Motown Greatest Hits

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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. After a slinky, subdued opener in Cleo’s Mood, Walker and his All Stars let rip with four uptempo, roadhouse rough dancers climaxing with the irresistible Shake And Fingerpop. Registered address: WRD Music Ltd, United Friendly House, 282 Camden Road, London, NW1 9AB, UK, Tel: +44 20 7267 6762. Since we began our programme of Motown releases, the Fantastic Four has been among the most requested acts we’ve been asked to feature.

Profane though such thinking might be, What’s Going On is the kind of album to make you imagine parallels between its narrator and Christ: both driven to spread a message of brotherhood and suffering for the sins of the world, only for their Fathers to have other plans. 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. 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”. or healing the world’s pain with the sheer exultation of this album’s mightily comforting, all-encompassing bear-hug of a title track. 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.

Spearheaded by the certain power and wonderful expressiveness of the quartet’s lead singer, the great Levi Stubbs, and steered by the songs of Holland-Dozier-Holland, Reach Out was their fourth studio album, and is awash with hits – Reach Out I’ll Be There, 7 Rooms Of Gloom, I’ll Turn To Stone, Standing In The Shadows Of Love and Bernadette (all written and produced by H-D-H) plus their atmospheric cover of The Left Banke’s Walk Away Renee, and though they’re less at home with Monkees hand-me-downs Last Train To Clarksville and I’m A Believer (one can hear, if not condescension, then a certain lack of engagement with the lyrics) they’re much more comfortable with Tim Hardin’s If I Were A Carpenter. Pretty much a straight-ahead instrumental soloist, he took an even more direct route as singer, aiming for visceral connection and power.

We provided an appetiser to the career of Brenda Holloway with “The Early Years - Rare Recordings 1962-1963”, issued on CDCHD 1241 in 2009. 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! The compilation features legendary Motown artists including The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Temptations, The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, The Jackson 5 and Lionel Richie.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. 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. The bonus titles span Brenda’s Motown career, from 1964’s pop-sounding ‘Mr Lifeguard (Come And Rescue Me)’ to the soulful ‘It’s Love I Need’, completed just a few months before her departure from the company in 1968.

Before it, Do The Boomerang, the title track and Road Runner have all shuddered the foundations, while after it Shoot Your Shot barely takes time for breath. The Tempts take the epic acid funk workouts of 1970’s Psychedelic Shack and stretch out the centres and soften the edges, pulling you down into a lush paradise of swirling strings and vocal harmonies. The Detroit quartet’s cancelled Motown album released at last – with 13 bonus tracks, many previously unissued. But you can’t have one without the other, and for every sceptic of Talking Book’s Marmite opener, You Are The Sunshine Of My Life, there are a thousand suckers for its uninhibited whistleability and emotional boldness. Neither seems to have full control over their melodic “gush”; they almost never let anything get in the way of the vocal and sometimes their songs seem built for the sheer joy of singing.Of all the many memorable transformations wrought by Motown’s Hitsville hothouse in the 1960s, perhaps none was more remarkable than that of The Four Tops: four men in their thirties, comfortable in their supper club routine of standards, jazz phrasing and easily crooned harmonies, metamorphosed into million-selling pop stars at the forefront of the label’s international expansion. The track ‘Every Little Bit Hurts’ exists only in mono and fake stereo; in the absence of a true stereo version, we’ve used the original mono master here. 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. Also included are some beautiful new guest vocalist versions that sit alongside the original vocals laid down over 50 years ago. But for all the talk of daily danger and strife, his burning spiritual optimism, first crystallized on 1972’s Music Of My Mind, still thrives.

The legendary Motown label was founded on January 12, 1959 and incorporated as Motown Recording Corporation on April 14, 1960 by Berry Gordy, Jr. 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. 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. To conclude, a few words from Brenda: “While I was signed to Motown I was constantly in and out of the studio. 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.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. 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.