Burt Bacharach 1928-2023

The composer leaves a long list of complex and distinctive melodies, interpreted by musicians of all stripes. Maybe you are humming one now?

- By Alexis Petridis

With the arrival of rock’n’roll, pop music divided, broadly speaking, into music aimed squarely at teenagers and songs that seem to target an older demographic. The twain seldom met: if anything, the divide became more pronounced. Look at the charts from 1966 or 1967 and you’ll find a stark split: Strawberry Fields Forever and Purple Haze v Engelbert Humperdinck and Ken Dodd’s Tears.

Burt Bacharach’s music existed somewhere in the middle. He often got lumbered with the term easy listening. You could see why – albums such as 1965’s Hit Maker! or 1967’s Reach Out tended towards syrupy arrangements and cooing vocal choruses. But, as any musician will tell you, Bacharach’s songs are seldom easy. No matter how mellifluous the melody, he dealt in changing meters, odd harmonic shifts, umpteen idiosyncrasies that were perhaps the result of an eclectic musical education: studying classical music under the French composer Darius Milhaud, listening to be bop musicians in the jazz clubs of New York’s 52 nd Street and hanging out with avant-gardist John Cage.