"Which comes first, the words or the music?" is one of the dumbest questions you can ask a songwriter. As the late Sammy Cahn once retorted, "what actually comes first is the cheque, when you get a commission to do the thing", with the subtext of his understandably piqued response being, if anyone asks me that damn question again I'll crown him with a piano". But, in fact, Sammy was wrong. Without getting too existential about this, what really comes first is the socially and genetically constructed person who creates the song and then sends it winging out from within her, or his, own private psychology into some shared place beyond any specific space or time. That is, of course, if the song is truly a work of art. And few would deny that Burt Bacharach has created many such songs, most often in collaboration with lyricist Hal David. From one of his first hits, the appropriately titled Magic Moments, right through to the likes of Walk On By, Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa, Anyone Who Had A Heart, Alfie, Make It Easy On Yourself and This Guy's In Love With You, to name but the few that are best known.
The best of these also are fined by a decidedly delicious sense of internal displacement, often purely as a result of the postmodern time signatures that are used, but maybe even more so in terms of some nameless longing which sits at the soul of the song. Yet if this takes us right back to BB himself, it might be stretching cause and effect connections too far to suggest that such feelings are rooted in the network of complexes that developed in his childhood because he was "small, shy and Jewish". But not so far that the link is totally implausible, the 67 year old composer admits, speaking on the phone from Los Angeles. He also addresses Neil Diamond's belief that being Jewish deeply influences the emotional texture of a composer's music.
"When it comes to the sense of yearning in many of my songs, much of it is unconscious. You begin to compose and just accept that this is where the music comes from, and takes you. But as for my Jewish background, I was Jewish, but pretended not to be," he says, conceding that, yes, pari of this pretence was forced on him by racist Catholics in New York who, for example, when they played football against a Jewish team would invariably say: "Let's go and kick the shit out of those Jews." Tellingly, Burt Bacharach's own family also suffered from similar prejudices.
"Well, I come from a family where nobody was too thrilled about being Jewish," he elaborates. "Neil may feel that the truest notes in his music are when he captures that Jewish cry, but he is very much more in tune with that part of his background than I am. With me the base, I feel, really has more to do with romantic longing. That, to me, is totally authentic, otherwise it wouldn't be there in so many of my songs. And I've always been that way, even back when I believed there was not one girl in a school of 3,000, in Forest Hills, who was smaller than me!
But what about now? Is Burt Bacharach still a romantic? "I'd like to think so, I believe so," he says. Not exactly a startling revelation, perhaps, as his current wife, Jane, is the fourth he's promised to love, honour and all that other impractical nonsense. The first was singer Paula Stewart, followed by actor Angie Dickenson, then songwriter Carole Bayer Sager. "I keep on trying, man, I keep on trying!" he jokes, not so discreetly closing the door on any indelicate intrusion into the area of his private life, as is the norm in Burt Bacharach interviews.
Yet let's not forget that when it comes to talk of love and sex what matters most about this man are not so much his own romantic liaisons as the fact that he has written countless crystalline odes to Eros, which have been used for magnificently "immoral" purposes by numberless lovers since at least, the Sixties. As for these days, well, Oasis main man and Burt Bacharach fanatic Noel Gallagher has said, "If you can't persuade a woman to sleep with you after playing, her Bacharach, you may as well forget it".
BUT which song, Mr Bacharach? "Oh, I think The Look Of Love, don't you?" responds Burt, his legendary charm tangling up the telephone line in tones which suggest he personally knows that this song, in particular, is a real killer when it comes to romance. But let's look at this Gallagher link more closely. Noel recently told me that, as a songwriter, he aspires to the "sophistication" of Burt Bacharach, a goal which is, arguably, beyond his reach, because Bacharach himself is obviously very much the product of a particular time, and of influences which include, he says, "bebop musicians like Charlie Parker, Impressionist composers like Ravel" and even a stint studying with French composer pianist Darius Milhaud.
"And one of the most important lessons I learned, along these "lines, was when I wrote an unabashed melodic sonatina at a time when my fellow students were composing dissonant, fist a thumping music, and Milhaud praised it, and said never be afraid of something that people can whistle or remember," Bacharach recalls. But does he really believe that whipper snappers like Noel Gallagher can even begin to emulate this process of learning?
"I had a lot foundation there, and absorbed a lot of music," he says. "But I don't know whether contemporary songwriters bother to learn the rules, go to music school, read music or just dump everything on to a tape, saying that everything is written in their heads. I just know that kind of approach wouldn't work for me."
And if you want to know what also really did work for Bacharach, it was singers who frequently stretched their talents for him further than they might for other composers, as was obvious from the BBC documentary on Bacharach last Christmas, which showed a clearly frustrated Cilla Black looking like she was going to die, or kill our Burt during the recording of Alfie. Likewise, recently released out takes of Elvis Presley have him snarling, "goddamn that son of a bitch" as he stumbles over that marvellous bridge in Any Day Now. So why does Burt Bacharach put singers though such hell?
"I haven't heard that Presley take, though I'd love to. I didn't even know he recorded Any Day Now, he claims, delighted to find it was, in fact the B side of Presley's "comeback" single, In The Ghetto, in 1969. "But, in terms of song structures, none of that was intentional. I just wrote what I felt was right. And I've always had people in the music industry look at my time signatures, or the vocal range in a song, and say, `you can't do that'. I've shown them you can, if it feels right.
"THOUGH, in retrospect, I realise I shouldn't, perhaps, have made it so challenging for vocalists. These days, I like to make it accessible so it's not stressing a singer out, not pushing them to meet such demands."
Since when did any artist of worth reach their full potential without being pushed beyond the range of their perceived limits? - Surely, for example, neither Cilla nor Scott Walker, who sang lead on the positively transcendent - Make It Easy On Yourself are so petty that either of them will moan about the demands of the original recording session when they realise that the work of art they created has endured more than 30 years, and will probably endure throughout time?
"That is true, but when I went to see Promises, Promises on Broadway I realised that the singers were not being allowed to express themselves fully because the songs were relatively difficult," Burt Bacharach responds. "But to go back to your original question, before we end. I must admit that more than anything else what I've always been aware of is the rush of time, trying to get more and more done before it's all over. I was like that back when I started and I'm still like that today. I'm always working against the clock. Maybe, in the final analysis, that's the longing at the soul of my work, if there is just one, that desire to beat time, before time runs out."
