Gilbert O’Sullivan: Out on His Own, BBC Four

While obviously not as seismic a Top of the Pops moment as Ziggy singing “Starman”, the almost contemporaneous appearance of the flat-capped Gilbert O’Sullivan hunched over his piano as if it were a dying coal fire certainly stuck in my memory as clearly as Bowie’s androgynous space-age carrot-top. Although the flat cap was quickly ditched in favour of casual knitwear and even a hairy chest phase (see pic below), today’s 64-year-old Mr O’Sullivan feels that his fate in the shape of his image was sealed all those decades ago, and he’s been fighting ever since to transcend it.

Although a reluctant documentary subject, having agreed to the project, O’Sullivan was determined to see it through as graciously as possible. But because there was no voiceover - so no one passing judgment on O’Sullivan but himself – the viewer was left feeling like an absent therapist reading between the generously spaced lines. For, like many creative souls, this accommodating if ill-at-ease musician oscillated between supreme self-confidence and the all-consuming addiction to the approval of others, and gave this away in every frame.

Whenever he said he didn’t care what the critics thought, it was clear he cared a great deal. And whenever he alluded to the successful careers of contemporaries such as Elton John and Billy Joel, he inadvertently gave the impression that he’d give his custom-made concert grand to have the respect and continued success of those two parallel piano men. At one point he breezily insisted that decades of media neglect didn’t matter when you’ve got a small but dedicated fan base, yet it was perfectly apparent, as he rifled through old press cuttings, that it hurt like hell. But who can blame him for feeling so cheated?

Back in the early 1970s I didn’t own a single Gilbert O’Sullivan record. This was probably because the teen tribe I belonged to would have boiled me alive in Clearasil for such a crime against rock. And yet every word of “Alone Again (Naturally)”, “Claire” and “Get Down” must have seeped in somehow, as today I can sing these songs word-for-poignant-word. These were – these are - truly great pop songs with bittersweet melodies the postman could get his pursed lips around.

So what went wrong? Well, essentially a protracted law suit with manager Gordon Mills. Although the songwriter eventually won the case, he claimed that this victory forever soured his relationship with the music industry. So today O’Sullivan continues to tour internationally, work like a truly dedicated craftsman on new material, and forlornly wonder how things might have turned out if Mojo and Q (credible music publications, as he sees them) had recognised that his music was more than just MOR fodder.

The film crew followed O’Sullivan to Nashville for a recording session, and we got to hear a new song about the victims of 9/11. It was at this point that it became clear that the people O’Sullivan half-jokingly refers to as his “enemies” might not be his only problem. Lyrically “All They Wanted to Say” was about the fact that people making cell phone calls from the planes and the twin towers all just wanted to say “I love you”. But instead of setting such potentially moving lyrics to an elegiac minor-key melody rich with nuance, longing or foreboding, the tune that issued from the studio speakers was little more than a jaunty retread of “Claire”. The disjuncture was jarring to say the least.

By the end of this documentary, you couldn’t help but feel for this intriguing character and the fire that still burns within him to once again be the biggest selling solo artist in the world. Most touchingly, perhaps, was the fact that his greatest desire is to have another Number One single, but without anyone knowing he wrote it. So why doesn’t he go the Elton or Randy Newman route and write for Disney or Pixar? Perhaps the idea of writing bespoke tunes for CGI animals is an insult to his artistic credibility.

Or maybe a musical based around his greatest hits? Boy grows up happy but poor in northern town, falls in love, is jilted, meets new love, etc. It’d be huge. If you need a co-writer, Gilbert, I’d be happy to be as critically panned as Ben Elton for the kind of money it would generate. But perhaps because O’Sullivan had such a tight control over the content of this film, such questions didn’t get asked. Anyway, I sincerely wish the old trouper the best of luck with getting his audience back up from tens of thousands to hundreds, if not thousands of thousands. All together now: "Claire, the moment I met you I swear…"

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• Watch Gilbert O'Sullivan - Out on His Own on BBC iPlayer