Neil Sedaka: One-Way Ticket to the Blues

I came across a singles chart from 1979, and there among the New Wave classics was a disco track: One Way Ticket by Eruption. I was pleased to be reminded of it - it's a good record - and almost chose it for today's Sunday music video.

But then I got into the history of One Way Ticket and found that the original version had been on the B-side of Neil Sedaka's 1959 hit Oh! Carol. (Carol, as you probably know, was Carol Klein, a former girlfriend of his, who we know as the singer and songwriter Carole King.)

One Way Ticket, though, is not a Neil Sedaka song - it was written by by Jack Keller and Hank Hunter. Keller, like Sedaka and Carole King, was one of the Brill Building stable of songwriters.

There's a lot wrong with One Way Ticket - the very 1959 backing singers, the cutesy references to other songs in the lyrics, Sedaka's 'laugh in the voice' singing style - but it's still an exiting record and must have sounded even more so when it was first released.