The Sunday Independent (Ireland) March 6, 2011 Sunday O'SULLIVAN IS BACK AGAIN, NATURALLY By Ciara Dyer Focused: One of Six children a family which fell on hard times when his father died at 50, Gilbert O'Sullivan was driven by the stengeth of self-belief and his love of music. The Grammy Award winner once dumped a Girlfriend for getting in the way of his songwriting. As he prepares to come to Ireland for a one-off show, Waterford-born Gilbert O'Sullivan tells Ciara Dwyer of the anger he still feels at being humiliated at school for receiving free meals, how he would confuse his air-hostess wife with her twin sister -- and why he limits himself to only half a Penguin a day 'I often meet people who say, 'I thought you were dead,'" says Waterford-born singer-songwriter Gilbert O'Sullivan. How does the prolific Grammy-award nominated musician react when people tell him this? "I smile because I can understand where they're coming from. I've never had a difficulty with that," he says. Due to a lengthy legal dispute with his late manager and producer Gordon Mills, which he eventually won, Gilbert went off the music radar for a few years. He stopped performing and recording. After it was over, he bounced back. Since 1990 he has toured consistently and recorded an album every two years. This week he will be in Dublin, in the Olympia Theatre, performing songs from his new album, Gilbertville, as well as all the old favourites -- Clair, Get Down, Matrimony, What's in a Kiss and Alone Again (Naturally). His songs have been worldwide hits and Alone Again has been recorded by a vast array ofsingers including Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, and recently,Neil Diamond. Gilbert tells me that all the while he never stopped writing songs. "As long as I can write songs, make a record and do concerts, I'm really quite happy. Of course I'd like to sell millions of records but I'm not bugged about it. The joy I get is in the writing and the performing. In my show I do 36 songs in two and a half hours. I love it and if nobody was there, I'd still enjoy it. I don't talk a great deal during my show. I just like to get on with it." That could pretty much sum up his life. He has always been very focused on making music. Back in the days when he was asingle man, he tells me that he often chose work over women. "I had a nice girlfriend when I was in London. I dropped her when it was interfering with my work. It was a terrible thing to do. I used to play music all night and sleep during the day. I was very career-minded. The music dominated everything and anything that interfered with that, I put a stop to it." He changed his habits when marriage and fatherhood eventually came along. In 1980, he married Aase, a glamorous Norwegian blonde, who was an air hostess for Pan Am. (His manager Gordon introduced them.) They met in L.A. where she was living with her identical twin sister, who also worked as an air hostess. It was a casual relationship for years. "It suited me to have an on-off relationship because of the music," says Gilbert. "It was good that she had her own career." Did he ever get the two sisters mixed up? "Sometimes I'd leave their house and I used to say to the guy with me, was that Aase or Ann Marie who just said goodbye? The only difference was their fringes -- one brushed it to the left, the other to the right. They used to take each other's flights if one didn't feel like flying. Nobody would know. They'd just turn the hair." Didn't he take his time about committing to her? I imagine that she and her twin sister must have had some wild times. "Yes. I'm not going there, I'm not going there," he says with a smile. "They were faintly involved in show business -- that's perhaps how they met Gordon -- theyknew people in the acting fraternity. Of course, they had good times in LA." "He's so lucky he doesn't know," Aase tells me later on. We both laugh. With long blonde hair and red lipstick, she is still a looker and radiates great fun. These days Gilbert lives in Jersey with Aase. Their daughters, Helen Marie and Tara, both work behind the scenes in the music industry in London. We meet in their daughters' flat in central London. It is the morning after one of Gilbert's concerts. He is in his socks and wearing a shirt that is buttoned up to the neck. His wiry hair is still long, his face is a little gaunt and through his clothes, I can pick out a slender frame, like that of a long-distance runner. At first, I think there is something a little priest-like about him. Perhaps it is the quiet way he speaks. But he is a nice man, with a good sense of humour. He isable to mock himself and others. This is also evident in his songs on his new album. Some are sexy, some full of attitude, while others are playful. The thing about Gilbert's songs is that you have to listen to them closely. "I think I'm a good lyricist. It takes a long time with lyrics. I pick up on things all around and often I'm attracted to the darkness -- alcoholism, depression. Nobody said Alone Again would be a success but with luck, judgement and timing, suddenly it was huge." But he is well aware of thefickle nature of the music industry. When he was nominated for the Grammy awards, he had to perform at the ceremony. He was dreading going to it and it turned out to be as bad as he had envisaged. Before the winners were announced everyone was telling him he was sure to win. "It's you, it's you," they'd say, pointing to him. And then, when he wasn't successful, they blanked him. He laughs at how awful it was. But he is philosophical about it and life in general. Gilbert is the second of six children. Born in Waterford, he spent the first six years of his life living in a housing estate on the Cork Road, beside the Waterford Crystal factory. His father John worked in Clover Meats while his mother ran a sweetshop. "We had really good neighbours. It was a normal upbringing." The family moved to England as his father was offered a job inan abattoir in Swindon. John headed over first and the familyfollowed. Initially they lived in a room in Battersea, while their father was getting on the housing list for them. "My mother worked as a waitress in a hotel in London where they served well-off people. At night my sister and I would be awake and Mum would come back with food, all the leftovers. Eventually they got a house in Swindon. "Things started to happen for me then." As a young boy Gilbert was shy and introspective. He failed his 11-plus and tells me that although he wasn't very bright at school, he was good at English. When Gilbert was 12, his father died of stomach cancer. He was only 50. "I suspect if he'd got it now, they would have been able to cure it. My only regret about family life is that I have so few memories about my father. It saddens me. But my mother, an incredible woman, is still alive. She is 90 and is always telling me stories about him. Before he worked in Clover Meats, he was in the army. The barracks used to look out on the race track. He liked gambling. I'm sure that had my father been alive when I had my success, there would have been a race horse or two in the garden. That would have been a logical thing for him to do. The fact that my mother was able to reap the rewards in later life is no more than she deserved." Life became much more difficult after Gilbert's father died. His mother, who by now had six children with her husband, got help from the social services. Eventually she remarried. Gilbert still speaks with contempt at the insensitive way they organised the free dinners in schools, for the people who couldn't afford to pay. "If you had no money, you got a yellow ticket instead of a red ticket. The teacher would ask at the start of every day, who is having a school meal and who is having a free meal? It got to the stage that I hated this so much that I used to tell the teacher that I wasn't having a free meal. I preferred to go without. I've written a song about it on my new album." But for all this, he says that the family never felt deprived. At home, they had plenty of food, warm clothes in winter and at Christmas, a man would come and bring them all toys. They weren't new toys but there were lots of them. Gilbert credits his mother with encouraging his interest in music. (He was chosen for the choir in school.) She managed to get him a guitar and a drum kit. They had a shed at the back of their tinygarden and he would practise in it all the time. He won an art competition, and with a teacher's encouragement, it was decided that he go to art school, with the eventual aim of becoming a graphic designer. "My first memory of art school is going to a midnight party and walking through bodies in a basement. A new world opened up for me and I was in seventh heaven. We wore railway men's jackets and chains and had longish hair. We felt different." He started playing in bands. Soon he was writing his own songs and sending them on message tapes to record companies in London. When nobody responded, he decided that he had to move to London. He got a job in C&A on Oxford Street, where a workcolleague put him in contact with a record company. He got a five-year deal. "I wouldn't give them a publishing deal without getting a record deal. I had a really healthy arrogance and an incredible belief in my ability to be successful,"he recalls Gilbert would spend his evenings in his bedsit, studying his craft by listening to great interpreters such as Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee. (Many years later, he recorded a duet with Lee.) Such was the strength of his self-belief, that he decided he needed a strong image, something different. The Beatles and everyone else seemed to have long hair, so he got a pudding-bowl cut, sported a Charlie Chaplin coat and looked like a grown-up Bisto kid. "I was trying to look like the Just William character. If somebody had told me to dress that way, I would have said they were mad. But it was my idea. I wanted to leave my mark. I hated the idea of being like everybody else. I looked ridiculous." His manager Gordon hated the look but he knew that the songs would draw them in. Eventually Gilbert listened to someone else's advice. He grew his hair long, wore jeans and looked like a student. He holds no bitterness about the court case with Gordon; rather it saddens him, especially as he was like "the father he never had". Gilbert wrote the song Clair about Gordon's daughter. He used to babysit for her. Making music is what Gilbert's life is all about. What does he do for kicks? At this stage, Aase walks in. "What does he do for kicks? Half a Penguin," she says. "You're giving the game away now," he says. "Every day I have half a Penguin biscuit. All my family laugh at the fact I'm so disciplined. I always think, a little of what you fancy." "I have a glass of wine at the weekend and I've never been drunk in my life. I don't go down to the pub with a bunch of mates. Maybe not being a drinker is the reason why our marriage has lasted. It's not that I don't like people, but I'm very unsociable. Although some women could argue that Aase would be really happy if I went out." He's not very rock 'n' roll andhe knows it. But he is happy with his lot. Gilbert O'Sullivan plays the Olympia Theatre on Thursday. Tickets, priced from ?35 including booking fee, are on sale now at Ticketmaster.ie.Tel: 0818 719 300. For more information see www.mcd.ie or www.gilbertosullivan.net |Home||Music||Lyrics||Multimedia||Images||Links||Biography||FAQ||About Us||Email|