Martell first started singing as a child with her elder brother’s band before she went on to perform with the Jimmie McGregor Band at the Barrowland Ballroom in Glasgow as a singer.<\/p>\n
As a teenager, Martell appeared on a 1950s ITV show called Find the Singer.<\/p>\n
She received her first recording contract at 16.<\/p>\n
Her musical career took her overseas and she eventually left the UK to work on Broadway, where she understudied Streisand in Funny Girl.<\/p>\n
The singer performed on cruise ships and in cabarets and concert halls, spending extensive periods in the United States. <\/p>\n
In the 1970s, Martell had her own BBC television series, which saw her singing and chatting to different big-name guests in front of audiences of more than 12 million every week.<\/p>\n
Her early studio albums were released under the Pye record label<\/p>\n
Martell’s cover of the song One Day at a Time, written by Marijohn Wilkin and Kris Kristofferson, reached the top of the UK singles chart for three weeks in October 1979.<\/p>\n
The single sold almost three million copies and earned her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records when it stayed in the charts for 36 weeks.<\/p>\n
She went on to place six albums in the UK albums chart between 1974 and 1980, including four in the top 20.<\/p>\n
Martell faced a series of health problems throughout her life.<\/p>\n
She was diagnosed with cancer and later underwent a triple heart bypass – a surgical procedure which uses a blood vessel from somewhere else in the body to create another way for blood to reach the heart muscle.<\/p>\n
After her recovery, Martell returned to the stage and continued to perform at the Pavilion Theatre in Glasgow.<\/p>\n
It is understood she died at a care home after a short illness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Martell first started singing as a child with her elder brother’s band before she went on to perform…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":793763,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-793762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793762\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/793763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}