The inspiration for the new album came from the UK boss of SonyBMG, Rob Stringer. “He told me, ‘Don’t give me an album of pop songs like people will expect, songs that will get played on the radio. Here’s the Cuban missile crisis in 1963 and I’ve just finished ‘Anyone Who had a Heart’…”All that’s changed. I’m writing songs with the Vietnam war going on and I’m not involved I’m not marching I’m not protesting.

I hope you accept my apology as a country,’ or showed some humanity…”This is not what one expects from the relaxed crooner He admits he wasn’t a political animal when he was young “There’s the thing. I think Bush is just about the poorest president we’ve ever had You’d have to go back before I was born to find a worse one. If you’re not in agreement with whatever he wants, well, he’s not the smartest guy in the room, and his reaction process is pretty much what we saw at 9/11, when they told him in the classroom about the towers and he went on reading the kids’ book, and then disappeared for a day in the sky.” Bacharach’s face creases in pain “If he’d said just once: ‘Boy. On “Who Are These People?” there’s a line about “this stupid mess we’re in” and Costello sings: “Seems like these liars will inherit the earth.” Were the liars the Bush administration or al-Qa’ida? “I’ve always had a problem with people who couldn’t tell the truth or admit a mistake and say they’re wrong. And wouldn’t it be great if Bush said, ‘I fucked up, I misjudged, it was my mistake’…

Invite him to wax nostalgic about the death of the jazz-fan’s paradise, New Orleans, and he says: “The music is the last thing I’m thinking about right now, in order of what’s important,” and directs you to read the articles – written months before the hurricane – in the Louisiana Times-Picayune warning what might happen to the city – “that it would be engulfed, that people would drown, that bodies would be floating down the road. Instead of pushing the funding up, they took most of it away to fight this stupid war, and that’s unforgiveable.”Check out the lyrics on the new album, At This Time – the first on which he’s supplied most of the words – and you find a sustained lament for the modern world. He is instantly likeable, confiding and modest about the commotion that greeted his appearance at the GQ Awards two days earlier, from an audience that included Robbie Williams, Bob Geldof and Bryan Ferry “I was blown away by the standing ovation. I’ve had tributes before, sure, but I don’t retain that feeling, and I wasn’t prepared for it on Tuesday. But maybe you shouldn’t retain these things or you’d be on a permanent high.”As he demolishes a hotel brunch of scrambled eggs, and talks about his life in a spectral whisper, the biggest surprise, from this merchant of superior schmaltz, is his new-found political indignation. For a chap well into his eighth decade to be still composing, singing and touring, this puts the 62-year-old Jagger & Co in the shade.

And to find that the record features guest contributions from Elvis Costello, Eminem’s mentor Dr Dre and the operatic divo Rufus Wainwright, suggests its maker is not yet ready for the twilight home and the night-time Horlicks.Here he comes. Five foot three, with dishevelled silver hair, he’s wearing a T-shirt saying “Change” and the top and bottom of non-matching tracksuits, as casual as a 19-year-old student who’s just woken up after a rave. Thirty-five years after these glory days, all the songs are playing in my head like a musical photo album.
We’re meeting today because Bacharach has a new record out next month. No movie of my teen years charmed me more then Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for which Bacharach won two Oscars – Best Music and Best Original Song for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head”, even though Sacha Distel’s chart-topping cover version, sung with a boulevardier wink, bordered on the emetic.