NEIL SEDAKA | LIVE REVIEW

St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Wed 20 Sept

Neil Sedaka is like the cuddly grandad of classic American rock and pop, and a sell-out audience turned out to see him play St David’s Hall on the last date of his tour. One of the legendary Brill Building’s most famous composers, Sedaka has been in pop music for 65 years. Through the decades he has written so many hits, and even though he never wrote songs for other artists – apart from helping to write the English lyrics to ABBA’s Ring Ring – some of his songs have been successful as covers.

Artists ranging from Peggy Lee to Queen have covered his songs – a video montage of these cover versions plays before Sedaka took to the stage. In recent years, he became known to a younger audience when his song Amarillo was made famous again by Peter Kay and Comic Relief; he also wrote Solitaire, which was a hit for The Carpenters, and the biggest hit of 1975 for Captain and Tenille, Love Will Keep Us Together.

As he said himself, he never gets tired of singing the old songs, and throughout the night all these songs were there. Among his best known hits were Oh Carol, Laughter In The Rain, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Calendar Girl and The Hungry Years. I would assume the rest of the audience were familiar with every song he sang, the majority of the crowd probably being twice my age.

In between the songs Sedaka is a genial, avuncular presence (I’m aware that I’m probably in the minority with this view, as I think I was among the youngest audience members) and listening to his between-song stories was like getting a history lesson on the golden era of American pop, from someone who was there on the front lines.

Even if a couple of time Sedaka’s voice cracked on higher notes – he is 78 and at the end of a tour – he was onstage for almost the entirety of two hours. Over that time, he provided a endearingly, entertaining journey through American rock’n’roll history and an impressively successful career.

words CHRIS WILLIAMS photos GARETH GRIFFITHS