Guildhall, Portsmouth Her distinctive rasp is still magnificent at 76, as she swings through 60 years of hits from Shout! to Relight My FireIt has, says Lulu, been “hard to put all the moments together” in her two-hour farewell show. One can understand why that might have proved tough. As the tour’s subtitle makes clear, she has been famous for 60 years, but her career was all over the map almost from the beginning.A tiny figure in a sequinned hoodie and huge sunglasses – we should all be so lucky to look as good as Lulu does at 76 – she opens with Shout!, taken at a more sedate pace than she did aged 15: her debut single, it became a huge hit, but she couldn’t follow it up, which led her to shift from raucous R&B to bubblegum and easy listening. The material she recorded ranged from the sublime – the movie theme To Sir With Love was, a little incredibly, the US’s biggest-selling single of 1967; her version of it tonight gets a standing ovation – to the abysmal. Boom-Bang-a-Bang was a Eurovision winner that seemed to exist primarily in order to make Sandie Shaw feel better about having to sing Puppet on a String – cheer up, at least it wasn’t this. Lulu still looks winningly mortified singing it 55 years later, although that’s nothing compared to the expressions on the faces of her band, one of those aggregations of journeymen musicians in which the drummer looks like a member of Mastodon, the guitarist seems to be moonlighting from a country and western outfit, the bassist from a cerebral Pitchfork-approved indie band. Continue reading...