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After enthusing for an hour or so on the joys and challenges of his songwriting partnership with Burt Bacharach that lasted three decades, Elvis Costello announces his next life goal. “I want to give a copy to Burt,” he says of The Songs Of Bacharach & Costello, a four CD/two LP box set that assembles everything they did together. Costello’s versions of Bacharach classics such as I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself, My Little Red Book and I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, recorded and performed throughout his career, also appear. “I want to go up to him and say, ‘Here you go, my friend. That’s what we did.’”
Costello never go to do that. A few days after we spoke about the impact that Bacharach had on his life, about their 1998 album Painted From Memory and the thwarted attempt to turn it into a Broadway musical, and about tackling songs that are easy to listen to but extremely difficult to sing or play, the American composer, songwriter and producer died. Costello learnt of his death the night before the first date of a residency at Gramercy Theatre in New York. “A really great man left us yesterday,” he said as he took the stage. “It’s never time to say goodbye to someone if you love them. I’m not ashamed to say I did love this man, for everything he gave.”
“I am very sad today,” Costello says a few days after that New York show. “But Burt Bacharach means the same to me this morning as he did at midnight on Wednesday, when the call came. I have to accept that there will not be the next song that he – or even we – might still be about to write. I will always struggle to think of him in the past tense.”
Costello’s blend of respect and affection for Bacharach typifies a faithful student’s relationship with a wise master. They met in 1989 when they found themselves in the same recording studios. “These are the chance encounters that don’t happen today, because now everyone makes albums on their laptops.” Costello says.
“I had been using a marimba with the same suspension as [that in the Bacharach classic] 24 Hours From Tulsa, as a gesture of acknowledgement really. He was down the hallway so I asked him to listen.” What did he think? He was gentlemanly about it.” That sounds like an extremely diplomatic answer.
So began a friendship that continued when the two worked on God Give Me Strength, a song for the 1996 drama Grace of My Heart, based loosely on the life of Carole King. “I took the unusual step of writing the top-line melody an faxing it to him, which is a presumptuous thing to do,” Costello says. “He’s not known to be collaborative on his music, but I wanted to tip the song towards his older material. When I was young his songs made me feel strange, I think because there was tension in them. They became more genial as he got older, and although nobody wants to go back – if someone says, ‘Can you write another Oliver’s Army?’ I’ll show them the door – there are certain things in rhythm and harmonic disposition that are classically ‘Bacharachian’. I wanted to acknowledge that musical grammar he once did as second nature.”
Bacharach’s musical grammar had a big impact on the young Costello. His father, Ross McManus as well as being the voice of the Secret Lemonade Drinker on an unforgettable 1973 advert for R White’s lemonade, was a performer wit the light entertainment-focused Joe Loss Orchestra. McManus was a glamorous but unreliable figure, only intermittently in his son’s life, “a great guy, but a terrible example as a husband and father,” according to Costello.
In the accompanying booklet to The Songs of Bacharach & Costello there is a photograph of McManus hanging out with Bacharach at a 1963 Royal Variety performance. “Not just Bacharach, but also the Beatles, Harry Secombe, Marlene Dietrich … they’re all there.” Costello says. “I had a lot more access to Bacharach than the average kid because my mum was friends with Michael Holliday, who had a hit with Bacharach’s The Story of My Life in 1958, when I was four, and Dad was bringing the songs home to sing on the Joe Loss Pop Show. As a teenager I was hearing torrid songs like Anyone Who Had A Heart and I began to understand the emotional moments in life they represented. Then I learnt a few chords on guitar and discovered how they were completely beyond me to actually play.
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