March 5, 2009. Copyright 2009, Graphic News. All rights reserved

American singer-songwriter Neil Sedaka, as popular as ever at 70
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, March 5, Graphic News:  Almost everyone over a certain age can hum a Neil Sedaka tune. Whether it's an early, uptempo number from the 1960s, like "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen", or "Oh, Carol" -- addressed to his old flame and fellow songwriter, Carole King -- or a classic 70s ballad such as "Laughter in the Rain", Sedaka's own hit singles tell only half the story. Some of the best-known pop songs of the last 50 years have come from his pen and have given artists, from Connie Francis to The Carpenters, tracks forever associated with their own career highs -- "Stupid Cupid" in Francis' case and the haunting "Solitaire" in Karen Carpenter's. Elton John has acknowledged his influence -- he briefly signed Sedaka to his own, fledgling Rocket Records in 1974, while the grammy award winning, "Love Will Keep Us Together", one of Sedaka's biggest hits, brought huge success for the Captain and Tennille, in 1975.
 
Many of the winners were co-written with his friend from teenage years, Howard Greenfield, a neighbour's son back in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where Sedaka, the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Turkey, was born in 1939. His father, Mac, was a taxi driver, who worked long shifts to fund Sedaka's first piano lessons, before the boy's natural gift won him a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School of Music. His mother, Eleanor, went out to work to earn the money for a second-hand piano. By the time he was 16, Sedaka was described by the piano maestro Artur Rubenstein as one of the finest young pianists in New York.
 
A classical career might have followed, had this not been the 1950s and the beginning of Rock 'n' Roll. Sedaka was already writing songs for a high school band he'd formed, later called The Tokens. He had met Greenfield -- three years his senior and the "poet" of their partnership -- and, by the end of the decade, was turning out hits every week at the Brill Building, a 1930s office block north of Times Square, rented by the leading music publishers of the day. Songwriters Hal David and Burt Bacharach, along with Neil Diamond and Paul Simon, were among those who, with Sedaka and Greenfield, became part of the "Brill Building" sound.
 
Married since 1962 to Leba, Sedaka made a record with their daughter, Dara, in 1980 -- "Should've Never Let You Go" -- while their son, Marc, is a screenwriter in Los Angeles. The Sedakas became grandparents in 2003 when Marc and his wife, Samantha, had twin girls via a surrogate mother. A grandson, Michael, followed in 2005, the surprise result of a natural conception. In the same year, 37 years after he'd written the hit for Tony Christie, Sedaka's song "(Is This The Way To) Amarillo" was reprised by British comedian Peter Kay and became that year's top-selling single. Sedaka has this year released a children's album, "Waking Up Is Hard To Do", on which his granddaughters perform backing vocals. He relives his own childhood on regular return trips to Coney Island, where he claims his favourite ride is still a wooden rollercoaster known as the Cyclone.
/ENDS