Interview: Legendary musician Glen Campbell

Outside the main entrance to the Orleans Casino in Las Vegas, a man in a green shell suit is singing in praise of the Lord. "Oh, Jesus," he begins, very softly and perfectly in tune. "Bring back the boy in me. Put your hand on your heart, and let me run free. Oh Jesus, my eyes need help to see. Bring back the boy in me."

It's Saturday afternoon in Sin City, and the Orleans forecourt is busy, but most new arrivals pause only to palm a few dollars to the parking valet, and enter without glancing at the face of my musical companion. Of those who do look at him, some - noticing his defiantly downbeat outfit, but not the two unlit Ecuadorian cigars in his right hand - pay him little attention. Others clearly recognise Glen Campbell but say nothing, at which point there passes between them that barely perceptible look by which a public figure thanks a stranger for not interrupting him.

"I remember it like yesterday," Campbell sings. "I realise my childhood slipped away. Chasing plans, chasing dreams; silhouettes of what I used to be."

He has the habit, during any conversation, of occasionally slipping into song, a transition he somehow manages with none of the absurdity that characterises such moments in drama. When he stops singing, a group of Hispanic tourists wave and applaud. They laugh and drive off. I don't believe they have a clue who he is.

Campbell waves back.

"I don't feel any different," he tells me, "than when I was 30."

It's a curious thing to say of a man who has sold almost 50 million records and had 27 top-ten hits, but Glen Campbell remains widely unrecognised as the legendary artist he is. His ongoing partnership with the prodigiously talented songwriter Jimmy Webb, who provided him with classics such as "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston", has been as compelling a collaboration between songwriter and artist as has ever been achieved in popular music. As a guitarist, Campbell played with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Ike and Tina Turner, Randy Newman and the Beach Boys, and nothing of the unique gift that attracted these performers has deserted him. And yet, over the three days I spend with him in Las Vegas, he repeatedly expresses surprise that I should be interested in talking to him at all.

"Wasn't it you," I ask him, "who once said journalists lie so much that they have to get another guy to call their dog?"

"I did say that, because a lot of the guys I met, years ago, just didn't give a shit. I've finally realised that you do what you do in the eyes of God. Those people were lying on paper. God hates liars. Not that we are perfect, in the entertainment industry. The majority of people in this business are bullshitters."

He's as familiar as most, from his years of heavy drinking and cocaine abuse, with the sort of headlines that can be generated when you trash your suite at the Plaza Hotel in New York, causing $1,200 of damage, and are sighted on a Texas golf course at dawn wearing nothing but your underpants. The press wasn't much kinder when, on a long-haul flight in 1981, he became involved in a heated discussion over seating arrangements with a member of the Indonesian government. He told the politician that he was going to "call my friend Ronald Reagan and ask him to bomb Jakarta."

"I didn't hold back," Campbell says, "in those days."

That was the old Glen and, as he's keen to emphasise, any exaggerated tales relating to nude golfing, or impromptu threats of aerial bombardment, are firmly in the past. Those were things that happened to "another man who once inhabited my body." Happily married since 1982 to Kim, his fourth wife, it's over 20 years since he publicly renounced the stimulants that fuelled his more distinctive social excursions. Back home in Los Angeles, the couple belong to a Messianic Synagogue attended, the singer explains, "by Jews and non-Jews who recognise Christ as the risen saviour."

Campbell, who is 71, unwraps his enormous cigars, hands me one, and strikes a match. As we struggle, in the light breeze, with the exhilarating process of ignition, he explains that he hasn't come outside simply to smoke: he suffers from claustrophobia and welcomes any opportunity to get outdoors.

"I don't like confinement. Low ceilings. Elevators. I've learned to accept it. I guess it's anxiety."

If there's a drawback to frequenting a public area such as this, it's that many of the looks he does attract are connected not so much with his artistic output, as with his arrest for driving while intoxicated near Phoenix, Arizona, in November 2003. The police photograph - to his great distress - has become the most famous single image of Campbell: wild-eyed and handcuffed, wearing a reversed baseball cap, Arizona Diamondbacks T-shirt, shorts and trainers. The picture was taken after his silver BMW performed a bold and unorthodox manoeuvre, resulting in a collision with a vehicle driven by a sommelier called Mr Roote.

Campbell allegedly attempted to knee his arresting officer, Sergeant Bill Niles, in what the policeman described as the thigh area. ("There was," Niles told reporters, "quite a bit of singing, and a lot of 'Don't you know who I am?' ") He was sentenced to 10 days in jail and community service.

"When they were taking you down to the station, did you really break into: 'By The Time I Get To Phoenix'?"

"I guess I believed I could sing my way out of trouble." It was an uncharacteristic lapse, Campbell says, and not one that he is proud of.

I'd arrived in Las Vegas the previous evening, and travelled straight to the theatre. People had warned me that they thought the musician, who suffers from occasional forgetfulness and disorientation, might be losing it as a performer, but when I walked in to the venue, he was already on stage, playing the William Tell overture immaculately, and at speed, on a 12-string guitar which was balanced on his head.

Whereas most artists of his generation seek to deny their age, Campbell almost flaunts it, embarking on whimsical solos designed to unsettle the audience with a fear that he'll never make it back to the main tune, which he invariably does - just.

"I do that," he says. "It's true. I think of them like mazy home runs. I like to get real lost and get back to base at the last minute. It's good hokum."

His singing voice, like his virtuosity, is remarkably unaltered. Campbell performs songs like "Rhinestone Cowboy", "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston" as though it's the first time he's ever played them, and when he does the atmosphere in the thousand-seater hall is mesmeric. Backstage, after the show, there was none of the hostility and posturing that experience teaches you to dread. His band, his veteran road manager, Bill Maclay, and everyone around him are generous and accommodating, which is not necessarily the norm in his business.

He performs several numbers with Debby Campbell. The knowledge that she hasn't quit her day job as a stewardess with US Air, and the fact that she is my interviewee's daughter had, I admit, led me to expect that she'd be just another figure in the long tradition of mediocre talents leeching off the reputation of their parents. In the event, she's great; their duet on "Jackson" is one that its originators, Johnny Cash and June Carter, would have been proud of. The show is sensational, actually.

"It's kind of you to say that. The thing is ..." Campbell pauses, and takes so terrifyingly vigorous a draw on his cigar that, when he exhales, he renders himself temporarily invisible. "I'm booked to play near Dublin in July. I'm really looking forward to that. But right now I really just want to just retire."

"Don't do that."

"Well ... I'd at least like not do this so much. I'd like to lay off for six or seven months," he says, "then quit."

He has the best suite at the Orleans, one of Las Vegas's larger casinos. Once indoors, though, he immediately seems less settled. You need to unlock a kind of golden cell door to access his floor, and Campbell periodically paces his sitting room as though he can't get that lavish barrier off his mind.

The seventh son of a sharecropper - of his 11 siblings, two died in infancy - he grew up picking cotton in Delight, a tiny settlement in Arkansas: "a land of opportunity," Campbell says, "if you had a car. We were just one step above the animals." When he first brought his father to a hotel like this, the singer recalls, Campbell senior swallowed half a small bar of complimentary soap, thinking it was chocolate.

Glen Travis Campbell died when he was two - technically speaking, for 30 seconds or so - after his leg got trapped in a willow tree, submerged in a local stream. His brother Lindell, now a preacher, revived him.

Whether it was this experience, or his cocaine use, or both, that precipitated his anxiety in enclosed spaces, even he doesn't seem sure.

"Because of the drowning," he says, "I have a smaller breathing capacity."

His humble upbringing, lack of formal education, and residual Arkansas accent have brought him a degree of mockery. In his British cuttings file especially, Glen Campbell's conversation is most often transcribed pseudo-phonetically, so that he's using phrases like "Ah guess," and "stoopid": a practice the same writers might hesitate to extend to an audience with the Queen, for instance, who might, by this principle, be quoted as having sighted a mice in her hice. Campbell is smart, with a dry sense of humour, and a manner that invites you to underestimate him at your peril.

"Have you had claustrophobia your whole life?"

He glances at his watch.

"Not yet."

In the early chapters of his 1994 autobiography Rhinestone Cowboy, the dominant images are of poverty, suffocation and beatings. He was given a guitar by his uncle Boo and, recognised as a prodigy, was working at 15, in a dance hall in Albuquerque.

He left New Mexico for Los Angeles in 1960 and was encouraged by producer Jimmy Bowen, who would go on to work with such distinguished figures as Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Steve Earle. Hired as a staff writer at an LA publishing house, American Music, Campbell had a hit the following year with his own composition, "Turn Around, Look At Me."

Glen Campbell, who has always been more interested in golf than gender politics, once remarked that a marriage is like a ship: if the man is not on deck and in charge of the vessel, it will founder. Just staying with his nautical analogy for a moment, there were indications, even in 1961, of the multiple catastrophes that would befall the SS Campbell, whose captain, undermined by a succession of volatile and mutinous first mates, tended to focus more on his rum ration than his compass.

He'd married his first wife Diane after she became pregnant at 15; they lost their son a few days after his birth.

"He never left the hospital," as Campbell puts it, "until he went to the mortuary." His uncle paid for the funeral. Debby, their second child, was raised by her mother and educated mainly in England. He met his second spouse, Billie Jean Nunley, in 1959, while he was still playing in Albuquerque. They married in the autumn of that year and spent their honeymoon here in Las Vegas.

"I took her to watch Bobby Darin," he says. "That was the first show I saw in this town. I remember looking at his guitar player and thinking that maybe I could do what he was doing."

"That sounds modest."

"I'm not half as modest as I think I am."

Highly in demand as a session guitarist, his output and range of collaborators, before he became a star, are simply extraordinary. In 1963 he appeared on 586 recordings. He plays the main guitar parts on "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees, and the Righteous Brothers' classic "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'. " Campbell became a pivotal member of "The Wrecking Crew", the musicians who did much of the studio work for Phil Spector.

"He was a madman," says Campbell, "but he knew how to get that sound."

He plays on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album, and toured with the band in 1964 and 1965, when Brian Wilson was unfit to travel. Among his more famous work is the guitar on Frank Sinatra's "Strangers In The Night".

"In the studio, I just kept staring at him. I couldn't believe that I was in the same room, let alone playing for him." As a result, Campbell recalls, "Sinatra asked someone who the fag guitar player was."

In 1969 he sold more records than The Beatles; a surge in popularity that came off the back of his television show, The Glen Campbell Good Time Hour. The programme, which began that year, was comparable in its power and influence, if not its spirit, to American Idol. He had guests such as Ray Charles, Bob Hope and Willie Nelson. Writers included Steve Martin and Rob Reiner.

Earlier, he'd been a regular on another variety show, Shindig.

"I believe that's where you sang the number 'May The Bird Of Paradise ..."

"Fly up your nose. Yes."

"One review of that performance began: 'As Mr Campbell sang, he did the hula hula bare-chested, swaying his grass-skirted hips with vigour.' "

"It was a hit," interrupts Campbell, looking a little hurt.

A friend of John Wayne, who chose him to co-star in True Grit ("My horse," Campbell recalls, "was frightened of his horse") he has never been over-sympathetic to socialism. He performed for both Nixon and Reagan at the White House. If you start articulating non-Republican values, he looks at you much as he might if you'd started to tell him that cork doesn't float: he's not about to agree with you, but neither will he hold it against you.

He remains a close friend of veteran New York comedians Tommy and Dickie Smothers, whose show was pulled when, as Campbell puts it, "they made one joke too many about Richard Nixon." Despite their radically differing views, Campbell had been a mainstay of the Sixties TV show The Smothers Brothers, even though there were certain things he was not prepared to do for them.

"In one sketch I was supposed to refer to Ronald Reagan as a homosexual. I looked in the dictionary to be sure what the word meant. I didn't want to badmouth the governor of California." He also declined to perform the Sinatra standard "I Believe (For Every Drop Of Rain That Falls)" when he discovered that Tommy Smothers planned to display, on a screen behind him, images from Vietnam. Three months after the Smothers brothers' show was cancelled, under pressure from the White House, The Glen Campbell Good Time Hour replaced it.

"I was a slow-talking country boy with conservative values," he says.

Though his instinct for a song is uncanny - he says he wanted to record Jimmy Webb's "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" the moment he saw the title - he has never acquired the respect accorded to some other performers; perhaps because his songs were considered too middle of the road for a pop audience, too country for the MOR market, and too mainstream for country and western fans. He's written hit records, but sees himself predominantly as an interpreter of work by others, including Larry Weiss, who wrote "Rhinestone Cowboy".

"And traditionally in pop music," I suggest to Campbell, "people like to perceive a close link between artist and song. If a tune isn't written by the singer, they like to imagine a collaborative bond, as existed between Lennon and McCartney, in that brief period when they could bear to perform each other's work."

"I have had that second kind of a bond," says Campbell, "with a man who has been like a brother to me. Jimmy Webb."

When Glen Campbell's first hit "Turn Around, Look At Me" was released, Webb, now 60, was a 14-year-old living in Laverne, Oklahoma. "I heard that song on the radio," the composer told me, on the phone from his home in New York, "and I borrowed money from my dad. I had never bought a record before." He played the single, as he recalls, to the point that his father, a Baptist preacher, implored him to stop.

"I said, 'Dad, this is what I want to do. I want to write songs like this one.' Then I went to my bedroom, and I knelt down and prayed," Webb went on. "I said: 'Dear God, when I grow up, please let me write songs like "Turn Around, Look At Me" and please let Glen Campbell sing them.' That was my prayer. And it was answered. In detail."

By 1967, Webb had established himself as a precocious talent in the publishing industry. A singer named Johnny Rivers recorded Webb's "By The Time I Get To Phoenix." Glen Campbell saw the title on Rivers' album, hanging on a studio wall.

"It was a big hit for him," Webb said, "and he did three or four songs of mine without ever talking to me. He knew that I was a longhair. He knew that I was a leftie. He didn't go for that sort of thing at all."

"Either there is a God, or we live in a world of extraordinary coincidences," I suggested to Webb.

"I'd say there was a profound connection between us very early on, that he was not aware of, but I was - because I had heard his first record, that beautiful song, and I'd deliberately set out to create things like that. So perhaps it's not all that strange that, years later, he should run across my songs and sense that they were perfect for him."

After the success of "By The Time I Get To Phoenix," (omega) Webb explained, Campbell recorded "Galveston." An apparently uncomplicated lament by a homesick serviceman, the song is has a haunting, occult quality which led D B C Pierre to use it as a recurring theme in his 2003 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Vernon God Little.

By the time Galveston was a hit, Webb was living in the former Philippine embassy in Hollywood, "with 50 of my closest friends. Glen finally called me. He said: 'Do you think you could write another song about a town?' I'd been driving around northern Oklahoma, an area that's flat, remote and almost surreal in its infinite distances. I'd seen a lineman up on a telegraph pole, talking on the phone. It was such a curiosity to see a human being perched up there, in those surroundings."

Readers of Rolling Stone, Mojo and Blender magazines have voted "Wichita Lineman" one of the greatest songs ever recorded: accolades that surprised even its composer. Certainly there's no question that this is the greatest record about a telephone-maintenance engineer from Kansas. It's typical of Webb's gift for discovering the poetic in the apparently mundane; "Wichita Lineman" begins like a redneck worksong: "I am a lineman for the county, and I drive the main roads" and seamlessly entices the listener into the mournful intensity of its second chorus: "And I love you more than want you / And I want you for all time." (The song has been covered by numerous artists including REM; its opening is so well-known as to be frequently parodied, in reference to the high-voltage nature of the narrator's work, as: "I am a lineman for the .... aaaaaargh!")

While Glen Campbell never let his politics get in the way of a hit - he recorded Buffy Sainte Marie's "Universal Soldier", for instance, and "Galveston" is widely interpreted as an anti-Vietnam song - it isn't easy to picture Webb and the singer as soul mates.

"The first time we met," Jimmy Webb told me, "he was in a studio, fiddling with his guitar. I'd never set eyes on him but I knew his politics. I knew that he loved John Wayne, who was a little bit right of Attila the Hun. My hair was as long as John Lennon's. I said, 'Hi, Glen.' He said: 'When you gonna get a haircut?' Those were the first words he ever addressed to me."

Webb's friends were fashionable renegades such as Lennon and the late Harry Nilsson.

"I remember the insanity of being very concerned that my socialist credentials would remain intact," says Webb, who hasn't drunk alcohol for seven years, and not taken cocaine for 20. "I was friendly with Joni Mitchell. I loved her, but I was terrified that I wouldn't be accepted in her world because people would be whispering: 'He works with Glen Campbell'. A man who uses strings, and plays Vegas - two things that, back then were clear indicators that you supported the Vietnam War, if not the devil himself."

"You must have hit it off on some level."

"We did. And then his life took a tremendous left turn - somewhat analogous to switching your support from the English team to the Scots, mid-way through a soccer game."

"You mean in terms of his recreations?"

"Yes. Politically he stayed conservative. But cocaine is a great leveller. People who had preconceived ideas about each other would drop them in a flash when a bottle of cocaine appeared. Although with Glen, there used to be something definitely disconcerting about the mix between the Holy Bible and the cocaine. He would be delivering the most astounding lecture from the Old Testament, and at the same time there would be lines laid out on the table. It was just surreal."

It's perplexing to Webb's admirers that he remains best known to many as the composer of "MacArthur Park." An ambitious epic which was a hit in 1968 for Richard Harris and, 10 years later, for Donna Summer, "MacArthur Park" is one of those things in life that everyone exposed to it has a strong and instinctive opinion about, like marzipan. Webb has had far less attention for the more mature and accomplished recent pieces that he's composed specifically with Campbell in mind, such as the magnificent "Postcards From Paris", which appears on Webb's 2004 album Suspending Disbelief.

"I have never failed in my love for Glen," Jimmy Webb says, "which has always been boundless. Nor in my admiration, nor in my respect. Even if there have been times when he has left me completely gobsmacked."

The devil, Glen Campbell tells me, back in his hotel suite, can take many forms. "Something like cocaine, something that totally takes over your entire being. That's evil. The devil is trying to get control of everybody he can."

"In your autobiography you describe eating squirrels as a boy. You say your father almost turned a shotgun on himself, out of shame that his family might starve. By 1965 you were driving round Las Vegas in a gold Cadillac. When did fame start to be a problem for you?"

"In 1969, when I began the TV programme. After the very first broadcast, my whole life changed. My privacy was gone. You drink to hide the pain."

"What pain?"

"I think they worked me too much."

"And Glen ..." Kim, his wife, has come in from the next room. "Had a difficult time coming out of a divorce." [He was separated from Billie Jean in 1975. The couple had three children.]

"I drank to escape that," he concedes.

It was Billie Jean, who died of cancer in 1993, who introduced him to cocaine, in the mid-Seventies.

"I've done shows where I don't remember being there. I'd go for days and I wouldn't remember anything. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. That scared me."

"And yet even when you were taking cocaine, you were watching religious programmes, and reading the Bible?"

"Right. I read the Bible for two or three days at a time, almost continually."

"Any particular part?"

"Ecclesiastes. 'That which hath been is that which shall be; and that which hath been done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.' I look back on some of the things I did and they were just totally outrageous."

He freebased just once, and suffered severe palpitations. (omega)

"That was here in Vegas. I thought I was going to die. God was telling me that I needed to change. That was an eye-opener, boy. I woke up on a couch. I didn't know where I was. At least I had enough sense not to take any of those hallucino ... hallucina ... oh, look it up in your dictionary. It's under 'adjectives' I guess."

"When he was on cocaine," Kim says, "I could see something very evil in his eyes. It was really scary."

By the time he met Kimberly Woollen, a dancer at Radio City Music Hall, he'd had two more dysfunctional long-term relationships: the first with Sarah, who became his wife in 1977. She'd previously been married to one of his close friends.

"We centred our life around cocaine," says Campbell, whose autobiography describes how he was "routinely nasty" to air crew, to the point that his rich friends would go and hide in economy. In 1980 he took up with country singer Tanya Tucker. Then a notorious hell-raiser in her own right, she was 22 years his junior.

"There are published allegations that you were violent towards Tucker: were they true?"

"No."

"She sued Glen for knocking her teeth out," Kim says. "They settled, because who wants lawsuits?"

Campbell says Tucker was biting him on the arm when she damaged her teeth.

"I just loosened them."

He was re-baptised by his brother Lindell in 1981.

"I'd met Kim, who didn't behave in the way I had been. Then I woke up one morning and I said, 'Glen, you are stupid. You are making very stupid decisions and it is not good for your life.' "

"We had little kids," says Kim. [The couple have three children: daughter Ashley, and sons Cal and Shannon]. We had a good church, where they mentored him."

"I discovered it's a lot better," Campbell says, "to live life sober."

"So how was it that, after years of successful recovery, you ended up on the front page of every American newspaper, in 2003?"

"Someone gave me a Coke, and I didn't realise that there was rum in it. I drank it and ... I didn't really know anything till I woke up in jail."

"He had a relapse of his addiction to alcohol," Kim says. "The Lord allowed it to happen to him. He needed that to shake him up."

"It can't have felt good," I suggest to Campbell, "the next day."

"Talk about claustrophobia. Man." He whistles. "I certainly won't do that any more. I wasn't in control of what was happening around me."

"No matter who's in charge," Kim says, "God is orchestrating everything. Armageddon. All of that is coming."

Her thoughts turn to Iraq.

"The ones who like us there hate us, and the ones who hate us double hate us. We're trying to help them build a democracy. Sad as it is, we should have just gone over and totally wiped them out."

I'm just wondering who, in this last sentence, the word "them" refers to, and whether it might take in all people east of Lowestoft, when Glen, who has been looking distracted, gets up and walks across the room. He comes back with a small white box, which he autographs and presents to me.

"Chocolates." He smiles.

"I had them hidden in a drawer," Kim says.

"You have them," Glen tells me.

"Do you still read the Bible now?" I ask the singer.

"I wouldn't say every day."

"What's your favourite passage?"

" 'I have not come to destroy but to fulfil ...' He quotes some more verses from the Sermon on the Mount. "That's pretty profound stuff."

As I'm leaving, Campbell walks down to the lobby with me. He talks about Presley, who chose him to play on his 1964 soundtrack Viva Las Vegas.

"I met Elvis for the first time in Albuquerque, in 1957. He was such a wonderful man. And a true friend."

Campbell goes into a perfect impression of Presley singing "That's Alright (Mama)."

"He asked you to stop doing impersonations of him didn't he?"

"He threatened to book the whole front row, and have his boys come down, and read the Wall Street Journal right through my show. I told him I'd have to gain a little weight if I was going to carry on doing him. At the end," Campbell adds, "he had the sorriest bunch of bastards around him. The old Memphis gang, he called them. Elvis was making all that money, and they were just hanging around him. He took pills, and he'd stay up for days. I saw him in that state and I thought wow, you just can't live that way. The body needs rest. I never really saw him drink. It was always pills."

He talks about his other late friend and amphetamine enthusiast, Roger "King Of The Road" Miller - a heavy smoker fond of LA Turnarounds: so-called because one pill would allow you to drive from Nashville to Los Angeles and back, with no sleep.

"How old was Roger Miller when he died?"

"56. He told me that his wife was such a bad cook, all the flies got together and fixed the mesh on the screen doors."

Campbell is laughing, and then he isn't.

"When Elvis died, I started looking at things a little different, that's all I can say."

He falls silent; pondering, I imagine, a different scenario, whereby his own life might have ended prematurely, while he was freebasing on that Las Vegas couch. As it is, he's fit, apart from some tendon problems in his right hand, and he's recently been performing again with Jimmy Webb.

"There is a deep and abiding affection that binds us even closer, now we have been through everything we have experienced together," Webb told me. "Sometimes I'll be with him and he'll reach out and take my arm, in a protective kind of way. That gesture says everything. It says: 'Look out, old friend - this is one hand for yourself, one for the ship.' There is a bond between us that is unbreakable. It's permanent now. Nothing could change it."

The pair are making an album together, to be released later this year. From what Campbell was saying to me earlier, this CD collaboration - like his appearance in Ireland - could possibly be his last.

"As the innately good person that he is - and this is not hokum - Glen has rightly come to a place where he is surrounded by love. He doesn't have to hurt himself any more," Jimmy Webb says. "And in a way that's what we are all looking for. But what concerns me is that people should understand that, as an artist, Glen Campbell is someone who is really important. I think that, one of these days, they will understand. I hope they will. Before it's too late."

Glen Campbell appears at the Midlands Music Festival, Mullingar, County Westmeath, 29 July, tel: 0870 243 4455; www.midlandsmusicfestival.ie

Campbell classics

"Gentle On My Mind" (1967): John Hartford crafted this poignant song in 15 minutes after watching Dr Zhivago. He won a Grammy for writing it. Campbell got one for singing it.

"By the Time I Get to Phoenix" (1967): A man writes a Dear John note to his lover then drives across the mid-west. Jimmy Webb's first hit for Campbell came in at No 84 in Mojo magazine's 100 Greatest Songs of All Time, in 2000.

"Wichita Lineman" (1969): Webb's follow-up to "...Phoenix", reached No 3 in the UK. Webb had spotted a man up a telegraph pole in the flatlands of northern Oklahoma - and the rest, as they say ...

"Galveston" (1969): When Webb wrote this account of a soldier in the Spanish-American war and the girl he leaves behind, the Vietnam war wasn't far from his mind.

"Rhinestone Cowboy" (1975): Campbell's biggest hit, written by Larry Weiss. A Rhinestone Cowboy wears all the gear without dirtying his hands. Campbell revisited it five years ago in a techno version.

Christopher Maume