The Look of Love — Bacharach and David’s song was perfect for a Bond movie
Dusty Springfield recorded the 1967 track for a seduction scene in ‘Casino Royale’
The comedian and filmmaker Mike Myers was on his way home from hockey practice in Los Angeles when “The Look of Love” came on the car radio. Myers’ British-born father, who had recently died, had always loved the scene in the spoof Bond movie Casino Royale featuring the song — Ursula Andress leading Peter Sellers through a luxury apartment to a sunken sofa, where she seduces him. Those three and a half minutes “just delighted my dad, because it was a combination of Sellers, James Bond and Burt Bacharach”, he recalled in 1997.
And in that flash of memory came a moment of inspiration: “I instantly felt the character and the movie of Austin Powers enter my brain.”
It’s entirely understandable. That Dusty Springfield recording of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s song still summons a particular vision of the 1960s: one not of flower power and the Democratic convention in Chicago and the Soixante-Huitards, but of little red Alfas, cocktails at dusk, beautiful people in beautiful clothes doing beautiful things. Bacharach had written music that was intended to reflect Andress’s appeal: the music had to sound sexy, and what is sexier than bossa nova?
Though Bacharach was always the more high-profile of the pair, “The Look of Love” is elevated by David’s lyric, something that is apparent when you listen to the first recorded version, an instrumental by Stan Getz, from late in 1966. It’s beautiful and sophisticated, but without the tang David adds, it’s subtle and sensuous rather than indelible. The lyric was added at the last minute, for the movie, and it transforms the song: with words, the scene with Sellers and Andress makes perfect sense — it is itself a seduction.
David’s conceit is to use words to describe everything that is said without speaking: “The look of love is in your eyes”, “And what my heart has heard, it takes my breath away”, “I can hardly wait to hold you, feel my arms around you”. It’s a song that embraces sexiness without ever straying anywhere near raciness. It is perfectly judged.
According to Elvis Costello, its status as a standard means it should be considered the greatest Bond theme. “How many people are gonna get up there and say, ‘I’m gonna sing a standard now,’ and sing ‘Thunderball’? Nobody,” he said after Bacharach’s death. “But people are going to sing ‘The Look of Love’, and ‘The Look of Love’ is from Casino Royale, even if that’s the anomaly of the Bond films.”
This is the rare song where the creator’s own version is inessential. Bacharach’s recording, on his 1967 album Reach Out, is instrumental, and misses David’s lyric just as Getz’s did. The pair’s great muse, Dionne Warwick, sang it in 1969, taking it at a slower pace than Springfield had, with more insistent rhythm, and a sense of regret and pain. When she sings of wanting it to be “the first of many nights like this”, it seems more in hope than expectation.
The first big hit version, though, was by neither of those. It came from Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’66 — sung by Janis Hansen — and reached number four in the US after they performed at the 1968 Oscars. It’s brassy and over-egged, with backing vocals that date it instantly. As could sometimes be the case, Nina Simone sounds less desirous than faintly disapproving on her version. Andy Williams is processed white bread compared to Springfield’s sourdough.
Of the big cabaret stars who sang it, the most interesting version was Shirley Bassey’s, from 1972, which begins with stark wah-guitar and rattling cymbals, like the opening of The Beatles’ “Come Together”. It suggests that maybe we’ll be getting something in the stark vein of Ann Peebles’ “I Can’t Stand the Rain”, but then the strings get slathered on. The chorus leaps into storming R&B, and you can sense the record it might have been had someone had the foresight to do less. Certainly not doing less was Isaac Hayes, who turned it into 11 minutes of sinewy funk.
Great singers have continued to record excellent versions — Shelby Lynne, Diana Krall — but one of the most interesting journeys has been that of the 1969 recording by the guitarist Barney Kessel, part of the famed “Wrecking Crew” of LA session players. His version was sampled by the great underground hip-hop producer J Dilla on the track “Look of Love” by his rap group Slum Village. After Dilla’s death in 2006, the jazz pianist Robert Glasper took the sample used by Dilla and played it himself as part of “Dillalude No 2”, one of his tributes to Dilla. And the song came full circle: once again sounding like beautiful people in beautiful clothes doing beautiful things, generations later.