Lulu has been charming anyone in earshot for 60 years and she is not about to stop now. ‘My father was called Eddie, and my grandson’s called Teddy, so that’s a good start,’ she says as we are introduced at a studio in north-west London. Moments earlier, she has been jiving and beaming for the photographer; now she bursts into a song, ‘Where’s Eddie?’, which she used to sing about her father in 1950s Glasgow. Colour me wooed.
Lulu often bursts into song: old standards, Bowie, Beyoncé, everything. Music is a way to entertain, to impress, and – sometimes – to escape a conversation she is not enjoying. Her voice, always rich, has a little more character than when she was 14, but it still radiates out of her, warming the far corners of the room. She excuses herself, reappears in a blue tartan jacket with baby-pink Adidas and matching scarf, flashes a smile as wide as the Clyde, and we are off. She can still turn it on.
‘I’ve always been good at that,’ she says. ‘When you start young, you train yourself early. I come from the kind of family where you had to be very disciplined. I’m resilient.’
On Friday the 28 June Lulu will appear on the Avalon stage at Glastonbury. Nominally part of a ‘final tour’, this was billed by early press as possibly her last appearance. But Lulu’s horizon has a habit of receding in front of her. Far from hanging up her microphone, she now has further tour dates booked up until November. She has performed consistently for six decades – as a singer, actor and presenter – and it is hard to imagine what she would do if she stopped.
‘It’s a joy to do Glastonbury,’ she says. ‘The crowd has come for the music. I’m in my element. You just know they’re all in there, they’re ram-packed, and they’re up for it.’
Not that she’ll be sleeping in the mud. ‘I’m not a camper. But what I am going to do [as well as her main performance] is get up on stage with [DJ] Arielle Free. She’s done a remix of Shout, which she’s going to drop that day, and I’m going to get up with her. I love it.’
It is yet another chapter in the seemingly never-ending story of her first hit, with which she announced herself to the world in 1964 as Swinging London’s most precocious teenager. To Sir with Love, the title song from the 1967 film in which she starred with Sidney Poitier, may have charted higher; her Bond theme, The Man with the Golden Gun, arguably had greater global reach.
But it is Shout, Lulu’s perky, joyous version of the Isley Brothers song, that has been ubiquitous since its release, and seems to acquire a new audience with every generation.
‘It has a life of its own, that song,’ she says. So much so, it is easy to forget that it was old hat to her by the time she recorded it. ‘I was 14,’ she says. ‘I’d found it the year before. I knew I was going to do a recording, but I had no idea about [which song].’ She hoped she might be given a Beatles number, and was mildly disappointed to be given Shout, which she had already been singing for more than a year.
This was the early 1960s, when Britain had yet to catch up with the American influence on pop music, so Lulu sang in an American accent. (She still has a gift for accents, flitting between hard Scots, American and her default, a kind of gently lilting RP, depending on what point she is trying to make.)
Then Lennon and McCartney named Shout as their favourite record of the week on Ready Steady Go!. Lulu was up and running: tiny but with that vast voice, slightly croaky around the edges but warm enough to melt a docker’s heart.
For Lulu music was an escape – metaphorically, and as the money started to roll in, literally, a way to get out of Glasgow and into a new life. She was born in November 1948, Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, the eldest of four children of Elizabeth, known as Betty, and Eddie, and grew up in Dennistoun in the rough east end of Glasgow. Her father worked at the Glasgow Corporation Meat Market. The ‘weans’ all shared a bedroom.
As the eldest, Marie had to assume a maternal role, not least when her father’s drinking caused physical fights with her mother. Although she was bright enough at school, it soon became her voice that everyone knew her for: she would get out of bed in her pyjamas to come and entertain the adults, win singing competitions she was scarcely old enough to be in.
‘When you’re not middle class, not rich, and people are striving to make ends meet, there’s a lot of struggle for life,’ Lulu says. ‘There were a lot of struggles in my household and everybody else’s where I lived, because we were working class. I think there’s a correlation with the Deep South of America, and the music, and the way people who are not educated articulate their feelings. Music, art, fashion, it’s an expression.
‘When people who are highly educated go to someone else’s house, they stand around with a drink and talk and talk. Where I come from, they would come to Mum and Dad’s flat, they’d get well pissed, and they’d sing and sing.
‘I’m going to show off, but last year I had lunch with Tom Jones and Van Morrison, and in the restaurant we were talking about all the music we liked when we were kids,’ she adds. ‘Van remembered all the songs. He’d never met my father, but we all come from the same place.’
Having achieved takeoff, Lulu went relentlessly onward: recording, touring, doing films and television, teaming up with a decent percentage of the great geniuses of the era. ‘I’m always someone who has run,’ she says. ‘All my life. I’ve never walked. If you’re 100 per cent passionate about what you do, you’re not really looking for fame. You may be looking for recognition of some sort but you’re doing it because you love it. I was going to do it for ever but I had no idea I would be catapulted into the centre of the fire.’
At just 15 she rushed into the Swinging Sixties as one of its most recognisable stars, a young Scottish girl with the confidence of the era. She had her own variety show, Happening for Lulu (later just Lulu). Perhaps the high point of her celebrity was 1969. In March she won the Eurovision Song Contest with Boom Bang-a-Bang.
A month earlier, at 20, she had married the Bee Gee Maurice Gibb. The service was meant to be secret but word got out, and when Lulu arrived, stepping out of a green Rolls-Royce in a long, white mink-trimmed coat over a white silk mini dress, she had to push through a 1,000-strong crowd to get to the church door.
‘Maurice and I got married because we were lonely,’ she says, 55 years later. ‘In the midst of all this success, we were lonely.’ Did it feel easier to be with another famous person, who understood what it was like? ‘It was about the same sort of lifestyle,’ she says, with the faintest flash of irritation.
‘What’s famous? Famous is b-----ks. It’s been tainted. If you don’t hang around those kinds of people, you don’t see what hard work it is. It’s not glossy and sparkly and happy-clappy. A lot of it’s not real; it’s PR.’
By 1973 the pair had broken up, without children. ‘We didn’t have any responsibilities,’ Gibb said. ‘We’d just party.’
‘There were moments when it was very difficult [to avoid rock and roll excess],’ Lulu says. ‘It was always hard. I would never vocalise [my fears]. I would just shut up, and be in tremendous fear, and smile and chat.’ Did her father’s alcoholism make her more aware of the dangers of addiction? ‘Probably. But nobody really teaches you about it.’
She was friends, and had a brief relationship, with David Bowie, and still performs her cover of his song The Man Who Sold the World. Somewhere, she says, there is a cache of songs they recorded together, but no one knows where. ‘It doesn’t look like we’ll ever find them,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that annoying?’ She breaks into song again, Bowie’s Can You Hear Me: ‘Can you hear me? Can you feel me inside?’
‘He did say he was going to find them, but he never came up with them, and now he’s gone,’ she says.
In the end Bowie’s drug-heavy lifestyle was too much, and she left him for John Frieda, the celebrity hairstylist. They married in 1976 and had a son, Jordan, now 46, an Eton- and Cambridge-educated restaurateur and former actor who once played Prince William in a television movie. She and John split up in 1991. She has two grandchildren, a girl and a boy.
Sixty years in show business have given Lulu a unique perspective on its effects on young people, particularly women. ‘I was eventually changed by all the things that were happening to me,’ she says. ‘I’ve always been close to my family. But it was difficult for my parents to be in Scotland. My mother leant on me a lot. Even though I was naive, I was what they called old-fashioned, which meant I had an old head on my shoulders. I’ve got a 14-year-old granddaughter. She’s smart, opinionated, kind, but she’s a teenage girl. We think we know a lot [at 14], but… My son points out occasionally that “Nana was out working at your age,”’ she says. How does that make her feel about her path?
‘It makes me feel… slightly sad for the 14-year-old me,’ she says slowly. Her eyes moisten at the thought. ‘Slightly sad. And yet it was the most exciting thing that could ever have happened to anyone. Internally, it takes a lot of strength, a lot of guts, courage, nitty-gritty, mindless forging forward. But you don’t think about any of it then, because it’s so mind-boggling. I used to cry myself to sleep, but I wasn’t going home.’
It seems unthinkable now, in a world where reality TV contestants have psychiatric screening, and musicians routinely cancel tours to deal with their mental health, that a girl as young as 14 would be exposed to the kind of attention Lulu had. ‘I think it would be wise for it not to be allowed,’ she says. ‘Let children have an education. But I wasn’t really getting on at school. I was only interested in music, clothes and boys. I don’t think it’s so different for girls today.’
She has also had a clear view of the expectations around women in entertainment. She has said she was not exploited, but she was certainly objectified by the press. To pick an obvious example, in 1983 she was awarded Rear of the Year, a competition that has not aged well.
‘I don’t even have a rear,’ she says, with a laugh. ‘I have no booty. I am announcing I have no booty, certainly not today when you look at the way booties have progressed. What a weird thing. I remember saying to my manager, “This is embarrassing.” It was embarrassing then. But my PR and manager, in their wisdom, thought it was good publicity.’
While Rear of the Year was discontinued in 2019, Lulu says things aren’t much better for young women than they were in the 1960s. Any gains in what’s acceptable in the mainstream must be weighed against the scrutiny of social media.
‘As a young person, do you see yourself the way you really are? It’s hard to look at yourself through a magnifying glass,’ she says. ‘Technology’s amazing but I think all this social media is very tough on kids’ self-worth. You’re awkward when you’re a teenager. When I look back at the pictures I thought were horrible, I laugh. It’s like somebody else, almost. That’s kind of sad, too. I thought I was fat. You think you’re not good enough, you’re not pretty enough. I thought I was odd anyway. When I came into this business I was never thin enough. It was me talking to my head.’
She has relaxed about her appearance over the years. In 2008 she said she was done with Botox, telling Good Housekeeping, ‘I thought it was fantastic at first. But it quickly fades. Too much of it makes your face immovable and it doesn’t actually help you to look young.’
‘Today I can’t believe how short I am,’ she laughs. ‘If I put a bit of weight on my middle, I don’t lose sleep over it. I’ll dress appropriately. But when you’re young you want to wear what the other girls are wearing. I thought I was really pretty ugly.’ The world seems to have disagreed, I suggest. ‘People are very kind,’ she says.
Her enduring youthfulness today may in part be thanks to keeping up with new music. As well as Arielle Free, she is effusive about Calvin Harris and Lewis Capaldi (all three of them Scottish). Another is more surprising: ‘I went to the Ivor Novello Awards last week and there was a guy called Skepta [the grime artist] – I looked at him and thought, this is the new wave. I was moved by the way he spoke. It was deeply spiritual, yet cool. It’s exciting.’
In 2021 Lulu’s OBE was upgraded to a CBE. Covid-19 meant she could not meet a member of the Royal family in person. The then-Prince Charles had awarded her the first gong. ‘In a strange way I’ve felt connected to him all my life,’ she says. ‘We were born in the same month in the same year. When we met, he was totally Prince Charming. It felt serendipitous that his mother wasn’t available.
‘I’ve always liked what he said about architecture and his concern about the world and his love of his garden. My parents loved the Royal family. When I did the Royal Variety show, I was doing it for my parents. They were very proud. They never thought any of their family would meet the Royal family. They came from a certain time, a certain place.’ Tears well up again.
Lulu’s early life seems very present to her. From the moment Shout was released, there has been Lulu and there has been Marie. ‘I’ve only learnt that over the past five years,’ she says, of the dual nature of stardom. ‘Beyoncé put it well.’ She breaks to belt out the chorus of Runnin’ (Lose It All): ‘Runnin’, runnin’, runnin’, ain’t runnin’ from myself no more.’
As the notes fade, she returns to her theme: ‘If you’re a performer there is someone who sits at home quietly, goes into meditation, goes deep inside, and mends and heals and reboots.’
Beyond the touring and acting – she has been nominated for a National Film Award for her performance in Arthur’s Whisky, a gentle comedy with Diane Keaton that came out in January – Lulu is toying with a book, even though she is dismissive of her memoir, I Don’t Want To Fight. ‘I should never have written an autobiography,’ she says.
‘I think at 75, I might be more vulnerable than I’ve ever been,’ she says. ‘I always wanted to be Miss Perfect. And my mother always told me it doesn’t cost you anything to smile. So I’ve always done that. To be vulnerable is to be very real. And I think I’ve avoided that. I don’t let everybody in.
‘Other women in my life have said that because I’ve had such a life, young women should hear about it… Maybe it would be selfish not to write a book.
‘I’ve always been very maternal, and I want to protect all those people who are thinking that fame and jewels and sneakers are going to make you happy, or are going to fill the hole in your soul. Because it’s misguided. That’s because I’m so old, I’ve learnt.’
She excuses herself at last: a car is waiting, there’s a festival in Somerset to prepare for.
Will Shout be on the setlist? ‘No, I thought I’d leave it out,’ she jokes. ‘No, the main thing is you go to Glastonbury and give them what they want. That song is a part of me. You give them that part of you. They’re happy and you’re happy that they are. It’s an exchange.
‘Bringing people joy is what I do. It’s what I get for doing it. I’ve learnt over the years that I know how to do it. I don’t know if there’s something else I could do well.
‘I love it, I look forward to it. How lucky are we, to be in the business of music?’
