Lulu: I Don't Want to Fight

In her mid 50's, Lulu shows no signs of retiring from the music buisness. In her book, "I Don't Want To Fight", she tells in great detail growing up in 50's Glasgow, being discovered, and travelling to her first gigs with her band the Luvvers. After being discovered, she shoots to fame almost overnight... She goes from a little schoolgirl in Scotland, to being an international teenage sensation, performing everywhere, not limited to performing behind the Iron Curtain. From there, She talks about life and death, marriage and divorce, love, success and failure. The whole book is written in the way she would talk to a fan, or on her radio show, just as bubbly and personable as ever.

Lulu's career in music has had its ups and downs, just like her life. The sixties were famous for love, drugs and rock'n'roll, but although Lulu enjoyed life back then, she was a late starter on the first, only sampled the second a couple of times, and her music deviated from the third fairly quickly. Nevertheless, Lulu's story is interesting in its own way. I read the whole book in one day and I never got bored. Each aspect of her life is covered in just enough detail so that I wasn't left thinking that I needed to know more.The book begins telling us about her parents and her childhood, explaining that they had more money than most of the families around them and why. Throughout the book, it is obvious that her parents, her sister and her two brothers are all very important to her.Lulu traces her career in music, television and on stage and screen, explaining how she was sometimes persuaded to do things against her better judgement. As I always suspected, she is much more interested in R+B than some of the fluffy pop music she was sometimes expected to record. Lulu describes some of the different records she made and the different people she worked with.Fans will be particularly interested to know about some of the music that is sitting in record company vaults, as yet unreleased. No specifics are given, but it's clear that there is some more music (apart from the tracks that were released) that Lulu did with David Bowie in the seventies, plus an album of new recordings that would have been released in 1997 but for record company personnel changes.Lulu also talks about her two failed marriages - the first to Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees and the second to a leading London hairdresser. It was this second marriage that yielded her only child, her son Jordan. It appears that Lulu still gets on well with both men despite their past problems.Apparently, Lulu nearly lost her life twice, once as a child when the rowing boat she was in drifted out to sea, and once in the eighties when she was in a head-on collision driving in thick fog. Later, she had a problem with her voice and at one time it seemed that she would never sing again. Fortunately, she made a full recovery.Lulu deliberately did not write her autobiography until both her parents had died, and it becomes clear early on why. If you have any interest in Lulu's music, there is enough packed into her life to make the book worth reading.This review is based on the UK edition which has a different cover.