The Look of Love I'll Never Fall in Love Again are exceptionally well-crafted songs but they seem designed to move units. Costello, the White Stripes and the singers who are covering the Bacharach songbook foster the idea that they are discerning about the business. Bacharach says it is great that people are covering his old songs: "Richard Rodgers tried to stop Peggy Lee from doing Fever and, if he had succeeded, we would have been deprived of the really best version of that song ever.
" Talking to Bacharach, now 80, is like that: lots of little insider stories. A few decades ago he wrote the likes of and for Sinatra, Streisand, Warwick and the Beatles. Now those songs are being covered or sampled by people like Ronald Isley, Kanye West and Ashanti.
The songs, in other words, aren't old chestnuts - they are evergreen. Bacharach's coming trip to Australia - it was postponed earlier in the year after he injured his arm - might well be his last trip across the Pacific. His Australian connections are pretty solid.
He shared a 1980 Academy Award - for best song, naturally - with Peter Allen. That was for the song , which was in the film , and more recently was on the soundtrack of , the Broadway musical about Allen's life. Allen and Bacharach's second wife, lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, are jointly credited with 10 songs in the musical.
But, actually, the strong bond was between him and Carole. For each of them, I think, it was a bit like my collaboration with Hal David; sort of blessed. She was devastated when he died.
News RSS