Interesting Facts About Tin

Catchy tune, bad grammar and a falsetto bit: how hard can it be to write a ...

PATRICK FREYNE  talks to some of the industry’s most successful hit-makers about the essential ingredients of a pop song – and then, taking their advice, gets down to recording one of his own

WHILE ROCK songwriting has always been about authenticity, pop songwriting has always been more about artifice. From the churn of Tin Pan Alley and the Brill Building to Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s Hit Factory in the 1980s, to small studios from Dublin to Stockholm, behind every fresh-faced starlet there is a businesslike production line churning out hits as though they were widgets.

On BBC2 at present, Secrets of the Pop Song  , among many other hits. There’s a pause before he answers his own question: “Well, you need something that appeals to everyone, that’s poppy and cool and comes in at around three minutes.”

That sounds easy.

“No, it’s not easy,” says Hawes. “It’s not easy at all.”

That said, the basic rules of hit-making don’t change much. “Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, a middle eight or breakdown section if you need one, and maybe a bridge section between verse and chorus,” says Chris O’Brien, who, along with his songwriting partner, Graham Murphy, has written for Westlife among other pop acts. “If it’s a boy-band song and a ballad, you probably need a key change for the end, for the bit when the fireworks go off and they get off the stools . . . Whatever you do, it has to pass the whistle test. If you have a great pair of legs and are wearing a funny suit you might be able to bypass some of this, but even Lady Gaga follows it for the most part.”

But how does one go about filling a chosen structure with music? In their 1988 book The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way  , it’s a very modern tune and in many ways couldn’t be from any time other than now, but there are elements there that are vaguely familiar from old Motown records. You have to be able to appeal to so many people at the same time. I think it was the Edge who said that most pop songs sound very familiar, with a 2 per cent X factor that gives them that little bit of magic, the bit that’s odd or interesting.”

The industry itself, of course, prefers to focus on the bits that are safe and familiar. “What the record companies want is always fed by things that are currently happening in the charts,” says Tim Hawes. “Every record company person wants the last big hit. Often by the time you write that for them, things have already moved on. It’s quite bizarre really.