Post by Ace on Aug 12, 2003 23:29:09 GMT -5
Telegraph: A word is worth 1,000 notes
(Filed: 10/08/2003)
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/08/10/boinv10.xml&...
Mark Steyn reviews Wrestling with Elephants: The Biography of Don Black by James Inverne
I was driving through the mountains the other day when Diamonds Are Forever came on the radio and, not for the first time, I found myself marvelling at what's indisputably one of the two all-time great Bond songs (Goldfinger being the other). I've always loved the way it captures Ian Fleming's view of Tiffany Case in just a few lines, the sense of a woman damaged by men. "Diamonds Are Forever/ Sparkling round my little finger/ Unlike men the diamonds linger./ I don't need love/ For what good will love do me?/ Diamonds never lie to me/ For when love's gone/ They luster on."
Don Black wrote those words to John Barry's music, and I was interested to know how he'd dug so deep into the character and the situation to be able to distil it so brilliantly. Page 73 of Wrestling With Elephants provides the answer: "John Barry gave Don some advice. 'Don't think of the song as being about a diamond,' he counseled. 'Write it as though she's thinking about a penis.' "
Oh, well. That works, too: "Diamonds Are Forever/ Hold one up and then caress it/ Touch it, stroke it and undress it."
Black's been writing Bond themes from Thunderball to The World Is Not Enough. Indeed, since the original Moneypenny retired and Q died, he's now the only link between the Connery days and the Brosnan era. That's his secret in a nutshell: he never goes out of fashion. If you like Matt Monro or kd lang, Hot Chocolate or Frank Sinatra, Placido Domingo or Denise Van Outen, Andrew Lloyd Webber or Doug Henning, Hollywood or Bollywood, John Wayne in True Grit or Anita Dobson in EastEnders, chances are you've come across a Don Black song.
Stars and styles come and go and, when they're gone, Don lustres on. He was the first British lyricist to win an Oscar (for Born Free), and here he is four decades later packing them in on Shaftesbury Avenue with Bombay Dreams and Tell Me On A Sunday.
Black's first musical was a show about premature ejaculation, which, predictably enough, didn't last long. But he's kept going ever since. It was Alan Jay Lerner, author of My Fair Lady, who turned me on to him, when I was in the middle of a long they-don't-write-'em-like-they-used-to moan and Alan interrupted: "Have you heard Tell Me On A Sunday? It's a lyrical tour de force."
What I like about Black is that, on the one hand, he's worked with Broadway legends like Jule Styne (composer of Gypsy) and Charles Strouse (Annie), and on the other, British show-business being what it is, he cheerfully accepts the naffest of gigs. I was on the phone to him a few years back and asked him what he was working on these days. "Well, you're going to cringe when you hear this," he said, "but I've just done the Michael Barrymore Christmas single." I did cringe, which can be pretty expensive at international call rates.
This was around the time when Barrymore had either just left his wife or just reconciled with her or just reconciled with the fetching young lad he'd left her for before he reconciled with her: I forget which. "I think I've found an angle on it," mused Black. "The song's called Too Much For One Heart." "Hmm", I said.
It's not clear to me, though, why Wrestling With Elephants is "The Authorised Biography Of Don Black". I would have thought Black was one of the showbiz figures least in need of an "authorised" bio. If he's got any illegal appetites, sexual or narcotic, they've been superbly concealed his entire working life.
Black is usually the sanest guy in the room, whether the other guy's Michael Jackson, coming over to draw with Don's missus, or Jule Styne complaining about swear words in the script for Barmitzvah Boy ("We can't have this kind of f--- --' language in a f-----' family show, you c----------!"), or Andrew Lloyd Webber proposing to try out Aspects Of Love in front of "a few mates" - David Frost, Geoffrey Howe, etc. "That way we'll find out what Joe Public thinks."
In most of the anecdotes retailed in this book, Black and Lloyd Webber seem to function like Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont, the former doing all the gags, the latter gliding by serenely oblivious to them. They make a very odd couple - a quintessentially Jewish ex-stand-up comic ("The Living Joke") from Hackney, and a South Ken classical boy who parlayed rock opera into a peerage. Black is, in theatrical terms, an anti-ego: as everyone says, if you can't work with Don, you can't work with anyone. And in his best work with Lloyd Webber he humanises the guy, he takes Andrew's inclination to big operetta bombast and brings it back down to earth, to make it intimate, tender, romantic.
That's the other oddity about the jacket: not just the "authorised" sub-title, but the title. "Wrestling with elephants" is Christopher Hampton's description of putting on a musical, and James Inverne extends it here to the process of lyric-writing: "Don wrestles with yet more elephants every day. It is the job of a lyricist to harness the stampeding images in his head, and to parade them in the confines of his verses." It's not quite right: the images don't stampede, they have to be coaxed out, and they have to match the stresses of the tune, the length of the line.
"Wrestling with elephants", for example, is a great, vivid image, but unless it fits the notes, it's useless. That's why Ira Gershwin holed up in a hotel to try and finish Embraceable You and emerged 48 hours later with seven words: "Come to poppa, come to poppa, do". Johnny Mercer took a year to finish the lyric to Skylark. And Herbert Kretzmer, lyricist of Les Miserables, says, "You're trying to capture something as elusive as a sound which suggests a word from which, eventually, a complete lyric emerges."
Don Black has always pooh-poohed making that much of a meal out of it. But in Born Free, on the couplet "the world still astounds you/ Each time you look at a star", "astounds" is just perfect, exactly as Kretzmer describes it: the right word, the right note, the right sound. I'd love to know more about how that happened.
Inverne gives us a breezy read, he tells the story easily, gets the banter and gags in, but he's not much for musicological analysis and, even though writing about music is (as they say) like dancing about architecture, the odd bit on crotchets and rhyme schemes wouldn't hurt. Instead, Inverne describes Diamonds Are Forever as "not so much about a penis, as a penis substitute - diamonds as dildos. And Barry's music is suitably raunchy, caressing the stave, teasing in the verses, hinting at what's to come, before the big ballsy climaxes."
I can't help feeling the song deserves better than that. To modify Freud, sometimes a penis isn't just a penis.
Mark Steyn's books include 'Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now' (Faber).
======================================
DAF is my favorite Bond song.... and I'll have to agree with Steyn's last sentence
Ace
(Filed: 10/08/2003)
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/08/10/boinv10.xml&...
Mark Steyn reviews Wrestling with Elephants: The Biography of Don Black by James Inverne
I was driving through the mountains the other day when Diamonds Are Forever came on the radio and, not for the first time, I found myself marvelling at what's indisputably one of the two all-time great Bond songs (Goldfinger being the other). I've always loved the way it captures Ian Fleming's view of Tiffany Case in just a few lines, the sense of a woman damaged by men. "Diamonds Are Forever/ Sparkling round my little finger/ Unlike men the diamonds linger./ I don't need love/ For what good will love do me?/ Diamonds never lie to me/ For when love's gone/ They luster on."
Don Black wrote those words to John Barry's music, and I was interested to know how he'd dug so deep into the character and the situation to be able to distil it so brilliantly. Page 73 of Wrestling With Elephants provides the answer: "John Barry gave Don some advice. 'Don't think of the song as being about a diamond,' he counseled. 'Write it as though she's thinking about a penis.' "
Oh, well. That works, too: "Diamonds Are Forever/ Hold one up and then caress it/ Touch it, stroke it and undress it."
Black's been writing Bond themes from Thunderball to The World Is Not Enough. Indeed, since the original Moneypenny retired and Q died, he's now the only link between the Connery days and the Brosnan era. That's his secret in a nutshell: he never goes out of fashion. If you like Matt Monro or kd lang, Hot Chocolate or Frank Sinatra, Placido Domingo or Denise Van Outen, Andrew Lloyd Webber or Doug Henning, Hollywood or Bollywood, John Wayne in True Grit or Anita Dobson in EastEnders, chances are you've come across a Don Black song.
Stars and styles come and go and, when they're gone, Don lustres on. He was the first British lyricist to win an Oscar (for Born Free), and here he is four decades later packing them in on Shaftesbury Avenue with Bombay Dreams and Tell Me On A Sunday.
Black's first musical was a show about premature ejaculation, which, predictably enough, didn't last long. But he's kept going ever since. It was Alan Jay Lerner, author of My Fair Lady, who turned me on to him, when I was in the middle of a long they-don't-write-'em-like-they-used-to moan and Alan interrupted: "Have you heard Tell Me On A Sunday? It's a lyrical tour de force."
What I like about Black is that, on the one hand, he's worked with Broadway legends like Jule Styne (composer of Gypsy) and Charles Strouse (Annie), and on the other, British show-business being what it is, he cheerfully accepts the naffest of gigs. I was on the phone to him a few years back and asked him what he was working on these days. "Well, you're going to cringe when you hear this," he said, "but I've just done the Michael Barrymore Christmas single." I did cringe, which can be pretty expensive at international call rates.
This was around the time when Barrymore had either just left his wife or just reconciled with her or just reconciled with the fetching young lad he'd left her for before he reconciled with her: I forget which. "I think I've found an angle on it," mused Black. "The song's called Too Much For One Heart." "Hmm", I said.
It's not clear to me, though, why Wrestling With Elephants is "The Authorised Biography Of Don Black". I would have thought Black was one of the showbiz figures least in need of an "authorised" bio. If he's got any illegal appetites, sexual or narcotic, they've been superbly concealed his entire working life.
Black is usually the sanest guy in the room, whether the other guy's Michael Jackson, coming over to draw with Don's missus, or Jule Styne complaining about swear words in the script for Barmitzvah Boy ("We can't have this kind of f--- --' language in a f-----' family show, you c----------!"), or Andrew Lloyd Webber proposing to try out Aspects Of Love in front of "a few mates" - David Frost, Geoffrey Howe, etc. "That way we'll find out what Joe Public thinks."
In most of the anecdotes retailed in this book, Black and Lloyd Webber seem to function like Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont, the former doing all the gags, the latter gliding by serenely oblivious to them. They make a very odd couple - a quintessentially Jewish ex-stand-up comic ("The Living Joke") from Hackney, and a South Ken classical boy who parlayed rock opera into a peerage. Black is, in theatrical terms, an anti-ego: as everyone says, if you can't work with Don, you can't work with anyone. And in his best work with Lloyd Webber he humanises the guy, he takes Andrew's inclination to big operetta bombast and brings it back down to earth, to make it intimate, tender, romantic.
That's the other oddity about the jacket: not just the "authorised" sub-title, but the title. "Wrestling with elephants" is Christopher Hampton's description of putting on a musical, and James Inverne extends it here to the process of lyric-writing: "Don wrestles with yet more elephants every day. It is the job of a lyricist to harness the stampeding images in his head, and to parade them in the confines of his verses." It's not quite right: the images don't stampede, they have to be coaxed out, and they have to match the stresses of the tune, the length of the line.
"Wrestling with elephants", for example, is a great, vivid image, but unless it fits the notes, it's useless. That's why Ira Gershwin holed up in a hotel to try and finish Embraceable You and emerged 48 hours later with seven words: "Come to poppa, come to poppa, do". Johnny Mercer took a year to finish the lyric to Skylark. And Herbert Kretzmer, lyricist of Les Miserables, says, "You're trying to capture something as elusive as a sound which suggests a word from which, eventually, a complete lyric emerges."
Don Black has always pooh-poohed making that much of a meal out of it. But in Born Free, on the couplet "the world still astounds you/ Each time you look at a star", "astounds" is just perfect, exactly as Kretzmer describes it: the right word, the right note, the right sound. I'd love to know more about how that happened.
Inverne gives us a breezy read, he tells the story easily, gets the banter and gags in, but he's not much for musicological analysis and, even though writing about music is (as they say) like dancing about architecture, the odd bit on crotchets and rhyme schemes wouldn't hurt. Instead, Inverne describes Diamonds Are Forever as "not so much about a penis, as a penis substitute - diamonds as dildos. And Barry's music is suitably raunchy, caressing the stave, teasing in the verses, hinting at what's to come, before the big ballsy climaxes."
I can't help feeling the song deserves better than that. To modify Freud, sometimes a penis isn't just a penis.
Mark Steyn's books include 'Broadway Babies Say Goodnight: Musicals Then and Now' (Faber).
======================================
DAF is my favorite Bond song.... and I'll have to agree with Steyn's last sentence
Ace
