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Connie Francis – Stupid Cupid (1958)
As a young jobbing songwriter charged with devising a hit for Connie Francis after the singer released a couple of flops, Neil Sedaka was unsure about Stupid Cupid: modest to a fault, he suggested that Francis, “a classy lady”, would be insulted by its daftness. Instead, she literally jumped up and down with excitement when she heard it. Understandably so: if Stupid Cupid is certainly silly – listen to the off-key guitar twangs – it’s irresistibly silly, a perfect encapsulation of a certain kind of 50s pop innocence, and Francis’s vocal completely sells it.
Oh! Carol (1959)
Sedaka got his breakthrough as a performer with 1958’s The Diary – inspired when Connie Francis refused to let him and songwriting partner Howard Greenfield scour her diary for inspiration. Oh! Carol, meanwhile, was a paean to Sedaka’s ex-girlfriend Carol Klein – the irrepressibility of the melody at odds with the misery in the lyrics (“I am but a fool!”). Klein was impressed enough to write an answer song, Oh! Neil, which she recorded under her new pen name: Carole King.
One Way Ticket (To the Blues) (1959)
Sedaka’s late 50s and early 60s hits are occasionally dismissed as the kind of poppy fluff that predominated in the charts between the waning of rock’n’roll and the rise of the Beatles. But that’s not strictly fair: despite the exuberance of the rhythm and for all the canny lyrical references to other rock’n’roll hits – Heartbreak Hotel, Lonesome Town – there’s an impressive minor-key darkness about One Way Ticket (To the Blues), amplified by the ghostly backing vocals.
Calendar Girl (1960)
On the other hand, Sedaka and Greenfield were more than capable of turning out fluffy teen-pop novelties when required, as evidenced by Calendar Girl, a song that somehow makes an adolescent boy ogling a pin-up sound curiously wholesome: “maybe if I ask your dad and mom, they’d let me take you to the junior prom”. One suspects the song’s backing-vocals-counting-down-the-months structure pricked the interest of a young Brian Wilson: listen to it next to the Beach Boys’ 1965 single When I Grow Up (To Be a Man) and you can spot its influence.
Connie Francis – Where the Boys Are (1961)
The diametric opposite of Stupid Cupid, the theme song for Francis’s motion picture debut – a teen comedy about pre-marital sex, a surprisingly racy subject for 1961 – had inauspicious beginnings. It was written to order, in a hurry, with Greenfield protesting the title was stupid: both he and Sedaka “hated” the end result. That seems a baffling judgment of a classy ballad filled with suitably cinematic strings and a powerful sense of yearning. It subsequently became Francis’s signature song.
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do (1962)
That Sedaka’s first US No 1 was a cut above standard early 60s pop fare – it was certainly more melodically sophisticated – was underlined when the singer returned to it in the mid-70s, dispensing with its doo-wop-inspired hookline and performing it as a faintly jazz-influenced piano ballad. It sounded less like a relic of a lost pop era than an entry in the Great American Songbook.
The Cyrkle – We Had a Good Thing Goin’ (1967)
The Beatles’ arrival in America was bad news for Sedaka, whose style was rendered passé overnight: “not good” was his blunt assessment of their effect on his career. He struggled for the rest of the 60s, although the Beach Boys redux of 1964’s Sunny is worth a spin. Meanwhile, We Had a Good Thing Goin’ – a minor hit for the Brian Epstein-managed Cyrkle – proved he could move with the times: entirely delightful sunshine pop, decorated with a weird pitch-shifting brass/woodwind effect that suggested someone had been listening to the trumpet solo on Penny Lane.
Patti Drew – Workin’ On a Groovy Thing (1968)
Sedaka’s career had slumped to the degree that his own version of Workin’ On a Groovy Thing was only released in Australia – he no longer had a US record deal. But the song itself was great, and furthermore had legs: the Fifth Dimenson had a 1969 pop hit with a luscious version in gently psychedelic easy listening style, but Patti Drew’s earlier, less successful cover is the pick, blending supremely classy orchestration with soul grit.
Superbird (1971)
Having spotted the way his former girlfriend Carole King had successfully transitioned from Brill Building writer for hire to contemporary singer-songwriter with the release of 1971’s Tapestry, Sedaka thought he might be able to follow suit. He was wrong, although the resulting album Emergence was both one of his best and his personal favourite. The opening I’m A Song, Sing Me is an affecting cri de coeur from the commercial doldrums, but the killer track is the lavishly arranged Superbird, with its spectacular shifts in mood and tempo from sorrowful reflection to euphoria.
Tony Christie – (Is This The Way To) Amarillo? (1971)
(Is This The Way To) Amarillo? has a peculiar story: it started life as a country-and-western-influenced track, was recorded by Sheffield’s Tony Christie in a style that most resembled the Mitteleuropean brand of oompah pop known as schlager and went to No 1 in Germany, was reclaimed by Sedaka in the mid-70s using an arrangement audibly influenced by reggae, then unexpectedly became completely ubiquitous in 21st-century Britain after being reissued as a charity single with a video starring comedian Peter Kay. “I guess … I have to play … The Song?” offers Sedaka on his 2012 live album recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, sounding utterly bemused at the latter turn of events.
Solitaire (1972)
The saga of Neil Sedaka’s 70s comeback is deeply unlikely: touring the clubs of northern England, he discovered Strawberry Studios in Stockport, recently established by four local musicians who were knocking out bubblegum pop songs for the US production company Super K. The ensuing sessions were to prove pivotal for all parties: Sedaka turned up with an exceptionally strong set of songs, including the disconsolate ballad Solitaire, and the musicians were sufficiently inspired by the success of the ensuing album to strike out on their own under the name 10cc. Solitaire went on to become an easy listening standard, although it’s more emotionally fraught than that tag suggests: the best version might be the Carpenters’ 1975 hit, featuring a typically poised-but-heartbreaking vocal by Karen Carpenter.
Love Will Keep Us Together (1973)
Buoyed by the success of the Solitaire album, Sedaka returned to Stockport and the nascent 10cc the following year and recorded The Tra-La Days Are Over. This time, the big hitter was the fabulously euphoric Love Will Keep Us Together, blessed with a spiralling chorus and a piano hook he freely admitted he’d pinched from the Beach Boys’ Do It Again. Captain and Tennille’s 1975 cover is a masterpiece of guilty pleasure pop, and comes complete with a nod to its composer – “Sedaka’s back!” – in the fade. It improbably ended up influencing some other customers of Strawberry Studios – according to drummer Stephen Morris, Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart was ironically titled in response to it.
Laughter in the Rain (1974)
By the mid-70s, Sedaka was on a roll once more: signed to Elton John’s label Rocket, turning out a succession of hits. You can hear the regained confidence in the gently breezy Laughter in the Rain, a huge transatlantic hit – it was the eighth biggest selling single of 1975 in America – and an absolute masterclass in seemingly effortless melodicism. Every last inch of the song is packed out with hooks. Scoff at it as rounded-edged and parent-friendly if you want: this is an awesome example of songwriting craft.
The Immigrant (1974)
Whatever else he may have been, Neil Sedaka was not noted as a writer of protest songs. The Immigrant, from the Laughter in the Rain album, is the exception that proves the rule. Apparently inspired by John Lennon’s contemporary struggles with US immigration, lyricist Phil Cody considered his parents’ own arrival in the US from Sicily, and Sedaka’s from Russia and Poland, bemoaning the passing of “a time when strangers were welcome here … they’ve closed the door”. Sedaka responded with a suitably yearning, wistful melody.
Bad Blood (1975)
Neil Sedaka carried on making albums well into the 2010s – turning out Christmas records, children’s albums and a collection of songs in Yiddish – but let’s leave him in his mid-70s pomp. He’d claimed Laughter in the Rain was inspired by a “drop dead chord” deployed by Elton John on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: on the surprisingly funky electric piano-driven Bad Blood his influence was even more pronounced, and not merely because he appears on backing vocals.
