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The way to stardom
Conrad Astley7/ 4/2006
NEIL Sedaka has achieved much he can be proud of. A career
spanning over six decades, during which he wrote more than 1,000
songs and sold tens of millions of records, and a star on the
Hollywood Walk Of Fame, would definitely be high up on anyone's
list.
But when he appears at the Bridgewater Hall next week, many may
know him as just one thing - the man who wrote (Is This The Way To)
Amarillo.
The song you couldn't avoid hearing last year, no matter how much
you wanted to, originally brought fame to Yorkshire crooner Tony
Christie when he took it into the top 20 in 1971.
The song's resurgence, thanks to Bolton comic Peter Kay, meant its
re-release more than three decades later outsold the original -
becoming the biggest selling number one of 2005, and the
longest-running chart-topper in seven years. Well, it was for
charity.
Christie has even been putting in surprise appearances to duet with
Sedaka on the songwriter's current tour, used to promote his latest
album - The Show Must Go On: The Very Best Of Neil Sedaka - which
unsurprisingly features a recording of Amarillo.
But revivals and comebacks are something the songwriter has long
been used to.
Sedaka, the Brooklyn-born son of a Turkish Jewish father and
Ashkenazi Jewish mother, had his first taste of fame as a child
prodigy, playing classical piano on a radio station and studying at
New York's prestigious Juilliard performing arts school, before
being seduced by rock 'n' roll.
His high school band, The Tokens, brought him two minor hits
before, while still a teenager, he decided to concentrate on a solo
career.
Far greater things were yet to come, and when Sedaka was introduced
to his young neighbour Howard Greenfield - by the boy's mother -
she had little idea she was forming a songwriting partnership of
Lennon and McCartney proportions.
Sedaka later said they wrote a song a day, and while many never
made it further than the notebook, some did a lot better.
The pair sold over 25m records over four years in the late 50s and
early 60s, but the partnership would go on to last for
decades.
They became an integral part of the "Brill Building sound", signing
to Aldon Music and joining dozens of songwriters including Burt
Bacharach, Hal David, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, and John Denver
who would punch the clocks at Don Kirshner's now-legendary Broadway
hit factory.
But seeking fame as a performer in his own right, he recorded
chart toppers such as Next Door To An Angel, Breaking Up Is Hard To
Do, and Oh! Carol - written for his one time girlfriend Carole
King.
But a new generation of musicians suddenly made Sedaka's
honey-drenched sounds seem irrelevant.
Although he continued writing for performers such as Tom Jones, The
Fifth Dimension and The Monkees, it took years for the songwriter
to recover for the damage done to his career by British bands like
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
Bizarrely enough, his comeback started with the help of Abba.
Sedaka, who had tried to woo international audiences by recording
albums in Spanish, Italian, German, and Japanese, was asked to help
the Swedes write the English lyrics for Ring Ring, their 1973
Eurovision Song Contest entry.
It came third, but seemed to herald a new era for the
songwriter.
He was signed to his friend Elton John's Rocket record label, and
began releasing internationally successful albums.
Rolling Stone Magazine named him "a new phenomenon" and his songs
were performed by Elvis and Sinatra.
The hits kept on coming, and he was particularly successful when he
dueted with his daughter Dara on 1980's Should've Never Let You
Go.
His greatest hits album, Timeless - The Very Best Of Neil Sedaka,
sold an astonishing half-a-million copies after it was released in
the 90s, while Breaking Up Is Hard To Do was listed as one of the
50 most performed songs of the last century, and as if all that
wasn't enough, he was immortalised in wax by Madame Tussauds Las
Vegas.
He was even forgiven for one of his more recent projects -
Classically Sedaka, in which he put his own lyrics to the music of
Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.
Neil Sedaka plays the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester on
Tuesday.
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