Songwriterobit: Andrew Gold

Andrew Gold, musician and songwriter, has died.

Born to a musical family - his mother's voice was the one appearing to come out of Audrey Hepburn's mouth in My Fair Lady - which may have helped calm his parents when Linda Rondstadt turned up at his High School and shortly after invited the young Andrew to join her backing band. From The Stone Poneys, Gold built a career which would see him appear on recordings by Loudon Wainwright III, Carly Simon and Cher.

He also had two hits in his own right - Thank You Being A Friend (and hats off to E! for boiling down his long and fascinating career into Golden Girls theme writer dies) and Lonely Boy:

From the perspective of a second child, that always seemed a bit of a whiny song to me. Amusingly, when his mother heard it - and realised there was a lot of biographical detail - she assumed it was written from the heart. He assured her it was actually made up.

Andrew Gold was 59; he'd been ill with cancer for some time.

UPDATE: As a commenter has pointed out below, while his US Top 40 tally was two, in the UK Andrew also had a hit with this:



And - at the same time - I'd completely forgotten Wax, his collaboration with Graham Gouldman: