Preview of Burt Bacharach at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham, in Shropshire Star on Friday 25 July 2014

Bacharach is back for a nostalgic show

Musicians don’t often apologise in mid-concert when they make mistakes, especially when they’ve just played a new tune. But that is exactly what Burt Bacharach does when he gets it wrong.

After more than 50 years in the music business, Bacharach’s need for perfection was summed up in this one gesture, which I witnessed during a relatively recent gig.He absolved the orchestra of any blame, while admitting a mistake that none of the audience probably even noticed.

Yet it is this perfectionist streak that has made a large contribution to Bacharach’s creative process and, without it, the nation’s record collections would be missing some classic tunes.

Bacharach had his first chart successes in 1958 with lyricist Hal David, resulting in hits for Perry Como’s ‘Magic Moments’ and ‘The Story Of My Life’ by Marty Robbins. The next five years would see a string of hits emanating from the Bacharach and David partnership, including standards such as Gene Pitney’s ‘Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa’ and Cilla Black’s ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart.’

This was only the start of the duo’s stellar repertoire, with Dionne Warwick securing a couple of Top 10 hits with ‘Walk On By’ and ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose,’ while Cilla Black repeated the feat with the theme from the film ‘Alfie’ in 1966.

Bacharach’s involvement in the movies goes back to 1958 when, with lyricist Mack (brother of Hal) David, he wrote the theme for the Steve McQueen film, The Blob, before composing the soundtrack for What’s New Pussycat in 1965, after the original choices, Dudley Moore, followed by John Williams (later to compose the theme for Star Wars, amongst many other tunes) each, in turn, dropped out of the running for the job.

With the title track of What’s New Pussycat a hit for Tom Jones, Bacharach followed up with the soundtrack for the James Bond movie, Casino Royale, in 1967, featuring the ‘The Look Of Love,’ a Billboard Hot 100 hit for Dusty Springfield in the US but, for some reason, released as the B-side of ‘Give Me Time’ in the UK.

Bacharach ended the decade by writing the soundtrack for the film, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, including arguably his most popular song, and one of the few numbers that he has been known to croon on stage, ‘Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head, ’though ‘Say A Little Prayer’ would certainly run it pretty close. More recently, cameo appearances in all three Austin Powers movies in the late 1990s and early 2000s introduced Bacharach to a younger audience.

The Bacharach and David song writing partnership effectively ended in 1973, but since then, the 86-year-old Bacharach has not been short of offers from lyricists, none more so than his third wife, Carole Bayer Sager, with whom he wrote the Oscar-winning ‘Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)’ for the film Arthur, in 1981, and, four years later, Dionne Warwick’s last UK hit, ‘That’s What Friends Are For.’
 
In the 1990s, Bacharach hooked up with Elvis Costello to record the 1998 album Painted From Memory, while his 2005 solo album, At This Time, proved that Bacharach was more than capable of penning his own lyrics while, at the same time, notching up another Grammy Award for good measure.

The word ‘legend’ gets bandied around rather too easily in these celebrity-dominated times but, after more than half a century of composing some of the catchiest tunes you’re ever likely to hear, Burt Bacharach is possibly the closest living embodiment of the word.

Burt Bacharach at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham on Monday.
See www.thsh.co.uk for booking details




By Stephen Taylor