![]() Maybe that’s why O’Sullivan doesn’t sound even remotely broken when he’s singing about being broken. His father had died when O’Sullivan was 11, and O’Sullivan hadn’t known him well. His mother was still alive when the song came out. He’s insisted that it wasn’t autobiographical. O’Sullivan wrote and produced “Alone Again (Naturally)” himself. It’s a 6.) Eventually, O’Sullivan started writing songs, landed himself a contract with CBS, and scored a couple of UK hits. ![]() ![]() (Supertramp’s highest-charting single is 1979’s “ The Logical Song,” which peaked at #6. For a little while, O’Sullivan played drums in Rick’s Blues, a band fronted by future Supertramp leader Rick Davies, and O’Sullivan credits Davies with teaching him both drums and piano. (It’s a completely unfunny play on the names of the theatre composers Gilbert and Sullivan, and O’Sullivan has been living with it for decades.) He was born in Ireland and mostly raised in London, and he started playing music as an art student in the ’60s. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s real name was Raymond O’Sullivan, and he changed it, at his manager’s urging, in that late-’60s moment when people were generally trying to out-surreal each other. Before the song is over, O’Sullivan questions the existence of God, sings about the deaths of his parents, and considers the ways that grief can absolutely destroy people - all this over music that could’ve been used to advertise laundry detergent. This was a sick, raw time.Īnd yet that sickness still only goes so far toward explaining the popularity of “Alone Again (Naturally).” One of the year’s most popular songs was a florid pop trifle on which the singer calmly announces that he’s about to throw himself off of a tower. ![]() Three days after the song hit #1, Thomas Eagleton, the Democratic nominee for vice president, left the race, admitting that he’d been hospitalized for depression three times. Four days before “Alone Again (Naturally)” reached #1, American health officials admitted that, for 40 years, they’d secretly experimented on black men, infecting them with syphilis and leaving them untreated, at Tuskegee University. A few months before Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” hit #1, Nixon ordered the withdrawl of American troops from Vietnam - a completely necessary move that should’ve happened years earlier, and a military loss that fucked with our national self-image. Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide just a few months after his underlings broke into the DNC offices at the Watergate Hotel. In the US, 1972 was a time of deep divisions and scrambled priorities. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. ![]()
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