50 best British songwriters - Telegraph
50 best British songwriters
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)
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26 Aug 2009
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.
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.
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)
11 David Bowie For a decade at least, being a Bowie fan was shorthand for being arty, alternative, make-up loving and weird. But his songs still sounded great on the radio, encoding mystery, futuristic alienation and sex. From Space Oddity in 1969 to the chic-sounding Let's Dance in 1983, Bowie's songwriting stands at the nexus of pop with the avant garde, matching his shapeshifting visual image stride for stride.
12 Queen Freddie Mercury wrote Bohemian Rhapsody, John Deacon wrote I Want to Break Free and Brian May wrote Flash and Fat Bottomed Girls. Yep, they were a mixed bag of songwriters, but together they created a kind of magic. Queen's ability to blend camp humour with macho bombast made them funnier than Victoria Wood and as heavy as Led Zep - no mean feat.
13 Ray Davies The lead singer of the Kinks and author of a stream of classic hits, Davies introduced the concept of the individual voice into British rock and pop - as distinctive, witty and instantly recognisable as Noël Coward. He is credited with inventing a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing by The Who's Pete Townshend.
14 Elvis Costello He may have looked like a cartoon Buddy Holly, but the young Costello was bristling with emotional and political invective, and had the musical and lyrical dexterity to recast his hurt and anger in any genre he cared to choose. That one of his earliest songs, Alison, may still be his best is no slight on the riches that were to follow.
15 Pete Townshend Pete Townshend's legacy will surely rest on writing The Who's era-defining My Generation, with a line that has entered the language - 'Hope I die before I get old.' Meanwhile, indie kids will carry on liking The Kids Are Alright, lovers of rock opera the towering Pinball Wizard and for fans of CSI the theme tunes - Won't Get Fooled Again, Baba O'Riley and Who Are You - are weekly reminders of what a great songwriter Townsend is.
16 Led Zeppelin Without the Zep's tales of pipers, misty mountains and the hammer of the gods, there would surely be no Spinal Tap, but there wouldn't be the drum intro to When the Levee Breaks, either. More than anyone else on this list, they show how songs can be more than just notes and words on a page. Oh, and they wrote something about a Stairway to Heaven, too.
17 The Bee Gees No question about their songwriting gifts, but do they pass the cricket test? The Brothers Gibb were born in the Isle of Man, but brought up in Australia. They wrote Islands in the Stream for Dolly and Kenny, Woman in Love by royal appointment for the Three Degrees, some critically esteemed early albums, and an endless stream of pop hits and disco classics, such as Night Fever and Staying Alive.
18 Neil Tennant/Chris Lowe (Pet Shop Boys) 'We were never being boring,' sang Tennant in 1990, and, 18 years on, it still sounds like a better epithet for the duo's songwriting career than the one with which it began, Opportunities (Let's Make Lots of Money). Tennant's gift is knowingness rather than cynicism, married to a deadpan wit that gives even his most melancholy moments - 'I love you, you pay my rent' - a bittersweet, sweet bitterness.
19 Pink Floyd Merging the late Syd Barrett into a single entry with Roger Waters is about as incongruous as this list is going to get: the former all playful wonder, the latter mostly bleak despair. Adding guitarist David Gilmour doesn't make things any simpler. You could make a case for the band's best songs being written either by Barrett, or about him (See Emily Play, Wish You Were Here, Shine on You Crazy Diamond) - unless you're a fan of Another Brick in the Wall.
20 P.J. Harvey Dark, theatrical and willing to explore the swampier side of human emotions, Harvey redefined what it meant to be a woman in rock - vividly feminine, rarely girly - in songs such as 1995's To Bring You My Love, before experimenting with mainstream pop to win the 2001 Mercury prize with 'Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea'.
21 Radiohead As a songwriting unit, Radiohead have the musical talent and emotional resolve to sally forth into any landscape. Their finest moments, such as Karma Police ('For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself') are so convincing that you can lose yourself in them.
22 Paul Weller The lead singer of the Jam cut a strange stylistic dash as part of the punk movement, marrying the look and sounds of Sixties mod with the anger of a revved-up class warrior and creating mini-epics, such as Down in the Tube Station at Midnight and That's Entertainment.
23 Bryan Ferry As he warbled, 'We are flying down to Rio!' in the middle of Roxy Music's first single, Virginia Plain, Bryan Ferry announced himself as a songwriter who would bring sex, style and movie glamour to the former town-and-country landscapes of pop. With the more sophisticated sheen of late Roxy and his solo career, Ferry embodied cool detachment in a series of croons.
24 Damon Albarn It's possible that Blur's Damon Albarn will forever be associated with those dynamic Woo hoo!'s in Song 2. But in his new band The Good, The Bad and The Queen, and as a member of the virtual group Gorillaz, Albarn's melodic gifts are undeniably as real as ever.
25 Coldplay In the summer of 2000, it was not possible to drive from one end of Europe to the other without being able to tune your car radio to a station playing Coldplay's single, Yellow. Since then, Chris Martin and co have continued to write big, sweeping, adult songs, selling 30 million albums in the process.
26 Sandy Denny The young classically trained pianist Denny threw herself into the London folk scene while working as a nurse at Brompton Hospital. She went on to write songs immersed in imagery that would have graced a Pre-Raphaelite painting, delivered in a voice as clear as a mountain lake.
27 Noel Gallagher Proof positive that tunes plus riffs plus attitude are a formula for rock'n'roll success, Gallagher's place in the history of British pop culture was established with a series of anthems, such as Live Forever and Cigarettes and Alcohol, then cemented with a soaring ballad, Wonderwall, which no one understands.
28 Annie Lennox/Dave Stewart In dramatic theatre pieces such as Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) and There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart) they strutted and emoted on a grand scale.
29 John Lydon Before his appearance on I'm a Celebrity..., the former lead singer of the Sex Pistols wrote the lyrics for at least two of the most influential songs of the 20th century, Anarchy in the UK and God Save the Queen.
30 Richard Thompson Thompson's lyrics explore the desert expanses of personal depression ('There's nothing at the end of the rainbow,/ I was on the Calvary Cross'). In the brilliant When I Get to the Border, though, he imagines a world in which 'My troubles will all turn to sand,' and 'I'll be dancing down the street'. We hope so.
31 Robert Smith (The Cure) When the teenage Robert Smith penned a song based on Camus' L'Etranger (Killing an Arab) as his contribution to New Wave, it announced the arrival of a highly individual and contrary voice. He is often miscast as a doom merchant, but his songwriting spans the twin poles suggested by his cartoon-like visual image - from the gothic mystery and melancholia of songs such as Charlotte Sometimes to the smeared-red-lipstick pop of The Lovecats.
32 Mike Skinner/The Streets The emotionally eloquent voice of Mike Skinner captured the lives of a generation far removed from those covered by US rap, a world of Maccy D's, beefy bouncers and dry your eyes, mate. It also forged the template for a new style of British pop, to be further shaped and moulded by Lily Allen, Jamie-T and Kate Nash.
33 Nick Drake Drake's songs have helped to define the image of the singer/songwriter as a sensitive outsider palely clutching an acoustic guitar. He died in 1974 from an antidepressant overdose, but his albums were bursting with hope and sadness ('I was born to love no one,/ No one to love me').
34 George Michael Wham! arrived in 1982. Senior partner George Michael soon felt that sharing fame was so Last Christmas, and began a solo career with 'Faith' (first single: I Want Your Sex). Its camp disco offerings sold 20 million copies.
35 Alex Turner (Arctic Monkeys) A century ago, D.H. Lawrence was lamenting the homogenisation of British regional culture. He surely would have approved of the rapid-fire bursts of demotic northern slang that have characterised the early career of this major new talent.
36 George Harrison The youngest Beatle didn't get a lot of space for his compositions on the band's albums, but he wrote some diverse and lovely songs, from Here Comes the Sun to Something. When the Beatles broke up, he released his pent-up energies with a triple solo album, 'All Things Must Pass'.
37 Jerry Dammers The musical force behind the Specials wrote the hits Too Much Too Young and Ghost Town about life in 1980s Britain, then turned his attention to an international issue for 1984's Nelson Mandela.
38 Amy Winehouse In songs such as Rehab and Tears Dry on Their Own from her second album, 2006's 'Back to Black', the troubled diva has turned her retro-styled compositions into something completely modern.
39 Cat Stevens Stevens wrote some of the most enduring songs of the 1960s and early 1970s: Wild World, Father and Son and the much-covered The First Cut is the Deepest, as well as some lesser-known beauties such as How Can I Tell You.
40 Sting De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da excepted, the songs Gordon Sumner wrote for the Police reveal an undeniable talent for crafting quirky pop gems, from Walking on the Moon to Message in a Bottle.
41 Gary Barlow Take That were supposed only to dance, look pretty and show off their six-packs, until evil genius Gary Barlow created a chart monster. Even the most hardened pop cynics had their hearts melted by Barlow's lovely ballad Back For Good.
42 Liam Howlett Howlett created the music that would fuel the Prodigy's rise from rave scene to international chart success, beginning with a track built around a sample from a 1973 children's public information film: 'Charly says always tell your mummy before you go off somewhere.'
43 Stuart Murdoch (Belle and Sebastian) Wistful, funny, culty and ever so slightly twee, the primary qualities of Murdoch's songwriting turn moon-in-June rhymes into delicately beautiful songs - 'You liberated a boy I never rated', he sang, in The Stars of Track and Field, in 1996.
44 Pete Doherty/Carl Barat Lesson one: complementary songwriting talents can make one unique whole, as the Libertines proved. Lesson two: don't go burgling your perfect match's flat. Simple.
45 Billy Bragg 'I don't want to change the world,' sang the young Billy Bragg in 1978's A New England. Not true. Over the next three decades, Bragg would prove that he had wanted to change the world all along, as well as write quirky and emotionally charged love songs.
46 Hot Chip 'Look after me and I'll look after you. That's something we both forgot to do.' Just to prove that hot dancefloor acts can also produce the sweetest pop, along came Hot Chip, a band of old schoolfriends from Putney.
47 Bill Fay If he'd never written anything else, the composer of Be Not So Fearful would deserve his place in this list. He had a brief career between 1967 and 1971, and his original vinyl albums - all two of them - are now collectors' items.
48 Joan Armatrading Being a successful black woman singer-songwriter in 1970s Britain made Armatrading a unique presence. She had her first top 10 hit in 1976 with Love & Affection, providing a blueprint for later songs such as Show Some Emotion and Me Myself I.
49 Mark E. Smith In another age, Smith might have been a pub ranter, in another still, a poet. The lead singer of The Fall's songs are original, uncompromising and deliberately rudimentary.
50 Ivor Novello The matinée idol and sex symbol who made his name by creating the music for the popular First World War number Keep the Home Fires Burning. He died in 1951, and the Novello Awards were created in his honour five years later.