I’m an alcoholic. I kept it from a lot of people

“My title is Lulu. I’m an alcoholic.”

It is a startling option to open an interview, even when you recognize it is coming.

The 76-year-old pop star, whose profession has spanned a long time since her first hits within the Nineteen Sixties, has simply sat down to debate her new memoir, If You Solely Knew. In it, she opens up for the primary time about her historic ingesting issues.

An early preview, within the type of a Times interview this month, made headlines around the globe, and she or he’s been heartened by the response.

“It is liberating,” she says. “It is good to share the difficulties, as a result of numerous [alcoholics] do not get right here. I am actually fortunate.”

Right now, Lulu is nearly 12 years sober. She sought assist in 2013, after opening as much as her household at her sixty fifth party.

As she cleared up the plates, her niece was speaking a few buddy who was combating alcohol.

“She mentioned, ‘I believe he is simply holding on by his fingernails’,” Lulu remembers.

“And I mentioned, ‘He isn’t the one one’.”

“It simply got here out of my mouth. I did not even give it some thought. However the desk went silent.

“Then my sister checked out me and mentioned, ‘I do know… I’ve recognized for a while now’.”

Initially, Lulu could not imagine she’d blurted out her greatest secret.

“I felt disgrace, worry, nervousness,” she says. “After which, ‘Oh, the angels have come down to avoid wasting me’.”

Inside 24 hours, she was on her option to America, the place she checked into rehab for six weeks and dedicated to Alcoholics Nameless, for “a gathering, two conferences daily for 5 years”.

On the way in which to the airport, she referred to as her son Jordan. He was dumbfounded.

“He mentioned, ‘Whoa mum, wait a minute. Are you positive?'” she says.

“I would saved it from lots of people.”

The truth is, she was so adept at hiding the issue that she’d taken half within the 2011 sequence of Strictly Come Dancing whereas ingesting in secret each evening.

“I may fall onto my mattress asleep having been drunk – however then the alarm would go, I would rise up, pull myself collectively, and I might go to work,” she says.

“I used to be what you’d name a extremely functioning alcoholic. Which is nice in some methods, however actually, finally, none of it’s good.”

She’s by no means spoken about it earlier than, frightened about damaging her “squeaky clear” picture. However as she wrote her memoir, she needed to set the story straight.

“As they are saying in AA, you are solely as sick as your secrets and techniques,” she says.

For Lulu, the secrets and techniques began as a baby.

Rising up in Glasgow’s tenements, Lulu – whose title then was Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie – lived in a “conflict zone”.

Her father Eddie was additionally an alcoholic, who frequently hit her mom, leaving her with black eyes and break up lips.

“Once they would combat in the home, they might throw issues and the noise was hellacious.

“However we might stroll out the subsequent morning and my mom would have warned us to not discuss it.

“The woman subsequent door would say, ‘Oh, that is a shiner you’ve got acquired there, Betty. What occurred?’

“She’d say, ‘Oh, I stood on a brush,’ however my dad had whacked her one.”

By the point her cowl of the Isley Brothers’ Shout made her well-known, aged 15, she was already versed in hiding her background.

Scrappy Marie from Glasgow was edged out by Lulu, along with her chipmunk smile, sculpted hair and bobby socks.

The title, chosen by her supervisor Marion Massey, was a slang time period which means “a exceptional individual” – but it surely wasn’t the one factor that modified.

Marie was instructed to “flatten out” her Glaswegian accent, and maintain her fiery temperament hidden.

“I would been handed a possibility to depart the ache and disgrace of my previous behind, so I fortunately stepped into the character created for me,” she writes within the e-book.

However, within the means of changing into Lulu, she misplaced herself.

“I acquired blended up with being a folks pleaser,” she says, “however I used to be simply an overview of an individual.”

The erasure continued into her music. As a baby, Lulu modelled herself on James Brown and Huge Mama Thornton – gritty R&B singers who lent their grit and growl to Lulu’s model of Shout.

Moderately than capitalise on that, she was pushed into making light-weight pop songs just like the Eurovision winner Increase Bang-A-Bang and the faintly ridiculous I am A Tiger, a purring 60s confection about her sexual prowess.

“I wish to wring a track dry, however I could not get my tooth into I am A Tiger,” she says (pun presumably not meant).

“I acquired house from recording that and placed on Ray Charles. Ray was my man. I could not even stand that he was so proficient.”

Often, she was given sturdier materials. In 1971, she recorded a unbelievable glam pop anthem referred to as All people Clap with a crack crew of musicians together with Led Zeppelin’s hell-raising drummer John Bonham, Cream bassist Jack Bruce and her then-husband, Bee Gee Maurice Gibb.

There’s footage of them performing it on Top Of The Pops, in what resembles a scene from the hippie musical Hair.

“That one was enjoyable,” Lulu beams, bursting into the refrain.

“Are you aware, Noel from Oasis loves that monitor?”

However the public had already determined what it needed from Lulu – and it wasn’t innovative pop. All people Clap did not chart.

One one who seen her potential was David Bowie.

“He mentioned, ‘The document labels do not get you they usually do not hear your voice both,'” Lulu remembers.

In 1974, they recorded a canopy of Bowie’s The Man Who Bought The World, returning Lulu to the highest 10 after a five-year hole.

“He mentioned to me, ‘I will make successful document with you’, after which he instructed different folks we had been going to do an album,” says the singer.

They reconvened in New York and reduce two extra songs – Dodo and Can You Hear Me – however, by Lulu’s account, Bowie was “getting misplaced in medicine” and their plans fell aside.

However the collaboration wasn’t simply skilled. The couple had a quick fling after Lulu’s marriage to Gibb ended.

“I used to be able to be plunged into the spell that was David Bowie,” she writes in her e-book.

“[He was] sinuous and virtually fey one minute, assertive and masculine the subsequent. He felt thrilling, unpredictable.”

“I by no means talked about it earlier than as a result of I believed, ‘Oh God, individuals are so predictable. They’re going to wanna know all the main points’,” she says.

Then, with amusing, “I imply, I most likely can be the identical.”

Lulu’s chart profession waned within the Eighties, however she was by no means removed from the limelight.

She carried out in West Finish productions of Guys And Dolls and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Music And Dance; and starred within the TV sequence The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole.

Her return to music got here within the Nineties, with the lite-house anthem Independence; and a star activate Take That is Relight My Hearth. She would later be part of them on tour, performing her solo each evening in a purple lace catsuit.

She’d all the time been a social drinker, however monitored her alcohol consumption rigorously.

“I used to inform myself, silently, ‘I do not wish to be like my dad’,” she says.

The lack of management got here throughout an enormous interval of upheaval in her 50s.

Her second marriage, to hair stylist John Freida, ended; and shortly afterwards, she parted methods with Massey, the supervisor who’d been by her facet for the reason that Nineteen Sixties.

Along with her teenage son attending boarding faculty in New York, and the lack of each her mother and father, she was more and more lonely at house; and floundering professionally.

“In the event you’re trustworthy with your self, you recognize that document corporations are searching for recent meat.

“New power, one thing completely different. So there was all the time that feeling of, ‘Properly, what am I going to do now?'”

Slowly, imperceptibly, she’d turn out to be depending on drink in her 50s.

“It is accumulative,” she says. “At the hours of darkness, every part ferments and turns into poisonous.

“However with alcoholism, you’ll be able to’t simply management it. It’s a must to cease. And should you do not cease, there’s an opportunity you may die.”

Right now, Lulu is approaching the twelfth anniversary of her sobriety. And he or she’s determined to share her story within the hope it could actually change lives. Not only for different alcoholics, however for her household.

“It is a household illness,” she says, “however they are saying that once you go into restoration you break the sample, so there’s hope for my grandchildren.

“And I believe I am fortunate to be right here, speaking about it.

“There’s lots of people who do not get right here – however I’ve tenacity. I’ve resilience, which I am very grateful for, as a result of irrespective of what number of occasions I’ve fallen down, I’ve bounced up once more.”