Neil Diamond admits he is not rated by some critics, but believes his music will have the last word in years to come. Brian Boyd meets the 61-year-old songwriter, who is still trying to 'dig deeper', and who performs in Dublin this weekend
Neil Diamond doesn't look like Neil Diamond. He looks like a Jewish dentist. As he plods across his hotel room to greet you in an accent that still betrays his Brooklyn upbringing, you notice how his speaking voice is not as deep as his singing one, how much weight he has lost from his face ("gotta keep in shape") and how meticulously polite he is in almost everything that he says.
Thirty-five years plus at the top of the hit parade pile have left him calmly assured about his position in the great musical scheme of things, but when prodded, he obviously still has "issues" about how he and his legacy are perceived.
"I'm just out of the loop as far as some critics are concerned," he says, "I've never been 'experimental', they say ... I've had that elitist stuff thrown at me; let me tell you one thing: all my music is experimental and while the fashions of music change, the music will have the last word, and anyway I don't think I'll be judged properly until a number of years from now."
The book of evidence is impressive, by any standards you care to apply: from I'm A Believer and Red, Red Wine through to Cracklin' Rosie, Sweet Caroline and I Am ... I Said.
He's someone who could release a multi-disc box-set of just his greatest hits. You could plot him somewhere on a curve between Abba, Tony Bennett, Sinatra and Paul Simon.
Multidimensional and multigenerational, he's one of the most "tributed" acts alive, and his live shows still have a touch of an evangelical rally about them. Anyone, anywhere can sing you a Neil Diamond song.
Soberly dressed in blue jeans, black top and a pair of expensive-looking Italian loafers, he has a slightly disconcerting habit of remaining entirely still, almost as if paralysed, as he talks about a career that his fans believe ranks up there with Elvis and The Beatles.
"It's a funny thing, but you just don't know when you're writing these songs that so many years later, they'll still have an impact, that they'll still be played and sung along to.
"You see it with other acts that their music is somehow picked up by following generations in an ironic sense but that's never been the case with me," he says.
"I can honestly say that everything I've ever done has been pure expression from the deepest part of me, and I think that is what people are responding to.
"I was in an Indian restaurant the other night and the staff came over to talk to me, they had all my records and stuff and were telling me just how much they loved the music - and that really thrilled me, that people from a very different culture to my American-Jewish one could still get into the songs and appreciate the emotions contained within them."
He believes his Jewishness is vital to his work. "I think a certain pain is reflected in the songs: if you listen to traditional Jewish music, you will hear it in the voice - that sort of breaking of the voice - and there is a cry in my work, a reflection of that pain, but how much of it is on a sub-conscious level, I don't know."
Born Neil Leslie Diamond in 1941, it was the present of a guitar on his 16th birthday that began his long and winding road to cross-over contemporary chart domination.
Educated at the same school as Barbra Streisand and Neil Sedaka, after a spell at New York University, he signed his first record deal aged 23, and had his first hit the following year with the simple three-chord pop song Cherry, Cherry.
A songwriter at the famous Brill Building (alongside Sedaka, Carole King and Gerry Goffin), he penned I'm A Believer which was taken to number one by The Monkees.
He quickly developed a unique style - mixing pop and rock with gospel and country influences (his own version of the song UB40 made a hit, Red, Red Wine, was styled as a country ballad).
He cites The Beatles as the main reason he moved away from the formulaic pop of Cherry, Cherry into more confessional style songs such as I Am ... I Said.
"What The Beatles were really saying was write what you feel and don't worry about the rest of it - they opened the doors for writers and artists," he says. "I got the courage to start trying to reflect my own psyche in the music - to be naked and vulnerable and cry through the music."
From the Touching Me, Touching You album in 1969, his powerfully resonant baritone voice and almost Byronic physical features have been constants in the charts and at enormodomes around the world.
HE has mixed it up along the way - recording the soundtrack for the film Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, having The Band's Robbie Robertson produce his Beautiful Noise album and starring in the remake of the Al Jolson story, The Jazz Singer.
He has been married and divorced twice, gone through Freudian psychoanalysis, and weathered all the climate changes in the music industry. He lives in Los Angeles but "always remembers" Brooklyn.
Now 61, Diamond says the only creative challenge left to him is to "re-plumb the depths, not to try to top anything I have done before, but to dig deeper. I know my limitations and I've always stuck to the basic core of who I am to come up with these songs and ideas and just hoped they would fit into somebody's listening desire."
There's still, however, no place in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame for Neil Diamond. "I'm very primal," he says. "I am what I am - raggedy, heartfelt, emotional, reflective, melancholic - but all that was there long before I ever started writing songs.
"That's the 'I Am ... I Said' of me. And I refuse to deny it. My music is probably too broad to be limited to just rock 'n' roll. I don't feel the need to write lyrics that are 'intellectually acceptable'. It's not about the intellect, it's about the emotion, and always will be with me."
Neil Diamond plays Lansdowne Road, Dublin tonight and tomorrow night. Tickets from Ticketmaster outlets countrywide. The Essential Neil Diamond is on the Sony label
