Burt Bacharach, legendary composer of pop songs, dies aged 94

Composer and Oscar winner Burt Bacharach has died aged 94.

The cause of death, which happened at home in Los Angeles, was natural causes, his publicist Tina Brausam said on Thursday.

Bacharach delighted millions with the quirky arrangements and unforgettable melodies of songs such as Walk On By, Do You Know The Way To San Jose and dozens of other hits.

Over the past 70 years, only Lennon-McCartney, Carole King and a handful of others have rivalled his genius for instantly catchy songs that remained performed, played and hummed long after they were written.

He had a run of top 10 hits from the 1950s into the 21st century, and his music was heard everywhere from movie soundtracks and radios to home stereo systems and iPods, whether Alfie and I Say A Little Prayer or I’ll Never Fall In Love Again and This Guy’s In Love With You.

Dionne Warwick was his favourite interpreter, but Bacharach, usually in tandem with lyricist Hal David, also created prime material for Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Tom Jones and many others.

Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Frank Sinatra were among the countless artists who covered his songs, with more recent performers who have sung or sampled him including White Stripes and Ashanti.

Walk On By alone was covered by everyone from Warwick and Isaac Hayes to the British punk band the Stranglers and Cyndi Lauper.

Bacharach was both an innovator and throwback, and his career seemed to run parallel to the rock era.

He grew up on jazz and classical music and had little taste for rock when he was breaking into the business in the 1950s.

His sensibility often seemed more aligned with Tin Pan Alley than with Bob Dylan, John Lennon and other writers who later emerged, but rock composers appreciated the depth of his seemingly old-fashioned sensibility.

“The shorthand version of him is that he’s something to do with easy listening,” Elvis Costello, who wrote the 1998 album Painted From Memory with Bacharach, said in a 2018 interview. “It may be agreeable to listen to these songs, but there’s nothing easy about them. Try playing them. Try singing them.”

He triumphed in many artforms. He was an eight-time Grammy winner, a prize-winning Broadway composer for Promises, Promises and a three-time Oscar winner.

He received two Academy Awards in 1970, for the score of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and for the song Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” (shared with David).

In 1982, he and his then-wife, lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, won Oscars for Best That You Can Do, the theme from Arthur. His other movie soundtracks included What’s New, Pussycat?, Alfie and the 1967 James Bond spoof Casino Royale.

Bacharach was well rewarded, and well connected. He was a frequent guest at the White House, whether the president was Republican or Democrat. And in 2012, he was presented the Gershwin Prize by Barack Obama, who had sung a few seconds of Walk On By during a campaign appearance.

In his life, and in his music, he stood apart. Fellow songwriter Sammy Cahn liked to joke that the smiling, wavy-haired Bacharach was the first composer he ever knew who did not look like a dentist.

Bacharach’s many romances included actress Angie Dickinson, to whom he was married from 1965-80, and Sager, his wife from 1982-1991.

Married four times, he formed his most lasting ties to work. He was a perfectionist who took three weeks to write Alfie and might spend hours tweaking a single chord. Sager once observed that Bacharach’s life routines essentially stayed the same – only the wives changed.

It began with the melodies — strong yet interspersed with changing rhythms and surprising harmonics.

He credited much of his style to his love of bebop and to his classical education, especially under the tutelage of Darius Milhaud, the famed composer.

He once played a piece for piano, violin and oboe for Milhaud that contained a melody he was ashamed to have written, as 12-point atonal music was in vogue at the time. Milhaud, who liked the piece, advised the young man: “Never be afraid of the melody.”

“That was a great affirmation for me,” Bacharach recalled in 2004.

Bacharach was essentially a pop composer, but his songs became hits for country artists (Marty Robbins), rhythm and blues performers (Chuck Jackson), soul (Franklin, Luther Vandross) and synth-pop (Naked Eyes).

He reached a new generation of listeners in the 1990s with the help of Costello and others. Mike Myers would recall hearing the sultry The Look Of Love on the radio and finding fast inspiration for his Austin Powers retro spy comedies, in which Bacharach made cameos.

In the 21st century, he was still testing new ground, writing his own lyrics and recording with rapper Dr Dre.

He was married to his first wife, Paula Stewart, from 1953-58, and married for a fourth time, to Jane Hansen, in 1993. He is survived by Hansen, as well as his children Oliver, Raleigh and Cristopher. He was preceded in death by his daughter with Dickinson, Nikki Bacharach.

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but soon moved to New York City. His father was a syndicated columnist, his mother a pianist who encouraged the boy to study music.

Although he was more interested in sports, he practised piano every day after school, not wanting to disappoint his mother. While still a child, he would sneak into jazz clubs, bearing a fake ID, and hear such greats as Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie.

“They were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before,” he recalled in the memoir Anyone Who Had A Heart, published in 2013. “What I heard in those clubs turned my head around.”

He and songwriter partner David worked in a tiny office in Broadway’s celebrated Brill Building, where they produced their first million-seller, Magic Moments, sung in 1958 by Perry Como.

In 1962, they spotted a backup singer for the Drifters, Warwick, who had a “very special kind of grace and elegance”, Bacharach recalled.

The trio produced hit after hit, starting with Don’t Make Me Over and continuing with Walk on By, “I Say A Little Prayer, Do You Know The Way To San Jose and Anyone Who Had a Heart and more.

The partnership ended badly with the dismal failure of a 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon. Bacharach became so depressed he isolated himself in his Del Mar holiday home and refused to work.

“I didn’t want to write with Hal or anybody,” he said in 2004. Nor did he want to fulfil a commitment to record Warwick. She and David both sued him.

Bacharach and David eventually reconciled. When David died in 2012, Bacharach praised him for writing lyrics “like a miniature movie”. Meanwhile, he kept working, vowing never to retire, always believing that a good song could make a difference.

“Music softens the heart, makes you feel something if it’s good, brings in emotion that you might not have felt before,” he said in 2018. “It’s a very powerful thing if you’re able to do to it, if you have it in your heart to do something like that.”