![]() ![]() As if he’s slightly embarrassed by all that romantic talk – ‘look, can’t we just not talk about all that lovey-dovey stuff? Just stay around and, you know, sort of live together.’” ![]() “Our publishers refused to make a deal on the song royalties with Elvis, but he did it anyway,” Napier-Bell says. Napier-Bell and Wickham had to deal with Presley’s management, who infamously would insist on portions of the royalties for songs that the King recorded. Other musicians also took notice of the beauty of the song, including the biggest star of them all: Elvis Presley. This was a path that she would continue to traverse when she made the masterpiece album Dusty In Memphis a few years later. You can also argue that “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” presented a more mature side of her than some of the bubblier pop songs she had recorded had managed to do. The end result was a #1 hit for Springfield (her first) in the UK and a top 5 spot in the US upon the song’s 1966 release. “Dusty had imbued the lyrics with a feeling and pain that was beyond us to have conceived when we wrote them.” “The end result was indeed magnificent,” he says. As a matter of fact, when Napier-Bell heard the finished performance, he couldn’t believe what she had done with his and Wickham’s words. Springfield’s performance manages to evoke pain and pride, hurt and hope, resignation and resilience. She just needs his presence in her life, if only temporarily. She doesn’t need any of the sentimentality. But she rallies in the chorus for a courageous if heartbreaking plea. That sends her into a spiral of loneliness and despair. “It wasn’t me who changed but you/And now you’ve gone away,” the narrator laments, suggesting that she’s been the victim of a subtle deception. ![]() And, aided by the drama of the melody, she found something else in Wickham and Napier-Bell’s words, which, despite their relative inexperience as songwriters, turned out to be potent pop poetry. Let’s just go home and have a good shag.’”īut then Springfield got a hold of the song. ‘You don’t have to say you love me’ was quite a good pick-up line in those days, meaning: ‘We don’t have to pretend about all that love stuff. “A typical night out was to get drunk, dance, and find someone to take home and have sex with. “In fact, in those days of swinging London and the early days of the pill, most of us were not too romantic,” Napier-Bell says. Napier-Bell told American Songwriter in a recent interview that he thought the lyrics that he and Wickham had written were actual a kind of clinical look at a one-sided affair. Hence, they added the words “to say” to the phrase and that opened up the whole song. They had settled upon the phrase “You don’t have to love me” when they realized that it didn’t fit the melody. As Napier-Bell explained in his wonderful memoir about British music in the 60s, entitled, fittingly enough, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, the lyrics came quickly once the pair struck the right tone. ![]()
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