Recently, people have been stopping Lulu in the street. “It’s incredible – they say ‘I heard your new record!” she says, smiling with a mixture of pride and surprise. “I haven’t heard that for a long time.”

At 77, not for the first time in her career, Lulu is having a comeback. When I’m invited in late August to the singer’s Maida Vale flat for an early morning chat and coffee (with cinnamon, a Lulu recipe), “I’m in Love Again”, her first single in 10 years, is the most popular song on BBC Radio 2. Last weekend Lulu played at the station’s festival Radio 2 in the Park in Stirling.

It’s a “Believe”-era Cher makeover: an Ibiza-inspired dance track and the first taste of a new album out in January, Let the Girl Sing Out. “I’ve been going to Ibiza since the Bee Gees’ parents lived there in 1969,” she says. Lulu’s first marriage was in her teens to Maurice Gibb. Encouraged by Gibb’s mother, she bought a house there and has been going ever since to relax – she’s done a bit of partying too. “Though I didn’t do drugs, I could drink pretty good,” she smiles. She’d always wanted to make a song with the spirit of the island.

But are the lyrics about falling in love again, and never feeling so sure, based on her real experience? “It’s just how I feel. It’s not autobiographical. My love is music. And to have this song has been very healing for me.”

Last year Lulu released her memoir, . It told the story – a far more traumatic one than anyone realised – of how the 14-year-old Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie landed in London from a tenement house in Glasgow to almost immediate success. Lulu’s debut single, a rumbustious cover of The Isley Brothers’ “Shout”, was a Top 10 hit in 1964, introducing the nation to her powerfully raspy yet soulful voice. She became a famous fixture of the “swinging 60s” in her teens. “It was wild,” she says.

She shows me the stacked wall of framed pictures in her second living room, which show her posing with everyone from The Beatles to Tom Jones to Elton John to Jimi Hendrix (“hard rock, but a gentle soul”). She was mates with The Who, lived next door to Ringo Starr (or “Ritchie” as she calls him) and was out with Paul McCartney the night he got with Linda Eastman. “It was a smaller industry when we started. We were all learning – none of us knew what we were doing.”

But behind the success was a secret struggle. As well as professional battles, in her book Lulu detailed the drunken domestic abuse she witnessed at home – her father Eddie would beat her mother Betty – and how she hid an alcohol addiction for decades before getting sober at a treatment centre in Arizona in 2013 (she was also diagnosed with PTSD).

Writing the book was a tough process. “It was like going to hell and back. It was intense. But it was cathartic.” Even if her cheerful conversation is peppered with mindful confessions – “I’m an addict”; “I’m obsessive compulsive”; “I’m a nervous Nellie” – she says having vulnerable things in the open has been more of a relief than she envisaged. “Now that I’ve come out and been vocal about being an alcoholic, I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed. Because I was ashamed. And of past things with my family.”

She says she didn’t realise how much “I’m in Love Again” would help revive her spirits. “I wouldn’t say I needed it, but I probably wanted it. I honestly wasn’t shopping for a record deal.”

She got one in a roundabout way after her appearance on Jools Holland’s annual last December. Not only did producer Brian Rawling (Cher, Tina Turner, One Direction) and his team watch the performance and see potential in a new Lulu record, but she was encouraged by the effusive praise on the night from fellow performer Jessie J, who thanked Lulu for paving the way for younger female artists. It became a theme of the album: “giving a platform to sing out loud and proud”.

The title track is partly about her younger self, but also a tribute to the young female artists of today. “There are so many, and they’re all killing it. I want to honour the young women today. Because it was hard when I started. And there were very few of us.”

Lulu had a lot of hits in the first 10 years: the title song to the 1967 film , in which she starred alongside Sidney Poitier; her Eurovision winner “Boom Bang-a-Bang”; a cover of former lover David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World”; a 1974 Bond theme “The Man with the Golden Gun”. But it came at a cost. After being brought to London in 1964 by her manager, Marion Massey, who worked with Lulu for 25 years, she was instantly reshaped into someone else, told she was too feisty and that her accent was too much.

“I had an act,” she says. “I was told to change my name, change my accent, change my character. I tried to do the best I could do. And it was an act that actually stuck to me very closely because I lived in terror of not being perfect. I look at old film from years ago and think, ‘the poor wee thing doesn’t know who she is.’” She went along with it because she was a people-pleaser. “And because of my insecurities. When you come from an alcoholic, or dysfunctional, family you’re on high alert all the time.”

But she had a youthful, Glaswegian steeliness. “When people heard ‘Shout’ they’d say, ‘Well, she’ll never last. She’s going to lose her voice.’ I thought, ‘Yeah, just watch’, because I was going to prove that I could sing anything.” Unfortunately, the industry had other plans – and the fact that Lulu “wasn’t a one-trick pony” became a problem. She wanted to sing the American rock and gospel music she loved, but was steered towards standards and light entertainment with a series of Saturday night TV shows.

“I was really a rough diamond. And I smoothed the rough edges off, which made me somebody that I wasn’t.” She says she was forced to put on a confident front. “I was frightened and I was anxious, but nobody could see it. Dusty [Springfield] said she couldn’t believe how courageous I was. I said, ‘Well, I’m absolutely terrified, but I go for it.’”

Similarly, she agreed to compete at Eurovision in 1969 against her better instincts. “But Marion said. ‘It’s about figures. The head of the BBC wants big ratings.’” Lulu’s entry, the catchy but twee “Boom Bang-a-Bang”, came joint-first with four other countries. But it was the sort of song Lulu didn’t want to do. “I would have a lot of going home and crying and saying, ‘Do I have to do that song? It’s not me.’ And I would get back from several people, ‘Oh It’s going to be a hit,’ thinking they know better. But they didn’t.” When she wasn’t working, she would drink to console herself.

It hadn’t gone unnoticed that she’d veered off course. “I mean, even Pete Townshend told me I’d sold out. I thought, ‘Who the f**k are you to tell me what to do?’ But truth sometimes hurts and sometimes you’re not ready to hear it.”

Did she manage to enjoy any of those early successes? “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “I was so busy. Today people talk about being present and enjoying the moment. I don’t think I did too much of that.”

Lulu says when she split with Massey in 1989 she had a realisation she’d been doing too much “middle of the road stuff”. Some big hits followed, notably a No 1 with Take That on “Relight My Fire” in 1993; in 2002 came her last Top 10 hit, “We’ve Got Tonight”, a duet with Ronan Keating. But there came a point when she had to front up to her past. “I was trying to find out who I was. Eventually you’ve got to face to the reality of life. I had a lot of things I had to face up to. It was so painful, I had to drink more.”

The process became all-encompassing, looking at “my part in things that didn’t go right. Taking responsibility for who I was. And then looking at what wasn’t my responsibility that I took responsibility for.” We talk about how that can be a typical female trait. “I’m very maternal,” she says. Lulu has one son, Jordan Frieda, with her second husband, celebrity hairstylist John Frieda (whom she married in 1977 and divorced in 1991). “My sister said, ‘I don’t know why you never had loads of kids, because that’s what you wanted,’” she says. “Yeah. I got distracted.” She starts to well up.

She suddenly asks me: “Do you pray?” No, I don’t. “You have to start praying. I’ve always had tremendous faith.” Over her shoulder sitting at her living-dining room table is a large bust of Buddha. “I call it spirituality more than religious. Every morning I get down on my knees and thank God for what I have.” She follows “an eastern path”, she says, and the philosophy of reincarnation. “I’ve been here before, millions of times, and I haven’t learned it all yet.” She really believes that? “Yeah. Absolutely. I know it. I do think there’s something greater than me. Look what’s just happened to me with making the album? It’s fabulous.”

Lulu is thrilled she is co-writing the album (with her songwriting brother Billy Lawrie) and setting the artistic direction: finally, the creative autonomy she always wanted. “It’s the most natural thing, because it should have been that way.” Music has once again proved a salvation. “I’ve struggled with my life, during my childhood, the break-up of my marriages, failures in my career. Music always opened up a new beginning. And this album,” she smiles, “it’s been rejuvenating.”

‘I’m in Love Again’ is out now. Let the Girl Sing Out is released on 15 January 2027