{"id":172225,"date":"2025-09-27T07:09:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T07:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/172225\/"},"modified":"2025-09-27T07:09:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-27T07:09:10","slug":"lulu-interview-i-had-such-terrible-shame-i-never-wanted-to-become-my-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/172225\/","title":{"rendered":"Lulu interview: \u2018I had such terrible shame. I never wanted to become my father\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I hear Lulu<\/a> long before I see her. That brawny, cheerful Glaswegian screech barrels down the corridor to the pod-like room where I am waiting at her publicist\u2019s office<\/a> in King\u2019s Cross a good 30 seconds before she appears. When she blasts through the door, her tiny stature still takes me by surprise, even though it\u2019s well known that she is only 5ft 1in. \u201cI\u2019ve got so much makeup on it\u2019s going to walk off my face in a minute,\u201d the 76-year-old squeals by way of greeting. She\u2019s wearing a punky new-wave-style black suit, white socks and loafers, and looks like a teenager from 1982. <\/p>\n

We\u2019re meeting to talk about her new memoir, If Only You Knew, in which she sets out for the first time some of the startling realities<\/a> behind one of the most enduring and hardworking careers<\/a> in showbiz. Lulu has been in the public eye ever since her debut single \u201cShout\u201d, an unruly, adrenaline-fuelled, floor-filling cover of the Isley Brothers, reached No 7 in 1964. She\u2019s released 15 albums, sung the themes to The Man with the Golden Gun and To Sir, with Love, in which she also starred, presented regularly on TV, worked with Take That, briefly reinvented herself as an electronica artist, and earlier this year was one of the hits of Glastonbury alongside Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart<\/a>. The three of them looked to be having more fun than most of the acts a quarter their age. For generations of Brits she will forever be the happy-go-lucky girl-next-door pop starlet with the voice of an American soul diva whose career has become a byword for breezy, cheesy middle-of-the-road pop. <\/p>\n

If Only You Knew tells a different story. There\u2019s the hardscrabble childhood in a Glasgow tenement block where she spent most nights trying to break up fights between her alcoholic father, a butcher, and her insecure, if indomitable, mother. There are the feelings of worthlessness that have dogged her for most of her life, and the awful pressure to conform and be good that came with becoming a child star at the age of 15. There is the lifelong frustration at being relentlessly packaged as the face and voice of Saturday night entertainment (her Eurovision winner \u201cBoom Bang-a-Bang\u201d was a career low point) when she only ever wanted to be Dusty Springfield. And there is the alcoholism,<\/a> which started to take hold in her fifties and became a full-blown crisis in her sixties and about which she has only very recently started to talk. When she guest-starred in Absolutely Fabulous in 1994, Joanna Lumley\u2019s character Eddie coined the phrase \u201cChampagne for Lulu!\u201d in tribute to Lulu\u2019s status as a queer icon. The reality was far darker. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been books written about me before but I knew they weren\u2019t honest,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not that I set out to be dishonest. But for decades I did choose not to talk about things. My granddaughter Bella [one of two children of her son Jordan, whom she shares with her ex-husband, the hairdresser John Frieda] was 15 last year and on her birthday we talked about what she was going to do with her life. My son said to her, of course, you know what Nana was doing at your age. And it was a lightbulb moment. I thought, I need to tell them the whole truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

There have been books written about me before but I knew they weren\u2019t honest<\/p>\n

They already knew about the drinking. Lulu, whose real name is Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, had been 11 years sober by that point, having sought therapy in 2013 after admitting to her sister Erica that she had been hiding a drinking problem for years. Few others did, though, thanks to a lifelong training in secrecy from her mother who, despite the habitual shouts and screams emanating from their flat and her frequent black eyes, was keen that none of the neighbours should know a thing about her abusive marriage. <\/p>\n

The irony was that, having often been sent by her mother to fish her father out of the pub when she was a child, Lulu had spent the first three decades of her career being relatively careful around alcohol, despite being briefly married in her twenties to Maurice Gibb, one third of the Bee Gees \u2013 a lovely man, by all accounts, who spent most of their marriage happily intoxicated. She also intuited from an early age how much more vulnerable women were to the pressures of fame. \u201cWe all knew what happened to girls and women who got on the wrong side of it all,\u201d she writes in her memoir, referring to Marianne Faithfull and the infamous drug bust at Redlands<\/a> in 1967. \u201cBut it was Marianne who\u2019d been most viciously hung out to dry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lulu:<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Lulu: \u2018We all knew what happened to girls and women who got on the wrong side of it all\u2019 (Paul Cox)<\/p>\n

All the same, as she entered her fifties, single, having divorced Frieda in 1991 after 14 years of marriage, she became vulnerable in a different way herself. \u201cYou\u2019re in a business that\u2019s fixated on youth,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd you look in the mirror and think, \u2018Oh my God. This face isn\u2019t going to be helpful in getting work.\u2019 Even when I was younger, people would sometimes say of me, \u2018Is Lulu still alive?\u2019 I don\u2019t know how many years it took, but [the drinking] was creeping up the whole time. You control it until you can\u2019t control it. And it\u2019s very lonely if you\u2019re just trying to manage it secretly on your own.\u201d<\/p>\n

She won\u2019t go into the tawdry details of just how much she was drinking and for how long. \u201cI went into all that during therapy,\u201d she says a little tartly. Still, it took a lot of courage to finally admit the truth to her family. It must have taken even more, I suggest, to attend the Meadows addiction clinic in Arizona, where presumably those also in attendance would have known who she was. \u201cSome people recognise you and they\u2019re a little bit shocked,\u201d she says. \u201cBut the most important thing by that point was sobriety.\u201d Even so, walking in that first morning must have been terrifying? \u201cYes. Because of the shame. I had such terrible shame. I had never wanted to become my father. And I never wanted to look at myself and know that I, too, was an alcoholic. And I\u2019ve only spoken about it publicly now because I finally feel I have the language and the tools to do so [in the memoir]. I didn\u2019t want it to become a headline in The Sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

As my therapist put it, I grew up in a war zone<\/p>\n

She knows everything stems from her childhood. In the book she describes it as a mix of love, chaos and terror; she was the eldest of four and at one point the family lived crammed into two rooms. She loved her father despite everything, and adored her mother, while admitting that her mother relentlessly needled her father when it might have been wiser not to provoke him. Yet she was also forced to become an adult very quickly, taking it upon herself to protect her younger siblings and to keep the peace as much as she could. Her father never threatened her, and she never feared he would. And only on one occasion, when she feared for her mother\u2019s life, did she call the police. \u201cAs my therapist put it, I grew up in a war zone [she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder].\u201d She has now come to terms with her addiction. \u201cI know now that alcoholism is a disease that is often passed on through families, and to admit it was such a relief. In rehab there were women who would say, \u2018I\u2019m getting out of here,\u2019 and \u2018I\u2019m not really like this.\u2019 I just wanted to stay for ever.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lulu never wanted to become a singer. As a child, singing was her private refuge, a means of expressing her unhappiness. It was never a viable career option. \u201cI hear [singers and actors] say that they always wanted to escape their lives by becoming an actor or whatever. But my plan was to be a hairdresser. There wasn\u2019t a Sixties revolution until there was a Sixties revolution. Before that time, if you liked singing, you might get a job singing in a club, but it would rarely amount to much more than that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Except, for her, it did. Having joined a Glasgow band called the Bellrocks when she was 14, singing with them on Saturday nights, she found herself the following year in London with a record contract and an agent after a scout was blown away by her huge, wild, versatile voice. Her agent Marion Massey, whom she stayed with for most of her career and who became a surrogate mother figure, made her change her name from Marie to Lulu, and quickly ironed out that Glaswegian brogue \u2013 although when Lulu is animated it quickly steals back in. <\/p>\n

So began years of Marie-as-was learning to accommodate her Teflon-plated shiny new persona and repress her fearful, insecure, sexually naive, scrappy, tenement-block-child self. It\u2019s this yawning discrepancy between her public and private selves \u2013 and her gnawing frustration that her career never found success in the edgier, soulful, experimental territory she craved \u2013 that shapes every paragraph of her book. \u201cLulu,\u201d says Lulu slightly confusingly, \u201cis happy clappy smiley. Private Lulu is also happy, but anxious, sometimes sad, and a fighter.\u201d Isn\u2019t it the case that most pop artists adopt a persona? \u201cYes, but I didn\u2019t learn this until much later. I love Lulu. Why wouldn\u2019t I love Lulu? Look at what she brought to me. But there came a point when Lulu started to take over.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\u2018Why<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

\u2018Why wouldn\u2019t I love Lulu? Look at what she brought to me. But there came a point when Lulu started to take over\u2019 (Getty)<\/p>\n

Yet she admits she also loved being a singer. Much of her life appears to have been a blast. There were the Mayfair dinners at Le Gavroche, and the many, many clothes from Bond Street. She hung out with The Beatles, nursed a crush on Eric Clapton, and had a brief fling with David Bowie at the height of his Ziggy Stardust phase. \u201cHe was irresistible\u2026 exciting, unpredictable,\u201d she writes: the pair spent the night together after he had played a gig at City Hall in Sheffield. \u201cHe took charge of someone who, tipsy on both the moment and a copious amount of wine, was happy to be seduced.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, her marriage to Maurice was extraordinarily profligate. Her accountant once queried the purchase of a bespoke champagne-pink mink coat, telling her icily that his wife had \u201chad the same fur stole for 40 years\u201d. She once rang Elton John, another friend, and asked him whether she should buy a leather jacket that she patently didn\u2019t need, knowing he would say yes. Did having so much money, having had so little as a child, go to her head? \u201cI didn\u2019t think about it,\u201d she says. \u201cExcept that\u2019s not true, is it? Because I would make a call to say, \u2018Listen, do you think I should have this?\u2019 I think on one level I never forgot where I came from. My mother used to hide money under the lino because she worried about it so much. But I will admit I\u2019m dreadful with a spreadsheet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lulu<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Lulu promoting \u2018The Man with the Golden Gun\u2019 with Roger Moore in 1974 (Getty)<\/p>\n

In the 1990s \u2013 in one of several canny reinventions that have helped prolong her career \u2013 she started working with Take That, appearing on their cover version of \u201cRelight My Fire\u201d in 1993. Did she realise then that Robbie Williams was also starting to struggle with the pressures of his career? \u201cThe whole world knew!\u201d she says. \u201cI was struggling privately and he was struggling publicly.\u201d Did she try to help him? \u201cI was no wiser than Robbie. Well, I was maybe a little, although I should have been anyway because I could have been his freaking grandmother. But today we have a dialogue. These days he is the best Robbie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Does she fear for today\u2019s younger stars, who may be more aware of the pressures of celebrity but are growing up in a climate that is arguably less forgiving? \u201cWhen I was starting out, everyone was learning how to do it. There was no template, and, in a way, nothing to lose. The boys would try and copy Elvis and the girls would do the best they could. But these days it\u2019s all about world domination. There\u2019s more at stake. And the scrutiny is hard to take. This business can make or break you.\u201d <\/p>\n

It\u2019s never broken Lulu, even though it\u2019s come close \u2013 she first sought therapy in the early 1990s after the breakup of her marriage to Frieda, and she has suffered long periods of doubt and insecurity throughout the course of her career. But she has always gutsily kept going, although last year\u2019s tour, the critically acclaimed Champagne for Lulu, was her last. \u201cI used to be afraid of the word \u2018tough\u2019 because I was so keen to be a people pleaser,\u201d she says. \u201cI just wanted to be loved. But I\u2019ve become tougher as I\u2019ve got older. I\u2019m still a work in progress. But you know what?\u201d She leans right in and stares straight into my eyes. She\u2019s talking pure Glaswegian now. \u201cI\u2019ve always refused to be a victim.\u201d <\/p>\n

‘If Only You Knew’ by Lulu is out now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172226,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,134,136],"class_list":["post-172225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}