The Beatles & Bacharach
A wary rivalry
Burt Bacharach suave, handsome and classically trained was not an obvious role model for The Beatles. Six years older than Brian Epstein, he was more an authority figure in the George Martin mode — a teacher rather than a fellow student.
Magic Moments, a lilting ballad sung by the impossibly square Perry Como came out in 1957, the year that The Quarrymen were formed. Not there thing, it is safe to say. Nor would Burt have come across their early work.
While they were doing their marathon Hamburg sessions, Bacharach was the musical director for Marlene Dietrich. Her upmarket cabaret circuit was never going to include the Star Club, where Paul was mimicking Marlene’s Teutonic vocal delivery on Falling in Love Again.
Burt goes Pop
The pop music market at the turn of the 1960s was in a state of flux. The demand for material tooled for old-school crooners like Perry Como was drying up. Most of the big easy listening hit were plundered from popular shows — and had little appeal for the increasingly teenage record buyers.
One new trend was towards girl groups— what has been described as a “naive schoolgirl sound”. It was a song that Bacharach cowrote for The Shirelles’ in 1961 that brought him into The Beatles orbit. It also provided him with a credit on the first Beatles LP without either party being aware of the other — see here for full story.
In interviews The Beatles generally referred to Baby It’s You as a ‘Shirelles song’. This downplaying of Burt’s contribution was initially unconscious. Songwriters were far down the pecking order in the pop world they aspired to. Bacharach-Williams-David (Mack rather than Hal in this case) was simply another combination of names on record label.
With the onset of Beatlemania and Bacharach’s increasing success in mainstream pop, there would be informal interaction. Bacharach wrote the first UK number one for their old friend Cilla Black. He then came to Abbey Road to produce her performance of his Alfie, working in collaboration with George Martin.
Paul McCartney spoke admiringly of Bacharach’s work — but talk of a collaboration never came to anything. But Bacharach remained an important influence at a deeper musical level, most obviously in his approach to integrating instrumentation and vocal arrangements.
Bacharach also showcased modulation, a musical technique Lennon and McCartney would later exploit. This was the process of changing from one key to another within a song. In Baby It’s You, for example, there is an unexpected switch from minor to major chords.
The Beatles would not have articulated this in term of musical theory. Bu there the subconscious impact of Bacharach’s approach would manifest itself Nowhere Man, In My Life, Eleanor Rigby and many more songs.
Baby It’s You — how The Beatles performed a Bacharach song before they knew who he was
Alfie — the story behind the song starring Burt, Cilla and a furious Dionne.
