Walk on by

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

08/08/65 : Hit Maker! - Burt Bacharach


This is the first week we'd have been in danger of running out of albums in a normal year - there are only three albums in the chart that we've not previously met and they are one live album and two best-ofs. However, the live album is a last resort and the other best-of is a Cliff Richard compilation (he was already up to his second!), so that only leaves us with this one - and it actually has the best argument for inclusion because they are at least new cover versions of Burt's songs, with him being involved in some unspecified manner, but at least enough to take the album credit.

Hmmm - this is an interesting one because they're all Bacharach/David numbers with severely reduced or non-existent lyrical content. If I was feeling uncharitable, I'd say that Burt did this to show that his stuff stands alone without needing Hal, thank you very much - and it both does and doesn't. The songs are all fine here, but they're just not a patch on versions which have the words in - a big part of something like "Walk On By" is the intense emotion of the lyrics and you can't help but notice their absence. And if I was still feeling uncharitable, I'd say that Burt realised this pretty early on because he had to turn up the dial on the instrumentation and weird sounds involved to make them all sound a bit more interesting. And it kinda works, but they still made me want to hear the originals, I'm afraid. 

However, let's be charitable and say that Burt just wanted to have a bit of fun and create different versions of some well-loved (and some lesser-known) songs - and he certainly achieves that here with "Walk On By", "(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me", "Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa" and "Anyone Who Had A Heart" all being instantly recognisable.  I do have to point out that I'm not denigrating Burt's input to these (and many other) classics here - the music is equally as important as the words and they were really were an all-time great partnership. One other random thing that surprised me in passing - "Blue On Blue" forms the basis of Royksopp's "So Easy" (and yes, I had to use the internet to dig that one out - whosampled.com is a very useful site). It's intriguing that he's wearing a Star Trek uniform on the album cover though.

We're at #16 in the charts this week on his thirteenth week of a fourteen week run, with #3 being it's highest position (all of which feels pretty generous to me). The top five this week were The Beatles, TSOM, Joan Baez, Mary Poppins and Bob Dylan (which is the first time in nine weeks we've had a different top three) and there are new entries for The Dave Clark Five (#17) and Cliff Richard (#20). 

Wikipedia has about four sentences on the album and it looks like there's going to be nothing of any interest and then you notice a couple of very interesting names that played on this in there, namely Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones - but Led Zep, this is not. Big Jim Sullivan also appears who I know is very highly regarded, but I don't know anything about him - sorry Jim!

"Customers also listened to" Jackie DeShannon, Dionne Warwick, Dave Brubeck and Elvis Costello - I wasn't expecting to see that Elvis appear! This album is an interesting curiosity - I enjoyed the visit and I imagine a certain type of muso visits it often to steal samples, but it really only shows how great the classic versions are. 

01/08/65 - Better than expected
15/08/65 - I liked this one

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