Singer and songwriter of such pop canon hits as Oh! Carol, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do and (Is This the Way to) Amarillo
“Prolific” hardly does justice to Neil Sedaka’s songwriting output, which ran to more than 1,000 compositions over seven decades.
If he had been willing to stay behind the scenes, turning out tunes for other singers, he would have still merited a place in pop history thanks to the number of those songs that became part of the pop canon, including Where the Boys Are, Love Will Keep Us Together and (Is This the Way to) Amarillo. However, Sedaka, who has died aged 86, had a constitutional need to see his own name in lights.
As a star in his own right, he contributed another half-dozen significant tunes to America’s pop songbook, the best known being Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Bad Blood and Laughter in the Rain. Never hip, and overlooked by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – which greatly rankled; he felt he deserved to be inducted – he was nonetheless a first-class song-and-piano man, surpassed by few of his generation.
The younger of Eleanor (nee Appel) and Mac Sedaka’s two children, he was born in Brighton Beach, the working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood in New York that also produced his contemporary Neil Diamond. (Carol Klein, later known as Carole King, his friend and subject of his early hit Oh! Carol, grew up in nearby Gravesend.) Mac, a Lebanese Jew, drove a taxi and Eleanor, an Ashkenazi of Russian/Polish descent, looked after their small apartment, which they shared with Mac’s parents and five sisters.
