Neil Sedaka, the singer-songwriter behind Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Oh! Carol, Calendar Girl and Bad Blood as well as many hits performed by other artists including Stupid Cupid and Love Will Keep Us Together, has died aged 86.
A representative confirmed his death to Variety on Friday, hours after he was reportedly taken to hospital in Los Angeles. No cause of death was given.
“Our family is devastated by the sudden passing of our beloved husband, father and grandfather, Neil Sedaka,” a statement from Sedaka’s family reads. “A true rock and roll legend, an inspiration to millions, but most importantly, at least to those of us who were lucky enough to know him, an incredible human being who will be deeply missed.”
Born in 1939, Sedaka was a child prodigy at the piano: he was nine when he got a scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York. “Music is so much a part of me: my parents told me that when I was an infant, I wouldn’t eat unless the radio was playing music,” he told the Guardian in 2012.
At first he studied to be a concert pianist, before realising his talent for singing and writing pop music. At 13, he befriended his 16-year-old neighbour, Howard Greenfield, and they began writing songs together, the start of a songwriting partnership that would last more than a decade. Sedaka was briefly invited to play for a place at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow in 1956, before being disinvited as “they had heard that my name was associated with writing American capitalistic rock’n’roll”.
Sedaka became a teen idol in the pre-rock’n’roll era of assembly-line pop songwriting, producing hits like 1959’s Oh! Carol, Calendar Girl and Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen: “When we ran out of lyrics we’d use a doo-bee-doo,” he once joked of this time. He was one of many musicians to go through the Brill Building, the Manhattan songwriting hub that also nurtured the early careers of Paul Simon, Burt Bacharach and Carole King – who Sedaka dated in high school.
Between 1959 and 1963, Sedaka sold more than 25m records, and was nominated for his first Grammy in 1962. But the arrival of the Beatles-led British invasion almost ended his career. “Between 1963 and 1975, I worked very little. The Beatles had come to New York and changed music – all the solo singers were out of work,” he once said.
Sedaka was a major influence on Elton John, to whose Rocket label he briefly signed in the 1970s. Aside from his own hits, Sedaka wrote many for other artists, including Connie Francis’s 1958 hit Stupid Cupid, and Captain and Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together. In 1973 he collaborated with Abba to write the English lyrics for their hit Ring Ring, and wrote songs for Rosemary Clooney, Patsy Cline, Engelbert Humperdinck, the Carpenters and Cher.
Sedaka maintained a six-decade career by touring and performing. Of fame, he told the Guardian in 2012: “You do have to give up your privacy. But the good thing is that you can get a table in a restaurant or a seat at the theatre.”
