He may not be everybody's idea of a pop star. But he's different.

ome months ago I promised myself that I would never again interview a pop singer. After four years of tripping over the outsized egos of all the dull little boys and girls who make their livings by singing songs I wanted to get right out and away before my mind became permanently softened. But there are some people in pop who I just can't ignore. And so now and again you may find me wandering back into my old pastures to make sure that I'm mot missing anything.

There's really no way that I could ever have missed Gilbert O'Sullivan. Eighteen months ago while interviewing tycoon Gordon Mills at his home in Weybridge he suddenly produced a pile of demo discs and demanded that I sit through them and give him any opinion on the songs and the singer.

"Ordinary, " I though. "Very ordinary." "Quite nice," I said tactfully. "He' s going to be enormous," said Mills. "I've signed him up."

"Ha-ha," thought I, silently laughing up my sleeve at the notion that this time Gordon Mills, he of the after-shave cheeks and Las Vegas-starring-artists, was finally going to get his come-uppance. "You've boobed this time."

Which just goes to show why Gordon Mills is a millionaire tycoon, and I'm not. Because not only is Gilbert O'Sullivan good; he is, I would think, potentially as great an asset as either of Mill's other proteges, Tom Jones and Englebert. Singers only make money when they sing. A good sing goes on forever. And Gilbert O'Sullivan writes marvelous songs

A lot of people have compared him with Paul McCartney-and he's not afraid to admit that the Beatles have had some influence on him (in fact, he's quite vehement in is admiration of McCartney), but it strikes me that there's much more of an old-fashioned music hall appeal to his work than McCartney ever allowed himself.

To hear him sing you might imagine he was a northern lad, born in a mill town and reared on his grandmother's Gracie Fields and George Formby 78s but he's actually from Southern Ireland (real name Raymond O'Sullivan), and went to school and art college in Swindon-where I don't believe they have a particularly strong vaudeville tradition.

He is 25, looks 20, and occasionally talks as though he's 15, but he isn't short on aggression and dollop of self-conceit, and the lines to his songs have a maturity that, he never showed during our interview.

"The only real thing I can remember about my childhood is that I wrote a song called Ready Miss Teddy that I liked. When I was at art school I formed a group, and I used to write songs and send the demo tapes to people like Tony Hatch.

"But they always sent them back unopened. I never got anywhere. The when I'd finished college I told my mother that I wanted to come to London to try my hand at music. I was good at art, in the same way that I'd been good at history, but I never thought that I was great. But I really thought that I could be, if I wasn't already, as good as anybody else at song writing. Not better -- but as good.

"So I took a job as a temporary sales with C&A - that would be the winter of 1967--- and I got myself a bedsitter in Ladbroke Grove and began sending tapes of myself out again. At first I got offered a publishing contract but I said I wanted a recording contract as well, so in the end they gave me one that called for about one record a year with CBS. It was a rotten contract so far as I was concerned, but I was delighted. I'd never seen one before.

"Then I took a job as a clerk that I got the Brook Street Bureau while I waited to make my first record. I had lots of plans for it, but Mike Smith was the producer and he'd just had a hit with the Tremeloes, and Keith Mansfield was the arranger and he'd just had a hit with The Love Affair, so I had to do what I was told. I was in no position to tell them anything. I knew before it came out that it didn't have a chance-although I quite liked the song."

It was about this time that he decided to radically alter his appearance. A t first it started out as a Charlie Chaplin look, but eventually he moved to a grey flannel suit.. Bistro Kid hat, football socks, little boy's school tie and clodhopping boots.

"It seems to annoy a lot of people," he says," but I like it. Now I've moved on to a jerry Lewis type of outfit and next it'll be a knickerbocker suit.

"It's just great fun-and a part of show business. Getting the grey suit was quite hard. I went into John Lewis and told them that I wanted a suit for my younger brother who was at school in Ireland, and he was quite a lot smaller than me. So they brought one out that came to just below my elbow and I said yes, that would do perfectly, I didn't dare say it was really for me.

"I really like thirties styles. Just as I like thirties music. The last record I bought was Shirely temple's Greatest Hits. It's fantastic, I play all the time. That and things by Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. They wrote great melodies in those days. But no one seems to do it much any more."

After three years of getting nowhere with, first, CBS records and then Major Minor, he decided to send some tapes to either McCartney, Mills or Robert Stigwood. He chose Gordon Mills first and finally met with some interest.

"I'd lost respect for everyone in the record industry before I met Gordon. Now he's the only person who's had any influence on my life. I depend on him for everything."

How long is his contract with Mills for, I ask? He looks incredulously at me: "God knows. When I signed it I didn't even look at it. If you respect somebody, and they're going to manage you, then you have to trust them. That's the most important thing.

He has no girl friends - and on one of the rare occasions that he was seen out socializing recently he too his sister as a partner.

"I just know that if I got mixed up in a love affair then it would affect my work," he insists. "It would ruin everything for me. That's why I'm denying myself."

Is he celibate because he believes that by channeling his frustrations into his music he will write better songs?

"Something like that. Most of my friends can take a girl out for some night and have a good time. They sometimes sleep with the girls and don't even know their names. But I can't do that because of my strict Catholic upbringing. Of course I don't necessarily agree with everything the Church says-I mean I'm no less a men because if it-but I do have a tendency to get involved. I've only ever been really involved once with a girl and that was when I was in Swindon. It went on for four years. But she's married now with a baby.

"And also I'm a terrible bungler. I suppose I'm just naïve in these matters. There was one girl called Sue, who was a model, and I used to see her every day in the Tube when I was a clerk. "I used to get off at Kensington High Street an everyday for about six months I'd have just the one stop to smile and say hello. Then one day she didn't get off-and as the Tube went on down past Gloucester Road and South Kensington I had to start talking to her. A bit later on I took her for a coffee and said I'd take her out to the pictures, but for some reason I never did. And she was just the girl for me. Perfect.

"She knew I used to write songs and all that, and then one day a few months ago a friend of mine was showing me some photographs when we came across her picture. He gave me her address and I wrote to her saying: 'Hello, Sue remember me, I used to talk to you on the Tube'. And she wrote me back a very nice letter saying that was married…

"I just bungled everything all the way along. Sometimes I think I'd like a girl friend, someone to take out and talk to. But if I had a wife and family I'd think about them instead of the songs. And the way I see it is that I don't miss what I haven't had."

"Sex? Well, I do miss it and I don't. I spend a lot of time on my own working and I don't go to clubs and things like that."

He now lives in a bungalow in Weybridge, travelling up by train a couple of times a week in his duffel jacket to do interviews or television appearances. Those are the only days he eats a square meal. "Mostly I just have an egg and cornflakes for breakfast and a couple of eggs a night. I can't have a housekeeper because I like to leave all of my records and things on the floor.

"When I joined Gordon I asked him to pay me L10 a week, which is what I'd been earning when I was a clerk, and I find it's enough to live on. Gordon puts all the money for my royalties into some company for me. You see, I don't need money now, bit I know that I will do one day. And three years in a bedsitter enables you to learn to live on not very much at all.

"I give my mother money if she needs it (she has five other children), but I haven't bought her a house of anything like that."

He usually writes at the piano, playing with opposites of words, little semantic games that would indicate a better education than he's had.

"It's all colloquial stuff, really. Realism is what I aim for. I never get ideas from books because I never read any. I don't see how anyone can sit down and become engrossed in a book in this day and age I don't get any enjoyment from it, and I don' think I'm missing anything. Most of my ideas come from the newspapers.

"Also, I don't write songs about love because I've never said to a girl 'I love you.' I just couldn't say it My songs are more about the ordinary everyday things of life." Like for instance his witty anti-abortion song Permissive Twit:

"Unless we raise the money she'll have to have it out.
What I mean is she'll have to have it the right way wrong way about."*

With his short back and sides hair like a bob of steel wool and little duffel bag he may not be everybody's idea of a pop star. But he's different. And the quality of his songs makes up for the awful corniness of his name.

Evening Standard,
December 1971

*Copyrighted 1971 Grand Upright Music