I thought I looked and sounded so dreadful... I now wish I had been kinder to myself

SHE was the 1970 Eurovision sensation whose winning hit All Kinds of Everything propelled her to international fame.

- PETER ROBERTSON

Now, 49 years after her first festive single It's Gonna Be a Cold Cold Christmas reached No4 in the charts, Dana has released her second Yuletide single, aptly titled Christmas Again.

Reflecting on her early career, Dana Rosemary Scallon, now 74, revealed she was her own worst critic, admitting: "I wish I'd been kinder to myself. I thought I looked dreadful and sounded dreadful.

"I never was confident and I had a poor self-image.

"I didn't see anything" extraordinarily unique about my voice and I thought there were lots of singers who were better than me, some professional and some who just sang in the shower.

"When I see photos and film of myself from the 70s, I look better than I thought I did at the time.

"I also think, 'God, I was very thin'.

Yet then, although I was about 7.5st, I thought I was very heavy.

"You had to be so careful with television because it puts 10lb on.

"I was very careful in what I ate - I ate the same meal plan for about four years without stopping.

"I didn't normally go to work until midnight, so I'd have breakfast at about 11am and always have scrambled eggs and bacon, no bread, an orange juice and tea or coffee.

"At 4pm, I'd have cheese with crackers. And then at 9pm I'd have a steak with a salad followed by fresh fruit salad and tea.

"After I came off the stage, I'd drink two pints of full-fat milk. They'd give me ice-cold milk in a champagne bottle.

"It was a very healthy high-protein diet, apart from the cheese and milk."

While contemporaries such as Karen Carpenter and Lena Zavaroni had their lives ruined by eating disorders. Dana says her family protected her from many of the ravages of fame.