THE LITTLE CLOWN WHO COULD
It is the first time I have ever shared a table with a piece of Cockney rhyming slang. A "Leo Sayer" is an "all dayer", a drinking session that lasts from lunchtime until closing time. When we meet at 1pm at Icebergs Dining Room in Bondi, Sayer has already cracked his first Peroni. Is it possible I could be in for a "Leo Sayer" with Leo Sayer?
He is dressed in white shoes, white jeans, a white shirt and a white belt. His topiary afro, as much a symbol of the 1970s as glistening mirror balls, remains gloriously intact. At 58, he looks like a well-preserved cross between the angel Gabriel and Krusty the Clown, but he has all the amiable energy of an excited young pop star - partly because he is, once again, an excited pop star. If not particularly young.
Sayer had 14 UK top 20 hits (and eight in Australia) between The Show Must Go On in 1973 and Orchard Road in 1983. He spent 1974 dressed as Pierrot, a stock character of French pantomime. He disappeared in the 1980s - robbed and almost bankrupted by his management - and spent most of the '90s driving down motorways with a roadie and backing tape, playing Leo Sayer's greatest hits to distracted audiences in UK working men's clubs. Leo Sayer had become a Leo Sayer tribute act.
In mid-2005 he emigrated to Australia, with a dream that he would restart his career: when he was notionally offered a make-believe Brit Award for his imaginary comeback single, he would stick a fantasy finger in the air and tell them where to shove it.
The comeback seemed unlikely, since Sayer had not made a new studio record for 16 years. Then, suddenly, in February this year, Leo Sayer reached No1 in the UK charts again, with DJ Meck's disco remix of his 1977 hit Thunder in My Heart. "A couple of nights I did wake up and think it hadn't happened," says Sayer. "But then I looked at the emails again and it was true."
In deep pockets of Australia, the phenomenon Sayer calls "Leo-mania" never died. The man the English tabloids call "the pint-sized pop star" was proportionately bigger in Australia than anywhere else in the world: according to Sayer, one in every four households here owned a copy of his second album, Just a Boy.
Sayer can still sell out the Revesby Workers' Club, the people's palace of Sydney's west. His audience is dressed for an engagement party: the men in long-sleeved shirts, worn outside of black jeans; the women in coloured frocks and sculpted hair. Several have brought their parents, in wheelchairs. These are people who were talked out of their virginity to When I Need You, and got married to I Can't Stop Loving You.
The amazing thing about the show - apart from Sayer's unlikely vigour as he jumps around the stage - is that it is, well, really good. His alarming falsetto is even more startling today, given his years. He jumps and he grunts, he belts out and he soars. He is, as he says, a soul man. He gives everything.
A line of "girls" climbs on stage for You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, including one woman who is still wearing her handbag over her shoulder and another who appears to believe she is dancing to Walk Like an Egyptian.
The stage is a strangely democratic territory, and another woman uses it to announce her 35th birthday. Sayer passes the microphone to her husband, who warbles disturbingly, "When uh neee-ud yuh, uh howwwld out muh haa-aa-aa-aand un um wi-i-id-d yuh."
"I want to tell you a story," insists the birthday girl. Her story is,"I'm 35 ... I grew
up with Leo Sayer ... and now I'm 35."
It is a story only in the broadest sense of the word, but nonetheless it takes a fantastic amount of time to tell. The band plays Happy Birthday then, inexplicably, Auld Lang Syne, then When I Need You. There are dry eyes in the house, but none in the front row.
Leo Sayer knows the names of most of the staff at Icebergs, and treats them with the deference of a diner confident of his own celebrity. Gerard Hugh Sayer (as he was born) is Leo Sayer again, and he's absolutely loving it.
For a long time, it was not much of a life being Gerard Hugh Sayer. He was born in Shoreham-by-Sea, a small town near Worthing in West Sussex. His father was the local hospital engineer, his mother originally a nurse. His father, who he describes as "a very brusque man", thought he was a fool and, says Sayer, "he didn't suffer fools gladly".
Sayer was sent to a "really rough" Catholic secondary school, where he was beaten up "every day". He was dyslexic; he could not count, he could not ride a bike, and he did not learn to tie his shoelaces until he was 15. In exams, he would "just go to pieces". In science lessons, he would "sit there with the Bunsen burner and set the desk on fire". His teachers used to laugh at him and give him grades like "minus 10 or minus 20". He slipped down to the D stream, at the bottom of the school.
His younger brother, Brian, was great at maths; his older sister, Kathleen, was also smart. "I was just this lost kid in the middle," says Sayer. His father, he says, aligned himself with his other children, and thought, 'He's no good at anything. Why did we give birth to him?'"
Sayer could not learn to swim. "I can't co-ordinate my arms and legs," he says, "so I panic. Mentally, my inadequacies take over my reasoning. My dad held me under the water when I was really young, and I never recovered totally from that.
"'You're gonna swim just like the others,'" says Sayer, aping a gruff voice of authority, the heavy hands of his father. It was, he says, horrific. He thought he was going to drown.
Sayer says he does not bear grudges, and everything has worked out all right, but a sadness comes over him when he talks about school sports. "The terrible thing about school," he says, "is that if you were so stupid in class in maths, there was no way you were going to get picked for the football team, even if you were a better footballer than other kids. The very few times I came in to the team, I'd score about 10 goals. But they'd never pick me. It was always 'Sayer-guts. We don't want him. He's crap.'
"'Sayer-guts,'" he says, sourly. "That's what they used to call me."
He ran away from home a couple of times, but says he was saved from delinquency by a priest who taught him how to sing. During his schooling, Sayer performed
as a boy soprano in church on Sundays. "Singing was something I felt good about."
Sayer moved on to art college, and studied to be a commercial artist. He left two years into the three-year course. "I got thrown out because I disagreed with the primary colours," he says, dryly.
"I felt brown should be in there: there's a lot of shit in the world."
At art college, he educated himself by going to the public library and reading books, although his dyslexia meant he could only concentrate on short passages. He was growing as a musician, but he could not play the guitar because he could not strum and change chords at the same time.
He found work in the advertising industry in Soho in 1967, when London was the centre of the world. He met Barry Humphries and Barry Crocker; directed an ad shoot with David Bailey; and had a girlfriend who went out with Jimi Hendrix.
He ended up running a design studio but he lost all his money because he could not make sense of his accounts. He had "a mini-nervous breakdown", returned to Shoreham-by-Sea and lived in a houseboat because he could not face his parents. "They didn't even know I was back for a year," he says.
As he recovered, he began to play music with a band of local boys who called themselves Patches. It was as the singer of Patches that Gerard Sayer became Leo Sayer - named for his "mane".
Patches went nowhere, but brought Sayer to the attention of producer David Courtney, with whom he began to write songs for a solo album. They recorded Silverbird in studios belonging to the Who's singer, Roger Daltrey. Daltrey was so impressed with their work he asked them to write for his debut solo album, too, and Sayer and Courtney's Giving It All Away was a huge hit for Daltrey in 1973.
Silverbird featured The Show Must Go On, a catchy tune about a performer who could no longer cope with the spotlight. Sayer sang the song in full Pierrot make-up and costume, because he identified with the character who, in French theatre, "is a man alone, a mime-mute, who has to find another form of expression. I thought Pierrot was ideal to portray these early songs I had about the kid who wondered why he was cut off from all the other kids, a dreamer who lived on his own."
The press, however, thought he looked like a clown. Although Sayer only played Pierrot for "a year to the day", he is still tormented by people who think he is a circus act.
Performing was agonising for Sayer. "For the first part of my career, I was sick every night," he says. "The first big show I did, at a music industry conference in Cannes, I threw up all over my clothes before I went on stage. I was standing up in front of all these record company executives with vomit down the front of my shirt. Frank Farrell, my bass player, was standing there with me, going, 'You poor fucker.'"
A little while after that show, he developed Pierrot. "He enabled me to do my growing up in public behind his mask," says Sayer. "The only problem was trying to find my confidence again when I stopped doing it, and feeling naked being just Leo. The mask was off and I really had to deliver. I got some tough press at the time, but luckily the hits kept flowing. At that time, anyway."
The 1970s were Sayer's years, but the flood of hits had slowed to a drizzle by the early 1980s. He continually returned to Australia to tour, and was playing Alice Springs in 1982 when he received a phone call from his brother, asking him to come home to be with his terminally ill father. Then a call came from his father, who told him, "I'm so proud of you. Keep on doing what you're doing. Don't come home." Three hours later, he died.
"That action, of him telling me not to go home, changed the whole family's perception of me," says Sayer. "Suddenly, it was a good thing to celebrate Leo Sayer. Up to that time, it had been, 'Oh, what's this Leo Sayer rubbish?' Even when I was being a success. The moment that he reset the law, it was okay for everybody else. I would've loved to be more loved by my dad, but maybe it gave me the template to find myself in a more individualistic way."
At 26, Leo Sayer had married his girlfriend Janice, a librarian. They were together until 1985. "I don't think she liked what I became," he says. "She saw me getting ripped off, and she saw me becoming an entertainer and losing the creativity. When we split - because she just hated being Mrs Sayer; she hated the music business - we made a promise to each other that we'd never speak again, and we never did. I don't know where she is."
Sayer was originally managed by the late UK pop star Adam Faith. He calls Faith his guru and his mentor, but says a lot of his money went missing due to bad accountancy and stupid investments. Faith passed him on to others, and the situation worsened.
When Sayer split with his record label, Chrysalis, the label claimed to still own his work, even though his contract had expired. Sayer hired a music-business accountant to get him out of the agreement.
They won the battle, and Sayer rented a house in the country with his new girlfriend, Donatella Piccinetti, an elegant Italian photography student he had met while she was working as a waitress in London. "I buried myself there in a new record project," he says, "feeling very bullish about life, owning all of my publishing and all of my tracks. [The accountant] went off behind my back and sold the lot. He set up bank accounts with forged signatures, and moved all my money into them."
It is not difficult to steal from a dyslexic. "I could never count," he says. "I couldn't count the change in my pocket. I've always had a complete and utter confusion with numbers. I know what a thousand dollars is, but when it gets to hundreds of thousands, my brain starts to blur. Rather than understand it, I would just go, 'Oh yes, okay,' and sign off the accounts. Anything to get out.
"The presence of Donatella at that time was terribly important to me," adds Sayer. His girlfriend became his manager. "There's nobody who's going to take on
a man in his 50s and look at a long-term career with him. They just think, 'How can I make some money out of the guy before he gives it up?' We spotted that, and we just said, 'No more of this shit.'"
It took several years, and thousands of kilometres spent driving around the UK with his backing tape and his roadie, but Sayer, under Piccinetti's guidance and with the help of The Sun newspaper, eventually cleared his debts.
Piccinetti is lunching with business contacts in Icebergs while Sayer and I talk. When they leave, she comes over to smoke a cigarette on the balcony close to our table. She is still elegant, still very Italian. Sayer calls her "darling", she calls him "darlink".
When they got together, Sayer was playing cabaret-style gigs at casinos in Las Vegas, Reno and Kansas City. "That was his showbiz side," she says. "It does not relate to what I love about Leo. It does not relate to his intelligence, to his depth, to his beauty, to his soul.
I was very unhappy there.
"What I used to see of people's perception of Leo was this: he's a clown, he's superficial, he's certainly not an artist, not a musician. But he's so much more than what everybody thinks of him. People think he's this happy-go-lucky fella who talks too much. That used to drive me mad. I thought, 'To hell with them. If no one understands him, I do.'"
She abandoned her photography degree in its final year and "devoted myself, if you like, to him". She proved to be a shrewd, tough and charming manager, and she talked and fought until Sayer won back the rights that were stolen from him.
His career was still going nowhere, however, when journalists from the English tabloid The Sun turned up at a showcase Leo Sayer gig in London's West End.
"I think they came down for a laugh," says Sayer, "because they were all wearing Leo wigs."
If they arrived as ironic detractors, they left as ironic supporters, stunned that Leo Sayer was still so good at being Leo Sayer. They launched a campaign to turn him into a national institution, "The Prince of Perms", and the paper's readers voted him "Best Comeback of 1997", even though he still hadn't made a new record. The Sun gave him permission to advertise his gigs "as supported by The Sun" and, suddenly, everybody wanted to book him again. He won exposure at the expense of credibility. No record label would touch the Prince of Perms and, once he had paid back all he owed, he and Piccinetti realised doing small shows in the short term would cost them money in the long term, so he stayed at home.
In 2000, he recorded a self-produced album at a studio in Denmark, which he finally released this year as Voice in My Head. It was overshadowed, however, by DJ Meck's remix of his 1977 hit, Thunder in My Heart. Sayer's name was not on the white-label pressing of the single, originally circulated to DJs.
He was considered a commercial liability to the fashionable Meck.
"When we made the record," says Meck, "we said to him, 'No disrespect, Leo, but we've got to keep your name out of it for as long as possible', because it did come with certain connotations. It was deliberate on our part to keep his name out of it for as long as possible. And he was happy with that. But when the record properly broke and it was surfacing as a Leo Sayer record, it actually worked in his favour, because I think most people went from thinking, like, they had a certain view of him to, 'Oh, good on him. He's coming back.'"
When Sayer did not even appear on the promotional video, Meck became embarrassed, and said Sayer had not promoted the single because they did not know where he was. The UK press decided he was lost in Australia, and probably did not even know of his newfound success.
Sayer followed the story from his new home in Bellevue Hill, in Sydney's east, excited, delighted and amused. Thunder in My Heart reached No1 in the UK in February. "It's as if time has stood still," says Sayer. "The past and the present intermesh in some way."
He has a new album out, and an old single. "I'd love to get a handle on it, and I can't. I'm confused, but it's a pleasant confusion."
Says Meck: "He's still as keen as mustard, isn't he? He's still got a really strong work ethic, and he's still really hungry. He always feels like he needs to prove a point. He doesn't feel like his career's over."
I don't end up having a Leo Sayer with Leo Sayer. After three beers, he orders a tea. I meet him again, however, at a cafe for a couple of Britney Spears. He says, to my surprise, that he and Piccinetti, so devoted and affectionate in public, are "no longer a couple".
"Some of what she wanted and some of what I wanted didn't quite work out. The respect continues - and the love, basically, continues - but it's defined differently.
"I'm certainly in a relationship with Donna, although our parameters may be bizarrely different from other people's. We live in separate bedrooms: I don't think we've slept together for years. We share the same house, we share our business, we work together, we adore each other, but we're pretty much free to have girlfriends and boyfriends if we want to.
"I like my life where it is," he says. "I have a great responsibility to Donna but I don't carry around anything that's burdensome. I live with one of the best cooks in the world. She's absolutely stunning. She does everything for me. But I hope that what we're doing is rewarding her in the same way."
He pauses. "I think it is. Half of everything I make is hers, and always will be, for life, whatever happens. And anybody coming in to a relationship with either of us would have to understand that. To have what we share - which is unique, and only she and I know really what it is - is a huge victory."
Sayer's confession is affecting and puzzling and slightly sad, but it ducks the main issue: how does it feel to be a piece of Cockney rhyming slang?
"A Leo Sayer is an all-day bender," he says. "They were saying to me it's gonna end up in the Oxford English Dictionary.
"There's another one, as well - Leo Sayer Syndrome: it's when you put your finger in the mains socket and your hair goes 'Yeeeeargh!'"