It’s 50 years since Gilbert O’Sullivan found himself at the top of the Billboard chart with Alone Again Naturally (6 weeks). Neil Diamond said he wished he had written it and swiftly featured it in his live set, as have several more singers over the years, from Nina Simone to Pet Shop Boys and Elton John. Paul Weller, Squeeze and The Lemon Twigs – proudly count themselves as Gilbert fans. Other notable admirers include Tim Burgess and the late John Peel, who wrote, “if we've got to live by the charts alone, then let's have Gilbert O'Sullivan in them".
On his new album Driven we see it’s chemistry into which we’re parachuted as soon as the needle drops onto Driven. Gilbert explains his part on Love Casualty as “something akin to “a Keith Richards riff”– although other ears might hear something closer to JJ Cale in the interplay between O’Sullivan and Pat Murdoch’s supple guitar ornamentations. A similar synergy characterises Take Love which sees Gilbert and guest vocalist, KT Tunstall trading lines over a sizzlingly energetic R&B arrangement.
The sublimely soulful Hucknall timbre you can hear on Let Bygones Be Bygones, a song which offers a timely corrective to the increasingly polarised thinking that characterises discourse in a social media age. As with so many Gilbert O’Sullivan songs, stretching back to his very first hit Nothing Rhymed, it’s a gentle call to humanity that favours plaintive persuasion over preachiness – and on Driven, it’s by no means alone in doing that.
