This is the transcript of a radio interview Gilbert did with Gerry Ryan on 2FM in Ireland on the 12th March 2004 on the occasion of the release of his greatest hits album called "The Berry Vest of Gilbert O'Sullivan".

GERRY: Do you remember this?

As an introduction he then played "MATRIMONY".

GERRY: Yes that's exactly what it is. Let me ask you a question this morning, do you remember songs just like the one we played, then there was "Nothing Rhymed", "Alone Again (Naturally)", "Clair" to name but just a few because the list is in fact a little longer than you might realise when you start looking at it.  If you do know who wrote, and I suppose to all boy band members listening this morning, therein lies the key to longevity, who wrote and sang these songs you are about to be reintroduced to him once again not only through this programme this morning but indeed the release of a greatest hits album.  The album is "The Berry Vest of Gilbert O'Sullivan" and he joins us in studio this morning.  Welcome back!

GILBERT: Yes, nice to be here Gerry.

GERRY: Last time you and I spoke it was up the corridor.

GILBERT: Absolutely.

GERRY: In another studio.

GILBERT: Good chat, I remember it.

GERRY: How are you?

GILBERT: I'm very well thanks.

GERRY: Welcome back.  Now, great list.  I was complementing you not only on the inclusion of certain titles but also the way that you have put this together.  This is always a challenge I think to decide how a greatest hits should flow.

GILBERT: Two hits and twenty fillers right?

GERRY: Tragically for some that's exactly....Rod Stewart had a great one I remember, the slow side and the fast side, but you can't do that nowadays.

GILBERT: The nice thing for me is that very often I've discovered, you find out when you do concerts is that, because you get to meet the people who like you, that their favourite track isn't necessarily the biggest hit.  Their favourite track is an album track or something may even be a b-side or something.  That's always interesting.  I don't look at the internet and you have those internet mmm...

GERRY: (Interupting) You have a big internet following.  The fact that you were coming on this programme was put on your internet site.  And we've had a lot of...strange enough.....people contacting us.

GILBERT: No I don't like the internet.  It's too much information but it's interesting when you do compile a list the thing about me is that it isn't the hits, I mean I wrote every song on my albums.  For every hit you had on an album there was eight or nine other songs that you hoped where as good in a kind of different way.  So it's nice to include those.  I mean there's a song on this album which came from an album in '77 it was the first self produced album I did in 1977 during my breakup with Gordon Mills.  It didn't sell anything but there was one track on there called "Miss My Love Today" and that is a track that the new people I'm working with at EMI, the people I'm working with at Sony, they pick up on that.  They are hearing that for the very first time and they really like it.  So I find that interesting as a writer who has been around a long time to see a song that was written a few years back, that wasn't a hit song be actually regarded, liked by young people.

GERRY: When you say A & R people maybe in EMI or in Sony, they pick up on  a track like that, what happens when they look at the other songs?  The songs that people become obsessed with, Nothing Rhymed or whatever.

GILBERT: I don't know if they're doing that because they're too young arguably for most of those so it would be their parents, but they pick up on "Miss My Love Today" because they never heard it before.  They made have heard "Clair" or "Alone Again" on the radio, they may have heard their Mum or Dad playing it, but they've never heard "Miss My Love Today" as an example, so what's nice about that is that it does introduce me to a  new audience and proves to me that the quality of a song isn't just determined by the way you are in the hit parade, it's determined by how good a particular song is, does it have longevity?  Longevity is proved by the fact that twenty yeas later somebody likes that.  I find that very...it's good creatively as a songwriter if you are not selling millions of records at least you are getting something back.

GERRY: When you wrote these songs like "Clair" and "Alone Again (Naturally)" and "Matrimony" which we heard just a few moment ago, did you think that one day they would be continued to be cherished in the way that they are by particularly by my generation?

GILBERT: No of course not.  You know you don't analyse what you do, you leave that to other people, you record it you write...

GERRY: Oh you did leave that to other people didn't you? (laughs)

GILBERT: (Laughing) That's a leading question, but the point is you do the work, it's the 3 R's.  It's the write, record, release, that's my philosophy and I don't go into any analysis about why I do, how I do, what makes a hit.  For me that's not my department, my department creatively is to write the stuff and I love doing it I have to say, but you don't think that will somebody like this in twenty years time?  It's nice when you are twenty years older to think that people do pick up on those particular songs, the standard issue because I get cover versions of a lot of "Alone Again" and "Clair" popping up all the time and I always find that's interesting. 

GERRY: Have you ever gone into a bar or to a wedding or to a pub or to a restaurant and heard people...cause I very recently was sitting in Nico's Italian restaurant, still one of my favourites on Dame Street where they still do the old fashioned Dublin bay prawn cocktail, and there was the piano player and he was playing "Alone Again (Naturally)" and I looked and he was an elderly man, even older than us, I just thought wow that's amazing.  That song lives now and it lives here in this restaurant tonight.

GILBERT: Well I go to a hotel in London where I have meetings occasionally and I hear "Alone Again" on the piano and there's no piano player, it's one of those that plays by itself.  That's nice though I get letters from people that "Matrimony" is being sung at their wedding and like the Robbie Williams thing of "Angels" being sung at funerals and stuff.  There something nice about when people react that way to a track and kind of mean something to them.  "Matrimony" for some reason maybe because it's Latin and they say that Latin never dates.

GERRY: For me what it is I was trying to think about this yesterday how all these earlier songs particularly and harking back to the earlier songs is a pain in the arse normally for people like you except for the fact that this is a greatest hits album so it's something that you have to indulge us in...

GILBERT: Well that's not a problem.

GERRY: Well you know some people don't like it

GILBERT: I wrote them so I'm very happy.

GERRY: Well you wrote them but some people don't like and some people get very upset about it.  I'm not going to refer to any particular artist but there are one or two of them and I've been at their concerts recently where they wouldn't even touch their old material that people loved and so you're there going 'yeah that's kind of interesting what he's doing now but where's the other thing?'  Anyway I was thinking where did the early albums come in my record collection, what was I listening to, because I think that this is interesting as to how you crossed so many divides.  There was the "Fragile" album from Yes, there was "Foxtrot" from Genesis, there was Leonard Cohen, there was God forgive them "Journey" with Arthur Brown, there was Tonto's Expanding Head Band and Gilbert O'Sullivan!

GILBERT: Himself yeah.  I don't know you tell me.  I can tell you other albums of mine that I bought that mean a lot to me but mine wouldn't be one of them.

GERRY: Would it not?

GILBERT:  No I don't think so, I mean I have lots of albums that are favourites.

GERRY: Do you ever put them on yourself at home?

GILBERT: What?

GERRY: Your own music.

GILBERT: Are you serious?  Do you go home and listen to yourself?

GERRY: No.  Only for legal reasons (laughs).

GILBERT: It's the same feeling you get when you hear yourself on a tape recorder for the first time.

GERRY: Do you get that?

GILBERT: Mind you not when I'm recording in the studio, that's a different mindset.  But generally if I hear one of my songs on the radio I'll turn it off.

GERRY: Why is that?

GILBERT: Because it has no interest to me.

GERRY: Is it embarrassing?

GILBERT: No it's not embarrassing.  It's just that I would rather hear other people than myself.  I can't learn from listening to myself but I can learn from listening to other people.  It's a good attitude.

GERRY: Yeah maybe a healthy attitude.  What does it feel like then to perform the songs again because I presume there will be an obligation upon you to do that for this album in order breath oxygen requires performing them.  'Bring Gilbert out stick the batteries in' (in an exaggerated accent).

GILBERT: Every time I have a new album I will always get out there and do a tour if I can, obviously it's not as easy as it may seem.  We are doing a concert in London on the 26th but I'm not sure about Ireland because I've got to get the Irish people off their backsides because it's all very well getting people to come and see you. The generation that like me in Ireland and there is a lot of people in Ireland that like me and I'm grateful for that, they really don't buy records anymore.  They certainly don't buy mine.  I sell less records here than I do in Mozambique..........and I don't sell many there.

GERRY: (Laughing)

GILBERT: It's a fact you know.  I don't lose any sleep over it.  But it's a fact and I have to live with it.  When I read about the likes of Damien Rice, David Gray, David Kitt going platinum in Ireland, my attitude is will I go rust.

GERRY: And yet Irish people would be very very quick to claim you know.

GILBERT: I'm one of their own.

GERRY: He's one of our lads!

GILBERT: Absolutely.  But I meet them in the street and they say 'I'm your biggest fan'.  Then I say well when was the last time that you bought one of my records.  'Well I've never actually bought one of your records'.  But that's something that I can deal with because as a creative person, as a contemporary songwriter that's the kind of baggage I have to kinda work my way through and I'm really quite happy to do it because I always believe the key to what I do is writing a song, making a record, hopefully somebody will play it and somebody will hear it and go 'wow who's that?'  With that in mind, naivety it may be I actually like that approach because that's how it's been for forty years.  I hear something, if I hear a record by John Mayer, I think 'who's that?' and I write it down and I go and buy it.  So I like to believe that when I make a new album which is what I do for a living, that the opportunity for somebody to hear something that I'm doing will come along and therefore that will lead me to a kinda new audience.  After all what could be simpler.

GERRY: Where do they buy the records?

GILBERT: They buy them..

GERRY: Don't tell me a record shop!

GILBERT: No they don't, in fairness to the public it's true they have great difficulty in getting them.  Most of the record stores are only concerned with those that are currently in the top 20, they are not really concerned with artists like myself.

GERRY: But they are all on amazon.com, I saw that yesterday.

GILBERT: That's true.

GERRY: And some very pretty weird import things as well.

GILBERT: For me?  I've got some good stuff too, we have a three CD box set out in the States on Rhino which is a really interesting package and we have a b-side collection in Japan.  There's a lot of good stuff out there...interesting...it's interesting.

GERRY: Japan, are you the proverbial 'big in Japan'?

GILBERT: Well it's a bit of a cliché now because everybody says that.

GERRY: Well I wouldn't care if I was getting money out of it.

GILBERT: But everybody's big in Japan because they are all very small there.  I mean Japan has been good to me. I have to say hand on heart because they have helped me finance...I own all my own product and as you know yourself it costs a lot of money to make records and it costs more as time goes by, it's not bedsit stuff, you don't do it in the bedroom, hip though that may be, it's serious business, proper studios, and therefore so it's costly so half the cost of what I do is paid for by the Japanese which allows me the freedom to be able to licence around the world.  Now when you get an artist you say that never want to hear their old hits and stuff, part of that is because they don't own them.  When George Michael says that he is not going to make anymore commercial recordings and that he's going to put all his new stuff for the future on the internet for free.

GERRY: Well Prince disappeared up his own backside by doing the same thing.

GILBERT: They wouldn't do that if they owned the original work.  When you owned the product...

GERRY: Prince for instance is selling his records on the internet.

GILBERT: I got one of them.

GERRY: What's it like?

GILBERT: It's instrumental rubbish.  He's a great artist...

GERRY: (Laughing)

GILBERT: He's a great artist...

GERRY: Because I read this book when I was away on holiday in New York and I was a great fan and I thought he was a superb musician and wrote some great pop songs, bloody good pop songs and now seems to have gone mad basically with bitterness.

GILBERT: Well he's dropped the name.  He's gone back to calling himself Prince.

GERRY: I'd be going back to calling myself Prince as well.

GILBERT: But what he's released on the internet so far is instrumental stuff.

GERRY: And it's crap, is it?

GILBERT: Well that's putting it nicely.

Gerry played "ALONE AGAIN (NATURALLY)"

GERRY: There you go that's just one of many on "The Berry Vest of Gilbert O'Sullivan" and of course the image at that time, well it was changing slightly around that stage, you were just mentioning while we were listening to the song, the boy in the short trousers and the Yorkshire cap.  I don't recall whether you were happy to talk about that the last time you and I met but certainly I think now you have a lot of affection for that image.

GILBERT: In photographs it's a fantastic image.

GERRY: Ah it's brilliant. The sepia photographs are great.

GILBERT: It's the Chaplin look.  It was based on Chaplin and Keating and I originally wore a Chaplin jacket.  The short trousers was only for impact, I didn't wear that for doing TV or for Press.  I did that just for impact.  When I took that picture in short trousers the press people that were with me hid behind the wall when a car came along.  (Laughing) Totally embarrassed about it.  I was really hitting against the business.  I was saying to the business 'up yours' because I felt powerful enough to do that because I wrote really good songs which people liked and people couldn't understand how anyone could look like this.  So that was the short trousers..

GERRY: And short hair?

GILBERT: But the pudding basin haircut, the reason it looks really good now because it actually looks extremely fashionable where most 70s haircuts look pretty dated with their platform boots and all that stuff.

GERRY: You've gone back to a 70s haircut I see.  You've got hair.

GILBERT: I had that for five years I mean you know, I had real trouble with girlfriends.  I was delighted eventually to lose it so I could get a few girlfriends.  You must remember 1967 when long hair was here to stay and flower power was in I was walking around looking like an escapee from an asylum or something because of that pudding basin haircut.  Nobody was looking like that.  I had serious trouble with girlfriends so after five years of it I was really happy to change and grow my hair.

GERRY: Were Gilbert O'Sullivan groupies different from others? (laughing)

GILBERT: (laughing) You tell me.  You wouldn't turn up dressed like me to support your favourite artist.  Having said that people turned up in.....

GERRY: Oh they do I remember them turning up dressed exactly like you.

GILBERT: Maybe in the G sweater, that was slightly different.

GERRY: I had one.

GILBERT: The G sweaters were good I liked that too.

GERRY: In fact I still have it, it's out in Clontarf.  I'll dig it out for Sunday.

GILBERT: I have film of the Dublin concerts in '71 and '72 and there's a lot of......

GERRY: (interrupting) Did you film them? Is it just home movie sort of stuff?

GILBERT: No it was filmed for RTE.  I've seen a lot of that stuff.  I've seen a concert from Dublin about '72.  It's really good.

GERRY: Could you Release it?

GILBERT: Well, em yes…it could be.  Well we’ve never done a DVD.  I’ve never been into that.

GERRY: Have you tried?  A personal obsession of mine at the moment.  That there are no real music DVDs.  I’m sorry to say this but there are only a hand full of them.  Most of them are videos collections of people’s greatest hits and most of them are absolutely uninteresting.  But what I’m really interested in is actual concert footage.  And something like that I think fans..

GILBERT: Oh yeah, we’ve have a Japanese concert which was filmed for Japan.  We have the rights to it worldwide.  But I’ve never gone down that road because I’ve never had the time to do it.  I mean the time for me is taken up with writing and recording.  I'm really not interested in books and going back over the past.  But having said that, we’ve uncovered a lot footage for two reasons, one because we’re doing a TV commercial for this particular album, so we've had to uncover footage for that.

GERRY: Do you own the video stuff?

GILBERT: We get the rights.  Yeah I own a lot of videos that I’ve made.  I made a few videos and I own those.

GERRY: Do you own the concert footage?

GILBERT: No, I don’t. That’s owned by another company.  But we’re in a position to be able to use it.  We just have to pay them.  You negotiate a fee and you give them a percentage.  So it is possible to be able use that stuff.  But it was interesting looking at some of that.

GERRY: How did you feel watching yourself performing live in '71?

GILBERT: It was a little bit weird.  I thought I looked pretty much the same, I thought 'well that was a bit of a disappointment'. There was no real change from the “G” look to the present in time and stuff.  So in a way...

GERRY: That’s because you haven't put on ten stone. 

GILBERT: In a way you'd want to change something somewhat and stuff.

GERRY: If the cardigan. I’ve got one of those cardigans. Is that good at the moment? The cardigan thing?

GILBERT: Three cardigans.

GERRY: Three cardigans, the three cardigans look folks.

GILBERT: Essential.

GERRY: It could catch on in rest homes.

GILBERT: When I see people in t-shirts today, I marvel at them. How they do it? If I went out in a tee short today I’d have double pneumonia.

GERRY: Finally I ask you as tempus fugit.  Can we see you performing?  Will we see you?

GILBERT: Well, if we get some Irish people to get off their behinds and purchase the music. The last time we were here was a great concert I have to say.  But as I say the key is as a performer, as well a writer and recording artist, the key is selling records. That’s what we’re here to do.  So therefore if you feel if people aren’t going to buy your records..

GERRY: What’s the point!

GILBERT: There's a slight justification.....

GERRY: OK, what do you feel about the unplugged genre?

GILBERT: The unplugged genre?

GERRY: We do them. We have a nice studio down the hall with facilities, fellas like yourself, always welcome to come in and perform.

GILBERT: Well I play piano that are detuned below concert pitch.  Could you get a nine foot grand in here?

GERRY: No you wouldn't get it in here but you'd get it into studio 8 or studio 1..

GILBERT: If you detune that nine foot grand in studio 8, you be sued (laughing).

GERRY:  I'll tell you what we have.  We have where the concert orchestra play and I'm sure..

GILBERT: But you couldn't detune a grand piano.  I have a especially made...

GERRY: I don't know.  I’ve done worse I think.

GILBERT: If you did that it would be sacrilegious.  Nobody’s ever detuned a concert grand.

GERRY:  Nobody?

GILBERT: No, no why? I did and I have two pianos. I had a Bechstein made for me.  A concert grand, which has a lever, it's unique in the world. When you pull the lever and it goes down to a semitone below concert pitch because I have a limited vocal range, and in the early days because of my limited vocal range I can't really....half a tone makes a lot of difference to me.  So singing a song half a tone below concert pitch and then having to sing at concert pitch will actually effect my vocal range.  So I had this made for me.

GERRY:  So when you go on tour you'll take it with you?

GILBERT: It stems from the days of buying cheap upright pianos.  When you buy a cheap upright piano in the late 60s, they were always under tuned anyway.

GERRY:  Deirdre look into this messing around with the piano down there that belongs to the orchestra, will you?

GILBERT: I remember detuning a Steinway once.

GERRY:  And not telling anybody?

GILBERT: And Steinway got very upset.

GERRY:  Anyway it's been a delight having you back with us.  The album is very simply entitled "The Berry Vest of Gilbert O'Sullivan", difficult to say even sober on a Friday morning.  I presume you have your own psychotic reasons for causing problems to people like me in pronunciation. 

GILBERT: But look at the cover!

GERRY:  It's great.  It's brilliant.

GILBERT: Look at the cover and then you'll make sense.

GERRY:  Yes I get it, I get it.  I think what you should get is you should get this because regardless whether you grew up with this music as I did, it's timeless and it's wonderful and I particularly enjoyed "Can't Think Straight" with Peggy Lee.

GILBERT: Isn't that nice because that was a wonderful experience and we filmed that for a video too.

GERRY:  Lovely to see you again.

GILBERT: It's good to see you.

GERRY:  God bless and thank you.

GILBERT: And you.