Sorry, I can’t see you clearly, eyes are a little moist. I’ve just watched and heard The Temptations singing, live, Just My Imagination and it got caught in my soul.
Sure, it was only a really scrappy Youtube upload but, still. You’d have to have Scrooge’s pre-woke attitude to poverty or Thatcher’s dying-day attitude to society not to feel something when David Ruffin gently intrudes on Eddie Kendriks’s personal ruminating to plead to one of the gods on his behalf.
If only I could have been there. When it was recorded.
Just My Imagination was released on 1971 and I would have been ten going on eleven, just beginning to notice pop music properly. I might have heard one of my sisters playing this but I was a long way from buying a ticket for a Tempt’s concert. Hold on. This was filmed in 1982…In 1978 I was living not far from Watford, home to Baileys, what was known as a chicken in a basket joint. Over one week in September I could have seen The Temptations there every night. And The Supremes in 1977. And The Four Tops later in 1978. And Smokey Fuckin Robinson too. Why didn’t I?!?
I mean, I was in full post-punk mode at that point but I loved soul music. It wasn’t even a secret, shameful enjoyment. Sometimes Gang of 4 need a little sugar to go along with.
James Brown at The Venue in Victoria, London in 1979. Two and a half thousand people and, in those days, no barriers before the stage. I could have been anointed by the sweat of the Godfather of Funk himself. But I didn’t.
In fact, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s when I got a job at Dingwalls in Camden that I realised the value in watching beloved old acts, apparently long past their sell-by date.
True, I was in a band that supported Curtis Mayfield around 1983, but that was a bitter disappointment. Perhaps because of costs he was travelling without a horn section and the parts were played on the most nasty horn-approximating synth possible. Sometimes the Musicians Union got it right.
But, at Dingwalls, I saw Wilko Johnson, Steve Marriott (still in his Humble Pie dungarees and loud enough to be heard singing over the PA itself) and, most crucially, Bo Diddley. On a stage that was almost too small to hold him, Bo Diddley, his guitar louder than the drummer, taught me a whole series of lessons that night.
Since then, given the chance, I’ve made a point of checking out as many artists as I can, otherwise placed in the bargain bins of pop and, with the exceptions of Lou Reed’s guitar during the Velvet Underground reunion and Ronny Isley’s wife’s seemingly endless party-crashing stint during an Isleys show at Southbank I haven’t been disappointed.
What’s coming up next year that you should try for? Let’s leave any Beatles and their derivations out of it for the moment…
Medicine Head at The Green Hotel, Kinross?
John Otway at the Crescent in York?
Lloyd Cole’s touring (I wouldn’t, I saw him and was a little bored, but you might)?
The Kane Gang at Dingwalls?
The Purple Hearts at The Cavern Club?
Fairport Convention?
Fred Wesley?
The Rezillos?
Lydia Lunch?
How about PP Arnold this Friday, 20th December at the Union Chapel? I think I will…
