The Burt Bacharach Discussion Forum

Elvis Costello taking us through the box set that is released this week.

A performance from 1969 by Tom Jones of 'What The World Needs Now' with Burt at the piano that is new to me. Given its relative brevity my guess is that it must have featured at the end of a medley.

Bacharach interviewed on BBC TV in 1964 talking about songwriting and how he went about constructing the arrangement for 'Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa'.

blue, I suspect that more and more excerpts like this one will be taken from the TV specials and uploaded on YouTube, which is obviously good news for us. I'll be keeping my eyes peeled.

Just heard the sad news that singer Chuck Jackson has died. As we all know he had his biggest hit with the Bacharach and Hilliard number 'Any Day Now' and here he is with the song on the TV special made in the UK in 1965 called 'The Bacharach Sound'. He's introduced by the composer. https://m.youtub...

Some absolutely priceless footage of Burt and Angie duetting on 'I'll Never Fall In Love Again', taken from a TV show they co-presented called Hollywood Palace and which first aired on the 10th of January 1970. Worth watching just to see Burt visibly wince after he messes up the rhyme with 'pneumoni...

Of all the tributes to Bacharach from fellow songwriters that I've read Jimmy Webb's is by far the most in-depth and personal. I don't know about everybody else on here but I think I must have read more on the net about Bacharach in the last ten days than I have in the past twenty-five years, the sh...

This article appeared in The Washington Post last weekend. I can't recall Carole King ever having commented publicly on Bacharach's music before, so it makes for an interesting read.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... ngwriting/

As deeply saddened as we all must feel right now, I'm sure we will continue to discuss and celebrate his unparalleled musical legacy.

While Jackie DeShannon's recording of 'What The World Needs Now Is Love' wasn't a surprise as one of Steven Spielberg's choices, Gene Pitney's 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' most definitely was. Whenever I hear the likes of Spielberg being interviewed I'm reminded of the Ian Dury song, 'There Ai...

Blair, admittedly it's now quite a long time ago and I don't know whether she's spoken publicly on the subject at any other time but I remember Carole Bayer Sager's comments for BBC radio regarding Bacharach's work with Elvis Costello as being very much pro rather than con. In fact the general tone ...

After Bacharach's music became fashionable again in the mid-90s the BBC broadcast several radio profiles or documentaries over the following ten to twelve years of which I recall 'The Look Of Love - The Burt Bacharach Story' from February 2004 as probably being the best. Outside of Tony Banks statin...

I must admit I was surprised when I first heard that plans were underway to produce a musical based on the songs of the Painted From Memory album, simply because it's difficult to imagine a successful Broadway show consisting almost entirely of ballads without any of the variety and the light and sh...

I think the live rendition of 'In The Darkest Place' featuring just Elvis Costello on acoustic guitar and Steve Nieve on piano is pretty special and the song's beautiful coda which has Bacharach's stamp as a composer all over it is particularly effective in this version. https://m.youtube.com/watch?...

I recall hearing Bacharach utter the words, "It's so easy..... there's nothing to it", to explain his optimistic outlook at the start of his career about writing songs in order to become hits, only to be disillusioned very quickly as he discovered how tough it was. I thought he said it in ...