Neil Sedaka, who has died at the age of 86, enjoyed two careers as singer and songwriter: first in the late 1950s and again in the early 1970s and beyond.
The first time I heard Neil Sedaka was around Christmas time in 1972 when Oh Carol nestled in the singles chart like a throwback alongside the likes of Slade and Sweet, T. Rex and Elton John.
In his suit and tie, he was like the antidote to Glam in, dad-dancing and finger-popping like some sort of middle-aged crooner – though he was only 19 or 20 when he recorded this in 1959.
It was impossible not to love the song, with its roots in a pre-Beatles era of doo-wop, when singers all wore suits and looked middle-aged, and its cheesily memorable spoken-word second verse.
Sedaka, a Brooklyn boy who studied classical piano at the Juilliard and started playing in a doo-wop group called The Tokens, wrote it while working at the Brill Building hit factory in New York.
Writing with his lyricist neighbour Howard Greenfield, who would become his longtime musical partner, Sedaka had already had a hit single in his teens with Stupid Cupid, for Connie Francis.
Oh Carol was a love letter to his high-school sweetheart Carol Klein, who was also working at the Brill Building, though by then she had married another songwriter there, Gerry Goffin.
She responded with an answer song called Oh Neil, released under the stage name Carole King. Unlike Sedaka’s effort, which launched his career.
Hers was a flop but she would soon rectify that: all three of them would become million-selling music legends: Klein/King in partnership with Goffin, and Sedaka with Greenfield.
I see now that the re-released Oh Carol came repackaged with another of his hits, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: others included Calendar Girl and Laughter In The Rain.
It was the start of a comeback for Sedaka, whose flourishing pop career in the late Sixties and early Seventies had been kiilled off by the British Invasion led by The Beatles in 1964.
The new Beat Music swept away the old-fashioned songs that had made Sedaka the self-styled “king of the tra-la-las and do-be-dos” and left him destitute after his manager ran off with his money.
Determined to revive his career, he moved to England in the early ’70s and found refuge and fresh inspiration thanks to an up-and-coming pop group of fellow Jewish boys from Manchester called 10cc.
Together they recorded two records, Solitaire and The Tra-La Days Are Over, and Sedaka found another new friend and mentor in Elton John, who signed him to his label and helped him launch a comeback with hits like Laughter In The Rain and Bad Blood (featuring uncredited backing vocals by Elton).
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One of his Tra-La songs, Love Will Keep Us Together, became a No.1 hit single for Captain And Tennille and The Carpenters had a Top 20 hit with Solitaire, as did Tony Christie with (Is This The Way To) Amarillo.
In later years Sedaka remained prolific, recording albums of classical music, children’s music and a collection of songs in Yiddish, until he retired from writing new music only in 2016.
Even then he couldn’t stop doing what he loved. At the age of 80 he was still performing, sharing performances from his home during the Covid pandemic and posting them on Tik Tok and Instagram – including a Valentine’s video of him playing his first hit, Stupid Cupid.