‘The Equal of Any Songwriter’
By John Lewis - Saturday, September 29, 2007
World-weary songs about death. Waggish wordplay. A scruffy urchin persona. When Morrissey performed Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1970 hit “Nothing Rhymed” at a gig in Dublin last year, he reminded his audience that this half-forgotten, hopelessly unfashionable singer-songwriter from pop’s dark ages has actually become a rather influential figure in contemporary music.
Morrissey’s defining preoccupations certainly echo those of O’Sullivan. Years before Morrissey sang “Irish Blood, English Heart”, O’Sullivan had examined his own English-Irish upbringing with “Irlish”; while, more than a decade before Morrissey wallowed in teenage depression with his 1984 hit “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”, O’Sullivan went the whole hog with his international chart-topper “Alone Again (Naturally)”, a deceptively jolly ballad about a jilted man contemplating suicide.
And, these days, rather like Morrissey, O’Sullivan complains of finding himself typecast as a litigious, hermit-like figure, railing against a music business that, he says, has always shunned him. Yet his music remains in demand, with a 2004 compilation going top 20 in the UK and much of Europe. Like his partial lookalike Leo Sayer, he has benefited from the fascination for 1970s kitsch and there have been recent cover versions of his work by the likes of Har Mar Superstar, Donny Osmond and The Feeling. At his best, though, O’Sullivan’s songs have a dark comic melancholy that resists reduction to camp status. Indeed, much of his early 1970s canon is increasingly used in films and TV programmes to signify poignancy, loss or sadness. You’ll find them accompanying tear-jerking moments on recent TV series including Life on Mars and The Simpsons or films such as The Virgin Suicides, Stuck On You, Stuart Little and Nicole Kidman’s upcoming Margot at the Wedding. And, recently, screenwriter Richard Curtis, on picking up a special Bafta award, cited a lyric from “Nothing Rhymed” as a motivating factor behind the Comic Relief project: “When I’m drinking my Bonaparte shandy/Eating more than enough apple pies/Will I glance at my screen and see real human beings/starve to death right in front of my eyes.” The Gilbert O’Sullivan I meet in his London flat appears less crotchety and ill-tempered than the image that precedes him. He is also intrigued by the Morrissey parallel, “although I find it annoying that none of his biographers have picked up on the connection. I think it may be the fact that I write very, very English songs, in my own accent, with a colloquial approach to language. Whenever I write lyrics and an Americanism slips in, I always cut it straight out. I can’t use the word ‘babe’, for instance. It makes me cringe.
“I remember Andy Williams ringing me up in the early 1970s. He’d covered a couple of my songs before but he planned to do a version of a song of mine called ‘We Will’ on his TV show and wanted permission to change one line in the song – ‘I bagsy being in goal’. He didn’t have a clue what it meant. ‘Bagsy’ – what a wonderfully English word! I used to get these reviews in American newspapers saying that they didn’t understand what my lyrics were about. I saw that as a compliment. That’s exactly what English songwriters should be doing!”
Today, O’Sullivan is a stick-thin, poodle-haired and youthful 61-year-old in a button-down denim shirt. Thirty-five years ago, when the likes of Andy Williams were calling, he was – for a while – the biggest selling pop star on the planet. His defiantly English songcraft was particularly popular in the US, with dozens of other prestigious American artists, including Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone, tackling his songs.
But, he says, he never really enjoyed himself. In 1972, he was nominated for four Grammys but, to this day, wishes he’d never been persuaded by his manager to go to the ceremony at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Never a clubbable figure, he hated the industry limelight and rarely hung out with other pop stars.
He was born Raymond Edward O’Sullivan in Waterford, Ireland, in 1946, one of six children. His father, John, who worked in an abattoir, moved the family to England, settling in Swindon, when O’Sullivan was seven (although he retains a faint Irish brogue to this day). Later, like many of his generation of pop stars, O’Sullivan went to art college, where he started writing songs.
In 1967, aged 21, he moved to Swinging London, sharing a tiny Notting Hill flat with two friends and a battered old piano. He worked in the post room of a West End department store and, by night, wrote songs with dreams of getting into the music business. To this end, he created a character called “Gilbert”, drawn from the Just William stories and Buster Keaton movies, who sported a pudding bowl haircut, wore a cloth cap, a Charlie Chaplin jacket, hobnail boots and ridiculous short trousers.
“I felt that I needed an image, something that made me look different. Everyone had long hair so I decided to cut mine off, which made me look like some freak who’d just escaped from an asylum. But I was absolutely insistent on this image. I’d go to meetings with record companies – CBS, Decca, EMI. They’d tell me to wear a pair of jeans and grow my hair and look normal. And I’d say, ‘Sod that,’ and storm out. And I do think that belligerence is important when you’re young.”
The career breakthrough came in 1969 when he sent a demo tape to Gordon Mills, a producer, songwriter and the manager of two of Britain’s biggest artists – Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. Mills hated the Gilbert character but went with it, welding it to his new signing’s real surname to create “Gilbert O’Sullivan”, a pun on the light opera duo.
The association with Mills brought O’Sullivan 14 top 40 UK hits (including two number ones), three of which (“Get Down”, “Clair” and “Alone Again”) also sold more than a million copies each in the US. During this period in the early 1970s, O’Sullivan lived in a small bungalow in the grounds of Mills’s palatial Surrey family estate in Weybridge, where the eccentric producer had his own private zoo with seven gorillas, three Bengal tigers and other wildcats. O’Sullivan, who at 13 lost his father, regarded Mills as a father figure and accompanied the family on holidays, dining with them and babysitting for Mills’s infant daughter Clair (subject of the huge international hit. Mills, says O’Sullivan, “was a genius producer, no doubt about it”. However, he was also responsible for O’Sullivan’s contract, which had been drawn up massively to the manager’s own advantage. He was paying O’Sullivan just £10 a week – the same he earned as a postal clerk – and awarded him a small percentage of the royalties on songs that ended up accruing £17m.
By the mid-1970s, with the pair’s record sales tailing off, O’Sullivan told Mills that he wanted to work with another producer. When O’Sullivan left Mills’s house for the last time in 1977, the singer asked if he’d still get the 50 per cent share of the publishing that he said he had always been promised. “He said to come down the office and sort it out on Monday. I went down and found that he had all but locked me out. So I had to sue.”
In 1979, he took Mills to court and – three years later – the judge ruled in the singer’s favour, with O’Sullivan receiving £5m in back-paid royalties from Mills, plus £2m costs. He also won the master tapes and copyright to his back catalogue. Mills died of cancer in 1986, aged 51. O’Sullivan says he has since been reconciled with Mills’s family and is back in touch with Clair, now a 37-year-old mother.
Reflecting on the experience, he says: “Nobody likes going to court. It’s like the Savoy – anyone can go in there but not many people can afford to stay there.” But 10 years later, O’Sullivan was back in court again, when the rapper Biz Markie sampled the eight-bar intro of “Alone Again (Naturally)” for a 1991 track. Other sampling cases had been settled out of court but this was the first time that one had gone to trial and had huge repercussions in the hip-hop world. Wasn’t he flattered that a young rapper was bringing his music to a wider audience?
“I wouldn’t have minded with some songs but I do make sure that that particular song isn’t used in an inappropriate context. I don’t care about the credibility or the money. It’s about integrity?.?.?. As it happens, there have been two rappers who have sampled my songs recently – both excellent tracks.”
Though landmark rulings – the likes of Sting, George Michael and Elton John cited the Mills/O’Sullivan precedent when pursuing similar cases against what they perceived to be unfair management contracts – the court cases came at great personal cost. O’Sullivan says he has not been able to get management or to sign to a major label for any of his new albums since the Mills case. He has remained a disgruntled figure on the outskirts of the music scene – torn between wanting to live an anonymous family life and desperately wanting respect from his peers.
He is unrepentant about his habit of writing angry missives to music journalists – he recently upbraided a Time Out journalist who, in an otherwise favourable review, described his compilation album The Berry Vest Of as “appallingly titled”. “The word ‘appalling’ might be suitable to describe the situation in Iraq, for instance,” wrote O’Sullivan. “It should not be used to describe a witty pun on a common phrase.”
O’Sullivan admits: “I do react strongly to some things, I make no apology for that. What offends me is that, on the rare occasions I get reviewed, it’s dismissive. If Paul Simon releases an album, even if it gets criticised, the review talks about his work. I don’t get that luxury.”
He still writes songs, working five days a week in his home studio in Jersey, where he has lived since the mid-1980s with Aase, his Norwegian wife of 27 years with whom he has two adult daughters. He “can’t bear the thought of retiring” and continues to tour and release albums every two years or so.
This week he plays his biggest UK date for years at the Barbican in London. “I’ve never got off the treadmill,” he says. “It’s frustrating when I do concerts when people come up and say, ‘Wow, do you still make records?’ And I can totally understand where they’re coming from, because nobody writes about them.
“But you have to see yourself as a contemporary songwriter. I still think I’m the equal of any songwriter there is. Put me next to Springsteen, Dylan, you name them. I’m always reading young songwriters talking about Ray Davies or Cat Stevens or Elton – it’d be nice to get a mention.”
Gilbert O’Sullivan plays the Barbican on October 4. ‘The Berry Vest Of Gilbert O’Sullivan’ is on EMI, ‘A Scruff At Heart’ is on ByGum Records.
Paul Morley recreates the sounds of Gilbert’s glory days
If you’d bought an album in 1969, you might have chosen one of the greatest of all time – Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica – or Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left, The Velvet Underground’s third, Iggy and the Stooges’ first. Or you’d have got something iconic by The Beatles (Abbey Road), The Who (Tommy), the Stones (Let It Bleed) or Led Zep (II). The Band and Neil Young were debuting, Dusty was in Memphis and Joni Mitchell was in the Clouds. For best single of the year, “Space Oddity” knocked out “Sweet Caroline” to meet “Honky Tonk Woman”, which beat “Suspicious Minds”, in the final.
In 1970, if you fancied something by a male singer-songwriter, you’d be tracking down Neil Young’s After The Goldrush, Van Morrison’s Moondance, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, Bowie’s Man Who Sold The World, Nick Drake’s Bryter Later, Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs and Tim Buckley’s Starsailor. For 1970’s top pop single, “Your Song” and “My Sweet Lord” were in the semi-final with “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Lola”.
In 1971, Carole King was queen, and you’d be scoring your favourite albums by the Who (Next), Bowie (Hunky Dory), Rod (Every Picture Tells A Story), Marvin Gaye (What’s Going On), the Stones (Sticky Fingers), McCartney (Ram) or Cat Stevens (Teaser and the Firecat). Pop single of the year was between Mick’s “Brown Sugar”, Rod’s “Maggie May”, Marc’s “Get It On” and John’s “Imagine”.
It’s 1972, and Bowie had become Ziggy, the Stones were exiled on Main Street, and the best solo male albums were by Neil Young (Harvest), Lou Reed (Transformer), Stevie Wonder (Talking Book), Kevin Ayers (Whatevershebringswesing), Curtis Mayfield (Superfly) and Randy Newman (Sail Away). Top 1972 single was a vicious fight between “Virginia Plain”, “Walk on the Wild Side”, “Telegram Sam” and “Layla” – Gilbert’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” put up a good show, ultimately losing out to Nilsson’s “Without You”.
In 1973, you’d put together a definitive prog rock collection – ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery, Genesis’s Selling England By The Pound, Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans and Camel’s Camel. Dark Side of the Moon and Tubular Bells were lording it over the charts, Queen were debuting, Bowie was now Aladdin Sane, and Roxy Music were playing For Your Pleasure. The leading LPs by solo males were Lou Reed’s Berlin, Tom Waits’ Closing Time, John Martyn’s Solid Air, Gram Parsons’ GP, John Cale’s Paris 1919, Hugh Hopper’s 1984, Kevin Coyne’s Marjory Razorblade, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On and Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, A True Star.
Gilbert’s I’m A Writer Not A Fighter LP was a little off the pace, despite including the rousing “Get Down”, which in the battle for pop single of the year couldn’t quite keep up with Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”, Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand The Rain”, The Wailers’ “I Shot The Sheriff”, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”, David Essex’s “Rock On”, Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia”, Elton’s “Saturday Nights For Fighting”, T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy” and Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song”.
‘Words & Music’, Paul Morley’s history of popular music, is published by Bloomsbury
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Merci beaucoup David!
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