Daily Mail, Thursday, July 6, 1995

THE SINGER WHO HAS BANNED HIS FAMILY FROM LISTENING TO HIS MUSIC, WONT BE SEEN WITH HIS WIFE OR BE PICTURED WITH HER AND HAS NO FRIENDS

Why Gilbert tries hard to be Alone again, naturally

By Grace Bradberry

AT THE age of 48, you'd imagine Gilbert O'Sullivan to be an older version of his Seventies persona - still rather shy, sweet-smiling and cuddly.

During the height of his fame, while Gary Glitter was thumping around in nine-inch heels and David Bowie was heavily into orange hair and face paint, O’Sullivan was the seemingly normal one at the piano, sporting a pudding-bowl haircut and singing romantic ballads.

So it comes as something of a surprise to discover yourself interviewing an eccentric craft, a man who won't allow his family to listen to his music, and who composed all his hits in the dead of night.

The man who gave us the smash-hits Clair and Alone Again (Naturally) bounds Into the living-room of his Jersey mansion in a blue-spotted shirt baggy trousers and bright red trainers. But two decades in the musical wilderness have turned his trademark boyish grin into a tense smile, his hair more bird's nest than pudding bowl, and his blue eyes rather cold.

He leads us away from the hospitality of his Norwegian wife Aase (pronounced Orsa) and into his music room in a far comer of the house. This is his creative inner-sanctum, and a place from which Aase and their daughters Helen-Marie, 14, and Tara, ten, are banned.

"Did he tell you about his latest album cover?" asked Aase later, pointing to a framed picture showing O'Sullivan at the piano, and. the back view of a nude woman.

"The first I heard was when a friend phoned to ask if I was the woman in the picture. I asked Raymond (O'Sullivan's real name) about it and he said it was "arty". I worried about what the girls would think. "It's got nothing to do with her," he says, gesturing at his wife. "It's all to do with me he insists explaining that he couldn't, function if his family invaded his private territory.

THIS preoccupation with 'personal space' extends to photographs. No, he tells us, he will not be photographed with his wife. 'We've never had a picture together. Every artist has done it. I never have.' In 1989 he reluctantly agreed to a Hello! feature and refused the mandatory smiling-portrait-on-the-sofa.

"It was horrible the whole idea of being pictured all smiley with my wife. In the end I said there would not be pictures of the family together. The Hello! People were very upset about that."

While you may feel admiration for anyone who refuses to be "all smiley" for Hello! It is difficult to sympathize with O’Sullivan's enduring self-obsession. He also refuses to socialize with his wife outside the gates of the huge home. "Jersey is too small," he explains.

And yet he confesses he would like another man to confide in "I wish I had some friends. I never had a best friend, not even at school. I envy people who have best friends.'

Even his relationship with his audiences is clearly given with difficulty. He is touring again, and performed at last month's Glastonbury Festival. But of this appearance he says only: 'There were people there who really hated me.'

The more you listen to the anguished reveries of Gilbert O'Sullivan circa 1995, the more you realize that his Seventies "smiley" image was false.

O'Sullivan spent his early years in Waterford, Ireland, before the family uprooted to Swindon. His fatter died when he was 11, leaving his mother to bring up six children alone.

Gilbert shared a bedroom with his younger brother Kevin - who now lives in an annex of his Jersey home.

He appears to have been dominated by his mother and older sister, fighting them but remaining repressed. 'When I was 15, I was given a book on Rembrandt as a school prize. I was so terrified of my mother that I ripped out all the nudes before I got home.

"I have great respect for my mother but I hated her when I was teenager. She wanted me to get my hair cut, and my elder sister always sided with her. I hated them."

It is therefore not surprising that when in 1970,he walked into the offices of the flamboyant impresario Gordon Mills; he thought he had found a man he could trust. Just to make sure, he became as close as possible to the Mills Family, and came to a childlike arrangement whereby Mills paid him just L10 a week.

"I blended in with his family. I was very young and naďve. I thought if I was part of his family, there was never going to be an opportunity for anybody to con me."

"I didn't want to grow up to be a person: I wanted to grow up to be a musician," and so he almost deliberately retarded his own emotional development. 'I didn't have a full relationship before I was successful,' he admits, though he was 'getting there' by the age of 24, when he had his first hit, Nothing Rhymed.

But, cocooned in a bungalow in the grounds of Gordon Mill's mansion, he could not avoid girls: they waited for him on his doorstep.

"Of course, I took advantage of it. I talked to all of them. The ones I was attracted to I would invite in. I didn't have to make that first move."

Sharing his bungalow was the singer Eric, another Mills protégé who never made the big time. "He was a sex maniac," say O'Sullivan with distaste. But despite his Catholic scruples, he could not help observe the skill with which Eric pulled the chicks.

Eventually O'Sullivan too, found romance. "There was a beautiful girl form Holland, and I had a relationship with her. She came to me, so that made it easy for me."

Then, in 1973, he began flying to America, and met Aase, who was a pan-Am air stewardess, and friend of Gordon mills. But, there was to be no commitment for seven years. What precipitated, his proposal and ended his delayed adolescence was his break with Mills. In the late Seventies O’Sullivan chillingly revealed the mettle he was really made of when he turn impresario.

It began as an artistic dispute and ended as a bitter court battle in which it emerged, that O’Sullivan had received only L500,000 of the 114 million fortune netted by his records

The legal action halted O'Sullivan's career but It also left Gordon Mills a broken man. He was humiliated in court, his company collapsed and his wife divorced him. He died in 1986.

It destroyed Gordon's company but they deserved it, says 0’Sullivan, his blue eyes flashing in anger.

O'Sullivan turned to Aase who, wisely, had continued to date other men. Partly out of jealousy, he finally proposed and they married in 1980 with only a few family members as guests.

He has since made as few concessions as possible to married life. "I no longer write at night" he says. "But Aase knew before we married I would never change."

Even the children, he says proudly, understand his moods. Tara has worked out that id Daddy says "hello", I'm OK, and if I say "Hi" I'm not.

He has ordered everything in his life according to his exact specifications. But somehow the most important element of all-success in the music business -- refuses to fit into his plan: "As far as the business is concerned I’m history."

His great goal is already in the past, and it clearly troubles him: My future is still about writing songs, making records trying to be a success -- trying to do what I did when I first started out. It’s boring and repetitive: it’s something you’ve achieved and longer have."