The man behind the hits

Albert Hammond may not be a household name, but you can bet his songs are. The songwriter who has worked with the likes of Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Aretha Franklin has now decided to release an album himself. He talks to Ed Reed about avoiding fame during a remarkable lifetime at the top of the music business"

" Listen to all kinds of music because a world grows inside of you, a world of different cultures and music and next thing you know things are coming out of you."

Here's a musical puzzle to test even the most knowledgeable fan of chart trivia: Which songwriter's tracks have contributed to a staggering 360 million album sales worldwide? Is it a member of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin or The Eagles? Could it be Elvis Presley, Burt Bacharach? Maybe even Madonna?

In fact, that particular figure was achieved by Albert Hammond, one of a generation of super-songwriters who dominated the music industry throughout 1970s, like Bacharach, and who has just released an album of brand new tracks entitled Revolution of the Heart.

From the 1960s onwards, musical legends came to the softly spoken songwriter to ask him to pen sure-fire anthems and ballads. Hammond, who resembles a kindly Keith Richards, worked and became friends with many of the world's most famous performers.

"Roy [Orbison] used to call me because his wife Barbara wouldn't let him smoke," explains Hammond in his gentle transatlantic drawl. "He'd say 'Albert come pick me up. We'll go down to the boat. We'll write some songs and smoke some cigarettes'! This was a guy I idolised when I was 17! To have gone to America and been friends with Roy Orbison and produced with him and Johnny Cash is just incredible."

As an artist, writer and producer, London-born Hammond was the quiet man behind four number one hits and two more that reached number two in the UK charts. Among them were Leo Sayer's When I need You, the Julio Iglesias track To All the Girls I've Ever Loved Before and The Air That I Breathe that clinched the number two spot for The Hollies in 1974. Hammond's One Moment in Time gave Whitney Houston her third British chart topper in 1988.

And if you find yourself humming a song by Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Celine Dion, Tom Jones, Bonnie Tyler, Barry Manilow or Chris de Burgh then the likelihood is it could be a Hammond tune. Through the 1980s and 90s he also wrote Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now for Starship (which reached number one) as well as creating material for Agnetha Faltskog, The Four Tops, Englebert Humperdinck and Elton John.

Hammond's hits remained popular right into the 90s with Diana Ross reaching number two with When You Tell Me That You Love Me in 1991. Mix those successes in with decades of working with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Phil Everly and receiving an OBE in 2000 for services to popular music and Hammond is definitely in the club of 'greats'. He has also founded something of a musical dynasty. Among a young generation of rock fans, Hammond's son, Albert Hammond Jr, is idolised as the guitarist with New York band The Strokes.

Following a brief spell as a performer at the start of his career in the late 1960s, Hammond stepped away from the limelight to concentrate on writing for others. The release of his Revolution of the Heart, mostly co-written with Leo Sayer, has seen him return to the stage. He is clearly pleased with the passionate yet understated tracks. "I think it's great and I don't think everything I've ever written is great but this record is about my life, my 60 years in this world." The fresh-sounding tunes possess a slightly old-fashioned feel thanks to the lo-fi production. "When they tried to re-mix the stuff in a different way, more like a hip way, like today, I said 'no, no, no, no, no - this is not what I want'. That's not me. I'm the 50's, the 60's, the 70's, the 80's and the 90's. I'm not 2004. And so I went back to my original thoughts," he says.

Chatting over the phone from an upmarket London hotel, Hammond seems pleased to be back in his home city and hopes to buy a house in the capital. Now 61, he was born in London during the Second World War, but his family left the country for Gibraltar when he was six months old. "Having grown up in Gibraltar, I guess I heard more music maybe than if I'd grown up in London. Probably in London I would have heard one kind of music only, but in Gibraltar you heard everything from flamenco to Arabic to Mexican to R n' B to rock and pop." His inspiration was far broader than Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. "All music influences me. I keep telling my son 'don't just listen to rock n' roll. Listen to all kinds of music because a world grows inside of you, a world of different cultures and music and next thing you know things are coming out of you'."

Hammond ascribes his astronomical lifetime record sales to the covers market. "I've been doing this since the 60's, it's been five decades for me, so in five decades of success, you could reach that kind of statistic - especially since my songs are not just sung by one artist. The Air That I Breathe has more than 500 covers, for example. When you think of that and think how many millions each one sells...The version of When I Need You on the Celine Dion record was 38 million albums alone."And whether coy or genuinely at a loss for an answer, he claims not to know how much money those 360 million sales have garnered. "I have no idea. I never even look at the royalty statements. Just as long as there's enough coming in. I'm sure I'm not getting as much as I'm supposed to."

His tunes make up the soundtrack to some of the most important moments in people's lives. "That's a wonderful feeling. I had a guy tell me he met his girlfriend and got married to When I Need You. There's a lot of songs like that. People say that The Air That I Breathe has meant so much to them in their life."