Motown Greatest Hits

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The insistent sermonising shuffle of Higher Ground (written and recorded in an astonishing three-hour whirlwind) and the jazzy uplift of Don’t You Worry ’Bout A Thing both prove that in the world of Stevie Wonder, hope continued to spring eternal. Both are loved by the masses of music fans for their fearless unselfconsciousness and sometimes maligned by the chin-strokers as vendors of cheese. Unfortunately for the Fantastic Four, it would not be until they moved to Westbound Records that they were able to rekindle the chart flame that had burned through their Ric Tic years.

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. Best is You Sure Love To Ball, bathed in warm fuzziness, guitars getting it on with harps with such empathy that they become almost indistinguishable, and Madeline and Fred Ross’s gasping and moaning errs just the right side of Lil’ Louis’s French Kiss. Previously, we celebrated the 100 Greatest Motown songs to leap off the Detroit production line, but what about those all-important albums? 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.

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. There was no ‘punk’ as any MOJO reader might recognise the term in James’s hybrid, which was actually funk-rock-pop; while his image was more Hollywood Pimp. 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. Within Universal, Motown was incorporated into various other subsidiaries including Universal Motown Records Group from 2000 to 2011 and later moved to Island Def Jam Music Group until both label groups were disbanded by UMG in 2014. 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.

The first album released in 1975, was a top 10 hit in the UK, where it charted for 35 weeks, whilst Vol. 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.Irrespective of the source, all of our collectables meet our strict grading and are 100% guaranteed. I’m so very grateful to my loyal fans all around the world, especially those in the UK who have never stopped supporting my career. The album comprised an overview of Brenda’s four-year spell with Motown, featuring all of her USA-sides, five B-sides and two tracks from her “Every Little Bit Hurts” long-player. The promise of Gaye’s sophisticated loving is all in his voice, coarser than the crystalline angeltone he employed on What’s Going On, but no less exquisite, and similarly augmented by a crosstalk of Marvindubs and brilliantly inventive backing vox (the impressionistic, dove-like coos from 3:50 in Let’s Get It On are astonishing). 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.

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.My Girl Has Gone, the fourth US hit single, follows with its dramatic crashes of orchestration on each chorus, contrastingly sharply with each gentler, more ruminative verse. 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. 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. She was the best female singer, bar none, to cross the threshold of 2648 West Grand Boulevard, but Gladys Knight was never considered an A-List priority act as far as Motown was concerned, so intent was the focus on promoting Diana Ross’s career. I hope you hear inside my voice of sorrow / And that it motivates you to make a better tomorrow,” he pleads during Living For The City.