Hits From Burt Bacharach With Love: The Tony Mansell Singers - Stereo Gold Award 1971

In the context of churning out one of these low budget albums, I can see the appeal in covering Bacharach and David; their songs are virtually bullet-proof, tried and tested safe harbours for any interpreter where the familiarity of the song itself can paper over any cracks in its delivery. You'd need to approach them with criminal intent if you wanted to screw them up and even my own Exhibit A in the 'ill-advised attempt' stakes (Deacon Blue's 1990 'Four Bacharach & David Songs' EP) has now, with the passage of time, adopted a strange charm of their own in the strained, over earnest way they're performed, and even then they're the exception that proves the rule.

 

In saying that, The Tony Mansell singers do their damndest to sabotage that back catalogue on this album through what I'm taking to be sheer incompetence rather than anything deliberate. Another of the sort of co-ed, easy listening vocal groups that were ubiquitous in the seventies, the massed male and female vocals are kept as separate as day and night and they grind against each other like unoiled gears. Chalk dry and just as brittle, the singers flail around in search of a harmony in a way that suggests they had never heard some of these songs prior to entering the studio and they're just trying to make the words on the lyric sheet scan with the music they're hearing for the first time. In so doing, they make up their own melody lines as they go along and put the  EMPHASIS on the words in ALL the wrong places in a way THAT turns the songs into strangers, Dr Jekyls transformed into Mr Hydes to give listeners the creeps with the added bonus of them being miked so loud it's as if they're shouting in your face.

 

The back cover note says these songs were 'recorded in their "Original Feel", but with a new depth of romantic colour and swinging beat' and scored by 'Derek Cox, who is, as they say in the studios "Tops In His Bag". I don't know what on earth all that is supposed to mean, but suffice it to say the background music on this is just that - kept well in the background and amounts to little more than a thin gruel of percussion and bass which leaves those vocals to do all the heavy lifting.  It's horrible stuff certainly, but that's not the worst of it - there are two songs listed on the cover ('What Made You Go' and 'Good Year For Young Love') that I'd never heard of before, certainly not as being written by Bacharach and David either together or apart.  But those paying attention will note we're back on the 'Stereo Gold Award' label and I'll offer no prizes for anyone who guessed these are L Muller originals slotted in amongst the real McCoys, presumably to harvest royalties off the back of someone else's hard work and goodwill.

 

'What Made You Go' is a non-descript affair that, in being presented in the same rough and ready way as the rest of it, manages to blend in as an equal instead of standing out as the sore thumb it obviously is - try and listen to it in between the classic versions of these songs as recorded by Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin et al to get the full effect of it's stench. At least it's a song that's trying though - 'Good Year For Young Love' doesn't even bother with finding it's own tune, it simply hijacks the same five syllable chorus melody to 'Guantanamera' wholesale (try singing that title to it and you'll have heard this song) and passes it off as its own. How they got away with it I'll never know, and how they got away with shoehorning this stuff onto a 'Hits From Burt Bacharach' album without someone suing I'll never know either. But they did, and the outcome does nobody any favours, not least me for wasting thirty minutes of my life sitting through it. That's a mistake I won't be making again.