The title of the first post on 8 February alluded to the title of a Bacharach & David song. Today, it was announced that Burt Bacharach had died. In my mind, the link between The Beatles and Burt Bacharach is incredibly clear. It’s all about the song.

There have been various “Beatle Adjacent” deaths recently including Louise Harrison, David Crosby, Jeff Beck, Jerry Lee Lewis (and yes, I know that these are loosely adjacent). This one is distantly adjacent, if such a thing is possible. In terms of songs, it comes down to only one, Baby It’s You from Please Please Me. I get the feeling it may have been chosen more because of The Shirelles than for Burt. It’s a decent, if quick, recording of a good, but not great, song. It works. Gets the job done and on we go to the next track.

There are other links, mainly involving our Cilla singing Anyone Who Had A Heart and Alfie (arranged by Bacharach and produced by George Martin).

But the real link is the dedication to making the song the star. The most important thing is whether the song works. The Beatles worked fast and if a song wasn’t coming together then it would be abandoned or given to a lesser act. For all their outside experimentations, they understood that they benefited from being popular. Bacharach has a back catalogue that simply impresses for its consistent application of melody, as though he understood that he didn’t need to push boundaries, as long the audience connected with the song.

I first became aware of his songs as schmaltzy background music in the stockroom at Argos. Close To You and What The World Needs Now Is Love became punishingly familiar, stripped of their lyrics into muzak. I needed time to make a connection and it was only later through Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick, when I was ready for melody over artifice that the connection came.

There’s an impressive number of standout songs to listen to and, most are best sung by female voices. Perhaps its just as well that he saw himself as a composer first. The song was best served by someone else’s voice. And that’s where the divergence comes in. The Beatles wanted it all. Burt Bacharach was part of that Brill Building tradition that there are signs of on Please Please Me. Two albums later and they’d be writing all their own songs, many of which they would rarely, if at all, play live. Their live set would be peppered with what we might now call standards. Standards might be a term used to describe the output of Bacharach but for now, let’s agree on classics.