LAST MONTH, ITV aired a repeat of its 2008 show An Audience With Neil Diamond. You know the format: some big star performs in front of a studio audience of fellow stars – it's a celebrity schmooze-fest.
In between songs, the star takes questions from the gathered celebs – usually gushing praise posing as questions: “Your music has touched so many hearts over the years – do you have a message for your millions of fans around the world?”
As I wait to talk to Neil Diamond, I vow to avoid falling into the gush-pit; this interview will be cutting, probing and unforgiving. I will take him to task for his crimes against rock 'n' roll, particularly Beautiful Noise, Forever in Blue Jeansand Song Sung Blue. I will admonish him for shamelessly pandering to the blue-rinse brigade; and I will rip through the sequined surface to expose the shallow entertainer within.
However, as soon as I hear that Brooklyn baritone, it hits home just who it is I'm speaking to. For the next 20 minutes or so, it's a gush-fest of biblical proportions. "Seventy? Why, you don't look a day over 50, sir!" " Sweet Caroline? Knocks Hey Judeinto a cocked hat!" " The Jazz Singer? A cruelly unacknowledged movie classic."
To give the devil his due, Diamond has just been inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, so I guess that means we can’t call him a middle-of-the-road artist anymore.
“Well, I feel rock ‘n’ roll,” he announces. “I look rock ‘n’ roll and I sound rock ‘n’ roll. So I guess I am rock ‘n’ roll.”
In his 50 years in showbusiness, Neil Diamond has achieved enough to deserve even the most grudging praise. He’s sold somewhere in the region of 125 million records – not all of them disposable middle-of-the-road guff either.
This year sees the release of The Bang Years, a collection of Diamond's earliest songs, recorded on his first label, Bang Records, which includes such burnished classics as Cherry Cherry, I'm A Believer, Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soonand his first-ever hit (and unofficial signature tune), A Solitary Man. OK, it's not quite Dylan's The Basement Tapes, but it does showcase the young Diamond's brooding, introspective style and his almost-unerring ear for a catchy tune.
It didn’t all happen overnight for the son of Russian and Polish immigrants, however. There was a short-lived deal with Columbia Records in the early 1960s which amounted to naught, after which he took a job as a songwriter-for-hire in the Brill Building, tailoring hits for Jay and the Americans and – most famously – the Monkees. And though his latterday songs may not have the same hit power of his heyday, he’s still able to knock a tune together, still able to walk onstage unaided, and still able to wrench a few raspy notes out of his larynx.
“My voice is better than ever,” he asserts. “It’s lonely out there when you open your mouth and nothing comes out.”
When he strolls out in front of the crowd at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday night, he’ll be reaping a whirlwind of love and loyalty that was sown when he was a music-obsessed teenager in Brooklyn in the early 1960s. Back then, his big ambition was to become a fencing champion, but when he heard the musical stylings of Les Paul and Chet Atkins, he swapped the sword for a guitar – and never looked back.
“I started writing songs when I was about 17 years old. My first influences were the guitar players, because I was taking guitar lessons when I was 16. Then, after a while, I started noticing the songwriters’ names underneath the songs. I wrote my first song to a girl I had a crush on . . . It was pretty terrible, but I kind of enjoyed it. I got hooked and I continued writing songs.”
The girl’s name was Jayne Posner, and Diamond found out quickly that the pen was indeed mightier than the sword – and particularly useful as a tool of seduction. “I got to kiss the girl. Matter of fact, I ended up marrying her and having two kids with her. It was a warning of the potential power of the song.”
Diamond grew up in a tightly-knit Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn. “Brooklyn is a little-bedroom community to New York City, and all the kids in Brooklyn were expected to take music lessons. That’s what all the kids in Brooklyn had in common. They could either sing or take music lessons.”
This might explain why Brooklyn is such a hotbed of alternative rock talent right now. But don’t bother talking to Diamond about Grizzly Bear, Bishop Allen or Dirty Projectors – he says he’s so busy writing, he’s got no room in his head for other people’s stuff.
“I don’t have time to listen to a lot of the modern groups. I’ve heard some things, and I think it’s interesting and I like the fact that there are new people coming up. But I try to stay away from too much listening of other people’s stuff, particularly when I’m writing, and it turns out that I’m pretty much writing all the time.”
He is, though, familiar with the work of his labelmates Kings of Leon, having bumped into the band at the Four Seasons hotel in Dublin the night before the Tennessee boys’ gig in Slane last month. If some reports are to be believed, Diamond and the Followills enjoyed a late-night session at the hotel. “There may have been a few lines of music exchanged,” says Diamond, coyly.
DIAMOND'S SONGS HAVE been covered by everyone from Elvis to Frank Sinatra, UB40 to Urge Overkill. You'd probably need a computer the size of a planet to calculate the royalties accruing from his best-known song, Sweet Caroline.
It's the law that Sweet Carolinemust be played at every Irish wedding – that alone would be enough to keep Diamond in plentiful supply of sequins.
“It’s one of the luckiest songs I’ve ever written. I wrote the song in half an hour way back in 1969, because I needed another song on my recording session. It became a number one record for me. And it’s been recorded by dozens of people over the years. The audiences seem to have adopted the song as their own. It’s the theme song for sports teams around the world, it’s sung at every wedding around the world. It’s an amazing story. I wish I could take credit for it, but all I did was write it, and teach the audience how to sing along.”
He's so well known for writing upbeat songs about girls and love unrequited, it's easy to forget that there's (don't laugh) an existential bent to Diamond's songwriting. Songs such as A Solitary Manand I Am. . . I Said tackle the loneliness of the long distance singer-songwriter, and news that Diamond spent a lot of time in therapy suggest his brooding persona is not just an act. For Diamond, twice-divorced, with four children and eight grandchildren, audience adulation is the constant that keeps loneliness at bay.
“It may be part of the person that I am, but I certainly don’t feel like that onstage. I’m surrounded by fans who know and love the music I’ve made, I have my 14-piece band and we’re putting it all together on one stage for one night. There’s no time for loneliness – it’s a time for celebration. I love what I do. There’s very little out there that excites me as much as the possibility of writing a really wonderful song, and then recording it, and then performing it for an audience that is open to my music. It’s the most exciting thing that I do, and I want to continue to do it forever.”
Neil Diamond plays the Aviva stadium on Saturday.
The Bang Years 1966-1968
is out now.
