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Lulu review – remarkable farewell tour ends one of pop’s strangest journeys

Her distinctive rasp is still magnificent at 76, as she swings through 60 years of hits from Shout! to Relight My Fire

Instead, light entertainment beckoned – “Bernie Clifton was her resident guest,” notes Wikipedia, darkly, of her 1975 BBC series, sharing the screen with a comedian who pretended to ride an ostrich being no fate at all for a woman who’d previously been in Muscle Shoals studios with Duane Allman and Jim Dickinson. You catch a hint of her light entertainment past in her between-song banter: when she mentions recording a duet with Ronan Keating, she feels obliged to do an Oirish accent, and she’s big on the kind of showbiz stories that begin with the words “you know”, as in “you know, I made a movie with Sidney Poitier”. But salvation of a kind came in the 90s: her house-y comeback album Independence, a hit for Tina Turner with I Don’t Wanna Fight – apparently the first song Lulu ever wrote, in her 40s – and the call from Take That to appear on Relight My Fire.

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