This gig is one that I had been eagerly awaiting for months. I bought the ticket in February and I wouldn't go as far as saying I was ticking the days on the calendar but there was a sense of something special about seing one of the greatest songwriters in the history of pop music. The show was an early start with the doors opening at 7pm and the gig starting at 8pm. It was my first time at The Royal Festival Hall and the venue proved to be as nice inside as it is ugly on the outside... Spent a couple of minutes in the lobby before climbing upstairs to access my seat, during which I managed to spot Jarvis Cocker, killing time before the gig by reading a paperback. My seat was quite far back (tickets weren't exactly cheap) but I still had a good view.
The gig started right on time with the band coming on stage and setting up and Bacharach joining them after everybody had finished tuning up. Still sporting his trademark blazer, he strolled on a stage in a relaxed manner greeting the crowd and thanking everybody for coming over. He said that he was pleased to come back to London and that he was grateful to Britain as it was here that records with his songs on them had first started selling. The show was very slick but Bacharach's demeanour is so laid back that something that must be a very "tightly scripted" performance comes off as relaxed. There wasn't any orchestra backing him contrary to his last London show at The Roundhouse but his backing band was quite impressive nevertheless : three singers, bass, an extra keyboardist, trumpet, saxophone, vibes, and a violinist. I think an acoustic guitar player would have been a good addition as sometimes the sound was a bit too "casio-ish" (if that makes any sense).
Rather than play a limited selection of songs from his back catalogue, Bacharach prefers to play lots of songs and compress them in medleys. I must admit that although I'd prefer to hear less songs but have them in their entirety, I didn't find the medley presentation as frustrating as I was expecting it to be. The medleys were done kind of thematically. One comprised the songs he had written for movies (with Bacharach singing lead on "Alfie"). One featured his early hits in the 1950's with songs such as "Magic Moments","The Story Of My Life" or the theme song for the movie "The Blob" that Bacharach said that even though it was a flop, both him and Steve McQueen's careers managed to recover from it. The three singers had quite a hard task on their hands having to cover for such great singers as : Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Gene Pitney, BJ Thomas, Jack Jones, Chuck Jackson, Cilla Black and the list goes on... The two females were really good but I'm a bit more reserved about the male (a bit too X-Factor-ish for my taste). The rest of the band was fine and I enjoyed the vocal performance of the keyboardist on "My Little Red Book". The appearance of Bacharach's son Oliver to play keyboard during "Make it easy on yourself" was a nice touch, even though request for him to come back on stage came to a dead end as "he only knows one song" dixit Bacharach. That evening was a rare chance to witness a fine performance by one of the best songwriters of the twentieth century.
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