Gilbert O'Sullivan: time for a reappraisal?

In 1973, Gilbert O'Sullivan was a piano-playing superstar on a par with Elton John. Today, he is maybe mentioned in the same breath as Clifford T Ward – which means he is barely thought of at all. What was Gilbert all about? Fey tunes, valium ballads? Wasn't his music a little like something Jerry from The Good Life would create if he recorded demos in his shed? Well, if Jerry also had a reputation as a bitter, reclusive curmudgeon …

That was what I thought, anyway. So I was knocked sideways when I heard his 1971 single We Will a few years ago, when my life was in a bit of a state. Here was a song of resigned melancholy about how to get through a personal crisis by appreciating things such as kicking a ball, visiting distant relatives, eating corn flakes. It was extraordinary, just what I needed, and I listened to it before I went to bed every night. Feeling like I owed him something, I went to see O'Sullivan at Croydon's Fairfield Hall earlier this year and thought: no wonder he's bitter. Smart kitchen-sink lyrics, super melodic songs, his new stuff just as good as his old; if he'd never had a hit, or worn an oversize flat cap, he'd be hailed as our own Randy Newman – one who references tea (frequently) and frozen peas (occasionally). At his best, he is the missing link between the Kinks and Squeeze.

Morrissey has been playing the gently apocalyptic Nothing Rhymed at his shows recently – not too surprising, as they're the only two songwriters who'd bear comparison with Alan Bennett. Morrissey remembers O'Sullivan. How did the rest of us forget?

The strangest thing about his disappearance from pop is that he was once so popular. When I was a kid, Gilbert and Elton seemed to be slugging it out for a good two years as the most famous singer-songwriters in the UK. And it wasn't as if his success was entirely local – Alone Again (Naturally) was among the 20 bestselling records of the 70s in America, spending six weeks at No 1. Quite impressive for a song about bereavement and suicide.

Things started going slightly awry with the funky – there's no other word for it, apart from maybe "lustful" – Ooh Baby, the follow-up to 1973 UK No 1 Get Down. Scraping into the top 20, it alienated fans who had pushed Back to Front to the top of the album chart (opening line of the first track: "I hope you'll stay and have a cup of tea"). Gilbert was only following a funk-flecked trend – see also Marc Bolan's Teenage Dream, Elton's Bennie and the Jets – but he only scored one more top 10 hit. Another, maybe more obvious, reason for his decline is that he didn't make an album between 1974's Stranger in My Own Back Yard and 1977's Southpaw, by which time the outlook was bleaker for pianists with curly mops. His songs, admittedly, also became patchier: for every winking, disco-pop number such as The Best Fun I Ever Had (for "fun" read "fuck") there was a limply questioning love song such as What's in a Kiss? (answer: er, spit?)

Crucially, there were lengthy legal battles with his manager Gordon Mills, which stopped him recording and no doubt will be raked over in the show Gilbert O'Sullivan: Out on His Own, which airs on BBC4 on Friday. After this career-trashing era, he started to become more familiar with lawyers' offices than recording studios: the first hip-hop court case was O'Sullivan v Biz Markie, who sampled Alone Again (Naturally). Says Gilbert: "We discovered that he [Biz] was a comic, a comic rapper … I'll go to my grave in defending the song to make sure it is never used in the comic scenario which is offensive to those people who bought it for the right reasons." You could see his point. The end result was that he won 100% of the royalties and made sampling extremely expensive in the early-90s. Biz Markie's lesson was a lesson for us all – don't disrespect Gilbert O.