“Prolific” hardly does justice to Neil Sedaka’s songwriting output, which ran to more than 1,000 compositions over seven decades.

If he had been willing to stay behind the scenes, turning out tunes for other singers, he would have still merited a place in pop history thanks to the number of those songs that became part of the pop canon, including Where the Boys Are, Love Will Keep Us Together and (Is This the Way to) Amarillo. However, Sedaka, who has died aged 86, had a constitutional need to see his own name in lights.

As a star in his own right, he contributed another half-dozen significant tunes to America’s pop songbook, the best known being Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, Bad Blood and Laughter in the Rain. Never hip, and overlooked by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – which greatly rankled; he felt he deserved to be inducted – he was nonetheless a first-class song-and-piano man, surpassed by few of his generation.

The younger of Eleanor (nee Appel) and Mac Sedaka’s two children, he was born in Brighton Beach, the working-class Brooklyn neighbourhood in New York that also produced his contemporary Neil Diamond. (Carol Klein, later known as Carole King, his friend and subject of his early hit Oh! Carol, grew up in nearby Gravesend.) Mac, a Lebanese Jew, drove a taxi and Eleanor, an Ashkenazi of Russian/Polish descent, looked after their small apartment, which they shared with Mac’s parents and five sisters.

In his 1982 autobiography, Laughter in the Rain, Sedaka remembered himself as “a Jewish mama’s boy” – a resounding understatement that did not reflect how completely Eleanor dominated his life until his mid-20s.

During his first wave of success, between 1958 and 1963, he handed over five-figure royalty cheques, which she cashed and kept, allowing him a $1,000 monthly stipend; when he married Leba Strassberg in 1962, she decided where the young couple would go on honeymoon and where they would live afterwards (they wanted Manhattan; she threatened to cut off their money unless they stayed in Brooklyn).

Eleanor was also instrumental, though, in his becoming a musician. On a teacher’s advice, she bought him a secondhand piano and expected her seven-year-old son to practise for hours every day; by eight, he was so accomplished that he won a scholarship to the preparatory division of the Juilliard School.

As “the goody two-shoes that the other boys liked to beat up”, he clung to his mother, and she took him into her confidence about things an adolescent son might have preferred not to know.

One of her more vivid admissions was that she had tried to induce a miscarriage while pregnant with him. Traumatised by the painful birth of his sister, Ronnie, she tried to end her second pregnancy by riding a rollercoaster every day for a week – when Neil was born, unscathed, she penitently devoted herself to him. He was 12 when she told him, and only a few years older when she confided that she was having a long-term affair with an air-conditioner salesman.

Remarkably, he was unfazed by the revelations. The rollercoaster incident was written into his 2010 jukebox musical, also titled Laughter in the Rain; as for Eleanor’s lover, Ben Sutter, Sedaka accepted him as part of her life. Sutter even came on family holidays, with Mac’s approval – an arrangement Sedaka later claimed was great fun.

The only real discord came in 1964, when he discovered that Eleanor and Sutter, who had appointed themselves his managers, had spent most of his money. He fired them and she attempted suicide, but “a few months later we all got over it,” he cheerily recalled.

He had the early makings of a classical pianist and, after graduating from Abraham Lincoln high school in 1956, returned to Juilliard for two years. But by then his head had been turned by rock’n’roll. He was writing songs with a neighbour, Howard Greenfield, and had joined a doo-wop group (after he left, they renamed themselves the Tokens and had a smash hit with The Lion Sleeps Tonight).

Sedaka craved fame, which he might well have achieved as a pianist – his talent had attracted the attention of Artur Rubinstein, who gave him a one-off appearance on New York’s main classical radio station – but rock music was the faster track to success. And, at a time when most rock’n’roll songwriters knew only four chords, the classically trained Sedaka stood out. He and Greenfield were spotted by Aldon Music and given a cubicle in the famous Brill Building, where they wrote Stupid Cupid and Where the Boys Are for Connie Francis, as well as chart songs for Bobby Darin, Dinah Washington and Jimmy Clanton.

Chivvied by the success of his cousin, the pop-jazz stylist Eydie Gormé, Sedaka hungered for the spotlight himself. His light, pitch-perfect tenor complemented his buoyant tunes, but it took 10 releases on three record labels before his first substantial hit, Oh! Carol, in 1959.

He had a total of 12 Top 40 hits between 1958 and 1963, including the chart-topping Breaking Up Is Hard to Do; as a bonus, despite being cherubic rather than hunky, he was a heartthrob to a swathe of teenage girls. If the 1964 British invasion had not unseated American pop singers almost overnight, his chart reign might have continued much further into the 60s.

With his fortunes as a singer floundering, he regrouped, and spent the rest of the decade writing for others, including the Monkees at their teenybopper peak and the 5th Dimension. In the early 1970s, he moved to the UK, where he was still popular, and enjoyed a resurgence.

He made an album with the then unknown 10cc as his backing band, but his remarkable second coming only properly got under way when Elton John, a longtime fan, signed him to his new Rocket Records label.

The singles Laughter in the Rain (1974) and Bad Blood (1975) reached No 1 and Sedaka – whose response to the 70s had been to grow his hair and add a dash of disco flavouring to his compositions – was again ubiquitous. He also had a royalties windfall in 1975, when Captain and Tennille made his Love Will Keep Us Together into a drivetime classic.

In 2005, Tony Christie’s cover of Amarillo was a major hit in the UK when it was re-released to raise money for Comic Relief. By then, Sedaka’s recorded output had dwindled mainly to greatest hits albums, but he was still a popular live draw, and toured until the end of his life. Despite never making it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and had a street in Brooklyn named after him, which he visited whenever he was in the neighbourhood.

In 2016, he released his last album, I Do It for Applause, which featured 12 new songs, plus a 13-minute symphony, Joie de Vivre. But in 2020, he said: “I stopped writing a couple of months ago because I felt if you can’t top it, you should stop it. I think the reason I’ve been around so long is I’ve always been able to raise the bar, reinvent Neil Sedaka, and to develop and grow.”

During the Covid pandemic, he posted more than 150 free mini-performances on YouTube, and in 2025, shortly after his 86th birthday, began a monthly Sunday residency at the Velvet Martini Lounge at Vitello’s Italian restaurant in Studio City, California.

Leba survives him, as does their daughter, Dara, with whom he had a Top 20 hit, Should’ve Never Let You Go, in 1980, and their son, Marc.

• Neil Sedaka, singer and songwriter, born 13 March 1939; died 27 February 2026