When Lulu Went South
“My only sadness is that it didn’t continue until the day I die.” Lulu (on her time at Atco Records).
BY THE TIME Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie was signed to the Atco subsidiary of the American soul giant Atlantic Records in the fall of 1969 she was twenty years old and entering the third distinctive phase of her recording career.
Her version of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” charted perennially in Britain for the next three decades.
In the first phase,begun when she acquired her stage name, Lulu, and fronted a band called the Luvvers, she had made the journey from Glasgow to London and become a British sensation with a knockout cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” (her version charted perennially in Britain for the next three decades).
She was all of fifteen and, despite an occasionally ragged relationship with the beat that was common among the era’s youngest rockers (among true youngsters, only Brenda Lee consistently sang with anything like old-fashioned assurance–rock & roll was never as easy as the masters made it sound or the haters wanted you to think), already pretty close to being the hardest soul singer the Isles produced. Her enthusiasm occasionally got ahead of her talent in those days but there were some scorching highlights.
Her ballad singing was assured from the beginning (she did a particularly lovely job of re-imagining Van Morrison’s “Here Comes the Night,” as a torch song). And her early hard-rock covers of “Dream Lover” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” are a long way ahead of pretty much anything the young Mick Jagger did in his pre-“Satisfaction” days. Say what you want about Lulu covering the classics but at least she never sounded like she had learned American English phonetically.
Even so, the early period was uneven. Production values were oft-times barely professional (a bit of a general problem in England at the time). The material was dicey (“Choc Ice” . . . really?). And, lacking clear direction, the voice seldom got its due.
That should have changed when she signed with Mickie Most, who was probably England’s top producer of the period, landed an acting gig in the Sidney Poitier vehicle To Sir with Love and entered her second phase with a bang.
The title song of To Sir with Love, written by a friend at the by-then seventeen-year-old singer’s request when she refused to sing what the studio handed her, became Billboard’s official #1 record of 1967 after it was released as a B-side and American dee-jays flipped it. As the singer put it herself in an interview years later: “Bless their cotton socks!”
She had more than a little to do with “To Sir with Love” becoming a smash, though. It was one of the best-sung records of the greatest era for vocal music we’re likely to know. One might have thought Most would know what to do from there—namely run off a series of quality hit singles, as he had done for Herman’s Hermits, Donovan, and the Animals previously (talk about covering some ground), and would do for Hot Chocolate later on.
The singer has often, and with some justification, referred to her Eurovision Song contest winning “Boom Bang-a-Bang” as possibly the worst song ever written.
Instead—and despite a handful of genuinely wonderful records which didn’t do much commercially (they are best heard on Rhino’s From Crayons to Perfume collection)—he steered her toward ever more banal material, finally climaxing with the already world-famous Lulu winning the Eurovision Song contest (usually reserved for those chasing the spotlight) for 1969 with a track called “Boom Bang-a-Bang,” which the singer herself has occasionally–and with some justification–referred to as possibly the worst song ever written.
Unlike most of the really good records she and Most had made together, it was a substantial hit, at least in England and Europe.
The disconnect between quality and success guaranteed a lot of sleepless nights, crying jags, and the absolute certainty that she would not renew her contract with Most when it ended a few months after the Eurovision win.
While all that was going on, Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, the only female British rock & roll singer who was a talent-match for Lulu (and who was, perhaps understandably, going by “Dusty Springfield”) had signed with Atlantic Records, a label known mostly for deep soul acts, and gone South to make an album which came to be called Dusty in Memphis. In addition to being one of the greatest albums ever made—“vocal” or otherwise—Dusty in Memphis produced a big hit single, “Son of a Preacher Man,” and set Atlantic mogul Jerry Wexler searching for more of the same.
It turned out to be an artistically satisfying venture which bore relatively little commercial fruit. Eventually, Jackie DeShannon, Betty LaVette, and Cher would each get her turn. And Jackie and Cher at least got their records released (with Jackie’s being a classic in its own right . . . I haven’t heard Cher’s Atlantic sessions, though they eventually got a CD release on Rhino Handmade). Betty, an actual soul singer, had to wait another thirty years and achieve an unlikely late-career discovery by the Public-At-Large for her fine sides to even see the light of day.
Lots of amazing music then.
But Lulu was the next in line and the music she recorded between the fall of 1969 and the summer of 1972 constitutes a body of work that bears comparison to anything that was going on anywhere in the period.
It probably helped that Wexler and others (Tom Dowd, Arif Mardin, like that) still had the wind of Springfield’s success at their backs when they all went back South (Muscle Shoals this time . . . with Duane Allman sitting in) to record New Routes.
The album concedes nothing to Dusty in Memphis except that Dusty’s is perfect and New Routes has a misguided version of “Mr. Bojangles” that features an awkward gender rewrite which pretty much undermines an otherwise great sounding record. (Lulu couldn’t very well pretend to be sharing a jail cell with Bojangles, so they are in . . . a park! Ouch.)
But that album or the next (Melody Fair, recorded in Miami with another crack southern session unit, the Dixie Flyers), both long afterward available only on reasonably scarce vinyl (my used copy of New Routes came with a sticker that read “Duane Allman!!!” . . . cool people, having received their values from the Crit-Illuminati need to know why a price has been boosted from the usual $0.99 to $2.99!!!), are, amazingly, not the entire point of the great 2007 package Lulu: The Atco Sessions, 1969–72.
There you get two discs—the first covering the two released albums, the second collecting various singles, alternate takes, and unreleased material.
As a listening experience, it’s of a piece. Heartbreaking for itself (there is no more plaintive voice and it was never more consistently plaintive than here . . . you can reference Lulu fans like Aretha Franklin and Al Green if you need further testimony) and for the different kind of break it so definitively represents–a kind of last look back before the rise of the machines.
This package is the sound of a singer coming home to her first love: straight soul music.
This package is the sound of a singer who had already successfully traversed hard-edged rock and R&B and classy pop coming home to her first love: straight soul music.
From this distance, it’s easy to hear just how fragile the moment was. Between bombastic rock and sleek dance music, glorious though much of it would be, amplifiers and synthesizers were setting the stage for the re-caging of the liberating human voices which rock and soul had brought to the center of Pop Culture—which was already the only culture America had left.
I don’t think you necessarily need that context to hear the fundamental sadness-tinged-with-liberating-joy that characterized these sessions. But knowing the context makes that quality inescapable.
Maybe because she had such an oddly shaped career (she went from these sessions to a fling with David Bowie—studio only—that produced a few truly great sides but, again, no real overarching vision) Lulu is a bit of an odd duck historically: a respected singer who isn’t quite revered; a commercial singer whose hits are strung out here and there over a couple of decades; a fine live performer who was always in the moment but rarely on top of it.
But she was also the kind of singer who used to arrive on the charts on a regular basis—distinctive, soulful, possessed of a genuine ache that never descended into phony angst or belting for the sake of belting—and do not arrive at all anymore.
And her time at Atlantic, at least, was priceless. She’s not the only one who regrets that it didn’t continue until the day she died.
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Thanks for reading! Below are links to three articles that are essential to knowing what the Tell It Like It Was publication here on Medium is all about — mostly rock & roll music of the ’50s and ’60s. Hope you’ll give it a look-see!
