Life of a Song

by Jan Dalley

  Inevitably, ‘Amsterdam’ was translated into English, and here Brel had two champions: Rod McKuen and Mort Shuman. McKuen was a singer, songwriter and poet whose translations of two Brel songs became pop hits: ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ became the widely covered ‘If You Go Away’; ‘Le Moribund’ became the schmaltzy ‘Seasons in the Sun’, a hit for Terry Jacks in 1974. McKuen’s ‘Amsterdam’ took many poetic liberties with Brel’s lyric but was not widely adopted.

  Meanwhile Shuman, American singer and songwriter, also took up the Brel banner. His translated lyrics to many Brel songs, including ‘Amsterdam’, have become the ‘standard’ versions, retaining Brel’s spirit, although with perhaps less of his poetic abstraction. Shuman also paid tribute to Brel by co-writing a 1968 off-Broadway show, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which became a 1975 film. (In the film Shuman sings ‘Amsterdam’ in a bar while Brel himself sits silently in a corner, nursing a Stella Artois.)

  One singer who was drawn to Brel via Shuman was Scott Walker. As one half of The Walker Brothers, Walker had had hits with pop tunes such as ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More’ but by 1967 he was showing an appetite for the fringes of popular music (an appetite that would culminate in his 2006 album The Drift, on which a percussionist was required to slap a piece of raw pork). Walker covered a string of Brel songs in the 1960s, among them ‘Amsterdam’ (they would eventually be collected on the fabulous 1981 album, Scott Walker Sings Jacques Brel). Walker’s ‘Amsterdam’ follows the Brel–Shuman template, its big arrangement and potent lyrics summoning up a scene of tragic debauchery.

  Then there was David Bowie. As early as 1969, Bowie was covering Brel songs (again, in Shuman’s translations): he sang ‘My Death’ at the Beckenham Arts Lab that year, and again at his ‘farewell Ziggy’ concerts in London in 1973. Later in 1973 when he released the single ‘Sorrow’, ‘Amsterdam’ was the B-side. Bowie’s version is stripped down, with only an acoustic guitar for accompaniment, but is no less dramatic for that: ‘And he pisses like I cry’ is delivered with spine-tingling intensity. A new generation had been brought to Brel.

  Subsequent versions by Irish singer Camille O’Sullivan (who gives the song a cabaret vibe) and folk band Bellowhead (ramshackle and rowdy) have brought the song to a wider audience. And in 2003 it was performed in the unlikely environment of the French TV talent show À la Recherche de la Nouvelle Star when a young singer, Thierry Amiel, sang it to a studio of swaying, banner-waving supporters. The show may have been cheesy, but Amiel nailed the song (although he came second in the contest). Over the years, the song has attracted a particular kind of singer, drawn to its swirling maelstrom of emotions – artists for whom, like Brel, mediocrity is anathema.

  David Cheal

  13

  WITHOUT YOU

  In December 1969, an unknown band called Badfinger released ‘Come and Get It’, a catchy pop song written by Paul McCartney, who had given it to the band to help them break into the charts. It worked. But it was the wrong song for the wrong band at the wrong time. Watch their performance on the BBC’s Top of the Pops: the group – earnest and long-haired – seem almost embarrassed by the song’s primary-coloured glibness. This was the end of the 1960s. Music was getting darker, more complicated. Surely they could do better than that.

  While McCartney’s ditty was giving them instant chart recognition, two of the group’s members, Pete Ham and Tom Evans, were hatching a more dramatic song back in their Golders Green bedsits. ‘Without You’ was written about the two men’s relationships with their girlfriends: Ham wrote the verse, Evans the chorus. The song was full of epic observations on the fragility of love.

  ‘No I can’t forget tomorrow/When I think of all my sorrow/When I had you there/But then I let you go,’ wrote Ham of his romantic entanglement; ‘I can’t live, if living is without you,’ said Evans of his own. The band performed the song with little sense of conviction or self-belief. It was buried, along with its tired, plodding arrangement, on the end of side one of their 1970 album No Dice.

  Harry Nilsson was an American singer-songwriter who was famous for a song he didn’t write: the lovely ‘Everybody’s Talkin’, Fred Neil’s get-away-from-it-all folk tune, which became the theme of the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy. Now, at a party, he heard Badfinger’s ‘Without You’, another song with potential (legend has it that he thought it was written by The Beatles: easy to believe).

  Nilsson got together with American producer Richard Perry and they transformed the song, which was a hit in early 1972. A two-note piano intro leads into Nilsson’s tender, high vocal. The fragility of love is given its appropriate arrangement. An orchestral backing is subtly hued, and the slide into the chorus tastefully negotiated.

  But then, on the first repetition of ‘I can’t live, if living is without you’, Nilsson lets himself go. It is the moment when resignation turns into something hotter and wilder. ‘I can’t give, I can’t give any more,’ Nilsson sings, desperately, and you cannot but believe him. He turns the delicate song into what would later be known as a power ballad; except that he himself is powerless, vanquished by his dependency.

  The song was a massive hit all over the world. It became a standard, recorded by some 180 artists and, of course a karaoke favourite, if you were really far gone. And then, in 1994, it emerged again, this time from the formidable vocal cords of Mariah Carey.

  Her version is smooth, polished, breathy, crowded with melismatic flourishes. It is everything that continues to be wrong with popular balladry today. The fragility is gone, the tentativeness nowhere to be found. On a video of a live performance, you can hear the audience revving up during each crescendo of the chorus. ‘I can’t live,’ sings Carey, but she is only girding herself for greater glory. At the end of the song, a gospel choir joins in: of course it does. ‘No, I can’t live, No I can’t live.’ The song, released the week after Nilsson’s death from a heart attack at the age of 52, was a huge success.

  What is it like to feel like you can’t live? The song’s writers, Pete Ham and Tom Evans, both knew. They hanged themselves, in separate incidents, Ham in 1975, Evans in 1983. Among their concerns had been ongoing rows about royalties from ‘Without You’. People talked of the ‘curse’ of Badfinger. The band that wanted to get away from simple pop songs, and delve into the darker waters of human despair.

  Peter Aspden

  14

  IT’S THE HARD KNOCK LIFE

  Listen a lot to Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’ (yes, I have two daughters) and you will notice the outline of another song within the 2013 mega-hit. It’s there in the jabbing piano chords at the beginning and the jaunty beat that tells us that, although poor Katy has been dealt a harsh hand by love, the plucky gal is going to be just fine.

  The song being echoed is that great anthem of American resilience ‘It’s the Hard Knock Life’, from the 1977 Broadway musical Annie. It is sung by the inmates of the girls’ orphanage where the eponymous heroine is incarcerated, a grim brick pile in Depression-era New York. There, we encounter an unmitigated picture of hardship, a ‘full of sorrow life’ without kisses or treats, a place where, as ‘It’s the Hard Knock Life’ dolefully informs us, Santa Claus never treads. It’s a scenario straight from the blues. ‘Once a day don’t you wanna throw the towel in?’ the girls chorus. Yet they deliver their lament in indomitably chirpy all-American voices, bulwarked by that jaunty beat that later turns up in ‘Roar’.

  Meanwhile (in the wonderful 1982 film) the drudgery of cleaning the orphanage is transformed into cheery dance routines with mops and brushes. At the end of the song, rather than throw in the towel, Annie attempts a bold escape in a trolley of dirty laundry. She ain’t a quitter. ‘It’s the Hard Knock Life’ was ingeniously revived by Jay-Z on his 1998 track ‘Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)’, adopting the girls’ perky chorus as an accompaniment to his rags-to-riches tales of Brooklyn hustling, with the song’s beat recast as hip-hop. It was a worldwide hit, the song, like Annie’s laundry basket, that
smuggled him into the mainstream.

  Jay-Z gained permission to use the ‘Hard Knock Life’ sample by writing a letter to the musical’s composer Charles Strouse and lyricist Martin Charnin expounding on his childhood love of the show, having won a ticket to see it on Broadway as a prize in an essay-writing competition at his hard-knock Bedford-Stuyvesant school. The letter was, he later admitted, an ‘exaggeration’. In fact the rapper came across the hip-hop version, by producer Mark ‘the 45 King’ James, at a rap show and bought it for a rumoured $10,000.

  His association with Annie continues with the recent film remake. Co-produced by the rapper, it updates the story to present-day New York and gives the soundtrack a hip-hop makeover. The result was roasted by the critics. Yet ‘It’s the Hard Knock Life’ has all the bustling energy of old, neatly prefaced by one of the foster girls (orphanages are so 1930s) asking what a ‘hard knock life’ means. ‘It means our life sucks!’ spits a colleague.

  Katy Perry pops up in the new Annie, tweeting about her love for the heroine. In ‘Roar’, ‘It’s the Hard Knock Life’ leads a medley of empowerment references. Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem ‘I Am Woman’ (1972) is alluded to in the title (‘I am woman, hear me roar’). Survivor’s Rocky theme tune ‘Eye of the Tiger’ is quoted in the lyrics. The context is Perry’s divorce from comedian Russell Brand. Co-written with her friend, singer-songwriter Bonnie McKee, ‘Roar’ gives a Californian spin to Annie’s tale of hard-won social mobility. Perry celebrates going ‘from zero to my own hero’, a dazzling act of personal validation. It’s like orphan Annie graduating from the school of hard knocks, moving to LA and swapping Sandy the dog for a personal trainer. You go, girl.

  Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

  15

  APACHE

  What links Burt Lancaster and the birth of hip-hop? Or pioneer rappers the Sugarhill Gang and the B-movie The Thing with Two Heads? Or a Danish Eurovision winner and a Native American rebel? The answer is a tale as wild and random as the best kind of party night, and it revolves around the Incredible Bongo Band’s reworking of ‘Apache’, once described as ‘the most crazed piece of orchestral funk ever recorded’.

  The story begins in 1959 when the English songwriter Jerry Lordan was inspired by the Robert Aldrich film Apache. It starred Lancaster as a brave holding out as Geronimo surrendered. Lordan wrote a stirring instrumental that he sold to the guitar whizz Bert Weedon, the man behind the 1957 book Play in a Day that taught generations of famous names – Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton and Brian May among them. Weedon cut a version, but his record company sat on it. Frustrated, Lordan passed the music on to The Shadows, and their dramatic, hard-riding rendition – released in July 1960, with Hank Marvin’s twangy guitar to the fore – became an unexpected UK Number 1. Weedon’s slower, almost wistful ‘Apache’ snuck out the next month. It only made Number 24.

  February of the following year saw Jorgen Ingmann, future Eurovision winner, take his cover to Number 2 in the US. Twinkly, even slightly prissy, it nevertheless ensured that ‘Apache’ was already something like a phenomenon. Later in 1961, the country singer Sonny James did a vocal version. ‘Alone, all alone by the campfire/She dreamed of her love,’ he croons. Cheesy, but curiously affecting, his ballad is just waiting for Quentin Tarantino to rediscover it. There were three other guitar versions of note in the 1960s – by the surf-rocky Ventures, the fuzzier Davie Allan and The Arrows, and those bad-acid growlers the Edgar Broughton Band.

  By the ‘Flower Power’ era, however, ‘Apache’ was redolent of a squarer time. It needed a Hollywood makeover to become a dance floor smash and one of the most sampled tunes in history: enter MGM’s soundtracks director Michael Viner and The Thing with Two Heads. Viner was given the job of providing incidental music for that shlocky 1972 flick. One of his numbers, ‘Bongo Rock’, caught on enough that he reconvened the session musicians who had made it to record an album of the same name. This group, which included the Motown conga player King Errisson and the Pet Sounds and Derek and the Dominoes drummer Jim Gordon, was hastily dubbed the Incredible Bongo Band. Track two on their soon-to-be-obscure 1973 LP was an infectiously percussive, horn-fuelled and organ-driven ‘Apache’.

  It came to the attention of a Bronx DJ, a Jamaican known as Kool Herc. He claims the credit for extending the percussion break on ‘Apache’ together with similar tracks or a copy of the same record. His so-called ‘Merry-Go-Round’ sent clubbers ‘hype’. By the end of the 1970s, such ‘breakbeats’ had emerged as the cornerstone of hip-hop – as joyously confirmed by the Sugarhill Gang’s 1981 ‘Apache’, complete with exhortations for Tonto and Kemo-Sabe to ‘jump on it’.

  The Incredible Bongo Band broke up in 1974 – King Errisson later touring with Neil Diamond, and Michael Viner becoming a publisher who died of cancer in 2009. Jim Gordon, who suffers from schizophrenia, remains in prison for murdering his mother in 1983.

  Their break has been looped and chopped, spliced and diced, repackaged and repurposed, by artists from LL Cool J to Missy Elliott, and Moby to Goldie. For an exhaustive list, look up the blogger Michaelangelo Matos. (He deserves an award for services to musical genealogy.) There’s also an entire documentary about it, Sample This (2012). But if all that’s starting to seem a bit po-faced, check out the Tommy Seebach Band’s ineffably camp 1977 disco-rock ‘Apache’: it’s hard to believe it’s not some stupendous mickey-take. All the same, you’ll want to dance.

  Richard Clayton

  16

  1999

  The year was 1982 and an androgynous young man named Prince had become a familiar presence on the radio and in the charts. But this was the year when he was to become a household name. From the beginning a prodigious recording artist, the mononymous Minneapolitan had released four albums in three years; his fifth was to be his breakthrough, its title track, ‘1999’, a bracing blast of funk.

  The album was the first to be recorded with Prince’s new backing band, The Revolution, and ‘1999’ featured the voices of two them, Lisa Coleman and Dez Dickerson, who took it in turns with Prince to sing the couplets. The song reflected the mood of the times, when the cold war had taken a chilly turn and fear of nuclear war was in the air (‘Everybody’s got a bomb, we could all die any day’).

  There’s also more than a whiff in Prince’s lyrics of his background in the pre-millennial, apocalyptic Seventh-Day Adventist Church: the longer album version of ‘1999’ spirals off into a handclapping funk workout, with Prince declaiming, ‘Can’t run from Revelation’. And there’s a curious line in which Prince sings, ‘I’ve got a lion in my pocket, and baby he’s ready to roar’. On the face of it, this seems to be a straightforward sexual metaphor, except that in the Bible’s Book of Revelation the Lion of Judah is a symbol for the return of Christ. Of course, Prince being Prince, it’s entirely possible that its meaning is both sacred and sexual.

  The song’s initial release as a single failed to make much impact, however. It was followed up by ‘Little Red Corvette’, which had enormous crossover appeal, bringing Prince’s music to a wider, whiter audience. In 1983, ‘1999’ was re-released and was a hit in several countries. Over the years it has been re-released many times, notably in 1999 itself, when the world was gripped by apocalyptic fears of collapse caused by the Millennium bug and partygoers took solace in Prince’s mood of defiant delirium. (Prince had been at war for some time with his record company, Warner Brothers, which owned the master tapes; to prevent Warner from profiting from the song, he re-recorded it in 1998.)

  In 1999 Prince (who by now had changed his name to a symbol) recorded a live show, Rave Un2 the Year 2000, which was broadcast on American pay-per-view television on the eve of the new millennium, culminating in an extended ‘1999’. After this, Prince vowed never to play the song again, but he later revived it in live shows; it cropped up during his run of 21 concerts at London’s O2 Arena in 2007.

  The song has not been widely covered, but a brave few have attempted it. Big Audio Dynamite covered it somewhat
feebly in 1992. English electro artist Gary Numan did a sound job of it on his Machine and Soul album, released in 1999, exploring – as you’d expect – the song’s darker side. Anonymous eyeball-headed West Coast experimentalists The Residents went further, turning the song into a clanging, twisted dystopian vortex on their Dot.Com album (2000). American nu-metal band Limp Bizkit murdered it on stage, vocalist Fred Durst basically shouting the chorus while his bandmates thrashed the riff to death. The American singer Beck, who has also covered Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’, has incorporated ‘1999’ into his live shows in a version that stays true to its funky roots. There’s also a jazz version by Bob Belden and Peter Bernstein on the Blue Note Plays Prince tribute album; their big, brassy arrangement is let down by Bernstein’s polite-sounding guitar. Meanwhile Prince plagiarized the vocal melody in his own 1986 song for The Bangles, ‘Manic Monday’: the tune from one song could easily be sung to the riff of the other.

  Finally, ‘1999’ returned to the charts in 2016 following Prince’s death at the age of 57. No doubt it will continue to get heavy rotation at New Year’s Eve parties across the globe in tribute to the man who sang, ‘We could all die any day/But before I’ll let that happen/I’ll dance my life away.’

  David Cheal

  17