Post by yerblues1968 on May 29, 2008 0:53:49 GMT -5
50 BEST BRITISH SONGWRITERS
Telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 19/05/2008
This Thursday the Ivor Novello awards will honour the greatest home-grown songwriters of the year. But who are the greatest of all time? Altogether now… compiled by Chris Harvey
John Lennon, Number 1 British Songwriter
The Beat Goes On: Neil McCormick on the Best British Songwriters
1 John Lennon
When Paul felt like it, he would come in with about 20 songs and say, "We're recording." And I suddenly had to write a f---ing stack of songs. "Sgt Pepper" was like that.' It can't have been easy being in a band with a songwriter as gifted as Paul McCartney, but during their time together Lennon would write many of the Beatles' greatest songs, including Day Tripper, All You Need is Love and Strawberry Fields Forever. While McCartney was writing material for solo albums and for his new band Wings, Lennon pushed on to create Working Class Hero, Imagine and Give Peace a Chance. He was a revolutionary artist who travelled far beyond the dream of rock'n'roll stardom.
Classic lyric: 'There's nothing you can do that can't be done./ Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.' (All You Need is Love, 1967)
2 Kate Bush
There may be a stampede of young talented female singer songwriters rushing into the charts, but none has quite created the sensation that the 19-year-old Bush did when she burst onto the pop scene in 1978 with her wild mane and interpretive dancing. She turned the most passionate English novel, Wuthering Heights, into an ardent song, and it made her the first woman to have a UK number one with a self-written number. Bush continued to explore new frontiers, building a lasting body of work.
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Classic lyric: 'You don't want to hurt me,/ But see how deep the bullet lies./ Unaware that I'm tearing you asunder./ There is thunder in our hearts, baby.' (Running Up That Hill, 1985)
3 Morrissey/Johnny Marr
The songwriting partnership behind the Smiths was responsible for some of the strangest and most enchanted pop music ever. Tales of thwarted sexual longing wrapped in enigmatic literary references are carried on reverberating waves of sound. That indefinable something takes in kitchen-sink romanticism and a camp disregard for the everyday ('There's more to life than books, you know,/ But not much more'), but it always points back to true north, as in the classic How Soon is Now? - 'I am human and I need to be loved/ Just like everybody else does.'
Classic lyric: 'Fame, fame, fatal fame/ It can play hideous tricks on the brain.' (Frankly, Mr Shankly, 1986)
4 Paul McCartney
The poppiest and most avant garde Beatle may have become more sentimental with age, but he remains one of Britain's greatest songwriters. He's certainly the most gifted tunesmith. McCartney could stuff more melodies into one song - Hello Goodbye, for instance - than most bands are capable of in a whole album. He wrote When I'm Sixty-Four as a 16-year-old, penned the most covered song (Yesterday) and - despite his atrocious last album, 'Memory Almost Full' - can still look forward to seeing Hey Jude slugging it out with Imagine, Bohemian Rhapsody and Robbie Williams's Angels at the top of the nation's favourite song poll.
Classic lyric: 'Love, love me do./ You know I love you' (Love Me Do, 1962)
5 Elton John/Bernie Taupin
The partnership between a Lincolnshire farmer's boy and a musical prodigy from Pinner, Middlesex, is one of the more unlikely associations in the history of rock and pop, but Elton's warm tenor and gospel-tinged piano-playing seem to fit perfectly with Taupin's references to rural life. Their collaboration began by post in 1967, after both replied to a press ad. They met six months later, banging out material for a record company - an hour for Taupin to write the lyrics, half an hour for Elton to set them to music - to create the songs that would launch Elton as a solo artist. All Elton's great numbers - including Rocket Man, Tiny Dancer and Candle in the Wind - were written together.
Classic lyric: 'So goodbye yellow brick road,/ Where the dogs of society howl./ You can't plant me in your penthouse,/ I'm going back to my plough.' (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, 1973)
6 Mick Jagger/Keith Richards
According to their outspoken former manager Andrew Loog Oldham, Jagger and Richards were reluctant songwriters who had to be locked in a room in 1964 until they produced their first two songs, both awful. The era-defining anthem (?I Can't Get No) Satisfaction followed in 1965 (they liked their brackets), and from then on the great songs kept coming for two decades.
Classic lyric: 'I can't get no satisfaction,/ I can't get no girl reaction,/ 'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try,/ I can't get no. ((I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, 1965)
7 Noël Coward
'Noël Coward was a charmer./ As a writer he was Brahma,' sang the late Ian Dury, tipping his hat to the rhyming skills of the composer who became a byword for sophisticated wordplay and society glitz. Coward's upbringing was slightly less glamorous. He was the son of a Royal Navy captain, which kept him out of the first rank in between-the-wars Britain, but not for long. He wrote his first song, Forbidden Fruit, at the age of 16 and went on to make his name as the author of sparkling comedies, incorporating his light, complex and elegant musical confections.
Classic lyric: 'I know it's stupid, to be mad about the boy,/ I'm so ashamed of it, but must admit the sleepless nights I've had/ About the boy.' (Mad About the Boy, 1932)
8 Ian Curtis/New Order
If your only knowledge of Joy Division had come from the film Closer, you could be forgiven for thinking that the band were a set of Manc music obsessives with a troubled singer. But a deeper image emerges from the band's final album, from which the film's title was taken, of an important late 20th-century artist confronting the extremes of human experience in songs such as Heart and Soul and The Eternal. That the musicians who took the journey with him all the way to his eventual suicide would go on to reinvent themselves in New Order as among the brightest, most engaging songwriters of the era was an extraordinary achievement.
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Click to learn more...
Classic lyric: 'Existence well what does it matter?/ I exist on the best terms I can./ The past is now part of my future,/ The present is well out of hand (Heart and Soul, 1980)
9 Van Morrison
Time may have ravaged the golden-haired minstrel on the cover of 'Astral Weeks', but nothing seems to warp the deep soul in his voice. George Ivan Morrison was born in Belfast in 1945 and had written a bona fide rock classic, Gloria, for his band Them while still in his teens. It barely hinted at what Van the Man would be capable of in a 40-year solo career that soon escaped the narrow confines of rock, plunging into folk, jazz and gospel to deliver a stream of transcendentally wonderful songs from Caravan to Into the Mystic to Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile).
Classic lyric: 'And I shall drive my chariot/ Down your streets and cry/ Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite/And I don't know why.' (Sweet Thing, 1968)
10 Joe Strummer/Mick Jones (The Clash)
Just six years separated The Clash's faultless run of singles, from White Riot in 1977 to Should I Stay or Should I Go in 1982, but they reveal a band that was developing at a breathless pace, alive to influences old and new. The combination of Strummer's fiery idealism and hard-to-catch lyrics, and Jones's gift for tunes and high harmonies, created a series of passionate bursts of energy that capture something unique and inspiring. Martin Scorsese described Janie Jones, the first track on their debut album, as the greatest British rock?'n'?roll song. It could be true, but the glory of Strummer and Jones's songwriting is that it's not even possible to say that it's the greatest Clash song.
Classic couplet: 'All over people changing their votes,/ Along with their overcoats,/ If Adolf Hitler flew in today,/ They'd send a limousine anyway.' ((White Man) in Hammersmith Palais, 1978)
More information on the top 50 songwriters may be found at:
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/05/18/sv_songwriters.xml
Telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 19/05/2008
This Thursday the Ivor Novello awards will honour the greatest home-grown songwriters of the year. But who are the greatest of all time? Altogether now… compiled by Chris Harvey
John Lennon, Number 1 British Songwriter
The Beat Goes On: Neil McCormick on the Best British Songwriters
1 John Lennon
When Paul felt like it, he would come in with about 20 songs and say, "We're recording." And I suddenly had to write a f---ing stack of songs. "Sgt Pepper" was like that.' It can't have been easy being in a band with a songwriter as gifted as Paul McCartney, but during their time together Lennon would write many of the Beatles' greatest songs, including Day Tripper, All You Need is Love and Strawberry Fields Forever. While McCartney was writing material for solo albums and for his new band Wings, Lennon pushed on to create Working Class Hero, Imagine and Give Peace a Chance. He was a revolutionary artist who travelled far beyond the dream of rock'n'roll stardom.
Classic lyric: 'There's nothing you can do that can't be done./ Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.' (All You Need is Love, 1967)
2 Kate Bush
There may be a stampede of young talented female singer songwriters rushing into the charts, but none has quite created the sensation that the 19-year-old Bush did when she burst onto the pop scene in 1978 with her wild mane and interpretive dancing. She turned the most passionate English novel, Wuthering Heights, into an ardent song, and it made her the first woman to have a UK number one with a self-written number. Bush continued to explore new frontiers, building a lasting body of work.
advertisement
Classic lyric: 'You don't want to hurt me,/ But see how deep the bullet lies./ Unaware that I'm tearing you asunder./ There is thunder in our hearts, baby.' (Running Up That Hill, 1985)
3 Morrissey/Johnny Marr
The songwriting partnership behind the Smiths was responsible for some of the strangest and most enchanted pop music ever. Tales of thwarted sexual longing wrapped in enigmatic literary references are carried on reverberating waves of sound. That indefinable something takes in kitchen-sink romanticism and a camp disregard for the everyday ('There's more to life than books, you know,/ But not much more'), but it always points back to true north, as in the classic How Soon is Now? - 'I am human and I need to be loved/ Just like everybody else does.'
Classic lyric: 'Fame, fame, fatal fame/ It can play hideous tricks on the brain.' (Frankly, Mr Shankly, 1986)
4 Paul McCartney
The poppiest and most avant garde Beatle may have become more sentimental with age, but he remains one of Britain's greatest songwriters. He's certainly the most gifted tunesmith. McCartney could stuff more melodies into one song - Hello Goodbye, for instance - than most bands are capable of in a whole album. He wrote When I'm Sixty-Four as a 16-year-old, penned the most covered song (Yesterday) and - despite his atrocious last album, 'Memory Almost Full' - can still look forward to seeing Hey Jude slugging it out with Imagine, Bohemian Rhapsody and Robbie Williams's Angels at the top of the nation's favourite song poll.
Classic lyric: 'Love, love me do./ You know I love you' (Love Me Do, 1962)
5 Elton John/Bernie Taupin
The partnership between a Lincolnshire farmer's boy and a musical prodigy from Pinner, Middlesex, is one of the more unlikely associations in the history of rock and pop, but Elton's warm tenor and gospel-tinged piano-playing seem to fit perfectly with Taupin's references to rural life. Their collaboration began by post in 1967, after both replied to a press ad. They met six months later, banging out material for a record company - an hour for Taupin to write the lyrics, half an hour for Elton to set them to music - to create the songs that would launch Elton as a solo artist. All Elton's great numbers - including Rocket Man, Tiny Dancer and Candle in the Wind - were written together.
Classic lyric: 'So goodbye yellow brick road,/ Where the dogs of society howl./ You can't plant me in your penthouse,/ I'm going back to my plough.' (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, 1973)
6 Mick Jagger/Keith Richards
According to their outspoken former manager Andrew Loog Oldham, Jagger and Richards were reluctant songwriters who had to be locked in a room in 1964 until they produced their first two songs, both awful. The era-defining anthem (?I Can't Get No) Satisfaction followed in 1965 (they liked their brackets), and from then on the great songs kept coming for two decades.
Classic lyric: 'I can't get no satisfaction,/ I can't get no girl reaction,/ 'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try,/ I can't get no. ((I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, 1965)
7 Noël Coward
'Noël Coward was a charmer./ As a writer he was Brahma,' sang the late Ian Dury, tipping his hat to the rhyming skills of the composer who became a byword for sophisticated wordplay and society glitz. Coward's upbringing was slightly less glamorous. He was the son of a Royal Navy captain, which kept him out of the first rank in between-the-wars Britain, but not for long. He wrote his first song, Forbidden Fruit, at the age of 16 and went on to make his name as the author of sparkling comedies, incorporating his light, complex and elegant musical confections.
Classic lyric: 'I know it's stupid, to be mad about the boy,/ I'm so ashamed of it, but must admit the sleepless nights I've had/ About the boy.' (Mad About the Boy, 1932)
8 Ian Curtis/New Order
If your only knowledge of Joy Division had come from the film Closer, you could be forgiven for thinking that the band were a set of Manc music obsessives with a troubled singer. But a deeper image emerges from the band's final album, from which the film's title was taken, of an important late 20th-century artist confronting the extremes of human experience in songs such as Heart and Soul and The Eternal. That the musicians who took the journey with him all the way to his eventual suicide would go on to reinvent themselves in New Order as among the brightest, most engaging songwriters of the era was an extraordinary achievement.
advertisement
Click to learn more...
Classic lyric: 'Existence well what does it matter?/ I exist on the best terms I can./ The past is now part of my future,/ The present is well out of hand (Heart and Soul, 1980)
9 Van Morrison
Time may have ravaged the golden-haired minstrel on the cover of 'Astral Weeks', but nothing seems to warp the deep soul in his voice. George Ivan Morrison was born in Belfast in 1945 and had written a bona fide rock classic, Gloria, for his band Them while still in his teens. It barely hinted at what Van the Man would be capable of in a 40-year solo career that soon escaped the narrow confines of rock, plunging into folk, jazz and gospel to deliver a stream of transcendentally wonderful songs from Caravan to Into the Mystic to Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile).
Classic lyric: 'And I shall drive my chariot/ Down your streets and cry/ Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite/And I don't know why.' (Sweet Thing, 1968)
10 Joe Strummer/Mick Jones (The Clash)
Just six years separated The Clash's faultless run of singles, from White Riot in 1977 to Should I Stay or Should I Go in 1982, but they reveal a band that was developing at a breathless pace, alive to influences old and new. The combination of Strummer's fiery idealism and hard-to-catch lyrics, and Jones's gift for tunes and high harmonies, created a series of passionate bursts of energy that capture something unique and inspiring. Martin Scorsese described Janie Jones, the first track on their debut album, as the greatest British rock?'n'?roll song. It could be true, but the glory of Strummer and Jones's songwriting is that it's not even possible to say that it's the greatest Clash song.
Classic couplet: 'All over people changing their votes,/ Along with their overcoats,/ If Adolf Hitler flew in today,/ They'd send a limousine anyway.' ((White Man) in Hammersmith Palais, 1978)
More information on the top 50 songwriters may be found at:
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/05/18/sv_songwriters.xml