Singer- songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan told David Hennessy about his new album and 60 years in the business.
Gilbert O’Sullivan will later on this year release On The Record, his twenty-first studio album.
This year also marks 60 years in the business for the songwriter known for hits like Nothing Rhymed, Clair and Alone Again (Naturally) among many more.
He is currently touring the UK and Ireland in celebration.
Gilbert O’Sullivan was born in Waterford before his family moved to London and then Swindon when he was a child.
Gilbert O’Sullivan has earned three Grammy Award nominations, three Ivor Novello Awards, chart-topping albums and sold millions of records sold worldwide.
The album’s tracks includes Is That You? a duet with Andrea Corr of The Corrs.
Gilbert O’Sullivan took time to chat to the Irish World about the new album and tour.
How are you enjoying the tour so far?
“Well just three dates so far, plus rehearsals in Dublin for the last three days for our arena show.
“What we’re doing in Dublin is very different to what we’re doing on the road.
“Bill Shanley and myself are touring around the country up close and personal, intimate.
“It seems to work really well.
“People get to hear the lyrics which they used to complain about when we were with the band.
“People used to say, ‘We enjoyed the show but the band were so loud and we didn’t get to hear your lyrics’.
“So it’s kind of nice the way we work now because they get to hear everything clearly.”
This year marks 60 years in the industry for you. The new album On the Record is also album number 22, how do those things feel?
“Well I’m happy to be in a position where the songs I write are still, I believe, good and to make the record.
“I’m very happy with that situation so no complaints and I look forward to its release.
“On the three shows we’ve done so far, we’ve done four of the tracks from the new album and the reaction has been pretty positive so that’s nice.
“The good thing about releasing a record and then getting out to promote it by doing concerts is you get to meet the people who are interested in you and if they’ve got your album, they’ll tell you one way or the other if they like it or if they don’t.
“I like that approach.
“Talking to people like yourself is good but the interaction you have with an audience is pretty special.”
I know you pay little attention to numbers like 60 years in the business but can you believe that’s what you have under your belt now? I’m sure you couldn’t foresee it when you started..
“Everybody from the Beatles right through to the present day artists who will tell you you can’t.
“The Beatles thought that they’d last a few years.
“Ringo thought he’d open a hairdressing salon.
“Nobody could have predicted the way the business would turn out for our generation.
“But then when you look at how our generation came up through the 60s and the 70s and what you have today, when you have artists who attract a young audience where they’re selling out 50,000 people stadiums.
“For example we’re doing one show at the arena but Westlife are doing 11 so there is that distinction between what we’ve achieved and what the younger audiences are now achieving with acts that they like.
“It’s kind of interesting just to keep up with what’s going on.
“I enjoy that aspect of the business too.”
The focus track of the album is Growing Old Disgracefully, where did that song come from?
“As a songwriter you’re always picking up ideas, writing something up on the wall, maybe a potential title so it had been there on the wall for about a year: The idea for a song called Growing Old Disgracefully.
“With my generation being the way we are, it affects us because there is that element if the world seems to pass you by, you feel that you’re being sidelined so I think Growing Old Disgracefully is a good way of getting back at people who think that, ‘We’ve had enough of you, just leave it to the young’.”
Love seems to be a great theme of this record. It’s in a number of songs like She Never Ceases to Amaze Me, Is That You? and many more. Would you agree with that?
“I’m not really into self-analysis.
“The amount of time I spend writing this song is long, arduous but very satisfying.
“What I like about She Never Ceases To Amaze Me is it’s based on our own children growing up, when they were three, four years old, when they were doing things that children of that age do.
“The surprise element when they learn to walk the first time, the excitement of that.
“When they come off the pot and the excitement they have about that.
“Those things growing up, I liked that I was able to put them into a song so I think I’m really happy about that.
“But no, I don’t analyse.
“I just get on with it.
“It isn’t a question of saying, ‘Well you’ve done three love songs, now you must do something else’.
“It’s what comes out in the 13 songs we do.
“The producer sat down with me to listen to them the first time.
“Maybe I’m playing 17, maybe 18, all I’m happy with and he’ll pick the 12, 13 that he likes out of that 17 and I’m cool with that.”
Prior to listening I wondered if No Place Like Home could be about Waterford, Swindon or indeed Jersey where you live now. It is in fact about none of those places but family and a sense of belonging, isn’t it?
“The line goes ‘I’ve never been to Amsterdam or Rome’, I don’t mention Dublin in that but I’ve been to Amsterdam and Rome but it’s not you in that lyric, is it?
“It’s the people you are writing about.
“For example when I grew up in Swindon, you lived in a council house attached to five other houses, small three bedrooms, tiny little back garden.
“Your neighbours became your best friends and my mother and the mother of the boy next door who I played with became friends, the contact was there.
“So if you ran out of sugar, you’d tap the fireplace and next door would come in with a bowl.
“That was how things were done in those days.
“It’s not how things are done today.
“Today there’s an element of separation, wanting your own kind of privacy and stuff.
“I was able to write about that because that’s what happened so it’s good that you can include things that have happened in real life for you, good relations with neighbours and stuff.
“I think that’s that was very clear when I was growing up. Good times.”
You have been known about world current events in your music. I was wondering what the track See Us Gone was concerned with?
“See Us Gone talks about the end of the world.
“See Us Gone is about Putin and his like.
“With the push of a button, we’re all gone.
“I think the world is the closest it’s ever been to nuclear destruction.
“Once the button is pressed, we’re all dead so you can’t be unaware of that going on.
“That’s in the song See Us Gone.
“What happens if Putin or somebody of his ilk presses the button? We’re all gone. It’s a horrifying prospect.
“If somebody pushes an atomic weapon bomb, how do you retaliate? You bomb them.
“We’ll destroy each other.
“It’s a horrifying prospect.
“It’s the world we live in.”
The album includes Is That You? that sees you duet with Andrea Corr of The Corrs. What made you think to make it a duet? Did you think it needed a female voice or something extra?
“No, I don’t think like that.
“The last album we had two duets.
“We had Mick Hucknall from Simply Red and we had KT Tunstall and that worked out really well.
“This time we finished.
“We’re in the studio after mixing, listening and I’m talking with the producer Andy, and we’re thinking, ‘Is there a duet here? Do you think something on here would make a good duet?’
“And then a suggestion was made that ‘Andrea Corr of The Corrs is a really nice singer so why don’t you try that?’
“So we did.
“Andrea said, ‘Well, I need to hear it’.
“So we sent her the song.
“She loved the song and away we go.
“She’ll come on the show in Dublin and she’ll also come on the stage at the Palladium in London to sing it so that will be nice.”
As you say you have duetted with Mick Hucknall, KT Tunstall and now Andrea Corr on just two of your more recent albums but before that your only duet was Can’t Think Straight with Peggy Lee. Are duets something you have only seen the benefit of in more recent years or why the new approach?
“Well I’m not setting out to do it.
“You make the record and if there’s something on there that you think might interest somebody else, your record company like the idea of you doing a duet so from that point of view, I’m up for it.
“If there’s a song that works, why not?
“The KT Tunstall thing was a good rocky track.
“Let Bygones be Bygone with Mick Hucknall was a nice duet and the duet with Andrea, it’s like a folk song because I don’t play piano on the record.
“It’s one of the few tracks, if any, where I don’t actually play the piano.
“It’s just two acoustic guitars.
“That’s unusual for me.
“I enjoyed that.
“I like the idea of recording without playing the piano.
“Can’t Think Straight with Peggy Lee I didn’t play the piano but that’s the only one, I think.
“Other than that, I’ve played the piano on pretty much everything.”
Was it always going to be music for you?
“Well I was at art school for four years so the potential career in art or graphic design was probably what I was thinking of in terms of a job, but while I was at art school, I was in a band.
“We were getting better.
“I was starting to write songs: To come back from college, go in the garden shed and work on little ideas that I was writing so I was getting into that and by ‘67 in particular the band I was in, Rick’s Blues, with Rick Davis and myself, could have turned professional but the bass player and the guitarist were on apprenticeships so they didn’t want to risk leaving.
“Rick and I felt we could have a career in music.
“He needed to be in a band so he joined a band called the Lonely Ones, then a band called The Joint which ended up becoming Supertramp, and then I ended up becoming me coming up to London, breaking into the business, determined to take my musical ideas forward.”
Do you still enjoy playing classics like Nothing Rhymed, Clair and Alone Again (Naturally) as much as ever after all these years?
“I enjoy it.
“I would get into it.
“If the sound is good, I’m really happy and I think people seem to like it.
“They get a mix over two hours.
“You get to mix the best known songs, album tracks that people really love and plus an example of new material so the mix is real.
“Having said that, the difficulty of learning the lyrics is a real dilemma.
“I have nightmares trying to get to learn the lyrics.
“I have the lyrics to some of them (new songs) plastered on my keyboard.
“There’s a lot of words that I write so remembering them is not easy.
“We get there in the end anyway.
“With the new songs, I’m in good shape lyrically pretty much by the time we hit the road.”
Do you have a particular highlight of your career? What leaps out for you?
“Well I talk about that on stage actually.
“After the first couple of songs, I talk to the audience, say hello and I talk about a highlight.
“Last year on the tour I talked about my first time in a recording studio in London, the experience of that.
“Having previously done everything in a garden shed, here I am in a big CBS studio recording with musicians, so that was a huge highlight.
“I wasn’t mad about how it turned out but for two of my songs to be recorded in a big-time studio with a big-time producer, that was a highlight.
“The highlight now that I’m talking on the current tour is the first cover I ever had of my songs.
“The publishing company I was signed to, April Music, put your songs out as a songwriter.
“Apart from you wanting to record them, they’re out there looking for covers and up came this cover of one of my songs by Tom Rush, an American singer in the James Taylor mode, very popular in America and he recorded my song Came to See Me Yesterday in the Merry Month Of.
“I do a little touch of that on the current tour to let people know what kind of highlights I had and what it was.”
What are you most of proud of?
“Last week was the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and I wrote a song on an aspect of 9/11 which hadn’t really been written about too much at the time.
“Everybody talked about the planes hitting the buildings, the destruction that it caused.
“I picked up on an aspect where people on an aeroplane, knowing they were going to die, were just using their mobile phones to ring their loved ones just to say ‘I love you’.
“So the song I wrote was called All They Wanted to Say.
“I’ve done the song in America and it really goes down well but we did it last week on the day after the anniversary.
“I’m really proud of that because it was never a hit but it’s a song that stood the test of time.
“It deals with something which will always be there and the reaction I get to singing it is enough for me to believe it was a success.
“That’s pretty special.
“That’s a rare thing.”
Something doesn’t have to be a ‘hit’ to be a success, does it?
“No, absolutely not.
“Success should be for you when you’re finished after the work you put into it, to write what you think is a good song.
“Nobody can take that away from you.
“That moment has nothing to do with outside success, not that you don’t want that but it’s just that nice feeling.”
You mentioned having the idea for a song called Growing Old Disgracefully for some time, does the songwriting and different ideas often stick around?
“I tend to keep ideas.
“If you write a good melody, it never dates.
“A good melody will survive any length of time but if you finish a lyric and you don’t use it, you’re caught in what we’ve discussed earlier about writing about something going on in the world and it’s over.
“(I had a song that started) ‘There are Bosnians on patrol in the Belfast Street’.
“That’s the line we took out.
“That goes back to the Northern Ireland scenario and issues going on in Bosnia so we took that out and replaced it with another line that I had pre-recorded.
“That’s an example of where you finish something years ago lyrically and you can end up not being able to use it because it has no relevance.”
Did you ever think of writing a book to tell your story?
“No, I think me and Jeff Lynne are the only two that are in the business that have never written a book.
“He hasn’t done it, I haven’t done it but everybody else has, I think.
“I’ve no interest in that but there are people that would like me to do it.
“But I can’t get my head around that at this stage but one day maybe I’d like to be able to.
“The only good thing about being able to write a book is that all the things that are not true about my court cases and whatever can be dumped and the truth can be said, so that’s a good aspect of what could happen if I were to do it.
“We’ll see.”
Gilbert O’Sullivan’s album On The Record is out on November 6, 2026 via BMG. He tours the UK and Ireland through to early November; www.gilbertosullivan.co.uk for all tour dates
