Rufus Wainwright joins songwriter Guy Chambers to lift the lid

Rufus Wainwright joins songwriter Guy Chambers to lift the lid on the song production process in a new series for BBC Two, Secrets of the Pop Song.
“Torture, pain and more pain,” might be some people’s description of the Top 10 each week but it is also, according to Secrets of the Pop Song on BBC Two (Saturday), what makes a great ballad. Ballads are by far the most popular type of song – Candle in the Wind is the biggest-selling single of all time and Yesterday has been covered more than any other – from which we may surmise that human beings like pain more than anything else. I suppose that explains the success of Roxette.

Secrets of the Pop Song set out to deconstruct ballads (anthems and breakthrough singles are to come) by building one from scratch. Robbie Williams’s songwriter Guy Chambers sat down at the piano with none other than Rufus Wainwright to show us how it’s done.

Their collaboration was wonderful to behold, proving once again that the best thing television can do with art is show it being made, rather than talking about it. This being essentially a music documentary, however, the spectre of This is Spinal Tap was never far away. That spoof film really has obliterated an entire generation of musicians’ chances of ever being taken seriously on camera. Last night, for example, in a documentary that was looking in earnest at one of the vertebrae of modern culture, there were still some momentous giggles as men who have sold more records than most of us have red blood cells made ninnies of themselves.

For example, neither Guy nor Rufus could come up with a word that rhymed with “battles”. Watching them flounder was delicious fun. Similarly, Guy’s face when Rufus, a man with a voice like sweetest sorrow, announced that he was thinking about rapping on his next record, was a song cycle in itself. “I think that would be… dangerous,” said Guy. Then again, Guy did suggest that they call their soaring ballad World War Three, on the grounds that you should always aim for a title no one’s used before.