Motown Greatest Hits

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A year beforehand, Marvin was paralysed by the death of his singing partner Tammi Terrell, but was drawn back to music by a composition by Four Tops’ bass Obie Benson and Al Cleveland. Talking Book is about the tunes, but it’s also about the times – and that’s the spoonful of medicine that helps the melodic sugar go down.

In addition to the tom-tom-crazy title track, the album had two of the group’s most mesmerising ballads, the rightly famed Tracks Of My Tears and the breathtaking, heartaching Ooo Baby, Baby, slightly less well-known but, frankly, better, with Smokey’s bittersweet vocal, at the top of his register, raising twice as many goosebumps. We provided an appetiser to the career of Brenda Holloway with “The Early Years - Rare Recordings 1962-1963”, issued on CDCHD 1241 in 2009. It must be the weirdest ever song to carry co-writing credits by a husband and wife, but Anna Gaye (sister of Motown boss Berry Gordy) had already ceded her position in the Marv bedroom to Janis Hunter, jazz legend Slim Gaillard’s 17-year-old daughter. On side two Walker’s first choruses on Tally Ho reveal a soloist far nimbler than the rest of the album might suggest, while best of the five other tracks is an outstanding band workout, Tune Up – fast, swinging and punchy. Registered address: WRD Music Ltd, United Friendly House, 282 Camden Road, London, NW1 9AB, UK, Tel: +44 20 7267 6762.Sadly they did not, and after two years in which the quartet recorded at least 30 sides and released just three non-charting 45s, their career at Motown was over. When “The Artistry Of Brenda Holloway” album was first released in the UK in 1968, I always wished that the rest of the world could have been able to enjoy it as well. Ultimately, Levi Stubbs’s voice conquers all: strong, beseeching, teetering on the edge of heartbreak, bursting with the thrill of new love, that explosive tenor joyfully roaring out “Bernadette! Behind the heavenly love and dreams of elopement we find Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me) while Smiling Faces Sometimes pretend to be your friend.

The latter is another staging post on Wonder’s political journey, a deceptively honeyed assault on the self-serving representatives of a white American status quo who “killed all our leaders” but will bring themselves down through their own iniquity. But Gaye’s own attitude to sex was complicated – his preacher father’s fire and brimstone prudery had planted a seedling of guilt that never withered – and Let’s Get It On would not be the great art it is if it were a mere carnival of zipless erotomania. Products labelled '*item fulfilled by Exertis on behalf of hmv' will be supplied to you directly by Exertis via their approved couriers. In total, utterly effervescent small ensemble playing behind the Walker tenor sax, which is all-wailing, barking, squeaking, quacking and hooting. If 1972’s Talking Book saw Stevie Wonder merely hinting at the socio-political unrest of early-’70s America, then the following year’s Innervisions faced the darkness head on.

Both are loved by the masses of music fans for their fearless unselfconsciousness and sometimes maligned by the chin-strokers as vendors of cheese. Primarily recorded at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, Innervisions is another masterclass of instrumental ingenuity and studio suss, but its genius lies in the concise arrangements – most fuelled by the pulse of Margouleff and Cecil’s TONTO synthesizer – and the clarity of his message. In recent years many of my unissued Motown recordings have been released for the very first time, most of which I had completely forgotten about.

Lovers of Detroit soul have long rhapsodised about the Fantastic Four, one of the Motor City’s most admired vocal groups of the 60s and 70s. Given the right circumstances, almost everything they recorded could have been hits to match those the company was having with such groups as the Originals, the Undisputed Truth and the Temptations.

Beware,” Smokey sings quiveringly, of passion’s pitfalls, “the danger’s there,” before reminiscing about his own misdirection in affection. In fact, no other record sounds quite like Talking Book, an album borne aloft on bubbles, simultaneously light yet sophisticated on the jazzoid You’ve Got It Bad Girl, irresistibly bittersweet Tuesday Heartbreak and the autumnal folkfunk of Big Brother. Brenda’s only up-tempo A-side for Motown, ‘Just Look What You’ve Done’, shows that she was more than capable of handling this kind of material. From Head To Toe is one of those wickedly infectious Smokey confections, outwardly simple, but as new layers of harmony build excitement and the mood is lifted even higher when the horns suddenly drop out of the track only to rejoin the arrangement with even higher intensity. Elsewhere there’s the queasy anti-chemical funk of Too High and his dig at the Nixon administration’s political chicanery – the mellifluously mocking He’s Misstra Know-It-All.

It’s Summer, a Norman Whitfield/Barrett Strong ballad, offers a necessary change of pace and tone but the album is predominantly concerned with the nitty gritty of physical attraction and emotional commitment, be it consummated or crushed. Gaye ends with Just To Keep You Satisfied, in which the sweet loving is weighed against “the bitching” and Marvin ends up concluding that maybe he’ll see her “somewhere down the line”. Previously, we celebrated the 100 Greatest Motown songs to leap off the Detroit production line, but what about those all-important albums? Now we serve up the main course with this expanded reissue of “The Artistry Of Brenda Holloway”, a compilation LP released exclusively in the UK in 1968.

When they came over to Motown while their last Ric Tic hit was scaling the charts, bigger things looked set to follow. Regardless of country of origin all tracks are sung in English, unless otherwise stated in our description. In January 2023 under Chivon Dean's new leadership as president and CEO, Motown has been divested from the Capitol Music Group while remaining under the Universal Music Group. Certain items can take longer to source than the estimated week, particularly during busy trading periods and may take longer to arrive at our warehouse.