Lulu says she was "afraid of sex" while growing up in the 1960s and has opened up about a long struggle with alcohol in an exclusive extract from her upcoming memoir, If Only You Knew, published Sept. 25.
The 76-year-old singer and Eurovision star, who rose to fame in 1964 with the hit "Shout" at age 15, wrote that sex had been a taboo subject in her household and that she felt "very self-conscious" and "a step apart" from others. She said she preferred to wait for love rather than pursue intimacy she did not understand, and that she "wasn’t a fan" of sex during her early career.
In the memoir extract, Lulu describes how conversations about sex were absent from her upbringing and how her mother, Betty, made the subject seem "almost shameful." She said she "never had any bad experiences" in the bedroom, crediting protection from her first manager Marian and friendships with musicians' wives and girlfriends that signalled she was not interested. She recalled boyfriends such as Alex Bell of the Luvvers and a brief romance with Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits, but said relationships rarely went further than a goodnight kiss because she had "skipped so much school that human biology had completely passed me by." She also recounts a teenage crush on Eric Clapton and an evening she nervously tried to act cool when he attended a party she hosted.
Lulu also spoke in a recent interview with The Times about long-term alcohol use and being in recovery. She said she had been a "secret drinker" for years and became more reliant on alcohol in her sixties after menopause, the death of her parents and her son Jordan Frieda leaving home. "For many years, and I can’t say how many, I had not been happy with the way I felt, not at all happy and [yet] unable to ask for help," she said. She described entering rehab and having learned from memoirs and self-help literature before deciding to speak publicly.
The memoir ties that personal account to earlier family experiences. Lulu writes about witnessing violent domestic abuse between her parents and an episode in which her father was "dragged away" by police, calling alcoholism a "family illness" and saying "the gene is there." She said she had carried "so much shame" about her parents' actions and that her own drinking was "the culmination of a life spent trying to suppress feelings" while maintaining a professional image.
Lulu has been married twice, to Maurice Gibb from 1969 to 1973 and to hairstylist John Frieda from 1977 to 1991. She said she now lives in central London with her cockapoo and is "living in a much brighter world." The memoir If Only You Knew is published Sept. 25 by Hodder & Stoughton. Lulu will be on tour from the end of September; ticket information is available on her official website.