Burt Bacharach remembered by Elvis Costello

‘He was extreme in his focus on details’: Burt Bacharach in 1968. Photograph: Martin Mills/Getty Images

I’m Just A Lucky So And So – that’s a lyric Mack David wrote in 1945 for Duke Ellington, the same Mack David who co-wrote Baby It’s You with Burt Bacharach, a song I first heard performed by the Beatles.

Yet despite these links back to its very beginnings, Burt Bacharach isn’t part of the dull orthodoxy of rock music. When a dogmatic journalist faulted his absence from the rock’n’roll revolution in the 1950s, Bacharach responded, “I was studying with the French modernist composer Darius Milhaud and listening to Dizzy Gillespie. Bill Haley just didn’t make it for me.”