I’ve been meaning to catch
Burt Bacharach all these years. His rich music output over all these years covered my early teens through to University and beyond. Part of the nostalgia kick is to listen to Dionne Warwick, Karen Carpenter and all the ones who made it with his songs.
By the way, Burt says Hal David is in hospital and not doing well at all. Take a pause and send some good thoughts his way.
You know the old songs of Burt and Hal, from
What The World Needs Now Is Love, Walk On By, Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head – you’ve heard them a thousand times from the hollow sounding microphoned recordings of old through to some chick flick leveraging nostalgia and soft moist tissues. – they’re very much like old film.
A lot of the youngsters have re-discovered the dye colours of film, shirking digital purity. They’ve seen the stuff we used to shoot on Kodakchrome, Ektachhrome, Agfachrome, faded a bit, and they want to shoot the same deal – with sprocket holes. See how many canned effects we have in Instagram, Picasa, Piknik that mock up that. That’s because they didn’t dip their hands in D-76 and the only hypo they know is a syringe reference.
Ok, film, despite the slow demise of Kodak, is not dead and not faded – it’s getting a new lease of arty life. Maybe, maybe you should experience film, just a few rolls, before cost and saving the earth from smelly chemicals and dyes overcome you. For, if you don’t feel the past, feel the current, how do you fashion the future?
Go get an old film camera, it doesn’’t have to be a Leica, it doesn’t have to be a Holga. Shoot it. You’ll never know until you do.
Oh, and Burt.
Bliss like anything. More than just an item on my bucket list. He brought the nostalgia back to me and to the whole audience of grey hairs and balds. We felt like teens and children again, swaying to the spell he cast. But it wasn’t tired, hollow mic-ed music performed competently. It was superb modern arrangements (but still the impeccable timing and precision that you can rely on from Burt), passionately played by his core band (and the Australian ensembles) and sung for all their life with interpretive gusto by Donna Taylor, Josie James and John Pagano. Melbourne still has one day, the 20th April – and
tickets should still be available online.
