I'm happy I didn't have kids...

I might have been less devoted to the day job!

- SIMON BUTTON

COMING to fame in the 1970s dressed as a clown, Leo Sayer is aware he hasn’t always been taken too seriously — especially by the music press.

“At first I was on the front cover of everything,” the 78-year-old singer recalls with a sigh, “then maybe because I was so happy and smiling a lot they were like, ‘Hang on, there’s something wrong with him because he’s enjoying himself too much’.”

UK reviewers could be especially caustic about the perky pop star, who was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, even after he'd ditched the Pierrot costume and make-up he'd adopted to promote first single The Show Must Go On.

“I got heavily dissed in England,” says Sayer “but you get used to it.

“And I don’t mind being undervalued because that means you’ve got places to go and things to achieve.”

The man born Gerard Hugh Sayer in Shoreham-by-Sea, in Sussex, has achieved rather a lot during the five-plus decades since that first single reached number two on the UK charts in 1973.

Subsequent hits You Make Me Feel Like Dancing and When I Need You topped the charts Stateside and Sayer had hit after hit in his homeland well into the early 80s.

Then he soared to number one in 2006 when a DJ named Meck remixed his 1977 song Thunder in My Heart.

Sayer has ridden the ups and downs of the fickle record business, survived financial troubles, weathered a health scare after an intestinal tumour was found to be benign (“That was scary but I got through it,” he says now), made it out of the Big Brother house with his sanity intact, continues to record music and perform live, and enjoys a “wonderful life” in Australia with his second wife Donatella.