Remembering Jackie Trent

by Bob Stanley

When Jackie Trent died last week she was primarily credited in news stories as the writer of the Neighbours theme. True, she was - Jackie also wrote and sang the theme from Mr & Mrs with her then husband Tony Hatch, but neither was exactly her greatest musical achievement.

Born Yvonne Burgess in the Potteries (hence her stage name), Jackie's only major hit single under her own name was Where Are You Now (My Love) which went all the way to number one in 1965. The papers were very excited that it toppled the Beatles from the summit, which Jackie thought was hilarious, as she explained to Brian Matthew.

Hatch and Trent were as close to the great team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David - writers of sophisticated, deceptively easy-sounding pop - as Britain has ever come. Where Are You Now was a beautifully controlled single, and in many ways an unlikely number one, a classy ballad with a soft minor chord verse which - in more commercially-minded hands - could have been swamped by an orchestral middle-eight. That would’ve been the obvious move, but instead Hatch and Trent kept it clipped, simmering with the same restrained sexuality as Brief Encounter.

The song and arrangement were like an Anglo-Bacharach playlet, with Jackie playing the schoolteacher stood up in the rain, walking back to her West Hampstead bedsit. It was a real (non-swinging) sixties London song, to file alongside Donovan’s Young Girl Blues, Lorraine Silver’s Happy Faces, The Kinks’ Big Black Smoke and David Bowie’s London Boys.

Then again, there is no record that epitomises the bright side of sixties London - its skip and freshness, its 1966 world capital confidence - like Petula Clark's I Couldn't Live Without Your Love. It came right in the middle of an incredible run of hits sung by Pet, and written by Jackie and Tony, that began with Downtown in late '64 and lasted her through to 1968, when The Other Man's Grass (Is Always Greener) became Pet's last UK Top 20 hit. In between came such quintessentially English sounds as Don't Sleep In The Subway, Round Every Corner and I Know A Place (a line from which helped Brian Epstein to name his autobiography, A Cellarful Of Noise).

As a singer, Jackie could also belt them out - check her terrific uptempo cover of the Ronettes' You Baby. As a writer she was in a different class, and she will be greatly missed.