YOU might hum the tune, but you sing the words, and for at least one generation, the words were those of Hal David, the songwriter who died on Saturday, aged 91.

He was famous for penning dozens of top 40 hits with composer Burt Bacharach.

David wrote phrases that skewered the heart of the lovestruck teenager, words that pumped tragedy into the break-up and resolve into the determination to milk every minute of it. "What do you get when you fall in love?" he asked. "You get enough germs to catch pneumonia," he answered. "After you do he’ll never phone ya."

He hitched the eternal to the everyday and made both seem credible. But he wasn’t only the laureate of the lovesick. Along with Bacharach, world peace, global harmony and the grit behind the glamour were merged in words and music. It was about believability, simplicity and emotional impact, he said, and the hardest of these was simplicity.

London, September 3