Lulu

Still making music, playing concerts and looking as good as she did when she made her debut in 1964, Lulu is inspiration to many of us. But her life wasn't always so glamorous. She talks to Noreen Barr about growing up in Glasgow and why she'll always be a rocker at heart?

There is much to envy about Lulu. Slim, pretty and fashionably dressed, it is hard to believe she first burst into the pop charts more than 40 years ago. It was way back in 1964, when she was just 15-years-old, that the Scottish singer astounded the world with the huge voice emanating from her tiny frame and notched up her debut hit, Shout.

At 56, Lulu is still making music, performing and presenting her own show on Radio 2, but her life has not always been charmed - indeed it has often been a difficult struggle against the odds.

She has only recently decided to tell the full truth about her troubled upbringing in the mean streets of Glasgow and the pain of her two failed marriages after the publication of her autobiography 'I Don't Want To Fight'.

The star, born Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, says: "My childhood was something I didn't talk about because it involved a lot of fighting. My parents had a volatile relationship. ?My father was an alcoholic and my mother was determined, even when they had a big barney the night before, that she would totally ignore it and pretend it never happened - even though the whole street had heard the shouting. My father had a very loud voice and they'd scream at each other. It happened throughout my childhood." Her parents also hit each other, she says: "It was a very physical fight they would have, and I'd be in the middle of it."

Lulu says her father only once threatened to raise a fist to her. She stopped him in his tracks, she recalls, by telling him in her native Glaswegian dialect: "Ah'm no' yer wife. You try that wi' me and ah'll send ye straight to jail." Her mother, however, did dole outphysical punishment: "Oh yeah, my mother would slap me, absolutely, pull my hair, drag me by the ponytail. She'd say, `That look will get you killed."'

But although Lulu's feisty personality sometimes riled her mother, she clearly loved both her parents, who are both now dead, and, despite their rows, she believes they were also devoted to each other and their four children. "My mother was like my best girl friend," she says. "My dad I loved because I thought he was handsome when he was young and I thought he had a great voice. Even though I didn't like his behaviour sometimes, I absolutely loved him and I know how much he loved my mother and how much he loved us." Lulu says her father used to rush out to buy rolls for the family in the morning, before going off to work as an offal dresser in the Glasgow meat market. He also had a flourishing business on the side, selling meat he had stolen from his employers. Scorning suggestions her family were poverty-stricken, she says: "We weren't poor. My father worked like a dog. He was a bit of an entrepreneur, would you say. I suppose in a way I admired him - I admired his ingenuity and the fact he worked so hard for his family."

The singer says she wouldn't have written her very honest autobiography couple of years ago if her parents had still been alive. Her mother died of cancer nine years ago and her father - who had obviously loved his wife, despite their battles - then lost the will to live and died in 1998.

Lulu now also talks frankly with the breakdown of her marriages, first to the Bee Gee Maurice Gibb and then to the celebrity hairdresser John Frieda. She wed Maurice in 1969 and was, she says, a virgin bride despite having been a famous party girl in the swinging 60s. But the marriage ended four years later after a counsellor told her to decide if there was anything worth saving in the relationship.

With the wisdom of her more mature years now, she says: "You know, nothing's really a mistake - what is that American expression? It's a learning curve. I learnt many things. First of all, Maurice was a drinker like my father. I think that was probably why I felt comfortable with him. It's what I knew." Maurice, she says, was not nasty when he was drunk and nor was the failure all his fault: "I realised he wasn't right for me. A lot of women do stay in there, my mother stayed in there. With Maurice, somehow, I just didn't see the future in it."

In John, whom she wed in 1976, it seemed for a long time as though she had met her perfect match. They had a son Jordan together, but after 14 years their marriage crumbled and they later divorced. This time, it was her husband who decided the relationship was over and Lulu still sounds mystified about what went wrong. "For a long time it was right and then it wasn't," she says. "I think we both became dissatisfied with the relationship and he was the one who wanted to leave, so what can you do?"

Lulu was heart-broken. It took four years, she says, to understand the marriage was over and she was single again. But instead of moping she set about relaunching her pop career. Her comeback single, Independence, was released in January 1993, and she went on to have a No 1 with Take That. In 2002 she made Together, an album of duets in which she was joined by contemporaries such as Elton John, as well bright young chart stars like Atomic Kitten and Ronan Keating, with whom she had the top five single 'We've Got Tonight'.

Talking about her latest album, 'Back on Track,' she says, "Back on Track is exactly where I found myself when writing and recording the kind of songs I really love to sing. I've had a varied career as an entertainer, but started out as a real rock 'n' roller, in my heart and soul that's where I am the happiest and where it is the most real."

Still brimming with energy and looking much younger than her Modern & Mature years she has no plans to hang up her microphone just yet. "There have been ups and downs, it's not been easy all the way but I'm still here. I'm still doing it," she smiles.