SHE HAS CHALKED up hit singles and platinum albums and shared bills with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but Elkie Brooks reveals that at 17 she was ready to turn her back on music altogether. Elkie, who turns 80 in February, found fame with her 1977 hit, Pearl’s A Singer – nearly 20 years after her first paid performance. “In the 60s, I was having to do cabaret shows up north and I hated it,” she tells me.
“I hated the songs I had to sing, I was working with musicians who really couldn’t play the dots...
There were a lot of bad gigs. I used to drink half a bottle of brandy before I went on.” The low point came at the Fiesta Club in Newcastle.
“Nobody was listening to me; they were all eating scampi and chips...
I thought ‘I’m going to have to do something else’. “My friend Maxine had moved to Israel and invited me to join her. The way I felt, I’d have gone straight away.
My life would have been so different. But Humphrey Lyttelton persuaded me to keep at it.” She’d met jazz legend Humph on an airbase in Germany.
“When he invited me to sing with his band, I got back to liking music again. We became lifelong friends. Even now if anything goes wrong at a show, I think, it could’ve been worse, it could’ve been the Fiesta in Newcastle.
” Elkie is currently on her Long Farewell Tour. “I’m not stopping, the clue is in the title – long farewell tour,” she says. “I’ll judge it on my fitness level as I go along.
I don’t want to disa.