Simply The Vest - April 17th, 2004 From:The Irish Times By ROISIN INGLE Nothing Rhymed. Clair. Alone Again (Naturally). We Will. Matrimony. I listed these songs to a friend recently in a discussion about our all-time favourite music. She looked at me blankly. You know, I said, Gilbert O'Sullivan. Right, she said, I didn't know you liked opera. O'Sullivan, I said, not and Sullivan. Oh, she said, tell me more. I thought everyone knew about Gilbert O'Sullivan. I've been listening to him since I was little, him and Barry Manilow, another much maligned songwriter introduced to me by my mother. Manilow used to have a weekly show on Friday night and as a treat I'd be allowed stay up and watch. For some reason we had the sitting room to ourselves those nights, other members of the family not being quite as enamoured with the big-nosed one as we were. You didn't get to see Gilbert on television though. He was everywhere in the early 1970s but by the time I discovered him he wasn't likely to turn up on Top of the Pops. All I had were some dusty cassette tapes which I played until his lovely voice singing his wacky lyrics (he actually has a song called Ooh Wakka Doo Wakka Day) grew thin. By that stage, I knew every lyric of every song and I loved him almost as much as I loved Paul McCartney. As a teenager, when I wanted to get even more depressed than I already was, I would turn the lights off and The Smiths up, but I'd always make sure I had at least one listen to Alone Again (Naturally). This song, which holds some kind of record for radio play in the US, starts off with Gilbert singing that he wants to climb the nearest tower and jump off. It's a song about wanting to end it all, about bereavement, about lost love, and the jaunty little tune makes it even more melancholy. Alone Again describes grief better than anything else I have ever heard. Near the end of the song, there are lyrics about the death of a father and the reaction of his widow. "And at 65 years old/my mother, God rest her soul/couldn't understand why the only man she had ever loved had been taken/leaving her to start with a heart so badly broken/despite encouragement from me, no words were ever spoken/and when she passed away I cried and cried all day/Alone again, naturally." I met Gilbert once - it must be more than 10 years ago, I think - when he performed in a sort of retrospective of his life. My mother and I sat in a box at the theatre and queued up for ages afterwards until we were shown into a little room backstage. I remember his hair, all big and fluffy, and he didn't say much, but he signed a book of his songs that I'd bought. It's still a prized possession. Gilbert never tried to be cool. Some less charitable people would say he couldn't have been cool if he tried. When he started out, he wore outfits inspired by his heroes, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, grey flannel trousers, braces and an old man's cap. He never lived down his Bisto Kid days. Later he started wearing preppy American jumpers with a big red G emblazoned on the front. Long before Live Aid, before it was cool to care about starving Africans, Gilbert was wrestling with his conscience in lyrics. "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?" He wrote songs about babysitting, and if Alone Again makes me cry, the whistled intro to Clair brings joy. There is some classic Gilbert trivia on the sleeve notes of his new CD. His favourite tipple is strong Assam tea but only out of a china cup, never from a mug. He has never drunk beer or hard liquor but he does like good red and white wines. He doesn't trust electric kettles and always makes them boil for longer than set. Rock and Roll. He loves a good pun does Gilbert, and that's why when I walked into a record shop and saw he had a new "best of" album out called The Berry Vest I wasn't surprised. The cover features the kind of vest your grand-dad might wear with a bunch of cherries on the front. A Berry Vest, if you will. Best of all, Gilbert O'Sullivan, originally Raymond O'Sullivan, is Irish. I don't know if he has been given the freedom of a city, or if there's a statue of him somewhere, or whether there's a plaque on the house in Waterford where he lived until he was seven years old before moving to England, but there should be. Do yourself a favour. If you half remember him, if you loved him once or if, like my friend, you've never heard of him, go out now and buy The Berry Vest of Gilbert O'Sullivan. You'll wonder where he's been all your life. roisiningle@irish-times.ie Copyright 2004 The Irish Times Thanks David for the article!