‘NANNY LU’
Swinging sixties singer Lulu still yearns for security
Having been blessed with just one child – and a son at that – Lulu had heard all the old adages and feared they might be true.
“You hear the stories, don’t you?” she asks. “Especially the one about a daughter being yours for life, but only having a son until he finds a wife. When you’ve only had one child, a son, that’s something you worry about. I used to pray, ‘Please let him marry a girl who gets on with his mum, otherwise I’ll never see him or my grandchildren.’”
Her son Jordan (39), a former actor-turned restaurateur, whose father is the hairdresser John Frieda, married his wife Alana in 2008, and the couple now have two children. To say that Lulu – or “Nanny Lu”, as Bella (7) and Teddy (4), call her – is a besotted granny is to put it mildly. But she is just as smitten with her daughter-in-law.
“My prayers were answered!” she says. “When they decided to marry, I won the lottery.”
She even goes as far as to suggest she now has a closer relationship with Alana than she does with Jordan. ”I love my daughter-in-law. I have a great relationship with my son too, but maybe I’d like us to be even closer. He’s very busy so I talk more to Alana than I do to Jordan.”
Few mother-in-laws could boast of such closeness, so what’s the secret? She gives one of her table-shaking Lulu laughs, then concedes that she has no idea. “You have to work at it. You have to work at everything. A lot of it’s about knowing when to let go. That’s a constant lesson.”
Then she gives another guffaw at the idea of being presented as some show business sage. “I don’t have the answer to everything because I’m a work in progress myself. Sometimes things aren’t the way you want them. The more I know, the more I realise I know nothing.”
What a force of nature Lulu is. And the most unlikely grandmother figure, surely?
This is a woman who’s had a rollercoaster life, after all. Now 68, she’s been married twice, neither time too conventionally. Husband number one was Bee Gee Maurice Gibb; number two was John, at the time the king of celebrity coiffeurs.
In between there was a jaw-dropping fling with David Bowie and a more recent “thing” with Take That star Jason Orange, who’s 22 years her junior, when she recorded with the band. How to explain all that to the grandkids?
It comes as a shock then to discover that she spent her early life craving convention. “I was programmed to think that the answer to life was a white picket fence and three children, you know, the happy-ever-after. And it’s unrealistic.”
She was a woman driven entirely – and often disastrously – by her feelings, she admits. “When I was younger, I was probably completely ruled by my emotions. But now that’s not the case because I put so much work into looking at myself objectively.”
One of the most interesting chapters was that fling with David Bowie in the ’70s. It was outlandish at the time. She was the slightly kooky pint-sized Scottish singer with the huge voice; he was, well, David Bowie. “Has there ever been an odder couple?” is how she herself summed it up in her second autobiography I Don’t Want to Fight in 2002.
David – struck by her voice and, clearly, more – invited her to record with him at his chateau-based studio in France, leading to the ultimate pinch-yourself moment. They ended up together, even though he told her she could do with losing weight. Wasn’t she outraged? Apparently not. “He wasn’t suggesting I should lose weight because he fancied me more that way,” she pointed
out in her book. “It was more a professional observation. He was one of the pioneers of the emaciated, heroin-chic look and he thought it would help my career.” He was, she says, “totally seductive”, with a “magnetic sort of personality that was intoxicating to be around.”
It must have been flattering to be singled out by him as worthy of attention? “Oh, it was,” she agrees. “A thousand million times. I was not cool and he was cool, so I was unbelievably flattered. He was the cool dude and I was just not.” Did the relationship have long-lasting effects on her confidence, perhaps?
“Did it change my life and I then became something else?” she ponders. “I think it influenced my life. But then I married John Frieda. I didn’t stick around with David.”
Presumably the music legend didn’t feature in her picket-fence fairytale future? Or did he? “Was I looking to marry David Bowie to have children with him?” she says, with some incredulity. “No. That never even entered the frame.”
Even as she laughs about her affair with David, Lulu can’t help but return to how she is a “conventional, conservative” sort of person. She craves safety, particularly when it comes to her always sensible choice of cars, which comes down to the fact she almost died in a car accident in 1979 (she severed an artery in her head and smashed a knee in the crash after a gig). Even today, the singer’s off to the osteopath after we chat, admitting that the legacy of
‘ I don’t have the answer to everything because I’m a work in progress’