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 WarwickĪfter 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. And so he began …īacharach and Dionne Warwick recording a song at the Pye studios in London, in 1964. “I thought it would be easy to write songs like those and make hits,” he says. Then, while conducting the vocal quartet the Ames Brothers in Las Vegas, Bacharach was struck by the simplicity of their work. I just knew I loved this music.”Īfter studying music at university and serving in the army, he was hired as a conductor for Vic Damone (“I lasted three weeks and got fired”) and Marlene Dietrich (“not my kind of music – very German”). I didn’t know what I was gonna do with my life. Sometimes there’d be more people on the bandstand than there’d be in the audience. It was the bebop era at the Spotlight club in New York City. “Somebody took me to a street where the music was totally different from anything I’d ever heard.
Being underage, he would sneak into nightclubs to catch big bands after falling for Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. His mother encouraged him to play piano and he became infatuated with jazz. He will be 91 on Sunday, but still performs, tours and writes, with new material set for release this year. Bacharach has won six Grammys and three Oscars, had 73 hits in the US Billboard 100 and 52 in the UK top 40 – and that’s at the time of going to press. You can see why he might have trouble keeping track. “I don’t know how many songs I’ve written, I don’t know how many hits I’ve had,” says Burt Bacharach when we meet in a dining room by the ocean in Santa Monica.
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