Queen of she-bop

Her Glaswegian roots keep her down-to-earth and straight-talking - she calls the Pop Idol scenario 'intrusive, abusive and horrible'. Now, with a come-back managed by Louis Walsh, Lulu talks to Tony Clayton-Lea.

In the early to mid 1960s UK popmusic scene, where female acts were traditionally a slightly updated version of either Alma Cogan or Vera Lynn - women who kept popular music fluffy, saccharine and as steady as a metronomic beat - it took a quartet of young women to break the mould.

Dusty Springfield would lead the way with her iconic, often breathtaking vision of Memphis soul; Cilla Black would eventually graduate her way into a nation's heart as a guffawing entertainer on television shows such as Blind Date; Sandie Shaw would take refuge in the coat-tails of domesticity, resurfacing in the 1980s as a cult favourite of Morrissey; and Lulu would wander into cabaret and all-round performer territory, a minefield of regrets, broken promises and what-might-have-beens.

Yet Lulu has - musically, at very least - kept her hand in. She might not have had the mystery and magic of kohl-eyed Dusty, but she beats her other competitors - and, indeed, many other pretenders to the 1960s she-bop throne - by virtue of her ambition and personality. She fails in career-focus, an area that has been revised so often it has gone around in circles. Her spirit, it seemed at various times throughout her almost 40-year career, had been sold to lacklustre entertainment.

"Has my career lacked focus?" she queries. "It probably has, but the focus has been continuously shifting. I'd gotten confused about the way to go.

"Certainly, music has been my first love, but it's also true that I've struggled to decide where to go. Because I was so young when my career started, I was guided by people who I thought knew me. To be fair to them, I have a career today partly through their guidance. I was told I could do everything, so I did everything."

Currently on the promotional trail for I Don't Want To Fight, her recently published autobiography, Lulu - born Marie Lawrie on November 3rd, 1948 - looks somewhat less than her age. She loves being blonde, she says through energetic bursts of laughter Yes, she has had botox injections, she tells me unprompted, and would rather not have cosmetic surgery on her breasts, thank you very much. A face lift? She's considering it.

Sylph-like and naturally pretty, the possessor of apparently boundless enthusiasm, Lulu in person makes up for what her book lacks. It's a bog-standard autobiography, freshened up by a few amusing pop music anecdotes (herself and David Bowie had a fling; Ziggy Stardust and Lulu? Go figure), some canny Glaswegian slang ("getting off at Paisley" is an excellent, must-use euphemism for coitus interruptus, soon to be adapted to a suburb near you) and a diplomatic dearth of sleaze.

"I'm tired of the grubby detail," she tells me when I ask why there was no nitty-gritty in relation to the men in her life - or, indeed, the life in her men. "There was only a certain level of digging in that respect that I could do." She was honest to a degree, she admits, yet didn't want to be hurtful, choosing to be as positive as she could. "But you can't please everybody," she allows, the implication being that she hasn't.

UNUSUALLY, though, her book isn't one big mini-celeb moan.Neither does it wallow in nostalgia, sentiment or self-therapy. Lulu was born into a deprived area on the outskirts of Glasgow, her mother (now dead) was a hard working, put-upon housewife, her father an offal merchant. "This book has in some ways enabled me to bring out into the open some things I could never have written about if my mother had still been alive. I've lived my mother's standards all my life. The episode with David Bowie - I could never have told her about that!"

Lulu's earliest memories of childhood, she writes, "are the tenement buildings and the greyness". Later memories are ones "fuelled by alcohol and resentment".

"It's a good human trait that we don't just linger in the pain and wallow in the dark, difficult times in our lives. It's important to have those memories, but there are many ways of looking at them. I like to have the bad memories and access them for positive reasons or for the purpose of learning. They are as much a part of me as the good memories, but that doesn't mean to say I want to live with them all the time.

"Some people like to live in the victim role, and that doesn't suit me at all. I'm not a victim and never was. It's important for every one of us to have experiences that penetrate deeply in order to make us think, and to have responsibility and humility."

Judging by her general demeanour - she appears genuinely annoyed at the usual interruptions to the interview; she switches off her ringing mobile phone with an exasperated "we have a f**king choice, you know!" - it seems that her sense of humility has never left her. "I would hope so. My background roots me to who I am, where I am and who I'm with." She has the tone of someone who has survived in the pop/entertainment field for the right reasons, fully realising that a completely different life could have been mapped out for her had she not been the owner of a pushy, rhythm 'n' blues voice.

"Do I have any idea what I would have ended up doing if I hadn't the voice? Anything, I suppose. I had a plan way back then that I was going to be a hairdresser - get married, have loads of kids and be a hairdresser." Ironically, she ended up marrying one (John Frieda) as well as pop star Maurice Gibb (of the Bee Gees), who looked like one.

Currently managed by Louis Walsh, Lulu released Together, a duets album (including a track with Samantha Mumba) , earlier this year. Planned for a re-release next month, with the addition of two new solo tracks that will act as a taster for a solo record release next year, Lulu specifically hooked up with Walsh in order to, once again, get her recording career back on track.

In her book, she describes the 15-minutes-of-fame Pop Idol scenario as "intrusive, abusive and horrible". Yet here she is, in bed, so to speak, with one of the perpetrators - who she describes (in the book) as a person who believes pop stars are "record company vehicles".

"Because of my experience, I have a slightly different relationship with him," she says. "All the other people he manages could be my kids! So he's not going to treat my career in any shape or form the way he would treat theirs."

The common ground they share, she maintains, is that both she and Walsh want her records to sell. Age clearly hasn't dulled her competitive edge. "I want to have a place in this business," she stresses. "I don't want to be on the sidelines. And I don't want to not have a record deal." And what about compromises? The answer is unsurprising and resolutely old pro: "They'll come".

So we leave Lulu, a woman whose accent is as Scottish as that of Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose street-smart intuition told her to steer clear of drugs, who terms her and her family as "fearless", and who described herself at the height of her 1960s fame as "the oddest kid on the block".

It's quite clear, I point out to her as a parting comment, that she knows the difference between what's invented and what's real. "Where I come from, sometimes you have to ask yourself the following question: who are you trying to kid?"

Together is re-released in November. Her autobiography, I Don't Want To Fight, is published by Time Warner Books (£17.99 sterling)