Oh me! Oh my! Happy Birthday Lulu! Boom-bang-a-bang!

Today - 3 November 2023 - is Lulu’s birthday. Apparently, she’s 75. That seems beyond belief. To me, she will always be younger than springtime. On this morning’s This Morning I got a bit carried away . When I think about her, I do. I love her music - I always have. I love her - I have since I first met her. I don’t meet her as often as I’d like. She probably feels she meets me quite often enough. I think we were last together last year, celebrating Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. I remember I interviewed her for the Sunday Telegraph 21 years so. Here is that interview. I’m hoping to interview her again for my new ROSEBUD podcast. Keep an ear out for that. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this.

Of all the girls I have met and fancied in my life, there are, I think, just three with whom I could have been happily married, and one of these, as it happens, is Lulu.

We are meeting (for the first time in fifteen years) for lunch at Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair. There is champagne on the table and magic in the air. Lulu, 54 on 3 November, singer, songwriter, survivor, has never looked better. ‘I know it,’ she says, happily. ‘It’s taken me a long time, but now I’ve got it right.’ Lulu is very pulled together these days: whatever exercise, grooming and science can do - ‘within reason’, she says - have been done. She is 5’ 1” and a half and an apostle of positive thinking. ‘Regrets are exhausting,’ she says, in a light, slightly husky growl, with barely a hint of her Scots roots in her accent, ‘but I admit I’d like to have been taller, with very long legs. Still, my body’s neat and in proportion and that’s good because it’s easy when it comes to clothes.’

Today she is kitted out in the pick of Ralph Lauren’s winter collection: a tightly waisted black jacket, grey shirt, white collar and cuffs and floppy bow-tie. ‘I like a uniform,’ she gurgles, wrinkling her nose. ‘Don’t get me over-excited,’ I say. We laugh and raise our glasses to the success of her autobiography, out this week. ‘I love you,’ I say. ‘Thank you,’ she says, and smiles. She is much calmer, much better at taking a compliment than she used to be.

Lulu was reared in the tenements of Glasgow. Her father, Eddie Lawrie, worked as an offal dresser at the Glasgow Meat Market. He drank, he fought with Lulu’s mother, he kept the family afloat by supplying stolen meat to local butchers. She says that ‘fear and relentless tension’ were part and parcel of her Glasgow childhood. From as far back as she can remember, she claims only to have been wholly happy when she is singing. Both her parents had fine voices and, from the age of four, Lulu has been singing in public. As a child she performed in hotels and clubs and, gradually, her reputation grew. Aged fourteen, she came to London, a wee bundle of nervous energy with a cherub’s face and a belter’s voice. In 1964, with her first single, Shout!, she became an overnight pop sensation. In 1967, she appeared with Sidney Poitier in To Sir With Love and sang the film’s title song. It became a No 1 hit in the US and the best-selling song of the year. Today, as elegant parcels of sea bass are laid before us, I say, ‘Let’s talk about sex in the 1960s.’

She squeals with laughter. ‘The sexual revolution had arrived in Glasgow by the time I left, but I must have been working that weekend. I knew almost nothing about boys and sex. Mum didn’t sit me down and give me “the lecture”. She didn’t have to. Without saying a word, she sent out all the signals. Sex was something men enjoyed and women endured. It wasn’t something good girls did, unless they were married. The mechanics of sex terrified me. I knew so little about it. Kissing was fun, but I certainly had no desire to “go all the way” or “get off at Paisley” as the locals described coitus interruptus.’

Lulu was the Britney Spears of her day: photographed by David Bailey and, age nineteen, celebrated as ‘The Virgin Queen of Pop’. She protected her honour with her handbag. ‘One guy put his hand up my skirt,’ she remembers, ‘and I walloped him. Then I ran after him and hit him again.’ She had a crush on Scott Walker of the Walker Brothers, an innocent romance with Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits, close encounters with Eric Clapton (‘He was very sweet and let me down gently’) and George Best (‘He was gorgeous but talked a lot of claptrap’). ‘I was portrayed as this sexy young pop star, the epitome of the “swinging chick”, but in reality I felt like the last virgin in London. There is a loneliness that comes with that.’

In 1968, her heart was torn between two young pop idols of the hour: Davy Jones of The Monkees and Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees. On 14 February, St Valentine’s Day, the day she was voted Top Girl Singer and Top TV Personality of the Year, she wrote in her diary: ‘What am I going to do? I seem to be caught. Every time Maurice goes I feel like crying. But then I get a call from Davy, or one of his letters, and I start looking forward to seeing him.’

When, a year later, she married Maurice, three thousand fans turned out to cheer. ‘I was so romantic,’ she says to me, with a little sigh, ‘I wanted us to live happily ever after. But it was a joke. It was doomed from the start. We were just children.’ According to Lulu, Maurice also lied, drank and got stoned and, within four years, it was all over. ‘To the world our marriage seemed perfect,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want anybody to know what it was really like. My family background was all about keeping secrets. You kept everything hidden behind closed doors. I told my mum I wasn’t happy. “It’s not all about happiness,” she said. Paul and Linda McCartney reprimanded me. They told me marriage is for keeps. In theory, that’s true, but it’s an easy thing to say when you make the right choice first time round. What if you make a mistake?’

Second time round, in 1976, Lulu married her hairdresser, John Frieda. ‘We were just children too, if you want to know.’ This relationship also ended in tears. As John’s salon and hair products empire grew, the couple drifted apart. In 1977 they had a son, Jordan. In 1988, they lost a baby. In 1990, John said to Lulu, ‘We’re not getting along, we’ve nothing in common. We never did have anything in common. I know exactly where I’m going and I know exactly what I want in my life. I want out.’ Lulu says now, ‘I think John left me in 1988 when I lost the baby. I was in denial of my marriage going wrong. I didn’t see us drifting apart. I always thought there would be signs. Perhaps there were. I just didn’t see them.’

What about the Frieda fortune, reckoned by some to be worth £ 100 million? ‘It took us a long while to work out the finances,’ says Lulu, without rancour. ‘John had always looked after the money side of things. I was happy to hand all that responsibility over to him. His product range was on the verge of huge success, but potential is something that is difficult to quantify on a balance sheet, let along a divorce settlement. Afterwards, many of my friends felt as though I should have had a stake in John’s business from the beginning. John never offered and I didn’t press him.’

Lulu’s family was pleased to see the divorce go through. ‘They hated the way I’d carried a torch for John. They’d also seen how it had triggered years of introspection, therapy and counselling.’ Lulu resolutely refuses to bad-mouth either of her former husbands. ‘I love Maurice, I love John. You can’t love somebody and then deny what you once had. It was real at the time. And with every relationship you learn, you grow.’

And because of John, of course, Lulu has Jordan, now twenty-five, a Cambridge graduate and handsome young actor who has just played Prince William in a film for American TV. ‘I did the best I could raising him, but I realise now I wasn’t always there for him. And even when I was, I was tired.’ She won’t talk on the record about Jordan: ‘He has asked me not to and I respect that.’ In her book she says simply: ‘I am so grateful that Jordan didn’t go off the rails or rebel. Nor did he succumb to drugs or try to shut me out of his life.’

Since their divorce, John and Lulu’s relationship has gone through several stages. ‘Initially we fought, then we became friends, then we came back together in a way that made our friends think it might be all on again.’ In her book, she says their renewed relationship was ‘just very cosy’. Over lunch, she reveals that it was ‘a full, head-on, crazy, passionate affair, very heavy’. But it’s over now. ‘We both want some closure and have stopped playing games.’

Lulu is currently unattached. She is not looking for love: ‘I’m certainly not waiting for the right man to come along, but, if he does, I’m ready. In fact, Gyles, I’m probably more ready for a relationship now than I’ve ever been. I’m thinking the love of my life is still to arrive.’

Lulu is riding high right now. Her career has had its plateaux. When we first met, in the 1980s, she was no longer an international singing star: she was a not-altogether happy B-list television personality playing Peter Pan in the provinces. Now she is back at the top, writing hit songs, rocking and rolling, working with the A team, from Elton John to Westlife. This year her album of duets, Together, has been a best-seller. Next month she is releasing a single with Ronan Keating. Thirty-eight years after Shout!, Lulu is back in the charts.

‘The music is everything to me, Gyles. Always was, always will be. As a child, I loved it when my family sang together. That’s when the bitterness disappeared. It’s when I’m singing that I’m most alive.’

How does she think she has changed across the years? What does she like about herself now? ‘I’m resilient. I like that. I’m less anxious, less nervous, more accepting, more patient with myself and with others. And I appreciate the moment in a way I never used to. I was always running, never looking. I’m still running, but now I take time to live in the moment and savour it.’

‘What don’t you like about yourself?’ I ask.

‘That’ll be a much longer list,’ she says immediately and then laughs because her mind goes blank. She can’t really think of anything she doesn’t like about herself right now. ‘That’s fine,’ I say. (‘That’s fine’ is one of her favourite phrases.) We let a silence fall. Slowly, quietly, she adds, ‘I have an ego. That’s what I don’t like about myself. I want what I want and I want it now. I have everything and I don’t think it’s enough. I have an ego and an ego gets in the way. It’s very unattractive.’

I think she’s wrong about her ego. She is certainly wholly wrapped up in herself (all performers are), but it’s her sense of self – invincible, arrogant – that makes her so attractive. I could be happily married to Lulu precisely because she knows now who she is and what she’s worth. She has talent, beauty, brilliance, energy, focus, determination. She is a convert to Siddha yoga and has a spiritual guide (an Indian lady called Gurumayi), but, thankfully, she doesn’t bang on about it and, no question, it has helped her conquer her demons. She is spoilt (she has access to anything that money can buy) but unspoiled. She is funny and sane and still rooted in reality. You can take the girl out of Glasgow, but you can’t take Glasgow out of the girl. Essentially, all she wants is to work and to love and be loved. Who could ask for anything more?

It’s almost time to go. With our coffee we are served small balls of iced white chocolate filled with strawberry sorbet. As we crunch into them and the sorbet dribbles down her chin, I say, ‘This is better than sex.’

She laughs: ‘Probably more consistent. Sex isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. You know, Gyles, I have always been so idealistic. I only want to have sex with somebody I absolutely love. I’m not settling for anything less than the best.’

After lunch, as we climb into the car, her West Highland Terrier, Bonnie, scrabbles across the back seat towards me, wagging her tail. ‘She likes me,’ I say. ‘That’s good,’ says Lulu, ‘It’ll be important when we are married.’