On the record, as in the movie, Lulu’s backing band was the post-Wayne Fontana Mindbenders, who’d hit #1 two years earlier with “ The Game Of Love.” And the music, while simple, does a nice job combining the beat-driven excitement of British Invasion rock (which must’ve sounded slightly anachronistic in 1967) with the orchestral sweep of a classic movie-theme weeper.īut what really sells the song is Lulu, who brings a wide-eyed candor and sincerity to the song’s gooey sentiments: “If you wanted the sky / I would write across the sky in letters / That would soar a thousand feet high / ‘To sir, with love.'” She’s got a big voice, and she does a few melismatic runs, but she never sounds like she’s trying to be Aretha Franklin. She belonged to the Dusty Springfield line of white British women singing R&B, and her biggest song before “To Sir With Love” was a 1964 cover of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout.” Maybe that’s how she got cast in To Sir, With Love, making her film debut as one of the movie’s rebellious teenagers, and how she ended up singing the song to Poitier at the end of the movie. Lulu had never had a real American hit before “To Sir With Love,” but she was a known quantity in the UK. (It was #7 on the list, between You Only Live Twice and Thoroughly Modern Millie.) And its theme song, from the 19-year-old Scottish singer Lulu, was a dominant pop smash - the “Gangsta’s Paradise” of its era.
#LULU TO SIR WITH LOVE MOVIE#
The movie was a huge hit, one of the biggest of 1967.
To Sir, With Love is about a black teacher, Sidney Poitier, and mostly-white students. In recent decades, most of those movies have been about white teachers and mostly-black students. I’ve never seen James Clavell’s movie To Sir, With Love, but it’s a foundational part of that whole “saintly teacher figures out a way to reach tough and wild teenagers” mini-genre.
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