Dionne Warwick will be eighty years old tomorrow. Whatever her chronological age, in my mind she will always be the twenty-something whose voice filled my grandparents’ farmhouse.

Listening to Do you know the way to San Jose? and it is a summer Sunday morning and lunch is being prepared. My aunt’s pale blue transistor radio is sitting on the kitchen sideboard and Dionne Warwick’s voice fills the low-ceilinged rooms.

There was something unmistakeably happy about Do you know the way to San Jose? It was a song that had a magic about it. It was song that filled a small boy with a confidence that all was well. Perhaps that was its selling point; it made you feel happy. Bacharach and David did tunes that put the world to rights – for three minutes, anyway.

The world outside was not a happy place. Dionne herself acknowledged the reality of the conflicts and hatreds and tensions of the 1960s, both at home and overseas, in her version of Bacharach and David’s What the world needs now.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No not just for some, but for everyone

Whatever the news from the world outside, and even journeying to San Jose in 1968 was  hardly in time of peace and wellbeing, in the confines of that 7″ single, there was a happiness to be found. Whatever the horrible realities of life at the time, there was a place for personal happiness.  LA might represent shattered hopes, it may be a reminder that life is not what it was promised to be, but San Jose stands as a symbol that there would be friends to be found and space and places in which to stay.

Did Dionne Warwick, and her contemporaries who were played on a Sunday lunchtime, create an idealised vision of the past? Could it be that the tunes of Bacharach and David were so beguiling that they glossed over the nastiness of the years?

The multiplicity of radio channels and digital music platforms now mean audiences have been split into many, many parts. There are no tunes that could have the impact of Dionne Warwick, no tunes that would have the listenership of millions on Sunday lunchtimes. No-one has the capacity that Dionne Warwick has to evoke the happiness of those Sundays fifty years ago.