Archive JULY 2025 TAKE 340 1 MIKE OLDFIELD (P42) 2 MELANIE (P45) 3 SUPER DJATA BAND (P46) 4 LALO SCHIFRIN (P49) REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS
DIONNE WARWICK
Make It Easy On Yourself: The Scepter Recordings 1962–1971 SOULMUSIC
A superlative singer’s ’60s, boxed.
By Richard Williams
IT’S tempting, of course, to see Dionne Warwick as simply the human delivery system, albeit a very gifted one, for the songs jointly written by the composer Burt Bacharach and the lyricist Hal David during their astonishingly prolific little golden age in the 1960s. The convincing evidence for such a straightforward proposition is contained within the 280 tracks of this new boxset, which includes all Warwick’s studio and concert albums released across a decade on the Scepter label, plus a sprinkling of unreleased live tracks and alternative versions.
Yet that’s not the whole story, not at all. On the face of it, most of the 14 original Scepter studio albums conformed to the old recipe of a couple of hits plus 10 pieces of filler. But there were always half-hidden Bacharach-David gems to be discovered, and this anthology also contains the earliest indications that, even if her reputation will always be defined by that particular partnership, Warwick could not merely exist but actually flourish outside their world.