The rock star from the Rock
LIKE everyone I have a novel inside me. The problem is finding exactly where I’ve been keeping it all these years. But wouldn’t it be even better to look back on your life and know that you’d written a great song? The sort of song that people are so familiar with that it seems as though it just appeared out of the ether. I have, it is true, written a few songs but then again too few to mention…
The trouble with being a songwriter is that even if everyone knows your songs they don’t necessarily know that you wrote them. Albert Hammond – who I talked to this week – gets a lot of that, always has done throughout his long career.
People are forever saying to him, “Ohhh you wrote that song. I never knew.” His 1970s hit It Never Rains In Southern California is the one that everyone associates with him because he performed it himself but his catalogue is extraordinary. He’s 74 now and has written hits for everyone who’s anyone including Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Tina Turner, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Julio Iglesias and Leo Sayer. He wrote The Air That I Breathe for the Hollies and One Moment In Time for Whitney Houston. If you haven’t slow-danced to one of Hammond’s songs at some time over the past 40 years, sorry, but you haven’t really lived. He has won an Ivor Novello award and he’s also OBE. His son Albert Hammond Jnr plays with The Strokes. Albert Snr is probably the most famous Gibraltarian in the world. He was born in London during the war because his family had been evacuated from Gibraltar. But they returned and he was brought up there. The Rock has been shamefully slow to honour its very own rock star. Albert sort of hopes they’ll get round to that soon if only for the sake of his 99-year-old mum. He has also had a racehorse named after him in Ireland (the Irish love him) which he finds rather thrilling.
How do you write a great song I ask, hoping for the big secret (the royalties would be nice too). “I have no idea how I write songs,” he says, adding modestly, “I only know three chords” (which I don’t believe for a moment).
He likes co-writing and has worked with other luminaries such as Hal David and Carole Bayer Sager. His songs encompass R&B, country, rock ’n’ roll. He gave up performing 35 years ago for quite a long time but missed the buzz of it so much that like many a star from the 1960s and 1970s he’s back on the road. He’ll be on stage at the BBC’s Proms in the Park in London’s Hyde Park next Saturday (September 8) which you can hear on Radio 2.
His album, In Symphony, is available now via BMG Records.
www.alberthammond.com