark side of life and investigating it and feeling it so strongly that's why my songs are so intense because you know I identify with depression and darkness and despair, completely. And in a way for me doing something gives me also a purpose. Gives me a sensibility of contribution and that is where I see a little special thing happening. That actually it isn't just that I am giving, giving - That there's something about the inherent sense of dignity that gets fed by doing, becoming proactive. You get something back, it's something you can't really describe."