KEY POINTS:
Veteran singer-songwriter Neil Diamond has gone straight to the top of the British and American charts with his new album - for the first time in a music career that spans more than four decades.
His double success comes 42 years after he released his first LP, The Feel of Neil Diamond.
No other artist has taken so long from the start of their career to get to the top of the charts with an original work.
Diamond, 67, topped the British album charts 16 years ago with a greatest hits compilation.
But despite being one of the world's most successful artists - selling 125 million records worldwide, notching up 36 Top 40 hits and winning a Grammy and a Golden Globe - none of his previous 45 studio albums have made it to the top spot on either side of the Atlantic.
His success was announced by the Official UK Chart Company and the US Billboard Top 200 chart.
The new album, Home Before Dark, is the second to be produced by Rick Rubin, who was crucial to Johnny Cash's success in the latter years of his career.
Rubin applied the same formula to Diamond's music as he did to Cash's, stripping down the songs to their very basics.
Their first collaboration was 12 Songs in 2005, the first album in years to feature Diamond just playing his guitar in a studio.
The critically acclaimed Home Before Dark again relies on guitars and keyboards for its sound and Diamond's band includes Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, the guitarist and keyboard player from Tom Petty's group the Heartbreakers.
Diamond is still best known for his 1970s hits such as Forever In Blue Jeans and Sweet Caroline, but also wrote songs that became hits for others, including I'm a Believer for the Monkees and Red Red Wine for UB40.
He was born in 1941 in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Poland.
Inspired by movie portrayals of singing cowboys, he wrote his first song at 15 years old.
He studied medicine at university but dropped out to devote himself to songwriting, landing a record deal in 1966.
- INDEPENDENT
