Up On The Roof

NEIL DIAMOND: "Up On The Roof" (Columbia)

DESPITE HIS seemingly pathological shyness and a style of body movement that suggests he sleeps with two boulders on each shoulder, Diamond obviously has his lighter side. Like when he said he'd received from a fan, "something worse than a death threat" - namely the offer of a complete collection of Barry Manilow records. Unfortunately, his lightness rarely shines through in his music, which is often so earnest as to seem untrue.

Of course I'm not forgetting that Diamond composed the song I recently described as the most erotic ever recorded by Elvis, 'And The Grass Don't Pay No Mind', plus similar classics from the '60s, such as that hymn for born-again romantics: 'I'm A Believer'. By anyone's standards, these are perfectly crafted pop creations from a man who mastered his trade in New York's much-maligned Brill Building - the period of his life Diamond seeks to celebrate on this album.

The last time he swaggered down these streets he delivered his best album Beautiful Noise. This time, however, he leaves his own pen at home and turns instead to the songwriting skills of his peers in the early '60s: Leiber/Stoller; Goffin/King; Pomus/Shuman; Sedaka/Greenfield and Phil Spector.

Few would dispute his choice of title song, Gerry Goffin and Carole King's 'Up On The Roof, an obvious highlight in more ways than one. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's characteristically witty 'Love Potion Number Nine', with Neil singing of how he "kissed a cop down on 34th and vine" should keep gays smiling as much as the same composers' coded homosexual song 'Jailhouse Rock'.

The same composers also provide two of the album's other highlights, 'Spanish Harlem and a version of 'I (Who Have Nothing)' with an orchestration that probably owes more to David Lynch than to Tin Pan Alley.

Diamond's relatively heavyweight approach to Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman's 'Save The Last Dance For Me' also works, especially when one recalls that Pomus wrote the lyric as he watched, from a wheelchair, his girlfriend being led around the dancefloor by another man.

However poignancy almost turns to perversion as the fifty-something Neil Diamond sings that song of teenage longing, 'Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen'. In the sleeve notes Diamond says the song "takes on new meaning at this stage of my life, with my two daughters past that age". Well, yes, Neil, and I know you've tried to neutralise the lyric but haven't you ever listened to the subtext in that song?

Yet apart from such minor aberrations Up On The Roof is a fitting tribute to the Brill Building, and to the songwriters too often written off as pedestrian talents in histories of rock. In their own way such songwriters were often, in fact, poets of the pre-rock era.

• Joe Jackson