Lulu

Emerging in the 1960s as a cheeky teenage Glaswegian with a ferociously powerful voice, Lulu originally struck gold with her explosive cover of the Isley Brothers' Shout. Her natural vibrancy and livewire personality, though, helped to sustain her stardom long after the hits dried up and she now qualifies as a British national institution. She'd joined her first group The Bellrocks at 13 before Shout opened her run of hits, including Call Me, The Boat That I Row, To Sir With Love and I'm A Tiger. In 1969 Lulu won the Eurovision Song Contest (tied with Spain, Netherlands and France) with the archetypal Euro song Boom Bang-A-Bang, married Maurice Gibb of The Bee Gees (they divorced in 1973) and broke into the US charts with Oh Me Oh My (I'm A Fool For You Baby). She had a renaissance in the mid-1970s with her cover of David Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World and the title song of the James Bond movie, The Man With The Golden Gun, by which time she was already establishing herself as a popular TV entertainer. In the 1980s Lulu appeared in various stage musicals and made a surprise comeback in the charts in 1993, collaborating with boyband Take That on the Number 1 single Relight My Fire. There have also been the occasional movie appearance and she was still recording and touring in the 2000s.