The Beat Surrender

A triple whammy of (mostly) greatness, this album takes you through Motown’s journey from the sixties, when it was arguably the most influential record label on the planet, to the seventies, to it’s sorry decline in the eighties.

The music of CD 1 (the sixties), is still almost perfect. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas ‘Dancing in the Street’, sounds like the start of a revolution, to which everyone’s invited; ‘Every guy, grab a girl, everywhere around the world’. Incidentally, if you haven’t heard it before, the end result may have you turning in to Katie White; ‘The drums! The drums! The drums! The drums! The drums! The drums!’

Motown in – chief Berry Gordy, had a downbeat lyrics set to upbeat music maxim, that in particular, Smokey Robinson stuck to with gusto. ‘Tears of a Clown’, and the marvellous ‘Tracks of my Tears’ are both here.

Late in the day, the big guns are wheeled out. Stevie Wonder with ‘For Once In My Life’ and Marvin Gaye with ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’. Over familiarity has not dented the latter songs power a jot, and Gaye remains far and away Motown’s greatest gift to the world. The Supreme’s and The Temptations are also well represented here, and CD1 contains some of the most thrilling, life affirming pop music ever made.

CD2 (the seventies) is almost as good. The Supremes, (without Diana Ross who by now had become unmanageable) with ‘Nathan Jones’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’ (Berry Gordy hated it), and Stevie Wonder, who, in any other record label, would be the best singer on it, with ‘Signed Sealed Delivered (I’m Yours)’ were all making the best music of their careers. Cracks, however, were beginning to show. Too many treacly ballads were shoehorned in, and the song writing quality had dipped. It has to be said, whoever decided the running order for CD2 has either a great sense of humour, or none at all. ‘Help Me Make It Through The Night’ is followed by ‘Let’s Get It On’, followed by ‘Love Machine’, followed by ‘Easy’. Post coital cigarette anyone?

CD3 (the eighties) is simply wretched. Marvin Gaye had died, Diana Ross had discovered disco, worse still (shudder), Lionel Ritchie had turned up to spoil the party rather like a drunken, embarrassing old relative. No ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ thankfully, but the vomit inducing ‘All Night Long’ is here. Goody. The paucity of material is such that Diana Ross’s monstrosity ‘I’m Coming Out’ (!), is considered good enough for inclusion while even a talent like Smokey was churning out dire material with ‘Being With You’. Motown wasn’t meant to sound like this.

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