Suddenly, Something Rhymed Source: Jackie Writer: Unknown Date: 1973 Gilbert O'Sullivan is sitting in his kitchen, walls covered in newspaper clippings, letters and phone numbers, talking to me about his life and the hard struggle he had to become a star. Those were the days when record companies used to sign up Gilbert and tell him to start writing like everybody else. "Mind you," he says with a touch of humour coming to his pale face, "I used to be very good at getting out of contracts with those record companies.  I'd say 'can I see so and so,' and then I used to go and sit in his office waiting for him day after day knowing he didn't want to see me." "Then when he eventually did see me I'd tell him some tearful story about making a mess of my life and always end 'please let me out of the contract.'  They always did, but of course in fact they could have kept me under contract for years." In the end Gilbert got fed up with record companies messing his life about and not being able to see they had an original writer on their hands, so he sat down at home in his usual methodical way and made a list of possible people who could become his manager. The first person to get a letter from him was Gordon Mills, who manages Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck  - you might as well start at the top!  Gilbert sent him some tapes of songs he'd composed and also enclosed some photographs of himself in a Charlie Chaplin jacket, because that was the way he saw his image in those days.  That was Gilbert's biggest break - because Gordon immediately liked what he heard.  And it was this combination of Gordon's management and Gilbert's talent that made Gilbert what he is today. "He liked the songs but wasn't impressed by the image," recalls Gilbert.  "I believe he was put off by the photographs.  But for the next year I used to go down to his house at weekends and play him my new songs, just to show him I was prolific." "It was a good idea, he's very shrewd, because he thought I might just have the songs I'd sent him and that was all.  Quite a few people can write a handful of tunes and then never carry on from there, so all this time he was testing me out to see if I could keep coming up new stuff, and I did." When we spoke he'd just broken off from a songwriting session, so it's obvious that he's still prolific to this day, as the table was scattered with pieces of paper with lyrics scrawled across them.. Gordon Mills made some trial recordings of Gilbert singing some of his own songs and meanwhile bought him the cottage in which he's at present living. "It was great because I could write songs without bothering the neighbours.  Before, I'd been living and working in a flat in Bayswater and you couldn't go on playing the piano too long at night, otherwise people would bang on the walls and ceiling! So Gilbert settled down in his cottage near Weybridge station, a quiet backwater with only the occasional passing car and the only sound being the singing of birds in the morning and the afternoon.  It was the life he'd been longing for because he always knew that his songs would win through in the end, and he wasn't interested in the glamour side of the pop music business.  He didn't mind going out for the occasional meal, but basically he's a home loving person and he preferred to stay at home and write.  The result was an enormous amount of songs. "Mind you, I've kept every song I've ever written - even from the days when I was at art college in Swindon.  I've got lyrics dating back to 1963.  In those days I didn't have a tape recorder, so I wrote down the notes of the melody.  Usually melodies are instantaneous, but lyrics never come that easy really." But it's probably the lyrics, more than anything else, that matters when you listen to a Gilbert O'Sullivan song, because they are highlighted by his plaintive, wistful voice.  They're a true reflection of the shy, retiring Gilbert. When you meet him, that's the thing you notice first, how quiet and modest his is.  Very unlike many pop stars, he's settled for the quiet life, because it's only in perfect quiet, sitting either at his kitchen table or at a piano, that he can really work.  And it's the piano that's brings the only bit of superstition into Gilbert's life. "Every time I have a new piano I must create a new song on it.  For example because I wrote 'Nothing Rhymed' in Bayswater I kept the piano I had there just out of sentiment.  I bought it originally for £10 at Barnes, it's just a very anonymous upright.  It doesn't work now, but it's nice to keep. "It served me well, that piano.  I remember that in about 1967-8 I was asked to appear on John Peel's Top Gear radio show.  They provide a piano in the studio and were really amazed when I insisted on bringing my own piano from my Bayswater bed-sit.  We loaded into a Bedford van and drove round to the BBC. "I did two sessions and the people in the studio couldn't believe it when they saw my old upright piano.  But you see, all the pianos in the BBC studios are tuned to concert pitch, and all the music I'd been writing and composing on this particular piano was below concert pitch.  So I had to use my own. "I've had about five or six pianos over the years.  I usually but cheap ones and because they are cheap the strings tend to break - the hammers break as well because I've got a hard thump in my left hand." When Gilbert isn't composing, or doing the housework, or even doing his own laundry (which he still insists upon doing), he pops outside and digs his garden.  It's only a small one but he finds it a good way to relax and possibly think lines for new songs.  His cottage is surrounded by trees so there are plenty of leaves to get rid of in the Autumn, and in the Spring there are lots of bulbs peeping through the mossy turf around the cottage, as squirrels play on the lawn. And if Gilbert wants a walk then he strides the quarter of a mile long lane to a village shop by Weybridge Station, a tree-lined lane that is hardly ever disturbed by cars.  Success for Gilbert O'Sullivan means a peaceful existence. NEXT WEEK: GILBERT'S PRIVATE LIFE Thanks JB