What an incredible body of work over such a long period. I loved his work with Elvis Costello too. My favorite Bacharach song, largely because of his fantastic, inventive arrangement is Anyone Who Had a Heart. Despite the better known versions, I think it is best realized on the Dusty Springfield cut (I like the way they got the title wrong on the album cover). Full of pleasant surprises:
Elvis, you say?
RIP, Burt!
When I was a snotty little young teenager, I despised music like Bacharach’s and the artists he wrote for, Dusty, Dionne, the Carpenters etc. This was music for squares, for grown-ups, I preferred to listen to music like Elvis Costello’s without having a clue that guys like him adored that music. Boy, was I wrong, and growing up I soon began to embrace this music (it’s NOT elevator music, as I would have said when I was thirteen). I think the first record I owned that had a Bacharach song was Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s “Welcome To The Pleasure Dome” which had a cover of “Do You Know The Way To San José”. Today I love Bacharach, IMHO his best interpreter was Dusty, but I’m biased because I love her so much. Like many others, I just love “Painted From Memory” and am listening to it in remembrance right now. RIP.
I didn’t know he wrote all those songs. Talented guy. Before my time. I first heard of him in The Meaning of Life (there’s no “s” in Bert Bacharach).
There used to be a restaurant called The Chestnut Tree just south of downtown Minneapolis. My dad would hang out there whenever he was in town, and I spent hours sitting alongside him while songs like these played on the stereo system. It was virtually all of the music I heard from the time I was in fourth grade until I hit puberty.
I’ve always loved Dusty Springfield, along with Dionne Warwick, Dean Martin, Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, The Seekers, and many other performers from the '60s.
A couple of years ago, I heard “Anyone Who Had a Heart” for the first time in ages, playing in the background on Heartbeat. (The show’s soundtrack is all '60s music.)
It took me a while to track down the artist, who (from what I can tell) is largely (and most undeservedly) forgotten today, Cilla Black. To my ears, she and Petula Clark embody the London Sound of the 1960s.
I heard once, and I don’t know if it’s true, that he used to bang out a lot of his tunes on a kids piano.
Easier to take along on trips, I’d imagine.
That’s an explanation. Today he would write the songs on a tablet when travelling.
One thing I noticed was the recording taking advantage of stereo - with parts of the sound moving left to right. Does any modern music do that these days?
I remember many years ago I thought my car stereo had gone bad, as a lot of songs were missing musical elements. Turned out that I had somehow gotten the balance all the way left (or maybe right). You’d think I would have noticed the sound only coming from one side, but . . .
I don’t know which particular version of Casino Royale was used for the clip I posted, but the reissued/remastered soundtrack has both mono and stereo versions of the songs and the stereo versions sound terrific.
Total tangent…
I have a vast collection of proper background music from the 60s and 70s which I have been listening to all day every day for years (don’t judge!). These special records have no song listings, so you get whatever they give you and are often puzzled by the identity of one catchy tune or another.
This specific tune that you posted instantly rang a bell in my mind: “I have heard that loads of times in my collection!”
One more mystery tune identified. Thousands to go.
Many of Burt Bacharach’s tunes are found in the Seeburg background music library–they are such a good fit for the genre. I suspect I will discover a few more familiar tunes as people post them here.
Casino Royale was a disaster of a film, yet the scene with Peter Sellers seducing Ursula Andress to a background of “The Look of Love” is an absolute and non-comic superstar classic.
You mean Burt. Bert Bacharach was his father, a well-known syndicated newspaper columnist and fashion editor back in the day.
Back when I was working on the radio, we played the Muppets’ version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” one evening. I was listening on headphones with my eyes shut, and it seemed that Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and the other characters were bouncing all around me. It was trippy!
wow she was perfect for that song …
slight highjack:
one of the saddest things i have seen on youtube is midge ure looking like he walked off the street to a pub singing “hymn” by himself to an instrumental track played on an I pad/pod sitting on a stool …
Dang him, if he hadn’t died today, I wouldn’t have spent most of it with his songs playing in the jukebox in my head. Catchy damn things.
See ya Burt, you had a good run.
ETA: The first single I bought with my own money was “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”. I honestly didn’t know he’d written it until today, and that should have been totally obvious.
He wrote the music for the Broadway musical “They’re Playing Our sing”. (Which was delightful; I saw it in its original run.). Part of the plot involves the main character, a composer, in the hospital, plucking out a melody on a toy piano.