Tom Dunne: The late great Neil Sedaka felt like part of the family
Neil Sedaka passed away recently at the age of 86.
There were no video cameras in our house when I was growing up. I thank God every day for that mercy. There are no touching home movies that we watch as we drink eggnog at Christmas. No flickering black and white images to bring a tear to various glass eyes.
Had my dad been a keen amateur filmmaker the main Dunne Family film would just show an armchair. From behind it though you’d discern a child’s voice rising to sing a song called No prizes for guessing which child. Oh, the mortification.
Its writer, Neil Sedaka, passed away last week. I had resolved to stop writing obits. “Your show could be one long music obituary,” a wag said recently. They aren’t far wrong, though. The stars are going out. So, I stopped, but there is no ignoring Neil.
One of the most striking things about him is his age. He was only 18 months older that John Lennon. It might as well have been 18 years. The Beatles were the sound of youth culture, and he was the old guard, part of a “Bobby Sox” world that was brushed away on their arrival.
His family were Turkish/Jewish stock on one side and Russian / Polish on the other. With his dad, a New York Taxi driver, you’d have expected they’d have given short shrift to his idea of making music his livelihood. But already practising five hours a day by the age of eight he was determined that music would be his life. And it was.
He claimed, as recently as 2016 that he was writing songs at the age of two. This may or may not be true, but he certainly was by the time he was 13, with school friend Howard Greenwood, and was signed to a deal, unsuccessful at it turned out, by 16.
After the group he attended Juilliard on a scholarship, one of the most prestigious performing arts schools in the world. At 19 he and Greenwood pitched to Connie Francis. It was his first Top 20 hit.
As an example of the songwriting craft, it is immense. It starts with the chorus, as Walt Whitman advised, and then repeats it. But it doesn’t leave it there. The hook is then passed to the backing vocal. There is almost never a time when you aren’t hearing it. No one ever asked, “what is that song called?”
It was a formula he would repeat in his late 50’s early 60’s heyday. and – a song he wrote for Carol King- all start with the chorus. He didn’t see the point in changing a winning formula.
Maybe he should have. In 1962, The Beatles’ a song that also started with the chorus, began the process that would take Sedaka and his ilk clean out of the water. It was a particularly brutal changing of the guard, and one that he, still only 23 must have found incredibly galling.
He made his way back into the music world in the most unlikely of circumstances. Touring the UK in 1971 he discovered a studio in Stockport called Strawberry Studios. He resolved to record there with the session musicians who owned it. The album became the session heads became 10CC.
That success got him signed to Elton John’s Rocket Records. and soon followed. It was a more grown-up Sedaka. When Captain and Tennile took the latter song to the top of the US charts in 1975 they adlibbed “Sedaka is back” on the fade out. And he was.
He became so successful at that point that years later he found himself as a guest on one of my very earliest radio shows. I told him the armchair story. He was delighted that, apart from world fame, immense wealth and incredible talent, he was also a part of Dunne family folklore. We were delighted to have you too, Neil.
It is one of the great pieces of music trivia that the studio - Strawberry Studios in Stockport - in which he recorded one of his great songs would seven years later gave us one of our generation’s great songs. Yes, seven years after he recorded Joy Division, in the same room, recorded
Coincidence? I really hope not. Travel on old friend.
