DELIVER THE WORD - Focus on Lyricists (Melody Maker 1973)

Dec15th 1973 Melody Maker published a series of articles on lyricists such as Pete Brown (who wrote lyrics for Cream and Jack Bruce), Pete Sinfield (who wrote lyrics for King Crimson, ELP, PFM), Bernie Taupin (who wrote with Elton John), Keith Reid who wrote for Procul Harum), Clive James and Larry Beckett.

The Introduction read -

DELIVER THE WORD - Melody Maker Dec 15th 1973

Bernie Taupin

The sheer musicality of pop has broadened and deepened so much in the past decade that it's focused most of the critical attention upon itself to the comparative exclusion of the lyric.

Considering the number of books multiplying each year on the pre-rock and roll writers like Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart and Johnny Mercer, it's surprising that the pop lyric hasn't come in for more examination.

Of course, there was a time when an evaluation of rock and roll lyric would be based on the somewhat flip belief that "it's so bad it must be good"

This campy notion still holds true for much of pop, whose inherent instincts are for the instant and disposable, but the change in attitudes to the lyric has nevertheless vastly altered in ten years.

Lyricists, especially Robbie Robertson, have tried to unfuse an awareness of tradition and cultural

Pete Brown

values outside pop have begun to appear, and the general appraoch among writers intersted in craft is to make lyrics more concious.

Whether pop lyrics are art is a moot point. Pop has always been at its most critically vulnerable when it's self-concious, largely because its writers aren't usually equipped to craft these new ambitions onto a form that's dependent on commerialism when it gets right down to it.

But Dylan, who opened up these possibilities, has been the forerunner of a whole clutch of contemporary lyricists anxious to graft new sensibilities, vocabularies and themes onto pop.

The MM spoke to 6 of these writers, whose commercial success has been of varying degrees, and whose approach to lyric writing and lyrics in general is radically different.

Pete Sinfield

We choose them specifically because their primary role is as a lyricist, and they work with one or more melodists. It's significant of the change in pop that a few years ago such writers wouldn't have existed