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 disappoint those who remember me from years ago.”
Some chance. Even at 79, Brooks puts her heart and soul into her performances. Grounded in jazz and blues, her versatile mezzo contralto vocals were familiar to rock fans long before her break-through from her years co-fronting 70s blues band Vinegar Joe with the late Robert Palmer.
“I did my first gig at 13 in a little cabaret club, Laronde, on Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester,” she recalls. “I was paid £5. I probably sang Blue Moon in the key of C. I was crazy about Ella Fitzgerald.”
Elkie, born Elaine Bookbinder, was the youngest child a of Manchester baker, descended from Jewish refugees. She was 15 when showbiz impresario Don Arden discovered her talent.
“I saw an advert for artists in The Jewish Telegraph for a show at the Palace Theatre in Manchester. Don Arden was holding auditions for singers and dancers. I sang Cliff’s Pointed Toe Shoes in B-flat.”
Her voice stopped Arden in his tracks.
“Don went crazy and put me on the bill that night – I wasn’t paid, it was just a privilege to be on the show.”
Arden, Sharon Osbourne’s father, asked her parents if she could join the package tour he was promoting with Gene Vincent.
“I was the only girl on the coach and I didn’t like that. So Don let me travel with him. We did a gig in Mansfield and he changed my name to Elaine Mansfield, which I bloody hated. He was sort of managing me, but I never signed to him – thankfully.
“Don’s real name was Harry Levy but he had a real issue about it. There was a lot of anti-semitism around.”
She joined Eric Delaney’s jazz band at 16, changing her name to Elkie – her name in Yiddish – and adopting Brooks because it sounded better than Bookbinder.
1964 could have been her breakthrough year. She released her version of Etta James’ Something’s Got A Hold On Me and gigs got bigger. She opened for the Stones at seaside resorts and did the Beatles Christmas show backed by the Mike Cotton Sound.
“The Beatles wanted me to jump over a skipping rope but in rehearsals I missed my footing and fell on my arse. I was mortified.”
The Fab Four’s variety show, including the Yardbirds and Freddie & The Dreamers, ran for three weeks.
“I drank half a bottle of brandy and a couple of pints of Guinness before I went on. I was the only woman out of 200 blokes on the bill – how the business has changed!”
By the fag-end of the Sixties, Elkie was fronting Dada, a 12-piece Stax-influenced fusion band formed by guitarist Pete Gage, her first husband. Dada morphed into Vinegar Joe, one of the hardest-working blues-rock bands of the 70s. They would cheerfully play the Black Swan in Sheffield and drive back to London for a 3am gig at the Roundhouse.
“We’d be drinking and doing cocaine to keep us awake – I never understood record company people who did it for no reason. I don’t do that anymore, which is why I’m still going! I’m probably healthier now than in my 30s. I practise aikido and exercise most days.”
Co-star Robert Palmer was “amazing and exceptionally competitive,” she recalls. “The London Marquee gigs were memorable, one night my foot went through the glass lights on the stage. I fell over and managed to get back up. I’d fractured my hip.”
Vinegar Joe’s albums bombed but they worked constantly, touring America and Germany. “We’d travel in a Volkswagen with my frock on top of the drum kit.”
After they split, Elkie released her first solo album, Rich Man’s Woman. Its risqué cover – her naked save for a skimpy feather boa – infuriated feminists.
“It was the photographer’s idea, I didn’t think anything of it, but then a lady from a New York paper had such a go at me, calling it disgusting and an affront to feminism. Nowadays with Taylor Swift, it’s come full circle.”
Her follow-up album, Two Days Away, propelled Elkie to stardom. Produced and partly written by Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, it included smash hits Pearl’s A Singer and Sunshine After the Rain.
“I headlined the Palladium gig, mum and dad came; it was quite lovely. The album was a life changer.”
Other hits, including Lilac Wine and No More The Fool, followed; her albums Pearls and Pearls II went platinum.
Divorced from Gage, Elkie wed sound engineer and d-i-y wizard Trevor Jordan, who she’d met when he was working with Diana Ross.
“We’ve been together 47 years now,” she says. “It’s our anniversary in March. I remember dates – I wish he did!”
They have two sons, Jermaine, now her manager, and Joey – a paragliding instructor who scattered Humph’s ashes in the heavens after he died.
Calamity hit in 1998 when Elkie’s accountant dropped a bombshell. “He sheepishly said, ‘We’ve got a problem. A £250,000 tax problem. It’s all my fault…’ It turned out he’d been paying the nonpayment fines rather than the actual amounts owed.”
They had to sell their five-bed house in Woody Bay, North Devon to get out of debt.
“We put everything in storage, moved into a motorhome, and I got on with touring. My sons had been on the road with me since they were born, so all of us were used to being in a motorhome for two or three months of the year.
“I’m a rock’n’roll gypsy – I’ve always been on the move.”
They rent a seaside flat in Devon while waiting for planning permission for Trevor to build a house on the farmland plot they bought in 2010.
These days Elkie relaxes by playing Wordle and Chordle. The champagne lifestyle isn’t for her – “I prefer a pint of Guinness,” she says.
“As long as I have my health and strength, and my family and my piano, I’m a happy lady.
“I’m very happy when I sit at my Yamaha baby grand piano and play for an hour or so as the sun goes down. I get as much pleasure out of that as I do from my shows.”
*For Elkie’s tour dates and tickets see elkiebrooks.com
