Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
LULU ON WHY
Most people look at Lulu with a mixture of wonder and envy at how she still manages to stay looking so young and effortlessly cool at the age of 72.
But her grandchildren, apparently, have a different view. The pop legend spent two nights during half term with Isabella, 11 and Teddy, nine, and didn’t quite get the same unfaltering adulation she’s been used to during her incredible five-decades-long career at the top.
Lulu chuckles: “My granddaughter will be 12 in December, nearly a teenager, and all the signs are there!
“She turned round the other day and said, ‘You know the problem with you, Nana, is that you think you’re cool!’
“The first reaction was, ‘Ooh’. I had to laugh. I didn’t laugh out loud because I know it’s a line she’ll use a lot if I laugh out loud. But I had to laugh to myself.
“The things she’s said to me! I wouldn’t take it from other people, but from her I take it and it’s hysterical. She pulls me down and puts me in my place, but she’s also very, very loving, so she’s not mean, she’s more messing around.
“Then my nine-yearold grandson says, ‘Yeah but I don’t want you choosing my sneakers now’. They are so funny.”
But it doesn’t sound like the pair are that embarrassed to be around their famous granny. “They always ask me to go out shopping with them. They think they know better but they want me to go to help them choose, because although I may not be as cool as them, they know I’m open.
“Isabella even wears my shoes, she’s size 12 like me. Just my sneakers, I think she’d like to wear my high heels but her parents wouldn’t let her.
“They’re both musicians, she’s very adept at playing piano and singing and he’s brilliant at guitar and singing. Last week he was singing Adele’s Go Easy in the car at the top of his lungs.
“And she and I, what we sing in the car, our two favourite songs right now, Elton’s single with Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran’s Shivers. Before that it was Bruno Mars’ Leave The Door Open and one of our all-time favourites, Nick Jonas’ Jealous.”
As well as getting to sing with the Sixties legend, the kids also get their hair cut by a world famous hairdresser, their grandfather John Frieda – Lulu’s second husband and father of her son Jordan.
“John cuts their hair but Isabella would never wear her hair like me,” she says. “At school all the girls have long straight hair so she wants to keep it long.”
Lulu says she often has a different fashion quandary – whether her headturning choice of clothes and hairdo is appropriate at her age. Last week she won more plaudits for her edgy fashion sense after being pictured out shopping in a biker jacket and red Gucci cross body bag, a black baseball cap and oversized sunglasses.
“Oh, don’t talk to me about that,” she laughs. “I looked OK from a distance, but up close I looked
awful! People who are getting older will give you the same story. Inside you’re the same, it’s just your body that’s getting old and run down. I don’t consciously try and dress different to my age. I go the other way. I see something I like, try it on, then think, ‘Should I really be wearing this?’ But I don’t ask advice from my granddaughter, I think I know it all.” Lulu’s love of dressing up is one of the reasons she jumped at the chance to be a guest judge on Rupaul’s Drag Race UK. She became a fan of the show in lockdown: “It lit up my TV room and lit up my life. I thought I’d got my hair and make-up sorted, but the men who