Lulu (Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, b. 1948) turns 75 today, which means that she has been a pop star for 60 years. She was only 15 years old when she broke into the biz!
It can be awful tricky (especially for Americans) to keep all those slim British pop stars and models from the '60s straight in our heads, what with Twiggy and Twinkle and Peanut and Tiffany, and even the ones with real entire names like Cilla Black and Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield. So it is our pleasure to give you the low-down on Lulu.
Most Americans of a certain age know at least one very important thing about Lulu: she sang the #1 charting hit single of 1967 in the U.S., the theme song to To Sir, With Love, a movie in which she also appeared, quite memorably, as "Babs". I've always been crazy about the song, with its mix of nostalgia, sensuousness, and soaring uplift, and little rock touches that anchor it in the time and place underneath the strings and Lulu's mature-sounding vocals. (I've always loved the movie, too, though I've since lost the wide-eyed credulousness I brought to such films as a kid. Hope for the human race never hurt anybody. To the sorrow of many, hope took a big hit the year after this movie came out.)
So that's principally how we know Lulu in America, though in the U.K., the Scots songstress had been well known since 1964, when she had a hit with a cover of the Isley Brothers' "Shout" at the age of 16!
As early as 1965 she co-hosted a weekly youth show on the BBC called Gadzooks! Throughout the next decade, until the mid 1970s she was constantly on British television hosting her own series of music/comedy/variety shows. And she had a string of major hit singles in Britain through the end of the sixties, though in the U.S. none of them performed as well as "To Sir With Love". Some of these songs are pretty great, though. Neil Diamond wrote "The Boat That I Row" (1967), one of her biggest UK hits, and its easily as good as any of his American hit tunes from the era. Her producer at the time was Mickie Most, who also famously produced Donovan, The Animals, and Herman's Hermits.
In 1967 Lulu performed on a double bill with The Monkees, and had a brief affair with Davy Jones. In 1969 she married Maurice Gibb of The Bee Gees, appearing with that group in the film Cucumber Castle the following year. In 1969 she won the Euro-vision Song Contest with the tune "Boom Bang-a-Bang", filmed a TV special in Sweden, and recorded New Routes, one of the first albums to be produced at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. In 1972 she starred in the film The Cherry Picker a.k.a. The Quiet Life, with Wilfred Hyde-White, Terry-Thomas, and Bob Sherman.
Then in 1974, the second thing Lulu is well known for in the U.S.: she sang the theme song to the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun! (Bet you thought it was Shirley Bassey!) Her last U.S. hit was "I Could Never Miss You (More Than I Do)" (1981).
In the States we tend to think of Lulu as a celebrity from the sixties, but in the U.K. she pretty much never stopped being a star. The '80s were kind of her years of lowest profile, but she rebounded in the '90s with several more British hit records, and roles in films like To Sir, With Love II (1996, directed by Peter Bogdanovich) and What Happened to Harold Smith? (1999) with Michael Legge, Tom Courtenay, Laura Fraser, and Stephen Fry. In 2002 she released Together, an album of duets withe artists like Paul McCartney, Sting, Elton John, Cliff Richard, Joe Cocker, Ronan Keating and others. And she's in the 2016 Absolutely Fabulous movie!
I caught one of Lulu's most recent projects quite recently without knowing it at the time. She's one of the voices in the 2022 documentary My Old School, about 30 year old high school student Brandon Lee. She also sings the title closing song.
For more on show business history please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and keep an eye out for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.
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