Beware,” Smokey sings quiveringly, of passion’s pitfalls, “the danger’s there,” before reminiscing about his own misdirection in affection. 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.

The Detroit quartet’s cancelled Motown album released at last – with 13 bonus tracks, many previously unissued. While Berry Gordy busied himself as a movie mogul, talent scouting was not an unalloyed success, but The Commodores and Rick James ploughed genuinely fresh territory for the label. Previously, we celebrated the 100 Greatest Motown songs to leap off the Detroit production line, but what about those all-important albums? That title track opened the floodgates for a cycle of songs that, far from being the hippy-soul peace-and-love fest it can at first appear, would address the human cost of war (What’s Going On), environmental breakdown (Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)), the protection of innocence (Save The Children) and social injustice (Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)), to a soundtrack of honeyed, loose, rock-solid soul with strings and a uniquely expressive singer pleading for sanity and humanity.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. 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. This intuitive grasp of his own talent was never better illustrated than on 1965’s rip-roaring Shotgun. 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. 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.

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. The first album released in 1975, was a top 10 hit in the UK, where it charted for 35 weeks, whilst Vol. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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. The legendary Motown label was founded on January 12, 1959 and incorporated as Motown Recording Corporation on April 14, 1960 by Berry Gordy, Jr.Regardless of country of origin all tracks are sung in English, unless otherwise stated in our description.