ELKIE Brooks has already been for a run, done a spot of aikido and gardening, and it’s only 11am.


In fact, if the batteries on her strimmer hadn’t died, she wouldn’t be talking to me now, from her rented house in Devon.


Keeping busy is what has got the 67-year-old singer through some of the toughest times of her life, including discovering she owed £250,000 in tax and losing her home, Trees, in Woody Bay, Parracombe.


Despite releasing 20 studio albums and once being named the most charted female album seller, Brooks and her husband Trevor and youngest son Joey, had to move into a motorhome.
“It was hard going,” she says. “But I should have asked more questions of my accountant.
“I guess I was busy. If I wasn’t on the road, I was in the studios or bringing up a family.
“I wasn’t very happy, but the most important thing when you’re depressed is to keep going. Since we got in trouble financially, that’s been a wonderful cure. I’d get the hoover out and do the housework. It’s great therapy.”


As is clear from her autobiography, Finding My Voice, Brooks is a survivor. She was 15 – and still called Elaine Bookbinder – when she took herself off to the Palace Theatre in Manchester and auditioned for music manager and father of Sharon Osbourne, Don Arden.
Arden was so impressed, he asked her to return that evening and perform in the show, and afterwards asked her baker parents if she could accompany the show on tour. They agreed.
Life became an endless round of singing “pop songs” in cabaret clubs – but it eventually began to grate.


“I really hated it, I was doing songs I didn’t like and after a bad experience on my 20th birthday, I was quite ready to go home,” she says.
In her book, Brooks admits that drink became her best friend, but she never became an alcoholic.


“How, I don’t know,” she says, “but I do love my food. I’ve always looked after myself and I’m a good cook. That’s probably been my saving grace.”
By the end of 1965, she’d met her mentor, Humphrey Lyttelton, who invited her on tour with his band – and she finally found herself musically.


In 1969, Brooks and Pete Gage, who would become her first husband, set up their first band Dada, which, with the addition of Robert Palmer, evolved into Vinegar Joe. Brooks established a rock chick style, which saw her dubbed “the wild woman of rock ‘n’ roll”.
She says: “I loved it, because I felt that I’d been so inhibited for such a long time and hadn’t been enjoying the music business – I was in my element.”
With the image came the obligatory lifestyle and Brooks was soon taking the musician’s drug of choice, cocaine.


“It was like having a cup of coffee for me,” she admits.


The band released just three records before splitting in 1974, when Palmer announced he was going solo. Brooks was devastated.


“He had plans for a year before he told us, and I didn’t talk to him until after he’d recorded his first album. That was the last time I saw him,” she says.


“I am sad and funnily enough, my eldest son Jay wanted to get us together again and do an album. I’m still very friendly with his mum and sent her a copy of my book.”


Brooks went solo and while her career was taking off, her marriage to Gage was breaking down. Three years after Vinegar Joe ended, he announced he’d met someone else.
Brooks was soon in love again, however. Impressed by a Diana Ross concert in London in 1977, she went and introduced herself to the sound engineer, Trevor Jordan. She arranged for him to do sound on her tour and wanted to impress him so much, she gave up cocaine.
The pair have now been married for almost 35 years and although Brooks admits it’s been a “struggle” to get back on track financially, they now own a small fruit farm in Devon.
“Living with someone is difficult, especially if you’re two very strong characters which we are, and sometimes we need a bit of time on our own. The great thing with his fruit farm is he’s out almost every day and I’ve got the place to myself.”


She’s proud of her two sons, the eldest of which is a musician and has recorded three albums with her.


Looking back over her long career, Brooks has few regrets – not even turning down Andrew Lloyd Webber for Evita (“I hate musicals”) – and she’s adamant she’ll know when the time is right to hang up her microphone.