NO, HONESTLY

IT’S LYNSEY DE PAUL

LYNSEY DE Paul was the Adele of her day — a small, mousey blonde, Jewish version of Adele. For several years in the 1970s, she was everywhere, with that facial beauty spot and that inimitable breathy voice cooing songs that she wrote, performed on piano and produced. Not for nothing was she heralded at the time as the British Carole King — and, subsequently, as the precursor to Kate Bush. In 1972, she was on Top of the Pops with her candycute top five hit Sugar Me. Her poignant 1973 ballad Won’t Somebody Dance With Me? — written about feeling rejected as a plain-looking teen at a synagogue social — won a prestigious Ivor Novello award, the first time a female had received such an accolade.

In 1974, she penned the perky theme tune to the sitcom No Honestly and in 1977 was runner-up in the Eurovision Song Contest with the misleadingly titled Rock Bottom. Now an anthology of her music has been released on Cherry Red, a label specialising in reassessing the work of cult musicians.

De Paul achieved even greater ubiquity via her affairs with Ringo Starr, George Best and James Coburn, to whom she was briefly married. It was a long way from Canons Drive, Edgware, for the girl born Lynsey Monckton Rubin in 1950.

“When you’re young you expect wonderful things to happen — you think you can own the world,” she recalls. “It was so fast I didn’t quite know what was happening.”

Her childhood was not full of wonderful things. She grew up in a house with an older brother, a violent property developer father and a mother who allowed her husband’s behaviour to continue unchecked. De Paul’s grandfather had been similarly abusive.

“Instead of breaking the cycle, he continued it,” she reflects. “When I hear people have had a happy childhood, I think: ‘How is that possible?’” Her father was “quite Victorian in his discipline”, meaning that “pop music was taboo” and listening to anything but Tchaikovsky and Beethoven strictly verboten. Indeed, she was encouraged to pursue a more formal classical musical training. By contrast, the synagogue the family belonged to was Liberal although, by the age of 15 — and despite having a kiddush every Friday at home — she had stopped attending.

“I’ve always strongly acknowledged my Jewish roots,” she says. “I just didn’t want to go to synagogue because I felt much of it was lip service and I wanted something with more integrity.”

De Paul’s miserable upbringing had one advantage. “It made me hide away and develop my drawing and piano-playing skills.”

As she left her teens, she also left Edgware behind to study at Hornsey Art College. While there, she found work as a commercial artist, designing record sleeves and posters. Soon, she had enough money to put down a deposit on a flat above an Indian restaurant in Belsize Park. Within a year, she was offered an £80,000 deal to sign as a recording artist with MAM, the management company and record label for Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones and Gilbert O’Sullivan. All she needed was a new name.

“I was told to change mine because they felt it wasn’t commercial enough and that it was too Jew- ish. It was actually Jews who said this. Remember, this was the year of the Munich Olympics tragedy [1972] and there was a lot of antisemitism about. They said if I didn’t change it, I’d be shot on stage!”

So Lynsey Rubin became Lynsey de Paul (Paul, ironically, being her father’s middle name) and before long she was creating hit after hit.

She wrote for other groups — the Fortunes’ Storm In A Teacup reached number seven. And for other solo artists, such as number two smash Dancin’ (On A Saturday Night) for Barry Blue — formerly Barry Green — a “nice Jewish boy” with whom she co-wrote the song. She also had hits on her own. Trouble was, she loathed the limelight.

“I’m not a born performer,” she confides. “I’m friends with Suzi Quatro and she suggested we go out on tour as Leather and Lace — no prizes for guessing which is which. But it’s not some- thing I ever wanted to do. I just wanted to write for other people.” She might have recoiled from celebrity, but she became one, hanging out with Spike Milligan (who rechristened the diminutive musician “Looney de Small”, much to her delight), as well as with Elton John and Marc Bolan, even if she avoided some of the pitfalls of fame.

“I’m not a wild person,” she says. “I’ve never taken drugs. I remember being in a restaurant in LA where the whole table was taking coke, and I just said ‘no, thanks’ and passed it on. I don’t even drink coffee. I’m horribly clean.”

She is reluctant to discuss her 1970s liaisons — including her marriage to Coburn — although she does allude to her relationships with Starr and