A generation knows her as the terminally naff television presenter with a Hammer Horrors dress sense and an unwise hair colour who, when she's not introducing Waynes to Sharons, is scaring the living daylights out of people by suddenly re-uniting them with a long-lost twin who emigrated to another continent 850 years ago, and was in any case better forgotten.
A more chronologically enriched generation, however, remembers a time when Cilla Black was the epitome of "coolness". Part of the Merseybeat explosion and later a standard fixture of the Carnaby Street/Soho Swinging Sixties scene in London, Cilla used to hang out with The Beatles, was the most successful British female recording artist of all time, counted Elvis Presley as one of her biggest fans and had a voice that put Dusty Springfield and Sandie Shaw to shame. How did the woman who could have been the white Aretha Franklin end up on television asking people if they got off with each other?
For all her "just a simple Liverpool girl" protestations, and her ever-so-sincere showbiz "warmth and openness", Cilla Black could re-write the mystery/riddle/ enigma cliche. Fiercely protective of her private and public lives, she never talks to the press apart from the odd puff piece in Hello! in which she witters on about marriage and career to no great effect. All that is officially known about her is that she's 55, has been married for 30 years to her manager, Bobby Willis, has three children and lives far away from the banks of her beloved Mersey in a 10bedroom, Buckinghamshire home on 16 acres. She does not talk about her past, the Beatles, Brian Epstein, her plastic surgery (she's had a nose job) or how she played in South Africa during the dark days of apartheid.
Funny then that she's just sanctioned the release of a major three-CD retrospective of her musical career. Spanning the years 1963-1973, the mightily impressive 65-track collection begs the question as to why a woman with a pitch-perfect voice that was replete with raw emotion gave it all up so soon.
It wasn't that she hadn't enough admirers - her singles used to sell one million copies apiece, the NME used to sponsor her gigs and Burt Bacharach wrote especially for her, preferring her phrasing to that of Dionne Warwick's. When the Beatles met Elvis Presley in Graceland, Ringo Starr rang Cilla from the house to say he had just seen her You're My World single on Presley's personal jukebox; when she got her own BBC television show (the first female artist to do so) Paul McCartney asked her if he could have the honour of writing the theme song - and he wrote Step Inside Love especially for her. The Smiths, too, were huge fans and they recorded a Cilla song, Work Is A Four Letter Word as a tribute.
Real name Priscilla White, Cilla was discovered in classic showbiz fashion when she was working as the cloakroom girl in Liverpool's famous Cavern Club. The Beatles heard her singing quietly to herself one night and alerted their manager to her talent. She released her first single, Love Of The Loved in 1963 but only really made an impression with her barn-storming version of the Bacharach/David song Anyone Who Had A Heart the following year. It went to number one, sold a few million and remains to this day the biggest selling single of all time by a British female recording artist.
Pushed more as a MOR singer than an interpreter of songs, she rather ill-advisedly then went through her "Italian period" - it was in vogue at the time for mainstream singers to record songs of Italian origin with the lyric translated into English and, although she scored a few Top 30s, nobody quite knew what to do with her remarkable voice. The problem back then was that, apart from Helen Shapiro, female singers of popular music were a rarity and there was little experience in managing and marketing them. Too often she ending up doing Beatles songs that the band themselves discarded because they were "too feminine". Also, her manager and husband insisted on writing a lot of songs for her and - while he wasn't bad - he was no Burt Bacharach.
Despite all the hits - and there's some wonderful stuff on this new collection - she is personified musically by her recording of (What's It All About) Alfie? Written for her by Bacharach and David after her triumph with Any- one Who Had A Heart, the track was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and immortalised on videotape by producer George Martin, who captured the whole session. Bacharach, who could have picked any singer in the world to do the song, was a perfectionist and he insisted on Cilla doing 38 takes in one day of Alfie. The former hairdresser's apprentice was visibly exhausted by the session and George Martin had to step in and politely tell Bacharach there was no point doing a 39th take because Cilla simply couldn't deliver it - besides which, Bacharach would find take two was the perfect take which, indeed, it was.
She went on to tour all around the world; she was a cult favourite in the US thanks to Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson putting her on their shows as much as possible; bizarrely, she went on to record a song by the Marxist song-writer Phil Ochs (Changes) . . . but Cilla could never equal or better the Alfie days and with diminishing chart returns and a new breed of female singers on the block who could write their own songs, she bowed out - at least as a serious singer - in 1974. Her voice shattering, tired of the road, one too many parties, some trauma or other? No one knows and she's not telling.
Cilla: The Abbey Road Decade is on EMI Records, price £21.99