Coolest man on earth

IF you are looking for anything by Burt Bacharach in a record shop you'll find it in the "easy listening" category: how cruelly ironic. If there's anything easy about the complex arrangements. key changes and melodic shifts in some of the best songs ever written I Say A Little Prayer, Anyone Who Had A Heart. Close To You and This Guy's In Love With You then somebody please put it on a music school syllabus and do us all a favour. Despite the fact that he's the most played composer in every hotel foyer and every lift in the world, Burt Bacharach's real claim to fame should be that besides Lennon/McCartney and Brian Wilson, he is the most talented pop melodicist of the pop music era.

Although he pre-dates both The Beatles and The Beach Boys (neither of whom have done anything decent since the late 1960s) Bacharach remains the man and the musical composer of the moment. He has very vocal fans in REM and Blur: Oasis put him on the cover of their Definitely Maybe album and when last year Noel Gallagher appeared on stage with him at London's Royal Festival Hall to sing This Guy's In Love With You, Gallagher introduced the song by saying "it's my favourite song in the whole world". Similarly, James Dean Bradfield of The Manic Street Preachers describes Raindrnps Keep Fallin' On My Head as "the best melody of all time" and a new generation of clubbers have learned to chill out to the lounge-like pleasures of the great man's back catalogue. The coolest man on the planet? Quite possibly.

We've seen and done it all musically and in these "post-rock" times, where everything is on the table and up for grabs, Bacharach's melodies, now that they have been reflected through the prism of pop history, mean more now than they ever have done. Not so much vindicated by history, as endorsed by it.

Bacharach was the first composer writing in the pop idiom to grasp the concept of melody. While his contemporaries, and the people he's most often compared to, came from a rhythm'n'blues background, Bacharach bypassed all that with the glorious result that his songs aren't built around traditional 4/4 rock beats; they're built around a series of melody lines that meander around your head.

Born in Kansas City but raised in New York, he studied musical composition after leaving school. His early works were very much jazz-based, but he soon tired of that and went off to work as the musical director for Marlene Dietrich's cabaret act.

There is a story that after a show in Edinburgh, a reporter asked Diet rich for an interview. "You don't want to speak to me or get my autograph, you want Mr Bacharach," she said. "Who's he?" someone asked. "You'll know one day," she replied.

Dietrich and Bacharach worked together for three years in the early 1960s and Bacharach was clearly impressed: "I learned a lot from her" he remembers. "A belief in perfection and hard work and how to deal with musicians. I remember Quincy Jones coming backstage one night and saying `what are you doing here, man?' - as though I should be on the road with Aretha Franklin."

He soon was. He teamed up with lyricist Hal David and over the next 10 years they wrote more memorable hit singles for more memorable artists than anybody has done since. Working mainly with Dionne Warwick, they notched up 39 hit singles over the decade including the definitive versions of Walk On By and Do You Know The Way To San Jose? but the jury's still out as to whether Cilla Black's version of Anyone Who Had A Heart was superior to Warwick's. (Younger readers should note that, strange as it may seem, Cilla Black was once quite cool she used to hang out with The Beatles and Brian Epstein).

OTHER artists transformed by the Bacharach/David team include Aretha Franklin whose version of I Say A Little Prayer is unsurpassable while Bobby Gentry, who did I'll Never Fall In Love Again and Dusty Springfield, who does mean versions of The Look Of Love and Wishin' And Hopin' were other grateful recipients of three-minute wonders. Soon they started to line up, looking for a verse, chorus, middle eight or anything from the Bacharach/David academy: singers as diverse as Tom Jones, The Walker Brothers, Sandie Shaw, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett and Cher.

There were also the films, where some of his best work was done: from Casino Royale to Alfie to What's New Pussycat and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, he casually flipped over some more classics and won three Oscars for his efforts. He also banged out a Broadway show the underrated Promises, Promises.

Never, though, was be accorded the respect and gravitas someone of his pre-eminence deserved. Caught between old-fashioned showbusiness and the newer wave of songwriters from New York's Brill Building (Carole King et al), Bacharach was dismissed in "artier" quarters as hotel-foyer fodder. There were, though, hidden depths to his music: as Albert Goldman summed it up: "Bacharach writes about the pathos at the heart of the American hullabaloo." The man himself says "I always tried to make songs that were like mini-movies. A song like Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa - it told a story, there's a balance between its highs and lows. And there's a lot of drama." Too right.

During the 1970s, he helped kickstart The Carpenters' career by writing Close To You for them and at one stage during that decade he was valued at about $40 million by dint of combined record royalties, sheet music and the simple reason that everywhere you went, someone, somewhere was singing a Burt Bacharach song

The only way to go was down and over the next 15 or so years he slid into schmaltz-type songs, letting a lush orchestration sweep blandly over his melodies. Songs like On My Own (sung by Patti Labelle), the atrocious Heartlight from the film ET (sung by Neil Diamond - quelle surprise) and Arthur's Theme - Best That You Can Do (sung by Christopher Cross) signalled that the flame was flickering as the streets of New York gave way to the sands of Malibu Beach.

HIS choice of singers such as the estimable Aretha Franklin and Billy J Kramer (who wrung the pathos out of every last note on Trains And Boats and Planes) used to energise his songs, but the likes of Christopher Cross's laid-back tones weren't up to the job. Significantly, Bacharach had dispensed with the services of Hal David at this stage of his career and was collaborating with a new lyricist - his second wife, Carole Bayer Sager.

He began to retreat into himself, using the music to keep the world at bay. "I like to be isolated and that's a great way to split up, to be able to go into that narcissistic world," he says. "I had my music so I could always isolate myself at the times I wanted to. When I was single in New York I would get rid of a girl by telling her I had to write an orchestration. Just to get her out of the house. But maybe she wasn't a great girl to spend the whole night with anyway.

Recent collaborations with Elvis Costello and Noel Gallagher may or may not rekindle the flame. He remains somewhat bemused by how he's being re-discovered, re-packaged and re-released to the Britpop/Clubby crowd. "Is it the melodic content they've been missing?" he wonders. "Perhaps they are learning that melody is nothing to be ashamed of. There's nothing wrong in writing something that people can whistle." And go on whistling for 30 years.