Magic moment as music legend Burt Bacharach reaches 90

WHAT have Magic Moments by Perry Como and the Tom Jones hit What’s New Pussycat? got in common?

No? How about if I add Alfie by Cilla Black and Walk On By by, well, everyone?

You’ve got it, they were all composed by pop music legend Burt Bacharach.

Voted “the greatest living composer” Bacharach, 90 on May 12, is responsible for hundreds of your favourite songs, many written with the late lyricist Hal David.

And when you translate those tunes into numbers, the figures are staggering.

Bacharach has won three Oscars and six Grammys, his songs have been recorded by more than 1,000 artists and he has written more than 70 US top-40 hits and more than 50 in the UK.

When asked the secret of his success, Bacharach says one explanation might be Hal David’s lyrics.

The two met in New York’s legendary Brill Building, a hotbed of musical talent, in the late 50s and in 1963 formed a songwriting partnership.

They penned more than 100 songs, many of them for Dionne Warwick with whom they worked closely after Bacharach discovered her as a session singer.

Bacharach and David then had a falling-out over royalties and didn’t speak for 10 years except through their lawyers, but they eventually patched things up.

“I will take the count for that one – my fault,” Bacharach said at the time of David’s death at the age of 91 in 2012.

David’s lyrics often came first, he explains, and they tended to have difficult internal rhythms such as What’s It All About, Alfie?

They would force Bacharach to be creative in the way he accommodated them, using what Frank Sinatra called Bacharach’s “hat size” phrasing.

“Alfie would never have been written without Hal’s lyrics coming first,” Bacharach says, “because it became a 10-bar phrase rather than eight.

“Or take Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They were dummy lyrics from Hal, a real mouthful, and he kept trying to change them but he couldn’t come up with anything better.”

Just as well because Raindrops was not only a No 1 around the world but also won them an Oscar.

“I have no rules apart from one,” Bacharach explains. “Don’t make it difficult for the listener.”

That rule doesn’t always extend to the singer, however, as Bacharach laughs: “Yeah, there were a few complaints.”

There is a clip of Cilla Black recording Alfie at the Abbey Road Studios in 1965 and she looks like she could quite happily kill the composer.

Says Bacharach: “Yeah, I made her do about 32 takes, then George Martin said to me, ‘I think we had it on take four, Burt.’”

The aforementioned Frank Sinatra was desperate to make an album with Bacharach but he wanted him there right then and the composer couldn’t make it.

“He hung up the phone! There’s no regret there. Talking about how I drive singers crazy, I’d seen him record. He comes in. The band are ready. One take, two takes, done,” recalls Burt.

“I don’t know how to do that. And my songs are not the easy songs that Frank was doing. I would have lasted maybe one hour with Sinatra before he said: ‘Let’s forget this whole thing.’

“But, hey, it was great to be even asked. Flattering.”

Bacharach got his big break at the end of the 50s when he was introduced to Marlene Dietrich who was looking for a composer and a conductor for her nightclub shows.

He became her musical director and when they weren’t touring the world, he was writing songs.

Bacharach recalls: “I started in Vegas with her, trying to make a living. You could say the music wasn’t my kind of music. It actually sucked.

“But I liked her. I have to say, she was very supportive of me and would champion me to everybody.”

Bacharach’s melodies are always tender and often melancholic, and he admits: “I can get emotional. I sometimes have to get away from the piano and go and lie down on the couch.”

But he rarely thinks of the women he’s in love with when writing, adding: “There may have been some subconscious stuff going on but it was more a matter of solving musical problems.”

Known as a prodigious womaniser – his nickname in Manhattan in the 60s was “the Playboy of the Western World” – Bacharach married on four occasions.

He says: “I know that I’m surprised. I thought I was a good kid and I didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but when you wind up being married four times there are a lot of bodies strewn in your wake.”

He is back on friendly terms with his second wife, the actress Angie Dickinson, though, with the pair sharing a painful bond – a daughter who was on the autistic spectrum and who killed herself in a fit of depression at 40.

“I take Angie out to dinner about three times a year,” he says. “It was hard losing Nikki for both of us, but especially for Angie, because they were very, very close.”