Farewell, Burt Bacharach

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well somebody has to post it

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Burt’s effect on me as a listener goes right back to Perry Como singing ‘Magic Moments’ on television in the 50s. I can remember that very vividly. I really have a very strong memory of hearing Cilla sing ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’ and not knowing why it made me feel peculiar. The music's really odd. You probably know it's written in different time signatures, and for a slow song, it has this weird effect on you, because it breaks out of metre. As I got older, I could appreciate that sort of carnal or sensual implication of so many of Burt's songs. There are songs I could point at, before Burt and I ever met, where I was attempting to speak in that kind of language, with differing degrees of success.

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Burt was standing up at the board, looking at the score and I knew what was coming. The voice comes on the talk back, [breathless Burt burr] "Elvis, you're not singing the right melody at bar 12." I just got one note wrong in the melody and he's heard it and then he's like, "Vince, We gotta really pay attention to downbeat at 61." Nothing escapes his notice, every single time I've been on stage with him, he's the same.

It's not like he's unreasonably demanding, he's just got incredible focus. Listen to those records he orchestrated and partly produced at Sceptre, how incredibly focused every part is in the orchestra and in the rhythm section, everything is serving the story. It's at a level that really probably very few groups other than the Beatles, in a very different kind of form, have. It's never less than it needs to be. Most everybody else's recording, there's something that's a bit more blurred.

There's only a couple of people that you could literally write that orchestration down and it will be like classical music, in its attention to be what it is. People don't really have access to that, because they're making Lego now by comparison. Two bar phrases, end on end, twelve people to write a song - great if you like it, but Burt can write the whole thing, and the orchestration. The only thing he doesn't do is write words, that's my job.

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