Remembering Lulu’s early days and how she shot to fame

Whenever Lulu arrived home to play in the city in the 60s and 70s, crowds gathered – she is pictured here with her adoring fans on the streets and signing autographs.

The singer - born Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie in 1948 – loved to perform even as a child, making her first public appearance at a Coronation party, aged just four years old.

“From then on, I used to go in for talent competitions on my own,” she recalls, in an article on her official website, adding that at school (Whitehill Secondary), she was always in trouble for singing during lessons.

She joined a local group – the Gleneagles, which changed its name to The Luvvers – when she was 14, performing in clubs around Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Every Sunday, they played the Lindella Club for a pound a night each and it was here that everything changed for the Glasgow teenager.

‘Spotted’ by Marion Massey, who described her as “tremendously magnetic” with the “makings of a great star”, Lulu’s career had lift-off and Massey would become Lulu’s manager and mentor over the coming decades.

Lulu had her first, absolutely massive, hit at the age of 15 with a cover of the Isley Brothers song, Shout! which reached number seven in the charts in 1964. (Incidentally, it was a favourite of Lulu’s since she had heard it sung by fellow Glasgow music legend Alex Harvey.) That same year she became the first Scottish artist to appear on Top of the Pops.

She went on to have a string of UK Top 40 hits, including Here Comes the Night and Try to Understand, and the David Bowie-penned The Man Who Sold the World.

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In 1966, she parted company from The Luvvers, toured Britain and Europe and became the first British female pop star to perform behind the Iron Curtain while touring with The Hollies.

Lulu also starred in her first movie in 1966, playing the part of Barbara Pegg in To Sir With Love alongside Sidney Poitier. The title song went to the top of the American Singles Chart, where it stayed for a record-breaking five weeks and it went on to sell four million copies worldwide.

She went on to enjoy TV success too, appearing on Three of a Kind with Mike Yarwood and Ray Fell, and in 1969 she jointly won the Eurovision Song Contest with Boom Bang-a-Bang. She also recorded a Bond theme song for the movie The Man With the Golden Gun.

Lulu has been married twice, to Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees in the early 70s, and then to famous London hairdresser John Frieda. She has one son, Jordan, who was born in 1977.

Read more: Which Hollywood heart-throb went to a Glasgow school?

Lulu pops up in some interesting places, too - at the beginning of 1987, for example, she starred as Adrian Mole’s mother, in The Growing Pains Of Adrian Mole, she has played in panto to rave reviews, performed in musicals on the west end stage and hosted her own radio show.

She published her autobiography in 1986 and a year later, Lulu’s musical achievements honoured by the British Academy Of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, with the award of their Gold Badge Of Merit for her services to the British Music Industry.

Her first number one single came in 1993, thanks to her collaboration on Relight My Fire with Take That and in 2000, she ‘showed the young ones how it should be done’ according to one reviewer, at T in the Park.

Last year, she was on the road again, celebrating 55 years since the release of Shout! and playing 35 dates across the country to the delight of those loyal, adoring fans.