Anyone who finds Eric Clapton and The Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb stepping up to offer their services as their producer is obviously special. It’s a view reinforced by knowing Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham and Small Faces were already their champions. Only one person fits this unique bill.
Immediately before recording their first album in 1977, Motörhead were on their last legs. They went into the studio after playing what was initially conceived as their farewell show. Appropriately, no one then could have predicted that the band formed by Hawkwind’s former bass player in 1975 would become integral to rock’s rich tapestry. It wasn’t even their first attempt to make an album: one begun in 1975 had been shelved.
There’s a moment in The Deuce (Sky Atlantic) – a rare quiet one – where a working girl called Darlene is visiting a kindly old gent on her books. He has A Tale of Two Cities on his TV, the old black and white version with Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton preparing to do a far far better thing. As the final shot of the guillotine pulls back over the Paris rooftops, Darlene (played by Dominique Fishback) can’t believe what she’s just seen.
That this year is the 40th anniversary of 1977, the year punk rock went mainstream, shouldn’t obscure the pub rock foundations underpinning much of what was supposedly new. The Clash’s Joe Strummer had fronted pub circuit regulars The 101’ers. In 1976, the Sex Pistols regularly played West London pub The Nashville Rooms. The Damned came together after Brian James and Rat Scabies scouted the audience at a Nashville Pistols/101’ers show for potential members of the band they intended forming.
As pretty much everything but a plague of locusts is visited upon this grim old world, an evening in the company of Neil Sedaka is the greatest of pick-me-ups. At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, as his UK tour drew to a close, the capacity audience clearly felt uplifted, borne aloft on a raft of enduring songs and the evident enjoyment of the man who wrote them.
Sixty years ago this year, Sedaka made his first appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and signed a recording contract with RCA. Since then he’s written some 600 songs, the latest so recent he needed the lyrics propped up on the piano. Not for him an autocue – Sedaka has it all in his head and under his hands. Here’s one man unlikely ever to suffer from brain fade. Only the knees and the hips have aged – when he gets up from the piano stool, occasionally for a little bop, you notice his stiff gait.
Sedaka's is still the voice of a young man, pitch-perfect and secure
In recent years, he has played with an orchestra. This time round he was completely solo, a man and his piano. Alone on stage, a screen projecting his image to those in what his friend John Lennon (for whom he wrote “The Immigrant”) would have called “the cheaper seats”, he cut a cheerfully unstagey figure. Sedaka is what an old-fashioned men’s outfitter would call “short and portly” – rather like Elton, who did much to rejuvenate his career in the mid-1970s, but the threads are more sedate: a blue sport coat atop an open-necked black shirt and slacks (as he’d surely call them) and comfy-looking shoes. His silvery hair is combed over and he has jowls – in other words, he’s happy to look onstage like the 78-year-old grandfather he is offstage. His eyes twinkle and when he refers to himself in the third person it’s mostly to poke fun.
The back projection offered close-ups of his hands and it’s fascinating to watch him play. For Sedaka is a real pianist, one who would most likely have pursued a classical career had he not heard the siren call of 1950s pop. He won a junior scholarship to the Juilliard when he was just eight years old, travelling to Manhattan from Brighton Beach for lessons. At 16 he played Debussy and Prokofiev for Arthur Rubenstein.
These days, he told us, his songs are written over a vodka martini or two, but those early hits which emanated from Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building were fuelled only by Coca-Cola and teenage effervescence as Sedaka teamed up with Howie Greenfield to write a string of hits that remain as fresh today as when they were written and which have been recorded by a roll-call of singers, from Frank Sinatra to Sheryl Crow via Elvis, Tom Jones, the Carpenters, Andy Williams, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney and Connie Francis, and he’s featured in The Simpsons.
At the Albert Hall, the hits just kept on comin’: “The Queen of 1964”, “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”, “Standing on the Inside”, “Our Last Song Together” (the last song he wrote with Greenfield following a 25-year partnership), “Solitaire”, “Where The Boys Are”, “Laughter in the Rain”, “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen”, “Next Door to An Angel”, “Love Will Keep Us Together”, “The Hungry Years”, “Betty Grable” and of course “Oh Carole”, written for his high school sweetheart Carole Klein, who the world came to know as Carole King. During a brief comfort break, a Cinebox video of “Calendar Girl” was played, Sedaka in red jacket and perma-tan, “the girls” in bikinis and furs: the American 1950s preserved in aspic. Returning, jacketless, to the stage, he quipped that “Miss January” had recently reintroduced herself to him in an LA club. “She looked so old,” he joked, pausing for a beat. “Of course I hadn’t changed at all!”
And vocally he hasn’t, for Sedaka’s is still the voice of a young man, pitch-perfect and secure, the tessitura and timbre as distinctive as ever. The audience would have had him sing all night – and he looked as though he’d have been perfectly able to oblige. Long may he play on, his perfect miniatures bringing joy to our lives. Michael Eavis should book him for Glastonbury.
Overleaf: Watch Neil Sedaka play a medley of his greatest hits on BBC's The One Show
Of Sondheim’s half-dozen masterpieces, Follies is the one which sets the bar impossibly high, both for its four principals and in its typically unorthodox dramatic structure. The one-hit showstoppers from within a glittering ensemble come thick and fast in the first half – stop the show they certainly did last night – and it’s hard not to miss all that when the camera zooms in exclusively on the quarrelling quartet.
The death of Walter Becker last weekend brings to an end one of the great double acts of rock history. Becker’s partnership with Donald Fagen, with whom he created Steely Dan, has left a legacy of music which seems destined to be at least as imperishable as the classic jazz and soul artists who inspired them.
TV Tube Heart, the debut album from The Radiators From Space, was issued on 21 October 1977, a week before the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. Each was a punk rock album and one, inevitably, has been subjected to greater historical analysis and many more reissues than the other. Of course, Johnny Rotten and co’s first and only long-player was significant but the other band’s album was important too.
Last year, the arrival of Close to the Noise Floor compelled theartsdesk’s Reissue CDs Weekly to conclude that it was “hugely important and utterly delightful”. A four-CD set, it was a thrilling, first-time overview of the UK’s early indie-synth mavericks from Blancmange to Throbbing Gristle and Muslimgauze to Sea of Wires. Now, it has spawned a follow-up.
August is often a quiet month on the release front but theartsdesk on Vinyl came across a host of music deserving of attention. Now that even Sony, one of the biggest record companies in the world, are starting to press their own vinyl again, it’s safe to say records aren’t disappearing quite yet. On the contrary, the range of material is staggering in its breadth. So this month we review everything from spectral folk to boshing techno to the soundtrack of Guardians of The Galaxy 2.