24 October 1969
Surely this is recency bias on my part, I thought, but I re-watched The Apartment on TV last week and my re-listen to ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’ today seemed like it could be fittingly sung by Shirley MacLaine’s Miss Kubelik: same cruel heartbreak, same world-weary sadness, same biting wit and snappy quips. And what do you know: as it happens, ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’ was written as a duet for the Broadway musical Promises, Promises – which I hadn’t realised was a Neil Simon adaptation of The Apartment. The original recording was therefore sung by cast members Jill O’Hara, in the Miss Kubelik role, and Jerry Orbach, better known to later TV audiences as the star of gritty crime series Law & Order.
Still, this version is nonetheless doing well in being sung by the Queen of Southern Gothic herself, Bobbie Gentry, previously known for throwing something suspicious off the Tallahatchie Bridge: an aborted foetus, it’s speculated, or perhaps the body of the guy who gave her pneumonia and then never phoned her. (The later Jerry Orbach could fittingly have asked Bobbie Gentry for help with his enquiries.) This all means that ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’ is a rare instance where Dionne Warwick isn’t the original singer or hitmaker of a song by the blessed Bacharach and David, who wrote the music numbers for Promises, Promises. Warwick releases her own iteration of ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’ later in 1969, plus has a hit with the twisty, technically challenging title song of Promises, Promises.
Anyway, and all that aside, how does this Bacharach and David song sung by Bobbie Gentry sound? Great, of course. While Gentry may not quite have—and who else does?—the stellar technical gifts of Warwick or the intuitive genius of Dusty Springfield, those two master interpreters of the Bacharach and David songbook, her Dusty-esque blend of smokiness and shimmer is still a good match for their sophisticated vignettes of bittersweet grown-up heartache and resignation. In particular here, she has a feel for when exactly to dab the humour pedal, especially in the song’s punchline of “So, for at least until tomorrow”. The sunny, bouncy cabaret-pop arrangement may not sound an obvious fit for a heartache anthem, but it’s the sweet to Gentry and David’s bitter. Yes, the whole thing flirts with schmaltz, but for me it pulls back just before toppling into Carpenters ruin.
‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’ is only one of two chart number ones in Ireland during the ’60s that were written by Bacharach and David. (The other is Cilla Black’s gaudy, provincial cover of Warwick’s breathtaking ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’.) They were the greatest pop songwriters of that decade – perhaps the greatest pop songwriters ever. Aretha Franklin’s version of their ‘I Say A Little Prayer’, also a cover of a Warwick original, may be the greatest pop single of all time; on the Irish charts in 1968 it reached no. 12 (twelve). A number one for ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’, a fine recording of a charming Bacharach and David composition by a top-drawer singer, and featuring one of Hal David’s most famous rhymes, is some small measure of consolation, though I grant you it’s no Irish showband number. Shut up and deal.
