From Amarillo to Stockport: 15 of Neil Sedaka’s greatest songs, and their extraordinary stories

From Amarillo to Stockport: 15 of Neil Sedaka’s greatest songs, and their extraordinary stories From being a writer for hire in the 1950s to his solo pop stardom and emphatic 1970s comeback, the late musician’s catalogue is stuffed with stunning, surprising songcraft News: Neil Sedaka, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do singer and pop song hitmaker, dies aged 86 Connie Francis – Stupid Cupid (1958) As a young jobbing songwriter charged with devising a hit for Connie Francis after the singer released a couple of flops, Neil Sedaka was unsure about Stupid Cupid: modest to a fault, he suggested that Francis, “a classy lady”, would be insulted by its daftness. Instead, she literally jumped up and down with excitement when she heard it. Understandably so: if Stupid Cupid is certainly silly – listen to the off-key guitar twangs – it’s irresistibly silly, a perfect encapsulation of a certain kind of 50s pop innocence, and Francis’s vocal completely sells it. Oh! Carol (1959) Sedaka got his breakthrough as a performer with 1958’s The Diary – inspired when Connie Francis refused to let him and songwriting partner Howard Greenfield scour her diary for inspiration. Oh! Carol, meanwhile, was a paean to Sedaka’s ex-girlfriend Carol Klein – the irrepressibility of the melody at odds with the misery in the lyrics (“I am but a fool!”). Klein was impressed enough to write an answer song, Oh! Neil, which she recorded under her new pen name: Carole King . One Way Ticket (To the Blues) (1959) Sedaka’s late 50s and early 60s hits are occasionally dismissed as the kind of poppy fluff that predominated in the charts between the waning of rock’n’roll and the rise of the Beatles. But that’s not strictly fair: despite the exuberance of the rhythm and for all the canny lyrical references to other rock’n’roll hits – Heartbreak Hotel, Lonesome Town – there’s an impressive minor-key darkness about One Way Ticket (To the Blues), amplified by the ghostly backing vocals. Calendar Girl (1960) On the other ha...