With lyrics that compared the earth to an apple, mentioned a carousel running rings around the Moon, and a door revolving endlessly, ‟The Windmills of Your Mind”, a pop sensation in 1968, resembled the work of a psychedelic band. But this was not the work of drug-driven furry freaks; it emerged from a collaboration between a couple who were a fixture in mainstream American songwriting, a French jazz pianist trying to establish himself as a movie composer, and an English actor who barely sang in the conventional sense.
In 1968, Norman Jewison was making the Steve McQueen movie The Thomas Crown Affair, and wanted a song for a scene where Crown, a sophisticated crook, is flying a glider, suggesting vulnerability. Jewison had created a rough cut of the scene with The Beatles’ ‟Strawberry Fields Forever” as holding music, and commissioned lyricists and songwriters Alan and Marilyn Bergman to write a song with a similarly psychedelic feel. The Bergmans were not the most obvious candidates, having written the lyrics for Frank Sinatra’s “Nice ’n’ Easy” and the ersatz-Caribbean ‟Yellow Bird”. Legrand, now resident in Hollywood, was scoring Thomas Crown, and Jewison introduced him to the Bergmans, requesting a song that reflected Crown’s growing unease and which was ‟repetitious”, which the director saw as a quality of ‟Strawberry Fields”.
Legrand brought eight melodies to the Bergmans to choose from, including the one that eventually became “The Windmills of Your Mind”. The lyrics they came up with had a psychedelic quality, and they were indeed influenced by a drug — but not LSD. ‟When I was seven I had my tonsils out,” Marilyn Bergman told the Jewish Chronicle. ‟As they gave me the ether, I remember this circular descent into a sleep state.” Alan Bergman, for his part, said he was trying to evoke a swirling feeling of anxiety ‟and you can’t turn your brain off”.
Noel Harrison, an actor and former British Olympic skier, was paid $500 to record ‟The Windmills of Your Mind” on a sound stage at Paramount, while the scene was screened and Legrand, conducting, blew kisses to the orchestra. Its imaginative mix of psychedelia, cod psychology and melodic sophistication made it a top 10 UK hit and it took the 1969 Oscar for Best Original Song, sung at the ceremony by José Feliciano because Harrison was on location. (Harrison’s father, Rex, had landed the 1968 award for ‟Talk to the Animals”.) Noel Harrison signed a lucrative deal with Frank Sinatra’s record company, Reprise, and the Bergmans and Legrand continued to collaborate successfully. But ‟The Windmills of Your Mind” kept circulating.
Legrand and lyricist Eddy Marnay composed a French-language version of the song ‟Les Moulins de mon Coeur”. The French lyrics offered a similar cosmic whimsicality to the English version, mentioning Saturn’s rings, the wind’s ‟harps” and a crying tambourine, but they focused on the heart, not the mind.
A cover by Dusty Springfield became a US hit when Atlantic Records sent 2,500 copies to radio stations the day after Harrison’s original won its statuette. Feliciano’s 1969 recording made ‟too free with the beautiful melody”, reckoned Harrison; clearly, he hadn’t heard prototype metal band Vanilla Fudge’s bludgeoning dismemberment. Soul versions arrived from Kim Weston and Billy Paul, jazz renovations from Dizzy Gillespie and harpist Dorothy Ashby, and there were numerous easy listening interpretations, the song’s natural habitat.
The song divided opinion: Harrison harrumphed about the lyrics when Legrand was teaching it to him, and Dusty Springfield complained she could not identify with it. Inevitably, it attracted parodies, notably The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s ‟Canyons of Your Mind”, and folk wit Jeremy Taylor’s ‟Windmills”, which included the line: ‟Like the objects that you find, wrapped around the bacon rind.” Other psychedelic songs mined the original’s seam, such as Allan Sheldon’s ‟Mirror of My Mind” (1970; tellingly, its B-side was called ‟Old Windmill Tree”), and Paul Parrish’s ‟Walking in the Forest of My Mind” (1968).
More than 200 versions of ‟Windmills” were released between 1968 and 1979. Sting’s stripped-down take for the soulless 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair returned it to the spotlight, and it was visited by Swing Out Sister (1989), Kiri Te Kanawa (1992, with Legrand on piano) and Alison Moyet (2004). Two years before his death in 2013, Noel Harrison performed his signature song at Glastonbury, where its psychedelic overtones were appreciated.
Legrand, meanwhile, went on to win Oscars for scoring The Summer of ’42 (1971) and Yentl (1983). But he was most closely associated with “Windmills”: when he died last month, he was described almost universally as the “Oscar-winning ‘Windmills of Your Mind’ composer”.
This piece was updated on February 21 to acknowledge that the English-language version of the song, which Legrand wrote with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, was written first. We are happy to set the record straight.
Whose are the best — and worst — versions of ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Rhino/Warner Bros; UMC (Universal Music Catalogue); UMOD (Universal Music On Demand); RCA Records Label; Warner Music Group - X5 Music Group; Warner Classics International; Sony Music UK
Picture credit: Giancarlo Botti/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images