SO much for brunette being the new blonde. There was wee Lulu, fit, 55 alive and foxy, and blonder than ever on her first tour for 15 years.

"I am a rock'n'roller at heart," she had said, introducing the musical direction of her new album Back On Track. "I'm going grungy, playing the image down, because it's about the music," she had told the Evening Press.

Well, her young band had dressed down in jeans and loose white shirts, but look at that shy, retiring, four-letter word LULU, emblazoned across the back wall in tiny fairy lights, and those tall, slinky black backing singers, Anna Ross and Lucy Jules, in figure-hugging white dresses. And now Lulu, all in white, flashing cleavage in her babydoll top, as she joined the sold-out party for the cabaret opening blast of Celebration, the old Kool And The Gang wake-up call.

Grunge could go take a flying leap. Playing down the image could do likewise. The Glaswegian gal couldn't resist the glitter, the diamante, on jackets and sleeves and even on the guitar straps, but she was right when she said "It's about the music".

Lulu loves performing, mixing it up close with the boys in her band from the start, where carnival queen Diana Ross had kept her raised stage to herself in Sheffield last Tuesday. This Greatest Hits show would be a celebration of her favourite songs, something old, something new, something borrowed, all very Lulu.

Song two, and she made Womack And Womack's soulful Teardrops her own; song three, Supernatural off Back On Track, had her brilliantly taking off the creamy Al Green, and only now did she turn the back pages of her pop catalogue for 1974's The Man Who Sold The World, interplaying with sax soloist Leo Green.

New single Keep Talkin'... I'm Listening, from the gnarled pen of Bryan Adams, brought rock into play for the first time in a Mel C manner. However, Lulu's singing prowess was better illustrated by the dramatic, pleading I Don't Wanna Fight; the Dusty In Memphis-style Oh Me Oh My, her most heartfelt singing of the night; and the grandstanding ballad To Sir With Love, the old B-side to The Boat That I Row.

By choice, she wouldn't have played The Boat..., so she skipped a couple of verses and said "Some songs, you've done them, you've got the T-shirt". Fair enough, because Lulu relishes now, not yesteryear, making light of losing her lines in Crowded House's Don't Dream It's Over, showboating in an extended Independence and, by now in spangly black, taking the show to new heights on Relight My Fire and an exuberant version of the New Radicals' You Get What You Give.

How did she finish? Weeeeeeeeelllllllllllll, she made you wanna shout, shout, shout. Feel all right? You bet.

Updated: 09:48 Wednesday, March 24, 2004