Sixties icon Lulu is back with the same soulful sound but a brand new feel.

After 50 years in music the singer released her first self-penned album, Making Life Rhyme, in April last year.

She says: “I don’t know why it’s taken so long. I should have done this years ago. But life is what life is, and now to write an album about how I see my life, it feels like it fits so well.”

The singer grew up in Glasgow and released her first single Shout/Forget Me Baby with the Luvvers in 1964, aged just 15.

She has been married and divorced twice, the first time to Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees at 19 years old, and had a romantic liaison with Davie Bowie in 1974 after her divorce the previous year. Bowie’s song The Man Who Sold the World was a UK No. 3 hit for the singer and she has pledged to sing it on her tour, which calls in at Wycombe Swan this month.

Her latest work draws on the popular American music from her childhood, such as rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues.

She says: “My musicians wanted to do a blues album, we went back and forth and did some tracks. It just grew and grew, every song we did it went further.

“When you write you have to write about experiences. You have to have a subject and think what do you want to write about? What’s your style? Then it takes on a life of its own.”

The debut single from her new album, Cry, was released on February 26.

Lulu says of the song: “Men all believe big boys don’t cry. I was in a relationship with someone and I couldn’t get them to be vulnerable, most men are like that.

“When I recorded it, I thought being vulnerable is very difficult for me, it’s more than just men.

“I came from a loving family but when I was a child there was a lot of violence in my house which I was in the middle of so I’m still always anxious.

I was diagnosed with PTSD. It’s something you’ve heard about with soldiers but a doctor pointed out as a child I was living in a kind of war zone.”

It is for this reason that Lulu has come together with The Military Wives Choir.

“I feel very close to those families. I’m very much a woman’s woman. I can relate to them.

“I’ve managed to look like I’m holding it together but it ain’t been easy. This is what I’m talking about, everything that I’ve been through in my life.

“It’s really about going beyond the problems everyone’s got. I’ve been there, done it but now I’m living in the solution. I’m living in the now, not running away or towards anything.”

Not only will all proceeds from the single be going to the charity, but for this concert Lulu will be joined by the Windsor and Sandhurst Military Wives Choir.

Wycombe Swan Theatre, St Mary Street, High Wycombe, Monday, March 7, 7.30pm. Details: 01494 512000, wycombeswan.co.uk