Sir George took me aside and said: ‘You got it on take four.’” “I was gonna get the best possible performance out of everybody,” he says now. I just knew that if I was gonna fly from New York to London, I’d take no prisoners,” he says. When Bacharach received a call to go to Abbey Road in London to work with Cilla Black and George Martin on a song for the Michael Caine movie Alfie, he took it extremely seriously. Photograph: Pictorial Press/Alamy Cilla Black Alfie (1966) “If we needed that song then, man, we need it now 20 times more.”īacharach with Cilla Black in the mid-1970s. On a more serious note, as a reaction to the Vietnam war, its message continues to have resonance today. More than 30 years later, in the first Austin Powers movie, Bacharach would serenade Mike Myers and Liz Hurley on a bus on the Las Vegas Strip with it. Was her opinion swayed too? “I don’t know that Dionne ever said, ‘I really love this song’,” he says. I said: ‘Jesus, this is the perfect voice for this song.’ Interesting how you can be swayed by someone else’s opinion.” Warwick would record it later on. Years later, David suggested playing it for DeShannon. “She thought it was too flag-waving.” Bacharach respected Warwick – “she had very good taste” – so much so that her distaste made him doubt the song. Jackie DeShannon What the World Needs Now Is Love (1965)īacharach and David played this waltzing ode to peace to Warwick, “and she didn’t like it,” says Bacharach. I didn’t really know Cilla!”īacharach serenading Mike Myers and Liz Hurley in the first Austin Powers film. “It’s not like I’d record it with Dionne then try to get Cilla on it. “If I recorded it as the arranger, anybody was then free to record it,” he says. The competition between her and Warwick was legendary, but Bacharach stayed out of it. Cilla Black’s 1964 cover of Warwick’s original was the biggest charting hit in the UK by a woman that decade. “You think – is it good? Can you hear this more than once or twice? Will you still like it a week later?” Try more than 50 years later. “You don’t think that when you’re writing it,” he says. The song was sophisticated, moving through 4/4, 5/4 and 7/8 times. It was about recording music that felt right. “But it wasn’t about writing songs to dance to. “Cos you couldn’t count one-two-three-four!” he says, laughing. “Musicians couldn’t understand it.” Neither could the youth, who struggled to dance to his composition Anyone Who Had a Heart, sung by Dionne Warwick. It was unlike anything being marketed towards teen audiences. He began to make a name for himself writing pop songs with unpredictable time signatures. I was hearing the record as I wrote the song.” Nobody had ever given me that kind of permission. “They wanted me to write the arrangement, pick the musicians, play it, conduct, run the date. He called to tell him that the R&B singer Jerry Butler wanted to record some songs of his. I wasn’t making much money.”Ĭalvin Carter, an A&R man, gave Bacharach his first break. “At 5.30pm, he’d get on a train back to Long Island. “We treated it like a business relationship,” he says. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Dionne Warwick Anyone Who Had a Heart (1963)Īfter moving back to New York, Bacharach started hanging out in the Brill Building, where he met the lyricist Hal David, who had already had hits. Bacharach and Dionne Warwick recording a song at the Pye studios in London, in 1964.
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