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Why the song is king at the Ivor Novello awards

You don't have to be famous to get nominated for an Ivor Novello award. It's about whether anybody thinks the work is any good
David Arnold
Composer David Arnold at the Dorchester Hotel, London, for the BMI London Awards Photograph: Michael Crabtree/EMPICS

Being a writer as well as a producer, I always think that, just as a great script might not always turn into a great film, a great song might not turn into a great record.

Technology has made it easy nowadays to create something that sounds like a record, but might not contain any good material. In some ways, that's brilliant, because it allows people who may not have a traditional training to express themselves musically. At the same time, it's an easy way to short-cut the craft of songwriting, where you struggle to find where the next chord should come from.

I believe that more resonant and memorable material is written when it's a little bit more steam-powered, and you should be able to sing a song away from the technology. But I suppose that's ever so slightly luddite, because you can have a great record that might not necessarily be a great song.

New Order's Blue Monday, for instance, is the most amazing, phenomenal record, but remove all the production, and I'm not sure how great a song it is, and that's taking nothing away from it. To a certain extent, I'd say the same about Play Dead, which I co-wrote and co-produced for Björk.

Recently the practice of writing a melody to a topline track has become a mainstay for many songwriters – a method that was unheard of 10 or 12 years ago. There are different worlds emerging now, in terms of the experience of what songwriting is, and you'd be foolish to think it was better in the old days.

When I produced Dame Shirley Bassey's album The Performance last year, featuring songs by Gary Barlow, Pet Shop Boys, and Manic Street Preachers, I remember saying to the writers: don't worry about writing a great Shirley Bassey record, just write a great song. I'll make it into a Shirley Bassey record. You're faced with the iconic monolith that is the Shirley Bassey song, and the level of expectation that goes with that is quite enormous. But when we stripped that away, that's when it started paying off. Gary Barlow, for instance, spent an awful lot of time writing at the piano, wanting it to be musically powerful.

Writing a movie theme presents a different set of challenges. The job of a film theme is to make its point quickly, explaining to the audience what's going on in the movie, and the umbrella of emotion under which all this drama can happen. But it's something that people are only going to watch and hear once. It goes past them, and there's no chance for it to grow on you. It's not like a record that you hear 10 times and all of a sudden it clicks.

If you're writing thematically, it means writing something that is a bit "hooky", that feels like a theme, and what is a theme if it's not a chorus? It's the bit everyone knows, from Jaws and Chariots of Fire to Close Encounters and James Bond. They're all great big musical hooks. It's not dissimilar to songwriting, but it's like starting with the chorus first.

The art of songwriting has clearly evolved. However, if you listen to the radio now, I don't know where you would hear Cole Porter or Jerome Kern, all the people that created the Great American Songbook. That's slightly worrying, because what inspired so many of the great writers of the 1960s and 70s were the people who wrote songs in the 30s, 40s and 50s. Now, I'm not quite sure where you would go to get that education.

That's why the Ivor Novello awards are so important. As we've seen over the last couple of years, you don't have to be famous to get nominated. It's just about whether anybody thinks the work is any good. To make a footballing comparison, the Ivors are like the players' player of the year awards. In terms of trying to protect, nurture and inspire songwriting as a craft, it's essential.

Taken from The Ivors Essays available in full at The Ivor Novello awards take place tonight and are presented by BASCA in association with PRS for Music.

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