Golden Girl Next Door; She's refused the advances of Tom Jones,

HALF past eight on a hungover Monday morning, Glasgow as grey and wet and depressing as a clubbed seal; these are not the ideal circumstances in which to meet a woman who laughs as loud as Lulu does.

"Ahahahahaha!" she shrieks, all teased-up blondeness and bare feet, coming to the door of her suite in One Devonshire Gardens, "What sort of time d'ye call this to interview someone?" And then, turning to her harrassed publicity person: "D'ye think I could maybe get a bowl of porridge?" This is Lulu in full effect. If she wanted she could get the three bears on toast.

Almost half a century ago, around this time of day, but away over in the east end of the city, Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie would be getting up. If it was a Sunday, she might visit her father, Eddie, at his job in the meat market, where he would spend his days disembowelling cattle, hardly dreaming that his daughter would, before too long, become one of Britain's most famous women, a gutsy wee thing called Lulu.

In her memoir I Don't Wan't To Fight, which she is here to promote, Lulu recalls the Glasgow of her childhood as a city of casual violence and repressed sexuality, stoked by alcohol; a city where "waterfalls of algae" on tenement walls enlivened the patina of soot.

If Lulu feels ambivalent about Scotland then so too does Scotland feel ambivalent about Lulu. This is because she left for London and Top Of The Pops just as soon as she could, because we suspect her of playing up her Scottishness when it suits her, and because ambivalence is a reasonable reaction to a woman whose life has been an uneasy balance of authenticity (her undeniable voice) and artifice (she seems somehow contrived, always showing the face she thinks will win most applause).

Others have taken her to their bosom. Ever since she moved south in 1964, aged 15, Lulu has kept company with the most famous in the land. She dated a Monkee, married a Bee Gee, and befriended The Beatles. Now she swims with the A-list shoal. Two days before we met, she'd had dinner with Elton John, David Furnish and the Beckhams. Despite being, at 53, in the afternoon of her life, she seems determined to be a 3am Girl.

Five foot one-and-a-half inches in her bare feet, immaculately tricked out in jazzy blouse, super-hip jeans on her hipless body, keychain hanging from one pocket, she should look like mutton dressed as lamb but somehow pulls the whole ensemble off.

Maybe it's all those wilderness years she spent playing Peter Pan in provincial theatres, or perhaps the perma-grin is because she really has discovered the Fountain of Youth, but aside from a few becoming lines left over from her Botox injections, Lulu seems to have entirely opted out of the ageing process. I reckon the only reason David Bowie looks so well preserved these days is because she slept with him in the 1970s ("Lovely thighs," she reveals. "Fairly normal" in bed).

I Don't Want To Fight is packed with detail about Lulu's relationships, particularly her failed marriages to Bee Gee Maurice Gibb and the celebrity hairdresser John Frieda. But the greatest love of her life, the one she never quite got over, seems to have been with her mother, Betty, who died of cancer in 1996.

As with all the most passionate affairs, they fought like crazy: "She would drag me around by the hair, banging my head against the wall, but I refused to give in to her." Betty was "needy", craving her daughter's affection to such an extent that Lulu, then still Marie, spitefully withheld it. And when Betty and Eddie fought, drunkenly and violently, Lulu would accuse her mother of goading him. Reading the book, I got the impression that she didn't even like her mother, but when I tell Lulu this she's appalled.

"Um, no, that's not true," she says. "My mother and I used to argue and discuss things like two friends rather than mother and daughter. That's the way she treated me and therefore I would treat her the same way, like she was a pal rather than a mother.

"But I did hate her provoking him. I would look at it like a child: 'He's drunk, why are you nagging him?' And I would be afraid that he was going to murder her, actually kill her."

Lulu thinks Betty was so dependent on her because the shock news that Betty was adopted, which she learned as a teenager, made her feel permanently disinherited by society. And before Lulu was born, she had at least one miscarriage. "So I was the first thing that really belonged to her," she explains. "Because even my father had been married before."

When Lulu left for London, Betty reacted badly. "I think she had a nervous breakdown. A standing-up one, where she functioned, but still a nervous breakdown."

But why should that be? After all, children leave home every day. "Mothers, generally, if you really want to know, have little breakdowns," she says. "My mother lost her eldest daughter and her best friend at the same time. I was a tremendous supporter of her. I would defend her against my father. They would be fighting, I would be in the middle. I would do her hair, I would do the shopping, I would clean up the house, I would babysit. She was devastated when I left."

Lulu looks as if she is about to start crying, but she doesn't quite. "We had a very special relationship. Very special. And, uh, I don't think I'll ever get over my parents' death. That's another thing you say: most kids leave home, all parents die, but I can't believe it's still affecting me so deeply."

Eddie Lawrie died in 1998. He was, says Lulu, "the most handsome and romantic man I had ever seen." Unconsciously, she has spent her whole life looking for a man who could live up to the ideal of her father.

She hasn't been short of offers. With Shout a massive hit in 1964 and To Sir With Love the biggest single in America in 1967, selling over two million copies, Lulu quickly became part of the swinging pop elite. Not that she did much swinging. She resisted the sexual advances of Eric Clapton, George Best, Davy Jones, Keith Moon and Tom Jones before finally marrying the first man she ever slept with, Maurice Gibb, in 1969.

"I don't regret not having slept with them," she says. "Sleeping around was never important to me. I'm a love bug; it was about falling in love. If you have sex, for me the ideal situation is always to make love to somebody that you are truly in love with."

Her first marriage - "a bloody painful lesson" - fell apart in 1973, when she became completely sick of Gibb's boozing. Later that year she met David Bowie, then at the height of Ziggy-mania. They became lovers and worked together. She covered his The Man Who Sold The World to some success, and they recorded original material together.

A few months ago, in the company of Russell Crowe and Meg Ryan, Lulu attended a Bowie concert. Backstage, he told her that he had remixed some of the old songs, but she is yet to hear them. Anyway, looking back, she thinks they probably weren't up to much. She sings for me, with exaggerated Bowie inflection, a song of theirs called I'm A Dodo: "Aaaahhhm a dodo/Wooah, no/Gotta hear it from me."

Nice lyric, I tell her.

"There you go," she says, sarcasm and Glaswegian accent increasing proportionately. "Ah've done some great lyrics in ma time. Ah have definitely sung great lyrics. Boom Bang-a-Bang and Shout shout shout shout shout shout shout shout shout."

The Bowie episode is interesting because it illustrates an important side of Lulu: she is scared to let herself go. In the mid- 1970s she had an opportunity to entirely shed the girl-next-door image and become deeply involved, creatively and personally, with Bowie. But she was afraid. "He was living in darkness and I walked away from it."

She is deeply attracted to hedonism and the bohemian lifestyle but is more voyeur than participant. Famously undruggy, she has only ever smoked dope a couple of times and is "terrified" of LSD. She can't handle the idea of losing control, "because I saw how out of control my parents were."

Lulu isn't daft. She realises that in avoiding the Bacchanalian excesses of her peers she, perhaps, allowed her creative side to wither. But while there may be a small part of her that would like to have been Janis Joplin, she's Lulu, for better or for worse, and she's alive. "My journey in this life is to reach the highest possible potential that I can in the most positive way," she explains in her unique mix of shrink-speak and spirituality, the result of years of therapy and meditation.

In 1976 she married her hairdresser John Frieda. The marriage lasted 14 years, and produced one son, Jordan, now 25. Frieda was desperate for another child and the marriage slid into trouble in 1988 when she miscarried. Two years later he left her, saying: "This relationship isn't working. I know exactly where I'm going and I know exactly what I want in my life. I have really thought about this. I want out."

Curiously, she doesn't seem willing to condemn this. "I don't know why I feel I have to defend him," she says, "but maybe when you want to get out then that's how you have to do it."

Really?

"Well, maybe not with such surgical precision, But that's how he handled it."

When he said that he had never been happy, did you believe him?

"No, we were definitely in love."

Have you forgiven him?

"I wonder if I have forgiven him? Maybe not totally. I'd like to."

Do you regret that you let him take Jordan when he moved to America?

"I regret the way we dealt with it."

You said that all mothers have breakdowns when their children leave home.

"I had several and I've only got one child," she laughs. "Yeah, I regret the way that John and I ... I think we gave Jordan a bad deal by not being honest about our split."

In fact, splitting from Frieda may have been the best thing that could have happened to her in career terms. Forced to abandon the roles of wife and mother she has reinvented herself, using Relight My Fire, her 1993 number one with Take That, as the launch pad of a raunchy new image.

There have even been rather eye-opening romances with the Scottish actor Angus MacFadyen - "the best sex I'd ever had" - and, earlier this year, with 21-year-old actor Stuart Manning ("a bit of fun, just a couple of nights").

The relationship with MacFadyen, which was sparked when they met at a party in 1997, seems to have been the real deal. And using the past tense might not even be appropriate. "Angus relit my fire," she says, unafraid of a cheesy soundbite. "We have a real soul connection. I mean we could still go in and out of that relationship."

So why didn't it progress? "That's what I used to ask him, 'Is it love or is it lust?' I mean, I was joking but I was actually serious at the same time."

Does she think she will ever marry again? "I don't know if I'll marry again but I'm quite optimistic about the fact that I probably still have to meet my soulmate."

You've got to love Lulu. And admire the way she has picked herself up time and again. She is putting the "Lu" into lust and also luxury, enjoying a late flowering as an undomesticated goddess of strings- free sex and conspicuous consumption. I'm still not sure quite who she is, blonde party girl Lulu who likes to shout about her life, or mousy wee Marie who enjoys a quiet night in, but I wouldn't bet against the former being in our faces for a good few years yet.

"I'll never be grey!" she cackles, Goldilocks of the Gallowgate looking forward to that bowl of porridge and, most likely, sleeping in a bed that doesn't belong to her. "Oh, I know all the tricks!"

I Don't Want To Fight is published by Time Warner Books, priced (pounds) 17.99 Mini profile:

Name: Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie Born: November 3, 1948, Glasgow Discovered at a club gig when she was 14, young Marie found fame when she changed her name to Lulu and her band, The Gleneagles, became the Luvvers.

Her first hit, Shout, charted in 1964. She has appeared on Top Of The Pops every decade since, as well as starring in pantos and musicals.

Copyright 2002
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