Lulu's voice soars but is she struggling to break free from the past?

The Herald Scotland

18-07-2025

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There is something that Lulu – who has now racked up more than 60 years in the business called show – wants her audience in Dunfermline to know tonight. 'I'm not retiring, by the way,' she tells us near the end of her raucously received gig at the Alhambra Theatre.
And why should she? Dressed in diamante and white, she looks great for her age (she's now, as she reminds us more than once, 76).
And she sounds even better. That soulful, rasping, rowdy voice with which she announced herself to the world as a young teenager with the single Shout back in 1964 remains intact, its dynamic range – greater than her songs and perhaps, at times, her own inclination, always allows – still apparent.
She's something of a dynamo herself. As she slinks and shimmies around the stage she encourages her audience to raise the noise. 'Come on guys, you're not dead yet.' Not all of us can move as easily as her.
Accompanied by her sister Edwina on backing vocals and a band who are all mountainman beards and headwear, she is an old-school trouper determined to put on a show.
And therein might lie the problem.
The format for the evening is a musical journey through Lulu's life. It begins with a nostalgic shuffle through a photograph album showing the many people she has been associated with in her life. The Beatles, Bowie, the Everly Brothers, Don and Phil Everly, Shirley Bassey, Elton John, Ronan Keating, her former husband Maurice Gibb and Dudley Moore all make an appearance. (Later there will be pictures of her with Jimi Hendrix and Tina Turner).
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But in many ways that gallery encapsulates the bipolarity of her career. She has always been drawn to soul and R&B (after opening with a relaxed reading of Shout she segues into a cover of Heatwave by Martha and the Vandellas and at one point she vamps a few lines from James Brown's Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine), but too often she has been drawn into the shallows of light entertainment.
And so, after a bouncy take on Neil Diamond's The Boat That I Row (a top 10 hit for Lulu in 1967) she feels obliged to give us Boom Bang-A-Bang, her successful Eurovision entry for 1969 (four songs all ended up with the same votes and were declared joint winners).
It's clear she's not a fan and she rattles it off as quickly as she can, but it sets the course for the evening; a constant push and pull between what she wants and what she thinks the audience wants.
This is a curated show. It allows her to redraw the outlines of her back catalogue, remove the dross and play up the highlights. Even so, she feels obliged to include the big hits, including her loud but empty Bond theme tune The Man With the Golden Gun and her duet with Ronan Keating of Bob Seger's We've Got Tonight.
Actually, the latter is one of the evening's highlights thanks to the interplay with her musical director Rick Krive, two great voices given space to soar.
And it should be said the evening is full of fine things. Her take on Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World had a suitably Ziggy loucheness to it (as well as her amusingly accurate impersonation of the great man's south London accent). Performing Where the Poor Boys Dance and I Don't Wanna Fight – the latter a hit for Tina Turner – is a reminder that, with her brother Billy, she is more than capable of writing a good tune herself.
But now and again the showbiz trouper in her slightly sabotages her best intentions; a few too many namedrops, one or two lurches into her 'Scottish' accent (although there's an element of play about the latter these days).
Lulu pictured at Pinewood Studios in 1968 (Image: Newsquest) And she finishes the first half of the show with To Sir, With Love, one of the best things she's ever done and a number one hit in the United States in 1967. But this is an inflated, self-consciously epic take on the tune that doesn't totally suit it. And while it showcases the power of her voice it doesn't show its range and depth (as the recording does).
Still, there's a lot to love here. Inevitably, she performs her 1993 comeback hit Independence and Relight My Fire (offering up a thank you to Take That for inviting her to sing it with them and for the LGBTQ community for supporting her through the years).
And it's appropriate that she should give us a version of her mate Elton John's hit I'm Still Standing. Because, 60 years and counting into her career, she most definitely is.
But you come away from this evening wondering what it might be like if she did a show for herself for once. Maybe she could perform her sadly overlooked 1970 New Routes album – recorded at Muscle Shoals with Duane Allman and Jim Dickinson – in full, or go back to the source of her love for soul and R&B and Rick Rubin it (think of what Rubin did for Johnny Cash).
Retirement is the last thing she should do. But maybe another reinvention?