Hal David

Read about the death of Hal David on the BBC's news channel and was surprised it wasn't mentioned in the subsequent news programme on the main channel. Doesn't it count as a major event, then? By way of compensation I searched my MP3 player for something to play as a kind of personal tribute, or reminder to myself of his lyrics; luckily there was Do You Know the Way to San Jose.

I remember once having a conversation with a former line manager about this song, someone of whom it might have reasonable to expect a degree of sensitivity to language, but no: for him the song was simply a jolly, bouncy thing and the lyrics a negligible part of that whole.

Even at an early age, I got it - and I think my first contact with the song was via that unlikely video of a donkey on a 1968 edition of Top of the Pops, which I'm guessing was got up by the BBC rather than provided by the record company.

Actually, not that unlikely - you could argue that the would-be stars are deceived by the thought of near-instant ("in a week, maybe two") gratification, like those poor translated boys in Pinnochio.

Talkin' 'bout Jackson

Thinking about Lou Johnson and Burt Bacharach in the previous post leads inevitably to thoughts of Chuck Jackson, another great African American singer whose gospel background helped give an added conviction to the work of Bacharach and David and other Brill Building writers. On an early Beatles questionnaire John Lennon actually names him as his favourite singer. Appropriately, when I won a record token for a letter in Melody Maker about the Beatles, I spent it on a Chuck Jackson LP on the DJM label - an assembly of Scepter/Wand tracks including Any Day Now, I Wake Up Crying and The Breaking Point. How's about this for a track listing, eh?

Pleased, Mr Johnson!

Here's another much-needed CD compilation - and this time it's Ace Records, so no worries about sound quality. Lou Johnson's original version of Always Something There to Remind Me is rarely included on Bacharach compilations (with the exception of a large box set and a recent single disc Various Artists Bacharach collection on Ace) but has haunted me since I first heard it in the early seventies; Johnson's performance reveals it to be a soul song, not a pop song.