The greatest song in the universe?

This is the greatest song in the universe, our youngest son recently said to me in a dream, and I awoke with the song still playing in my head. 

You can allow some hyperbole in a dream, but it was Bryan Ferry's Don't Stop The Dance, and there are days when I do believe it is the greatest song in the universe. 

In the late 1980s when I was almost 40, two university students used to babysit for us. Rosie had worked with me as a student teacher in my classroom, and her friend Sam turned out to be our neighbour's boarder. Rosie was a serious Beatles fan, at a time when a student was more likely to be a fan of… what? Michael Bolton? Bros?

One winter vacation they asked us to babysit their children (as they said), and they lugged over some crates of their most cherished vinyl LPs. They were worried about burglars making off with them while they were away. 

Big responsibility, but I was welcome to listen to them. It was clear that, as well as the Beatles, Rosie was into Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music. 

These albums were a revelation. I mainly knew them through hits like Love Is The Drug (Roxy, 1975), and Ferry's retro-remakes Let's Stick Together and The Price of Love (1976), but I'd never explored them properly. 

The stand-outs for me were Roxy's Flesh And Blood (1980) and Ferry's Boys and Girls (1985). Tracks like Slave To Love, Don't Stop The Dance, and Flesh And Blood, with their layers of instruments and inventive arrangements, felt close to a multi-sensory experience.

Although Don't Stop The Dance appeared in a dream as the greatest song in the universe, recording or track or might be more accurate. I'm not surprised that there are few covers of the song, because its attraction seems inseparable from the production.¹

When we say we love a song, we often mean we love a recording, whether it's an original version or an inspired remake. That's been true ever since a hit song stopped being measured in sheet music sales.  When I say I love Be My Baby I mean that extraordinary artefact from 1963, the recording by The Ronettes, not the unadorned melody and lyrics. 

The great pop producers of the 50s and 60s, people like Bob Crewe, Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, understood that it was the recording, that unique one-off artefact, that was important.² 

Spector had a genius for an arranger, Jack Nitzsche, who is usually overlooked by the average listener, but in a way Spector's name was shorthand for a collaborative enterprise that included songwriters, arrangers, session musicians, producers, engineers as well as the upfront talent. 

It's extraordinary that I still listen to Don't Stop The Dance at least once a week some 35 years later, and hard to imagine that the five- and six-year-olds I was teaching at that time would have turned 40 themselves last year.

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1. Ferry himself may have been following this line of thought when he remade Don't Stop The Dance in an instrumental trad jazz arrangement on The Jazz Age (The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, 2012). He was "fascinated to see how [the songs] would stand up without singing" (interview in Daily Telegraph, quoted at Wikipedia).

2. Michael Campbell & James Brody cite songwriter-producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller: "We don't write songs, we write records." (Rock and Roll: An Introduction, course notes, University of Minnesota, 1999, 2008.)