Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)

One of the last great star songwriters, linking Milhaud and The Beatles, The Blob and Austin Powers, Burt Bacharach combined sparkling sophistication with a devastating emotional range, turning melodies that taught the world to sing and still amaze peers and devotees. “Burt was in touch with the soul,” they tell Bill DeMain

THE FIRST TIME I INTERVIEWED Burt Bacharach, in 1995, his opening words to me were, “You realise our backs are up against the wall, right? Let’s do this.”

Whether he had a studio date or writing session that day, I don’t know, but it was clear, as it would be each of the eight times we spoke over the years, that Bacharach, who died on February 8 at the age of 94 from natural causes, didn’t enjoy revisiting his musical legacy. In conversation, he could seem preoccupied, like he was working out some melodic puzzle in his head. Ask him about the inspiration for A House Is Not A Home or The Look Of Love, and he might come across as impatient or frustratingly brief. Of the latter, he told me, “I watched the scene of Ursula Andress dancing in Casino Royale and the melody came to me.”

What mattered most for Bacharach was the now, the next, the new. “I like the present and the future,” he said.

That restless, forward-looking energy was at the heart of his world-conquering melody writing. That several of his songs had cities in the titles – Do You Know The Way To San Jose, Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa among them – makes poetic sense, because his tunes often felt like living skylines. With elegantly constructed architecture that yearned upwards, their dynamic push and kinetic leaps always seemed in quest of sky-scraping emotion.

Blue on blue: Burt Bacharach in London, 1966.

Getty

The story of his life: Burt Bacharach with Marlene Dietrich, 1960;

recording with Dionne Warwick, Pye Studios, London, 1964;

with wife Angie Dickinson;

Kreusch/AP/Shutterstock, Getty (3), ITV/Shutterstock, Percy Hatchman/Shutterstock

Bacharach visualised it in a similar way. When I asked how he composed, he said, “I like to get away from the piano. I can hear a long line that way, peaks and valleys. I can hear the whole song without worrying about what my hands are playing. I get a sense of balance that I wouldn’t get by just sitting at the piano.”

Through the 1960s and early ’70s, Bacharach found an ideal three-way balance with Hal David and Dionne Warwick. David’s everyman eloquence as a lyricist and Warwick’s nimble voice, with its cool ache, helped propel dozens of Bacharach’s tunes into the charts and the fabric of our times, beginning with Don’t Make Me Over in 1962, Make It Easy On Yourself (from 1963’s Presenting Dionne Warwick) and 1964 US Top 10 smash Walk On By.

“When I heard Walk On By the first time, it was probably an 8.5 or 9 on the tectonic scale,” recalls Jimmy Webb, who, aged 18 in 1964, was two years away from his own success. “In the songwriting world, everybody’s ears perked up at the same time. It was like, ‘Holy moly, who and what are we dealing with here?!’ And then, it was song after song.”