‘I was a secret drinker’, singer Lulu says as she reveals battle with alcoholism
By Pol Allingham, PA
The Scottish singer Lulu has admitted she was “a secret drinker” as she publicly revealed her battle with alcoholism.
The 76-year-old Eurovision star told the Times that she was at her own 65th birthday party when she first disclosed to her sister that she was not in control of her drinking.
24 hours after the family lunch, she flew to the Meadows rehabilitation in Arizona, where she stayed for six weeks and committed to Alcoholics Anonymous, which she still attends.
During rehab, she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder caused by witnessing violent domestic abuse between her mother and father as a child, she told the newspaper.
Lulu, whose real name is Lulu Kennedy-Cairns, said: “I’ve never spoken about the alcohol before. ‘Lulu’ is sort of squeaky clean.”
“I think I always wanted to be Miss Perfect, the ‘best Lulu’, and I was terrified of being like my father.”
She added: “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.”
The Glaswegian said she spent five years dependent on wine before admitting the problem to her sister.
Even her friends in recovery did not spot the habit, she said, telling the Times: “When I finally told them, they said, ‘How did we miss that?’”
She added that she never drank before going on stage or around her young grandchildren, now aged 15 and 13, but alcoholism does run in her genes.
Her therapist in Arizona compared her homelife in a Glasgow tenement to a “war zone”, she said.
Her father would regularly hit her mother when he was drunk and her mother would lie that she had tripped on a broom, the Times reported.
“My mother taught me how to keep secrets,” she said, adding: “She also provoked him.”
“I carried so much shame about my parents, about having got my father taken away (by the police) on one occasion. I never wanted to be like my father”, she said.
At the age of 15, she moved to London and scored her first hit – a cover of the Isley Brothers’s Shout.
From the beginning of her career in 1964, Lulu has achieved 10 UK top 10 singles and a UK top 10 album.
She is also known for I’m A Tiger and Boom Bang-A-Bang, which was a joint Eurovision winner in 1969 with the Spanish, Dutch and French entries, who all tied on 18 points.
She performed at Glastonbury this summer and in 2024.
She told the Times: “‘Lulu’ would help me feel light and cheerful when really I was a bit of a tortured soul because of my character.
“For years, I made a choice not to talk about (my alcoholism) publicly.”
Her interview came ahead of the release of her memoir, If Only You Knew, on September 25.
