Legendary crooner Neil Diamond will be performing at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow on Tuesday, reports Faron Stalker.
To put you in the mood for the gig, here are 20 amazing Neil Diamond facts to impress your mates with.
1. Diamond participated in the Erasmus Hall High School Freshman Chorus and Choral Club in Brooklyn, New York along with his classmate, Barbra Streisand. The pair would later perform You Don't Bring Me Flowers at the 1980 GRAMMY awards.
2. Neil Diamond was first inspired to write his own songs at age 16 when folk singer Pete Seeger performed a small concert at Surprise Lake Camp, a summer camp for Jewish children that Diamond attended in upstate New York.
3. Diamond had a talent for fencing. He was admitted to New York University with a fencing scholarship and was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team.
4. In his final year as a pre-med student at New York University, Diamond dropped out when Sunbeam Music Publishing offered him a job writing songs for four months, earning $50/week. Diamond has been quoted saying, "If this darn songwriting thing hadn't come up, I would have been a doctor now."
5. Diamond spent the early years of his songwriting career making only enough money to spend 35 cents (pennies) on food a day.
6. Diamond wrote the songs I'm a Believer, A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You, Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow) and Love Love for himself. But the charttopping covers by The Monkees were released before his own recordings.
7. Elvis Presley has covered Diamond's hits And the Grass Won't Pay No Mind and Sweet Caroline.
8. In the mid-60s, after signing a deal with Bang Records, Diamond considered using a stage name, narrowing it down to two possibilities: Noah Kaminsky or Eice Charry.
9. Neil Diamond originally said that the 1969 hit Sweet Caroline was written for Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy, after seeing her in an equestrian riding outfit on the cover of Life Magazine. However, just last year, he revealed that the song is actually about his wife Marsha, but he needed a three-syllable name and he couldn't find anything that rhymed with Marsha.
10. Australians love Neil Diamond. Diamond's hit album Hot August Night spent 29 weeks at number 1 in Australia and was voted number 16 favorite albums of all time in Australia.
11. In 1973, Diamond wrote the soundtrack for the film Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and despite winning a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Diamond sued the director, Hall Bartlett, for butchering his score.
12. Diamond received a Razzie Award for Worst Actor for his performance in the 1980 remake of The Jazz Singer.
13. Diamond's hit Heartlight was inspired by the 1982 film E.T. The Extra Terrestrial.
14. Reggae group UB40's hit Red Red Wine was actually written by Neil Diamond; however, the cover of it became much more famous than Diamond's original recording.
15. Johnny Cash won a grammy for his cover of Diamond's Solitary Man in 2000.
16. Will Ferrell did a recurring impression of Neil Diamond on Saturday Night Live.
17. Diamond played Glastonbury Festival in 2008 to approximately 108,000 fans. During his performance of Done Too Soon, the sound went out for a few minutes, but the crowd filled the silence with chanting and clapping.
18. Neil Diamond is one of the world's best-selling artists of all time, having sold more than 125 million records worldwide.
19. Diamond was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November, 2011 and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2012.
20. The last time Diamond performed in Scotland was at Hampden Park in Glasgow on July 2, 2011.
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