Drugs, sexism, awful acne...Lulu remembers the Sixties
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/8124304/Drugs-sexism-awful-acne...Lulu-remembers-the-Sixties.html
Ahead of her new BBC One series, the pop star tells Benji Wilson why
it wasn't all 'flower power'
By Benji Wilson
11 Nov 2010
One can only imagine the production meeting when the BBC had to
choose someone to present Rewind the 60s. "Right, we need a
charismatic Sixties legend who was there in the thick of it all to
host a show celebrating everything about the era. Suggestions please."
"Hendrix?"
"Joplin?"
"Bonham?"
"Moon?"
One of the troubles with the swinging Sixties was that for some
people they swung a little too much. It would be unfair to Lulu to
say that she is presenting Rewind the 60s because everyone else is
dead, but she does acknowledge that she did well just to get through
a time of notorious excess.
"What's incredible is that I've survived. I think everybody thought
it was fun and nobody really had any idea of how dark things would
become. I was just a kid [she was 12 in 1960; 15 when her first
single, Shout, hit the charts]."
Lulu is not merely a plucky survivor. Unlike some of her era at 62
she is only five years younger than Keith Richards she has not just
lived to tell the tale but lived well. Her skin looks particularly
peppy. That's borne, she says, of a Sixties paranoia.
"I had spots I was on TV all the time, I would hang around with all
the rock stars with their model girlfriends, I was distraught. So
since then I've always been interested in how I could make myself
look good." She began her beauty regime in the Sixties by visiting "a
skincare guru called Countess Csaky, who made her own yoghurt and put
honey on my face honey is a very good natural antiseptic. From the
moment I saw signs of ageing I became fanatical about trying every
product on the market. These days I have my own skincare range."
She says that in among all the harum-scarum of the Sixties she stayed
sane thanks to her manager, Marion Massey, with whom she lived in
London when she moved down from Glasgow aged 15. She also credits her
upbringing.
"My father was an alcoholic. I was the eldest of four, so I learned a
lot of coping skills. I have a canniness about me and I also have a
lot of grace in my life somebody up there likes me."
She admits, though, that she wasn't always squeaky clean. Much of our
image of the Sixties is seen through a fug of spliff smoke, and she
did inhale.
"I tried [cannabis] once or twice when I was married to Maurice Gibb
[she married the Bee Gee in 1969; they divorced in 1973]. One time we
were on honeymoon and I got paranoid. I couldn't remember what I'd
just said. That wasn't fun. Peace and love and drugs and rock 'n'
roll and tripping out? I was afraid to go there."
Which is one reason that she is still with us as a TV presenter.
Rewind the 60s is a daytime series, starting on Monday on BBC One,
that plonks Lulu in a studio and makes her the hub of a cavalcade of
archive footage, first-hand accounts and celebrity guests from Jimmy
Tarbuck to Zandra Rhodes.
"If someone had asked me to do this 20 years ago I'd have said no,"
she says. "I don't just want to be thought about as some bit of old
baggage from the Sixties. But of late I've changed my way of thinking
about that time. There were more changes going on worldwide then than
in the two decades that followed. Working-class people like myself
were getting jobs and becoming well known. Actors with regional
accents were becoming stars. I was living in a golden age." Even so,
her memories of the Sixties aren't all positive.
"I got patted on the head a lot by the boys in my band. That
irritated the s--- out of me, because I thought I was a liberated
woman, and I had a hit record. Trying to get my input accepted by
male producers was very difficult, too. They saw me as a little cute thing.
"It's still hard for women today. Look at Lady Gaga. She's so
talented but I seriously believe that if she didn't dress the way she
dressed she wouldn't have had her success. If she'd have come on in a
white T-shirt and jeans and sang all those songs, no one would have cared."
So would Lulu have made it today? "I don't think so. Today, even with
a good song, you can't rely on radio. You have to tweet, you have to
be on MyFace [sic], you have to have all the hoopla going on with it.
There's got to be so much more controversy look at Amy Winehouse.
It's very hard to handle. It was a different thing then: it was about
the music."
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Rewind the 60s begins on BBC One on Monday at 9.15am
.
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