SUPERSTAR WHO LOOKS LIKE A HOBO
Matt White
28 January 1976

The final track of Steet Life, a new Neil Diamond album which has already sold a million copies before it reaches the shops has just been completed.

It's almost midnight in Paramount Studios recording room and Diamond sits slumped in a chair, looking like a weary hobo.

Old jeans, a faded shirt and his feet bursting out of battered shoes.with holes in the soles and the uppers breaking loose.

I can also see a rip in one of his socks.

"My lucky shoes" he explains weakly. "I always wear them to recording sessions. My dog chewed the hole in the socks."

That's comforting to know because there has been scurrilous gossip around this gossip-throbbing showbiz capitol that Neil Diamond has begun to slip in popularity as a No 1 song-writtin superstar vocalist.

The main reason is that he has refused to do concerts for the last three and a half years. And in Hollywood a face unseen is a face forgotten.

Next Friday, Neil Diamond emerges from his self-imposed exile to do concerts in Sacremento and Utah.

These aere not comeback appearences, but merely a warm up for his Australian concert tour next month.