Lulu has opened up about her alcohol addiction for the first time, admitting she is now in recovery.
The 76-year-old Eurovision star, who is best known for her 1964 single Shout, has revealed she spent years facing ‘dark’ moments and battling ‘shame’ which left her in rehab.
In a new interview with The Times, she said: ‘I was a secret drinker. I think I always wanted to be Miss Perfect, the “best Lulu”, and I was terrified of being like my father.
‘For years, I made a choice not to talk about [my alcoholism] publicly. I chose to wait until I had the language to understand it before I could start spouting off.
‘I’ve learnt a lot from other people, their memoirs, and self-help books too, so maybe I can be of some help now.’
She went on to say her alcoholism got worse as she got older and her son, Jordan Frieda, 48, left home.
She said: ‘For me, it had been controllable until I got into my sixties.
‘After I became menopausal, with both my parents gone, the empty nest, looking around and seeing all the young kids in the music industry, I became more and more reliant on it and so it just got worse.
‘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.’
Lulu then detailed some scarring moments from her upbringing, such as witnessing violent domestic abuse between her father and her mother and the time her dad was ‘dragged away’ by police.
‘It’s a family illness,’ she said. ‘The gene is there.’
While she feared people perceiving her parents as ‘bad people’, she now says they were ‘damaged’, but she also ‘carried so much shame’ about their actions.
Lulu believes her alcoholism was ‘the culmination of a life spent trying to suppress feelings’, having always supported her family and had a professional image to uphold.
The singer went on to say that she has now ‘never been happier in life’.
She said: ‘The thing about drink is that you become the worst part of who you really are. You can be happy and singing and having fun, but that doesn’t last.
‘If you keep drinking, you can become morose. We can become angry. I worked so hard to understand this. I finally understood it’s an illness that messes with everything.
‘So I know it sounds perverse, but I’m glad I’m an alcoholic and that I’m in recovery.’
These days, Lulu, who has been married twice, firstly to Maurice Gibb from 1969 to 1973, then to John Frieda from 1977 to 1991, said she is living in a much ‘brighter’ world, residing in central London with her cockapoo.
She’s also determined to persist with her career ‘until [she] drops’.
