IT'S May, I hope the sun is shining today – and even if it isn’t, it should be because Burt Bacharach is 80 years old tomorrow and while Burt is around everything is just dandy.
In a world that grows more homogeneous and mediocre by the year, he stands out like a shining light.
Burt is one of the great songwriters and arrangers of this or any other century and anyone with half a soul inclined towards beautiful music should raise a glass to him today.
The litany of great songs he has composed, largely in partnership with lyricist Hal David (who will be 87 in a fortnight), is extraordinary: Walk On By, (They Long To Be) Close To You, I Say A Little Prayer, Anyone Who Had a Heart, What The World Needs Now, The Look Of Love, Do You Know The Way To San Jose?, Make It Easy On Yourself, This Guy’s In Love With You, A House Is Not A Home, Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head… To read the list is to sing it; only the Beatles, arguably, have a body of work so instantly recognisable, unforgettable and hummable.
He was, and for all I know still is, something of a tyrant over his work.
“Burt wrote very particular notes,” Dionne Warwick told me a few years ago. “And it was those notes he wanted sung, so it was never a good idea to sing any others.”
He was tough on the young Cilla Black too, although the recordings he drew out of her, during long sessions at Abbey Road Studios, remain (surprise, surprise) her very best work. Alfie, in particular, is stunning.
He is master of the teasing intro. Think of the few bars of yearning piano that set up Close To You, or better still the extraordinary vamping at the beginning of his own version of This Guy’s In Love With You. He knows he has a great melody coming so he delays and delays, trickling the same, teasing little arpeggio back and forth until he’s ready to launch the main piano part.
Noel Gallagher of Oasis once remarked: “If I could write a song half as good as This Guy’s In Love With You, I’d die a happy man.”
Bacharach’s own recordings of his songs were not deemed particularly successful, so powerful was his music in launching other careers (would Tom Jones, for instance, have attracted such an abundance of flying underwear without What’s New Pussycat?) but they are ageless.
Among Bacharach aficionados, the “vinyl vultures” who root through boot sales for the original records, Burt’s own albums are the most cherished: the writer’s cool, Redford-esque profile almost always accompanied by a Sixties beauty of some variety.
As with Herb Alpert, Andy Williams and to a certain extent Dean Martin (though not, unfortunately, Sinatra), his image was based on a certain aloofness. These were the Marlboro men of their age: unidentifiable as anything fashionable but instantly recognisable as defining a certain variety of cool, ageless masculinity.
Nevertheless Bacharach’s love songs, and they are nearly all love songs, are unisex and he only once overplayed the alpha male card, with Wives And Lovers. The message: if you don’t dress up for your husband, he’s going to run off with someone from the office, is clunky by Bacharach standards, even if the tune is gorgeous.
Ironically, perhaps, though I struggle to pin down quite why, my only meeting with Bacharach was more than a decade ago at Madame JoJo’s, a nightclub famed for transvestites, in London’s Soho.
Tanned, dressed in a casual sweater and looking about half his 60-odd years, Burt had the easy but slightly distracted air of a man watching his lawn being mown.
His music had been “rediscovered” for the umpteenth time and formed the background of the then burgeoning “lounge” scene: 20-somethings dressed in Sixties’ slacks and mini-skirts dancing to Bacharach, Alpert, Bert Kaempfert and countless others once abandoned in the record store broom cupboard marked “Easy Listening”. He had just had one of his more recent pieces, Love Always, recorded by a Motown protégé called El DeBarge, a stone-cold classic that I thought he should try to get re-released or covered by someone more famous.
He was friendly, chatty, modest (all those things you hope your heroes will be) but he was not going backwards. “It’s a good idea but I’ve got so many songs,” he said. “There’s always another to write and try to make into a hit.” In essence, perhaps, that was the secret of his success. There is no bitterness to be found in Bacharach or in his work: think of Make It Easy On Yourself, arguably the most generous break-up song in history. Tyrant he may be, technically, but the compassion in his music suggests a different sort of character.
Last year, when the news broke that the disabled daughter he had with ex-wife Angie Dickinson had died, I dug out the track he wrote for her when she was born, prematurely, in 1966 – the instrumental Nikki. It is simply glorious. There wasn’t a dry eye in my lounge, I’m happy to admit.
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