Gilbert O’Sullivan: “The record companies didn't like how I looked – but they liked the songs"

For Gilbert O’Sullivan, it always begins at the piano.

“I tried guitar, but I’m left-handed,” the Waterford-born, Swindon-raised singer-songwriter tells me.  “When I was young – 15 or 16 years old – my mother bought me a guitar, and I went for lessons. But she said, ‘You have to play it the way right-handed people play.’ And so I said, ‘Fuck it.’ I moved to drums then. And then I moved to piano.”

It was a move, of course, that would have extraordinary ramifications – leading to a six-week run at No.1 in the US, three Ivor Novello Awards, three Grammy nominations, landmark legal victories, a surreal photoshoot with Muhammad Ali, a song covered (or rather dramatically reassembled) by Nina Simone, and adulation from the likes of CMAT, Paul Weller and Morrissey.

Gilbert O'Sullivan and Muhammad Ali in 1973 – in a promo shoot for O'Sullivan's I'm a Writer, Not a Fighter album

At the time of our conversation, he’s gearing up not only for a sold-out show in the 3Arena – as part of his 60 Years of Music Tour – but also for the release of his 21st studio album, On The Record. Now approaching his 80th birthday – and having penned some of the most beloved songs of the late 20th century, including ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’, ‘Nothing Rhymed’, and ‘Clair’ – the writing, he tells me, still comes as naturally as ever.

“There’s no writer’s block or anything – I’ve never suffered from that,” he says. “I’m always capable, if I’m in a writing mode, to come up with something. I never feel bored sitting at the piano. And if I’m practising, it’s good for my fingers!”

From happy memories of his daughters growing up (‘She Never Ceases To Amaze Me’) to cheeky reflections on ageing (‘Growing Old Disgracefully’), O’Sullivan clearly isn’t short of inspiration at this stage in his life. But sitting down in a Dublin hotel room – with a 24-hour news channel flashing images of international conflicts in the background – he tells me he does “tend to pick up on difficult subjects too.”

“We have a song called ‘See Us Gone’ that’s almost like the end of the world – the push of a button, and Putin…” he reflects. “Strangely enough, I sing about how the warning signs are there – leaders getting tougher, and all it requires is one of them to do it. And we’re in that kind of scenario now.

“Or even watching the students in France,” he continues, nodding at the TV. “That’s horrendous – when you see the state of some of the schools. And only a week before, the Pope was there, and it was unbelievable. I haven’t seen so many people for a pontiff like that. The contrast between then and now is massive.”

At the same time, he’s avoided getting too directly political in his work.

“I take an interest, politically,” he says. “In the UK, I was always a Labour Party supporter – as opposed to a conservative working class. But my life, from once the success was achieved, was really just concentrating on the work that I was doing, and the writing. The writing was always the key to everything I did. I didn’t let anything interfere with that.”

Although he claims he’s not one to “look back too much”, he still can recall the excitement of stepping into a proper recording studio for the first time, back in 1967.

“That was a thrill, to be with a big-time producer [Mike Smith], and these top musicians,” O’Sullivan notes. “Prior to that, all my work and writing was done in a garden shed. So it was a big upward move.

“What’s great about now, with the internet, is that you or I could pick up a guitar or a piano, play a song you’ve written, film it and put it online,” he continues. “People are always searching online for new acts. But that’s something we never had in the ‘60s – you had to already be way up the ladder for a record company to be interested in you. It was tough.

“But it’s interesting now, what the internet allows writers to do. I think it’s a good thing!”

O’Sullivan is no stranger to the more difficult aspects of the music industry. Although he found huge success on both sides of the Atlantic in the early ‘70s, his momentum was stalled by a bitter legal battle against his manager, Gordon Mills, which wasn’t resolved – in O’Sullivan’s favour – until 1982.

Later, in the ‘90s, he unintentionally altered hip-hop history, by taking the US rapper Biz Markie to court over the unauthorised sampling of his famously melancholic ballad ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’.

“He asked if he could use the track, and we said, ‘Let us hear it. If we like it, we’ll give you the usage,’” he recalls. “But I didn’t like it, because he’s a comic rapper – I didn’t know that beforehand.

“So we said, ‘No, you have to stop. You can’t put it out.’ But he went ahead and did it anyway. So we have to go to New York, and go to court. Where is he in court? He’s not even there!”

The judge ultimately ruled against the rapper – forever changing the practice of sampling in hip-hop, by ensuring that record companies had to clear samples with the original creators.

But there were other frustrations along the way for O’Sullivan – including what he describes now as “the image thing.”

“I created this image – Charlie Chaplin jacket, pudding basin haircut, cap and boots,” he says of his unique early look. “If you see pictures of me now from that period, from the neck up, I look the hippest thing going – because everybody’s got their hair like that now! But in late ‘67, everybody had long hair, so I looked freakish.

“The record companies didn’t like how I looked, but they liked the songs,” he adds. “And I always felt the two were compatible, because the serious stuff was the writing. The image thing was just lightweight – it was just a bit of fun, to look different. We’re piano players, and we can’t really move around on stage. Like Elton – he dressed up in all kinds of weird things.

“So I was determined to use the image, because I liked it. It was just something I had to do – to dare to be different.”

But, as he acknowledges now, he “certainly lost sales” as a result.

“You could see why the record company said, ‘If you look more like a James Taylor, and grow your hair long, you’ll sell more records than you’re going to sell looking like this,’” he says. “And they were right, there’s no question. You wouldn’t want to be walking around the college campus with a Gilbert O’Sullivan album under your arm. It’s not the hippest thing to do.

“But I’ve certainly no regrets about doing it.”

A big inspiration behind O’Sullivan’s “dare to be different” outlook, he says, was The Beatles – with “the hair and the collarless jackets.”

“Nobody had ever looked like that,” he says. “The Beatles were the biggest influences for me, when I started writing in the garden shed. I was a few years younger than them – but you still identified with them, because they were young.

“And they wrote these great songs, but they couldn’t read music,” he continues. “Before that, you always felt you needed to be very professional to be a singer, or to be a writer. Very few writers before The Beatles were anything other than established writers like Burt Bacharach.”

Another major influence, “on the singing side as well as the writing side,” was Bob Dylan.

“The thing I identified most with Dylan was that he didn’t have a great voice, and I don’t have a great voice – but he had a distinctive voice, and I have a distinctive voice,” he reflects. “If you’ve got a distinctive voice, you don’t have to be perfect.”

He remains clued into the modern pop scene, too – telling me he listens to Ariana Grande and Olivia Rodrigo albums at home. There’s also a great deal of mutual respect between himself and CMAT, who once described him as the “best songwriter alive”.

In other news, @cmatbaby joined Gilbert O’Sullivan on stage at Glastonbury this evening!

@GilbertOSull_ #GilbertOSullivan #Glastonbury #Glasto #Glastonbury2023 https://t.co/KD8YRT7DuG

— Hot Press (@hotpress) June 25, 2023

“I knew she was a fan early on, so when we did the Glastonbury Acoustic Stage, we invited her to come on and sing ‘Nothing Rhymed’,” he says. “That was great. She’s a really good acoustic guitar player. I was really impressed by her – and now she’s taken off.

“On stage she’s jumping around, flying about, and people are applauding,” he continues. “But she doesn’t even need to – she’s a serious songwriter. And she should be charting. She’s really talented.”

Having lived in Waterford until he was seven, O’Sullivan has made no secret of his own Irish roots – declaring on ‘January Git’, from his 1971 debut album Himself: “Maybe it’s because I’m an Irishman, that I like Dublin best…”

“In my early days – ‘67 to ‘69 – I didn’t do anything in Ireland,” he recalls. “I would just go there on holiday, in my student days. I’d get the train over. Our next-door neighbour on Cork Road in Waterford, Peter Roche, drove, so we’d take trips to Killarney. I really liked that. But musically, I didn’t have anything going on there.

“But I’m proud of my roots – and when ‘Nothing Rhymed’ took off, I was desperate to get back,” he adds. “And I was proud of the reaction. When we did the first concert here, in the National Stadium, it was a bit crazy. It was an amazing for us – the whole family.”

Though, at one point, he claims he was selling “more records in Mozambique than in Ireland.”

“But it’s gone up a lot since then,” he laughs. “We overcame that!”

<br?Gilbert O'Sullivan at 3Arena, 2026. Copyright Zoltán Szabó/hotpress.com

Selling out the 3Arena, he says, was a particularly special achievement at this stage in his career.

“There were people who said, ‘Maybe your day has passed for doing an arena show’,” he reflects. “I said, ‘No. I don’t mind if it’s half empty – let’s do it.’ You can get kind of pigeonholed: ‘You have a great past – but the present is really all about younger people.’ So I felt very positive about doing it.”

As for retirement, or farewell tours, O’Sullivan feels that, as of right now, he’s happy in the position he’s in.

“I still have the enthusiasm for it, and the love of the craft,” he says. “I’m 80 in December – and who’d have thought that I’d still be singing at 70, let alone 80? But I’m not conscious of the time. I’m just conscious of what I’m actually doing.

“The record company, BMG, are solidly behind me,” he adds. “The difficulty would be if you were writing what you thought were good songs, but nobody wanted to put them out. So touch wood!”

• On The Record is out now