1989

This page provides a snapshot of Lyn Paul's career from 1989. To find out what else was happening in 1989 select any of the following options:

To find out about the rest of Lyn's career, choose a year from the table below.

Ecstatic!

A special year in more ways than one - on 16th February Lyn celebrates her 40th birthday and on 17th April gives birth to her son, Ryan. Years later, Lyn described how she found out she was pregnant:

"I had felt it was unlikely I would ever have children ... Then one day I got too hot sunbathing. I came inside and lay on the floor and felt sick.
Next morning I got up and felt sick again. I said to Alan [Lyn's partner]: 'If I didn't know any better, I'd think I was pregnant.' I did a pregnancy test and when it turned blue I nearly passed out with shock."
(Daily Mail, Thursday, 31st July 1997, page 53)

The unexpected news leaves Lyn feeling "ecstatic". She later told YOURS magazine how she felt when Ryan was born:

"When I first saw him, I couldn't believe that little bundle was mine. I couldn't hug or kiss him enough. It makes me fill up just remembering how I felt."
(YOURS Summer Special, July 2000, page 45)

During the Summer Lyn plays some dates for Pontins. Then, on 2nd September, five months after Ryan was born, Lyn and Alan get married. As Lyn told it to the Daily Mail, the wedding invites went out as though they were from Ryan:

"When Ryan was five months old we sent out invitations saying: 'Ryan invites you to the wedding of his Mummy and Daddy'."
(Daily Mail, Thursday, 31st July 1997, page 53)

The wedding itself is something special. It even gets a mention in the magazine Hello!.

"When I got married the first time, it was in a register office and I wore a blue frock. This time, I was married in a church and I wore a cream dress, the rings were blessed and everything was done properly. When I got to the altar, Alan cried and I cried. I cannot tell you the amount of love I felt at that particular moment. I knew I was doing the right thing."
(YOURS Summer Special, July 2000, page 45)

Lyn is soon back to work. On 28th October she tops the bill in the Palace of Variety Show at the Palace Theatre, Kilmarnock.

During 1989 the Hollywood Nites record label releases a Greatest Hits CD by the New Seekers. Although the cover photo features Lyn Paul in the line-up, the tracks on the CD are in fact re-recordings of the New Seekers' original hits together with a handful of newer recordings. The lead vocalist turns out to be Donna Jones, Lyn's one-time singing partner from the trio the Chrys-Do-Lyns. Worried that people might be misled into thinking that she was unavailable for solo work, Lyn complains to The Stage:

"I'm not concerned with the money side of things but I don't want people to think that I'm back with the New Seekers when I'm not. ... When I heard the songs I was so annoyed as there were none of my vocals on there at all and my photo was on the front cover."
(The Stage and Television Today, 6th April)

As a consequence of Lyn's complaint the CD is withdrawn from sale and repackaged.

By coincidence Judith Durham, the former lead singer with the Seekers, experiences a similar "identity crisis." The Seekers had re-formed with a new singer, Julie Anthony, and in April issue a 20 track album featuring nine re-recordings of their original hits. Judith Durham later finds out that the album was released in Europe with her picture on the cover. Her reaction is similar to Lyn's:

"It was as though I had been a session singer on those original recordings. It's one thing to re-form a group with a new singer, but it's another thing entirely to re-record the old hits, rewriting history in a way. It was almost as though I'd never existed."
(Quoted from The Judith Durham Story: Colours Of My Life by Graham Simpson, page 270).

At Christmas Lyn Paul is back in panto again. From 21st December 1989 - 28th January 1990 she stars for the second year running in Roy Hudd's production of Babes In The Wood, this time at the Theatre Royal, Bath. Starring with her are Roy Hudd as 'Orrible Uddy' and Geoffrey Hughes as Evil Eddie (Geoffrey Hughes is best-known for his roles on television as Eddie Yeats in Coronation Street, Onslow in Keeping Up Appearances and "Twiggy" in The Royle Family).

Amid the tumult that was 1989 Lyn finds time for a night at the theatre. She goes to see Blood Brothers at the Albery Theatre in London. The show has a big impact on Lyn. As she later recalled in an interview for the Liverpool Echo:

"I went to see Kiki Dee as Mrs. Johnstone, but her understudy took over that night. It was still one of the most moving nights I have ever had in the theatre." (Liverpool Echo, 5th April 2002, page 6)

Lyn knows there and then that she wants to swap her seat in the auditorium for a place centre stage. "I said to my husband then that was the part I wanted to play." (South Wales Evening Post, 20th June 1997, page 3) Eight years later she does just that.

Incidentally...

Don Black, who wrote the lyrics for two of Lyn Paul's singles (Sail The Summer Winds and If Everybody Loved The Same As You) has success on the stage and in the charts with the musical Aspects Of Love. Written in partnership with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Charles Hart, the show opens in London's West End on 17th April, having already taken £2 million in advance ticket sales. A single from the show, Michael Ball's Love Changes Everything (Really Useful RUR 3), is released ahead of the opening and climbs to number 2 in the UK singles chart. The London Cast album (Polydor 841126 1), which is released later in the year, tops the UK album chart on 16th September.

Who said that?

Forty

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of forty, sometimes more than once.
Dave Barry

When a woman is twenty, a child deforms her; when she is thirty, he preserves her; and when forty, he makes her young again.
Leon Blum

At twenty years of age, the will reigns; at thirty, the wit; and at forty, the judgement.
Benjamin Franklin

You get up with the sun in the morning,
And you work till you're ready to fall.
Oh! the first forty years are the hardest
After that you get used to it all.
Ed Morton, Jas S. Donahue and M.K. Jerome

Life begins at forty - but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person three or four times.
Helen Rowland


Pregnancy

If pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters.
Nora Ephron

The only time a woman wishes she were a year older is when she is expecting a baby.
Mary Marsh

To me, life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.
Rita Rudner

Childbirth

I think women oughta have babies the way God intended - strapped to a table, numb from the neck down.
Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan), 'The Golden Girls'

If you want to know how childbirth feels, just take your bottom lip and pull it over your head.
Carole Burnett

One book recommends choosing a Birth Mantra to chant over and over again. I didn't realise until I went into labour that I had subconsciously chosen my mantra:
"Get This Baby Out Of Me."
Cathy Crimmins

If men had to have babies, they would only ever have one.
Diana, Princess of Wales

I realise why women die in childbirth - it's preferable.
Sherry Glaser

Amnesia is a condition that enables a woman who has gone through labour to have sex again.
Fran Lebowitz

I'm not interested in being Wonder Woman in the delivery room. Give me drugs.
Madonna

When I was giving birth the nurse asked, 'Still think blondes have more fun?'
Joan Rivers

Having a baby is like trying to push a grand piano through a transom.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Well that was the messiest, ickiest, most unbearably primitive experience I've ever had.
Binky Shelton (Deborah Rush) 'Big Business'

We have a secret in our culture, and it's not that birth is painful. It's that women are strong.
Laura Stavoe Harm

Delivery is the wrong word to describe the childbearing process. Delivery is, 'Here's your pizza.' Takes thirty minutes or less. Exorcism, I think, is more apt: 'Please! Get the hell out of my body!'
Jeff Stilson

Having a baby is like watching two very inefficient removal men trying to get a very large sofa through a very small doorway. Only in this case you can't say, 'Oh, sod it, bring it in through the French windows.'
Victoria Wood

Babies

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one.
Leo J. Burke

Babies are beautiful, wonderful, exciting, enchanting, extraordinary little creatures - who grow up into ordinary folk like us.
Doris Dyson

I can't think why mothers love them. All babies do is leak at both ends.
Douglas Feaver

A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Knox

Children

Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.
Sophocles

Parents

The joy of parenthood is to experience the development of a "lively" child into a fine human.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg

You realize after you have had children that you'll never love anything more than your child.
Kate Hudson

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.
Michael Levine

Mothers are a biological necessity; fathers are a social invention.
Margaret Mead

The quickest way for a parent to get a child's attention is to sit down and look comfortable.
Lane Olinghouse

Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body.
Elizabeth Stone

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.
Alvin Toffler

Having children changes your life irrevocably. It takes the whole paradigm and turns it upside down in the most wonderful way. Until you have a child, you've never been certain you'd give your life for someone, you've never been so proud, you've never been so tired.
Elizabeth Vargas

Second Marriages

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck, men risk theirs.
Oscar Wilde, 'The Picture Of Dorian Gray'


Bath ... Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?

Beware of the unmeaning luxuries of Bath and of the stinking fish of Southampton.
Jane Austen, 'Love and Friendship'

Bath, compared with London, has little variety, and so everybody finds out every year.
Jane Austen, 'Northanger Abbey'