Podcast appearances and mentions of Ian Levine

Did you love the Boybands Forever documentary which Robbie was featured in recently? It was a great show, but it was also really sad to hear the negative sides of what most of the 90s/00s boybands went through. They each discussed their rise to fame and what they hysteria was like, but also how it affected their mental health, and left some of them with no money in the end.There's one 90s boyband member who's been discussing this topic and more with other pop stars on his own YouTube channel, The Accidental Pop Star, for a while. So, we're thrilled to be joined by Ally Begg from Bad Boys Inc to hear about his 90s boyband experience, as well as his memories of meeting and seeing Robbie live many times.Bad Boys Inc had 6 Top 40 singles and a Top 20 album and were created by one of Take That's early producers, Ian Levine, to rival Take That. Ally fills us in on how he felt about that, what being in Bad Boys Inc was like and why the band split after just one album. He also tells us what happened the first time he met Take That, and why he ended up going to some of Robbie's earliest solo gigs and rehearsal shows. Robbie once suggested a put down to use with anyone being snide, that Ally still uses to this day!Find Ally's show at https://www.youtube.com/@theaccidentalpopstar ======If there is an advert in this episode details will appear below:============**About Robbie Williams Rewind**Join husband and wife Matt and Lucy, as they rewind through legendary pop star Robbie Williams' solo career. Each episode, they have a guest fan to help us relive Robbie's incredible music and tours.Visit: robbiewilliamsrewind.com to discover more episodes, track listings & photos!Follow: @rewindrobbie on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter & TikTok.

Send us a text"Make Earth Wet Again"Mark invites Film Stories' Mark Harrison to submit his five choices for the Tinsel Tunnel. Why doesn't Mark want to make Earth wet again? What's hiding underneath the scratchy red blanket? And why can't the Doctor go back and save Adric? All this and more!Apologies for any audio issues you might experience with this episode, we'd have used AI to clean it up, but we don't have Ian Levine's considerable heft....I mean, wealth.Support the showFollow us on TwitterLike us on FacebookBuy us a pint

Send us a textIn the latest episode of Too Hot For TV Dylan is joined by David Kitchen from The Doctor Who show. Together they look at 20th Anniversary Radio Times Magazine and the David A. Mcintee Missing Adventure 'Lords of the Storm'. And they answer the burning questions: Why does anybody in Australia know about the Radio Times? What is the Toymaker doing on Gallifrey? What Doctor Who story is used in Guantánamo Bay?

Send us a textIn the first episode of Series 5 of Doctor Who: Too Hot For TV Dylan is joined by Pete Lambert and Conrad Westmaas. Together they look at the studio footage and Ian Levine edit of 'Dimensions in Time', the Vworp Vworp animation of 'A Meeting on the Common' and the BBV audio 'The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind'. And as always answer the burning questions: What is the size of medium sized restaurant ?What is it like to see Gary Downie at work? Who was pen pals with with Pip and Jane Baker? 

Long-time listeners of Doctor Who Literature know that this podcast is a K-9 house. We are all about K-9 here. This week, his first TV spinoff, the Christmas 1981 special gets its own novelization, the final book of the short-lived Companions of Doctor Who line. Joining Jason this week are two great friends making their first appearance on the show: Drew and Brent, from Who & Company. And yes, it's coincidence that they're showing up to discuss K-9 & Company. Jason appeared on Who & Company a few months ago. Jason has also recently been on Trap One to discuss the Celestial Toymaker Blu-ray animation and a tribute to the late William Russell. I recommend audio clips from The Simpsons' "Kamp Krusty" and the legit banger that is the Ian Levine & Fiachra Trench K-9 & Company theme. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, subscribe, and rate us! Watch this episode and all previous episodes on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@drwhonovels. "The Companions of Doctor Who –K-9 & Company" features cover art by Peter Kelly. Doctor Who Literature is a member of the Direction Point Doctor Who podcast network. Please e-mail the pod at DrWhoLiterature@gmail.com. You can catch all past episodes at https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/doctorwholit.

Type 40 • A Doctor Who Podcast Episode 148: One Vision: New Season Preview 2024 With Ian Levine After weeks of next to silent running, we're positively ripping towards more All-New Doctor Who. This new era starring Ncuti Gatwa stalled on Boxing Day! Now at last we've official word of what's to come in his first season as the Time Lord. Trailers, posters, episode titles: it's all out there! Type 40 wades in with our customary preview… It's a fast return to the show for fandom legend, Ian Levine: Saviour of the Daleks and one of Doctor Who most seasoned commentators. Who better for regular panellists Simon, Charlotte and Dan to decode the title teasers and hunt for answers to the questions on all our minds? Ian doesn't hold back and we're proud to have had his input at this crucial time for the series PLUS there's updates on his projects reconstructing the missing 60's episodes. Get it all when you stream or download Type 40: A Doctor Who Podcast HERE: Find Type 40 • A Doctor Who Podcast feed here at: • type40.podbean.com Listen to Type 40 on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, iHeart Radio,           Tune In and the Podbean App. • Or as part of FPNet Master Feed @Fpnet.podbean.com • Join Ian Levine's Doctor Who Group on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1621173348305895 • Ian Levine on X @IanLevine • Dan on X and Instagram @The_spacebook • Simon on Facebook at Doctor Who: The Whonatics If you would like to contact us directly you can: • Email: type40doctorwho@outlook.com • Twitter: @type40doctorwho • Instagram: @type40doctorwho • Facebook: Type 40 • A Doctor Who Fan Page • Join the Facebook group Type 40 • A Doctor Who Fan Group: http://bit.ly/type40_fbgroup • Subscribe to the Type 40 Doctor Who YouTube channel! For extended versions, our weekly livestream magazine show and exclusive Type 40 content here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh8T5-mFYWblZo6lnakCSCw TeePublic Store: Help support the Fandom Podcast Network and wear some of their fantastic original designs and logos on t-shirts, mugs, hats and more from Tee Public Go to: https://www.teepublic.com/user/fandompodcastnetwork or just search Fandom Podcast Network to find our storefront. Please listen to our other formidable podcasts on the Fandom Podcast Network: Master Feed: https://fpnet.podbean.com/

Type 40 • A Doctor Who Podcast Episode 147: With Ian Levine There's been a massive amount of public interest surrounding Doctor Who since its debut. Association with it has both made and arguably ended fortunes. There are a select set of people who seem inseparable from it. Generally they're those you'd think! Many household names and industry darlings. And then there's Ian Levine… A tremendously successful man in his chosen fields or Songwriting and Music Production. To fellow fans though, he's perhaps a polarising yet undoubtedly fascinating person. He joins regular hosts Sarah, Simon and Dan for this extended exclusive new interview. Just as he's wowing the Whoniverse with a brand-new project, to bring the missing episodes back to life. Where do we start? How on Earth could we finish?? What dirt could he dish? Is Ian Levine really the ultimate Doctor Who fan? Find out when you stream or download our conversation HERE: Find Type 40 • A Doctor Who Podcast feed here at: type40.podbean.com Listen to Type 40 on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, iHeart Radio,           Tune In and the Podbean App. Or as part of FPNet Master Feed @Fpnet.podbean.com Join Ian Levine's Doctor Who Group on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1621173348305895 Ian Levine on X @IanLevine Dan on X and Instagram @The_spacebook Sarah on X and Instagram @StarryEyedWho Simon on Facebook at Doctor Who: The Whonatics If you would like to contact us directly you can: Email: type40doctorwho@outlook.com Twitter: @type40doctorwho Instagram: @type40doctorwho Facebook: Type 40 • A Doctor Who Fan Page Join the Facebook group Type 40 • A Doctor Who Fan Group: http://bit.ly/type40_fbgroup Subscribe to the Type 40 Doctor Who YouTube channel! For extended versions, our weekly livestream magazine show and exclusive Type 40 content here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh8T5-mFYWblZo6lnakCSCw TeePublic Store: Help support the Fandom Podcast Network and wear some of their fantastic original designs and logos on t-shirts, mugs, hats and more from Tee Public Go to: https://www.teepublic.com/user/fandompodcastnetwork or just search Fandom Podcast Network to find our storefront. Please listen to our other formidable podcasts on the Fandom Podcast Network: Master Feed: https://fpnet.podbean.com/

Welcome back to DRE's Classic Doctor Who discussion podcast!  This time host Jonithan Patrick Russell talks about Ian Levine's AI Reconstructions of missing episodes! An amazing project that hopes to fill all the missing gaps of 60s Doctor Who with completely faithful reconstructions. Jon talks about these amazing recons and how YOU can help support them, and enjoy them for yourself! (Uploaded with Ian's permission.)NO ATTEMPT HAS BEEN MADE TO SUPERSEDE OR INFRINGE ANY EXISTING COPYRIGHT IN RELATION TO DOCTOR WHO OR ITS CONCEPTS AND SOUNDS, WHICH REMAIN PROPERTY OF THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION.THIS SHOW IS A NOT-FOR-PROFIT EFFORT.WHAT WE DO, WE DO FOR OUR FANS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT.RATED U - For Universal Audiences!Enjoy a sample clip from Ian Levine's AI Recon of The Daleks' Masterplan:http://www.dreamrealmsite.com/FileShare/DMP-Ian-Sample-Clip.mp4Join Ian Levine's Doctor Who Group to see more:https://www.facebook.com/groups/1621173348305895/?hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen&multi_permalinks=1913186509104576Donate to Ian Levine's Doctor Who AI Reconstruction Project through PayPal:Here: ian.levine@btconnect.comWhether or not you donate, and/or the amount you choose to donate is totally up to you. This is a crowd funding effort on behalf of Mr. Ian Levine! No one is obligated to pitch in, but it would be greatly appreciated!

With Russell T Davies imminent return to the Tardis in sight, the Bloobcast take a look back at the first series of the successful revival of the BBC Sci Fi Series Doctor Who. They discuss the state of the franchise in the years between 1989 and 2005, how Buffy the Vampire Slayer influenced the revival, how the show managed to be both scary and silly at the same time, Russell T Davies pre empting the Marvel Cinematic Universe, some of the behind the scenes controversies, and Euan shares his controversial opinions on 'Classic Who'... Credits: Buffy theme by Nerf Herder Doctor Who OST by Murray Gold Doctor Who owned by BBC Doctor In Distress by Ian Levine and Fiachra Trench Dimensions In Time by Children in Need (BBC) Heroes owned by NBC Universal Television Studio Luther by Comic Relief (BBC) Shadow Raiders theme by Robert Buckley

The Celestial Toymaker is soon to be with us, meanwhile Ian Levine is publishing bits of his own animated reconstructions and the BBC have decided to use AI to promote Doctor Who... Or are things not actually quite as wild as they might seem. Presented by J.R. Southall, with Jon Arnold, Matt Barber and Dylan Rees

Today on Funky Pearls Radio, we're delving into the life of David Ruffin, a towering figure in the soul and R&B world, whose voice came to define an era at Motown Records.  Born David Eli Ruffin on January 18, 1941, in Whynot, Mississippi, David's early years in the church choir laid the foundation for his future success. The younger brother of Jimmy Ruffin and cousin to Melvin Franklin of The Temptations, David was surrounded by musical talent from the start.  In his teens, David's foray into professional music began with the gospel group the Dixie Nightingales and continued with the doo-wop group the Voice Masters.  By 1960, he was in Detroit, signing with the Anna label as a solo artist, releasing singles that would mark the beginning of a remarkable journey. David's destiny with The Temptations began in 1964 when he replaced Eldridge Bryant. Initially a background vocalist, David soon emerged as a lead singer on hits like 'My Girl' and 'Ain't Too Proud To Beg', his voice becoming synonymous with the group's success.  However, his time with The Temptations was not without its challenges. By 1968, due to various issues, David was replaced in the group, leading him to embark on a solo career. His first solo hit, 'My Whole World Ended' in 1969, proved that his voice could captivate audiences just as powerfully on its own.  The 1970s saw David collaborate with his brother Jimmy and work with producers like Van McCoy. His album ‘Who I Am' in 1975, featuring the hit ‘Walk Away From Love', marked a high point, resonating with fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The late 1970s and early 1980s were a period of transition for David, with a brief imprisonment for tax evasion and a move to Warner Brothers Records.  His album 'Gentleman Ruffin' in 1980 and the subsequent reunion with Eddie Kendricks in 1982 rekindled memories of their Temptations days. David's collaboration with Kendricks culminated in the album 'Ruffin And Kendrick' in 1987, showcasing their enduring vocal magic.  This period also saw them perform with Hall And Oates at the Apollo and the Live Aid concert, celebrating their legacy in soul music. The early 1990s saw David recording with Ian Levine's Motor City label and touring with Eddie Kendricks and Dennis Edwards. However, this resurgence was cut short by his tragic death on June 1, 1991, in Philadelphia, following complications related to substance abuse.  David Ruffin's legacy in music is monumental. His voice not only defined the sound of The Temptations but also left a lasting impact on soul and R&B. His albums, from 'My Whole World Ended' to 'Ruffin And Kendrick', are testaments to his versatility and enduring appeal. As we reflect on David Ruffin's life and career on Funky Pearls Radio, we remember a man whose voice was as compelling as his life was complex.  His contributions to music continue to resonate, reminding us of the power of a soulful melody and a passionate voice. David Ruffin, a true legend of Motown, remains an unforgettable figure in the annals of soul music.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Support us on Patreon  https://www.patreon.com/missingepisodes Tip us on https://ko-fi.com/missingeps Follow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/drwhopodcasters It's episode 13 of The Missing Episodes Podcast! For the first time proper, the TARDIS is back on contemporary Earth, indeed in contemporary London, and The Doctor and Dod… uhh… the Doctor and new, groovy companions Ben and Polly face down the mechanical menace in the Post Office Tower and The War Machines. Master podcaster Steven Schapansky (@RadioFreeSkaro) and Doctor Who Historian Jon Preddle (https://broadwcast.org/) join to help analyse this most seminal of stories, as Season 3 draws to a close and Doctor Who marches on in a new format under Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. Then it's off on a world tour, as Jon talks us through the sales process, censorship in Australia and New Zealand and how and why four prints of The War Machines ended up in Nigeria, to be found by Ian Levine in the 1980's. This is the deepest of deep dives and summarises years of Jon's cutting-edge research. We also explore why, perhaps, The Wheel in Space wasn't in Jos when Enemy and Web were recovered over ten years ago! So leave your Dodo at home, put on your fab gear and join us as we take a look at The War Machines. If you enjoy this podcast, we ask that you share it on social media to help us find our audience! Tim is on Twitter @drwhopodcasters, and please do come and like our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/drwhoandthepodcasters. Executive Producer: Rich Tipple Become a patron and help us cover our fees and keep us in biscuits via https://www.patreon.com/missingepisodes. Thanks to much to the exceedingly lovely Alex TheSkapes, Andrew Llewellyn, Andy Kitching, Anthony Carroll, Tony Carroll, Anthony Fusco, Anthony Wainer, Ashton Withers, Bedwyr Gullidge, Bluey111, Brendan McKenna-Nicoll, Charles Geers, Chris Arkle, Chris Fone, Colin Brockhurst, Craig Thomson, Darren Howard, David Gillespie-Pratt, David Green, David Matthewman, Dean Poole, Deetz Easterwood, Dominic Jackson, Garry Byrne, Gav Rymill, Harry Townsend, Huw Buchtman, Jack Sharpe, James, James Cluskey, Jamie Bate, JB, Jess Jurkovic, Jim Trenowden, Joe Lewallen, Joe Bloggs, John Geoffrion, John Rivers, John Thomson, Jon, Jon Sheehan, Jonathan Le Targat, Jonathan Potter, Joshua, Marc Cameron, Martin Ramsdin, Matthew, Matthew Purchase, Michael Elison, Neil Smith, Nick Lawton, Nick Mellish, Oliver Wake, Patrick, Paul Cooke, Peter Cuminskey, Philip Stubley, Pierce Carrig, Ray Badrick, Reuben Hergfindahl, Rich Hughes, Richard Byatt, Richard Higson, Richard Smith, Richie Howarth, Rob Fleming, Sara Irving, Sarah Crotzer, Sean Martindill, Sidney Troat, Simon Exton, Simon Whitehead, Sinead Morse, Stephen Hartwell, Stephen Moffatt, Stephen Wolterstorff, Steven Manfred, Steven Quinn, Steven Schapansky, Steven White, Stewart Boyles, Stuart Hargreves, That's Chroma, Tim Arding, and last but not least, Toby Hadoke. With thanks the wonderful Bea Garrido https://twitter.com/BeaGarrido00 for her art, assistance and her patience. Check out her brilliant Doctor Who art https://beagarridoart.weebly.com/ This free podcast borrows snippets of music from “Marche, Les Structures Sonores” – Lasry Baschet. We lovingly pilfer original music cues by from the BBC's original production of The War Machines.

In Chapter 2 of our very special Flux season, Ben and Mark discuss "Once, Upon Time" and "Village of the Angels". Should Doctor Who always be playing it safe like in Angels? Or should it be aiming for the fences with a wild swing like Once?Also: What happens if a Weeping Angel is reflected in your stream? Mark's disastrous attempt at doing a Wordle live on a podcast. And a tribute to Ian Levine (who isn't dead). Support the showFollow us on TwitterLike us on FacebookBuy us a pint

"Mission to the Unknown"Production DCOctober 9, 1965   On the planet Kembel, Space Security Agent Mark Cory has found a Dalek city where various alien races are converging to form an alliance against the universe. Podcaster John S. Drew and writer/editor Jim Beard join forces once again to become the masters of time and space as they watch and review every single episode of the Classic Doctor Who series. In this episode we discuss the only episode not to feature the Doctor in some capacity, the animation of Ian Levine's fan production, and the stepping up in terms of story-telling. Please make sure you are subscribed to our podcast via any of the major popular podcasting apps. You can write and comment or ask questions of us via email at thedoctorsbeardpodcast@gmail.com or by joining our Facebook community. Join our Patreon community where your sponsorship earns you early access to new episodes as well as exclusive content. Click on the link here to take you to the Patreon page.

I årets sidste afsnit af Noget Ved Musikken går vi helt amok i 80'er remix, og denne gang har vi virkelig skruet helt op på 110 % og bringer jer her et 2 timer langt nytårsmix. Det er simpelthen smækfyldt med nogle af de fedeste remix fra 80'erne bl.a. fra geniale remixere som Jellybean, Ian Levine og Shep Pettibone og vi skal både forbi genrer som new romatic, latin freestyle, synth-pop og acid house. I kan stifte musikalsk bekendtskab med Kim Wilde, Spandau Ballet, Tears For Fears, Hithouse, TV-2, The Police, Alisha, The Human League, ABC, Bronski Beat og Whitney Houston for bare at nævne et par stykker. Derudover snakker vi om Madonnas ekskærester, frisørsaloner fra 80'erne, om hvor vidt der bliver bagt Rådhuspandekager på nytårsaften og hvad der måske var Helmut Kohls ynglings tv-serie. Håber I alle får et fantastisk nytår, og så glæder vi os til at lave endnu flere afsnit af Noget Ved Musikken i 2023. Playliste: Spandau Ballet – To cut a long story short (12” Version) Ultravox – Dancing with tears in my eyes (Special Re-Mix) Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Enola Gay (NVM Extended Version) ABC – The look of love (USA Remix) The Human League – Love action (12” Version) Bronski Beat – Smalltown boy (Extended) Whitney Houston – Love will save day (Extended Remix) Kim Wilde – You keep me hanging on (W.C.H. Mix) Olivia Newton-John – The rumour (12” Extended Mix) Divine – Love reaction (12” Version) Freddie Mercury – Love kills (Extended Mix) TV-2 – Be-Bab Megamix (By Sanny X) Pet Shop Boys – Paninaro (Ian Levine Remix) Bucks Fizz – New beginning (Mamba seyra) (Ian Levine Club Mix) Jellybean – Sidewalk talk (Dance Mix) The Breakfast Club – Never be the same (The Shep Pettibone Mix) Alisha – Baby talk (Extended Dance Mix) The Police – Don't stand so close to me '86 (Special Dance Mix) Peter Schilling – Major Tom (Coming home) (Special Extended Version) Tears For Fears – Everybody wants to rule the world (Extended Version) Hithouse – Jack to the sound of the underground (Party Mix) Coldcut feat. Lisa Stansfield – People hold on (12” Version) Yazz & The Plastic Population – The only way is up (Long Version) Eurythmics – Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (Extended Mix) Strawberry Switchblade – Since yesterday (Extended Mix) Faithless – Insomnia

In the second part of this anniversary celebration, Dylan is once again joined by Mark Donaldson from On The Timelash. Together they discuss three DWM anniversary comic strips.Time & Time AgainWriter: Paul CornellArtist: John RidgwayHappy DeathdayWriter: Scott GrayArtist: Roger LangridgeTV Action!Writer: Alan BarnesArtist: Roger LangridgeThey meander around these three releases and all things multi doctor, while answering these burning questions: Who wasn't invited to Ian Levine's house?Do we actually need an excuse to see a Mandrel?What is it like to be housemates with William Hartnell? 

Mentalinstrum Giant Storm - trust yourself - 280 West club mix (NEW) Al Mack Jacqueline Maurizio Verbeni - appreciate - Fantasy vocal mix remastered 2022 (NEW) Peter LC - Paradiso Mediterraneo (NEW) Alan Sorrenti - children of the Sky Situation Venessa Jackson - dangerous games - Black Sonix vocal mix (NEW) Billie - it comes back around - Edit (NEW) Inner City - share my life - Ian Levine radio mix (NEW) Mood II Swing Wall of Sound - run to me - Maurice Joshua club vibe mix (NEW) Ltj Xperience Taka Boom - feel the real - Black Piggy remix (NEW) Sugar & Martini - I'm just loving you (NEW)

It was a match made in pop music heaven: Sinitta and Stock Aitken Waterman. But although the idea of the "So Macho" star recording at the Hit Factory seems like a no-brainer now, it didn't happen overnight. And as Sinitta reveals in our exclusive interview, SAW were unsure about working with her — and not just because her record label boss Simon Cowell had made a habit of hanging around at PWL uninvited. In the end, "Toy Boy" was created, and Sinitta talks about how SAW used her life as inspiration for the lyrics and what prompted her to come up with the rap that kicks off the single. As well as talking about "Toy Boy", Sinitta discusses her early music releases, including "Cruising" and "Feels Like The First Time"; the epic road to the top 5 for her breakthrough smash, "So Macho"; shooting her first music video; and the infamous fight between Simon and producer Ian Levine. So get down, get down, get down-loading...

Résumé Style musical qui a littéralement explosé les charts occidentaux à la fin des années 70 et durant les années 80, la High NRG est un dérivé machinique du disco, particulièrement présent sur les scènes nocturnes gays. Ce sont les mêmes principes linéaires et répétitifs mais avec des rythmiques plus rapides. Essentiellement composée de synthétiseurs et de boîtes à rythme, qui est programmée à l'aide de séquenceurs analogiques. Même si son histoire a été ternie par une véritable tragédie, c'est dans l'émancipation que l'on trouve ses racines, puisqu'elle épouse la trajectoire ascendante de la culture gay, fière de s'afficher et de la culture club, du moins sa version "moderne", comme on pourrait l'entendre aujourd'hui. Bon nombre d'acteurs de cette scène croisée vont ainsi s'épanouir : Patrick Cowley, Ian Levine, Sylvester,Evelyn Thomas, Pete Waterman, Divine ou encore Pete Burns. Un seul mot d'ordre : la fête libre et sans complexe. C'est ce leitmotiv qui permet d'expliquer l'évolution de ce style musical, de son succès à partir de 1981 à sa propagation au travers d'autres styles de musique électronique des années 90. Playlist Donna Summer - I Feel Love (Patrick Cowley Remix) - 1978 Patrick Cowley - Menergy - 1981 Miquel Brown - So Many Men, So Little Time - 1983 Frankies Goes to Hollywood – Relax - 1983 VS Evelyn Thomas – High Energy - 1984 (Caub Special Bootleg) Dead or Alive - You Spin Me Round - 1984 Bananarama – Venus - 1986 Pour aller plus loin Josh Cheon, jeune issu de San Francisco, longtemps membre du collectif Honey Sound System, mais aussi fondateur du fantastique label Dark Entries, a depuis quelques années accompli un travail phénoménal pour rendre hommage à Patrick Cowley, déterrant au fil de ses recherches des bandes sons de film porno, des collaborations hallucinantes et récemment des enregistrements inédits regroupés sous le nom de Mechanical Fantasy Box. Treize morceaux ou démos composées entre 1973 et 1980, à retrouver ici : https://patrickcowley.bandcamp.com/album/mechanical-fantasy-box Bibliographie Bill Brewster, Frank Broughton, Last night a DJ saved my life, Castor Astral, 2017, 753p. Bernardo Alexander Attias, Anna Gavanas, Hillegonda C Rietveld, Dj Culture In The Mix: Power, Technology, And Social Change In Electronic Dance Music, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, 344p. Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco, Faber & Faber, 2009, 368p. Médiagraphie Arte a publié un documentairerelativement complet sur l'essor et l'évolution de la High-NRG au travers des années 80. Il n'est malheureusement plus en ligne et n'est pas non plus proposé à la VOD. Il est possible de contacter Charles et Nelson d'Une Histoire du Rythme pour l'obtenir (en passant par la fiche contact de Prun.net). High Energy : Le disco survolté des années 80, de Olivier Monssens, Arte, 2018.

Shada, Shada, SHADA! We are back with another new episode of KerVAM where this week we take a detailed look at the history of Shada and all the different releases we've seen! From the 1992 VHS to the Ian Levine version, to the latest final animation, get the lowdown on all the different versions, what worked and what didn't!! Apologies for the slightly dodgy audio in the first 5 minutes! Please do follow us on Twitter @KERVAMpod. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, please do drop us a review! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kervam/message

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Episode one hundred and eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Heat Wave" by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginnings of Holland-Dozier-Holland. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "My Boyfriend's Back" by the Angels. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more----   Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Martha and the Vandellas. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including Martha and the Vandellas. And Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva  by Martha Reeves and Mark Bego is Reeves' autobiography. And this three-CD set contains all the Vandellas' Motown singles, along with a bunch of rarities.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to take a look at the career of one of the great girl groups to come out of Motown, and at the early work of the songwriting team that went on to be arguably the most important people in the definition of the Motown Sound. We're going to look at "Heatwave" by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginning of the career of Holland, Dozier, and Holland: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Heatwave"] By the time she started recording for Motown, Martha Reeves had already spent several years in groups around Detroit, with little success. Her singing career had started in a group called The Fascinations, which she had formed with another singer, who is variously named in different sources as Shirley Lawson and Shirley Walker. She'd quickly left that group, but after she left them, the Fascinations went on to make a string of minor hit records with Curtis Mayfield: [Excerpt: The Fascinations, "Girls Are Out To Get You"] But it wasn't just her professional experience, such as it was, that Reeves credited for her success -- she had also been a soloist in her high school choir, and from her accounts her real training came from her High School music teacher, Abraham Silver. In her autobiography she talks about hanging around in the park singing with other people who had been taught by the same teacher -- Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, who would go on to form the Supremes, Bobby Rogers and Claudette Robinson, who were founder members of the Miracles, and Little Joe Harris, who would later become lead singer of the minor Motown act The Undisputed Truth. She'd eventually joined another group, the Del-Phis, with three other singers -- Gloria Williams (or Williamson -- sources vary as to what her actual surname was -- it might be that Williamson was her birth name and Williams a stage name), Annette Beard, and Rosalind Ashford. The group found out early on that they didn't particularly get on with each other as people -- their personalities were all too different -- but their voices blended well and they worked well on stage. Williams or Williamson was the leader and lead singer at this point, and the rest of the DelPhis acted as her backing group. They started performing at the amateur nights and talent contests that were such a big part of the way that Black talent got known at that time, and developed a rivalry with two other groups -- The Primes, who would later go on to be the Temptations, and The Primettes, who had named themselves after the Primes, but later became the Supremes. Those three groups more or less took it in turns to win the talent contests, and before long the Del-Phis had been signed to Checkmate Records, one of several subsidiaries of Chess, where they released one single, with Gloria on lead: [Excerpt: The Del-Phis, "I'll Let You Know"] The group also sang backing vocals on various other records at that time, like Mike Hanks' "When True Love Comes to Be": [Excerpt: Mike Hanks, "When True Love Comes to Be"] Depending on who you believe, Martha may not be on that record at all -- the Del-Phis apparently had some lineup fluctuations, with members coming and going, though the story of who was in the group when seems to be told more on the basis of who wants credit for what at any particular time than on what the truth is. No matter who was in the group, though, they never had more than local success. While the Del-Phis were trying and failing to become big stars as a group, Martha also started performing solo, as Martha LaVelle. Only a couple of days after her first solo performance, Mickey Stevenson saw her perform and gave her his card, telling her to pop down to Hitsville for an audition as he thought she had talent. But when she did turn up, Stevenson was annoyed at her, over a misunderstanding that turned out to be his fault. She had just come straight to the studio, assuming she could audition any time, and Stevenson hadn't explained to her that they had one day a month where they ran auditions -- he'd expected her to call him on the number on the card, not just come down. Stevenson was busy that day, and left the office, telling Martha on his way out the door that he'd be back in a bit, and to answer the phone if it rang, leaving her alone in the office. She started answering the phone, calling herself the "A&R secretary", taking messages, and sorting out problems. She was asked to come back the next day, and worked there three weeks for no pay before getting herself put on a salary as Stevenson's secretary. Once her foot was in the door at Motown, she also started helping out on sessions, as almost all the staff there did, adding backing vocals, handclaps, or footstomps for a five-dollar-per-session bonus.  One of her jobs as Stevenson's secretary was to phone and book session musicians and singers,  and for one session the Andantes, Motown's normal female backing vocal group, were unavailable. Martha got the idea to call the rest of the DelPhis -- who seem like they might even have been split up at this point, depending on which source you read -- and see if they wanted to do the job instead. They had to audition for Berry Gordy, but Gordy was perfectly happy with them and signed them to Motown. Their role was mostly to be backing vocalists, but the plan was that they would also cut a few singles themselves as well.  But Gordy didn't want to sign them as the Del-Phis -- he didn't know what the details of their contract with Checkmate were, and who actually owned the name. So they needed a new name. At first they went with the Dominettes, but that was soon changed, before they ever made a record What happened is a matter of some dispute, because this seems to be the moment that Martha Reeves took over the group -- it may be that the fact that she was the one booking them for the sessions and so in charge of whether they got paid or not changed the power dynamics of the band -- and so different people give different accounts depending on who they want to seem most important. But the generally accepted story is that Martha suggested a name based on the street she lived on, Van Dyke Street, and Della Reese, Martha's favourite singer, who had hits like "Don't You Know?": [Excerpt: Della Reese, "Don't You Know?"] The group became Martha and the Vandellas -- although Rosalind Ashford, who says that the group name was not Martha's work, also says that the group weren't "Martha and the Vandellas" to start with, but just the Vandellas, and this might be the case, as at this point Gloria rather than Martha was still the lead singer. The newly-named Vandellas were quickly put to work, mostly working on records that Mickey Stevenson produced. The first record they sang on was not credited either to the Vandellas *or* to Martha and the Vandellas, being instead credited to Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas – Mallett was a minor Motown singer who they were backing for this one record. The song was one written by Berry Gordy, as an attempt at a "Loco-Motion" clone, and was called "Camel Walk": [Excerpt: Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas, "Camel Walk"] More famously, there was the record that everyone talks about as being the first one to feature the Vandellas, even though it came out after "Camel Walk", one we've already talked about before, Marvin Gaye's "Stubborn Kind of Fellow": [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Stubborn Kind of Fellow"] That became Gaye's breakout hit, and as well as singing in the studio for other artists and trying to make their own records, the Vandellas were now also Marvin Gaye's backing vocalists, and at shows like the Motortown Revue shows, as well as performing their own sets, the Vandellas would sing with Gaye as well. While they were not yet themselves stars, they had a foot on the ladder, and through working with Marvin they got to perform with all sorts of other people -- Martha was particularly impressed by the Beach Boys, who performed on the same bill as them in Detroit, and she developed a lifelong crush on Mike Love. But while the Vandellas were Motown's go-to backing vocalists in 1962, they still wanted to make their own records. They did make one record with Gloria singing lead, "You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)": [Excerpt: The Vells, "You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)"] But that was released not as by the Vandellas, but by the Vells, because by the time it was released, the Vandellas had more or less by accident become definitively MARTHA and the Vandellas. The session that changed everything came about because Martha was still working as Mickey Stevenson's secretary. Stevenson was producing a record for Mary Wells, and he had a problem. Stevenson had recently instituted a new system for his recordings at Motown. Up to this point, they'd been making records with everyone in the studio at the same time -- all the musicians, the lead singer, the backing vocalists, and so on. But that became increasingly difficult when the label's stars were on tour all the time, and it also meant that if the singer flubbed a note a good bass take would also be wrecked, or vice versa. It just wasn't efficient. So, taking advantage of the ability to multitrack, Stevenson had started doing things differently. Now backing tracks would be recorded by the Funk Brothers in the studio whenever a writer-producer had something for them to record, and then the singer would come in later and overdub their vocals when it was convenient to do that. That also had other advantages -- if a singer turned out not to be right for the song, they could record another singer doing it instead, and they could reuse backing tracks, so if a song was a hit for, say, the Miracles, the Marvelettes could then use the same backing track for a cover version of it to fill out an album. But there was a problem with this system, and that problem was the Musicians' Union. The union had a rule that if musicians were cutting a track that was intended to have a vocal, the vocalist *must* be present at the session -- like a lot of historical union rules, this seems faintly ridiculous today, but no doubt there were good reasons for it at the time.  Motown, like most labels, were perfectly happy to break the union rules on occasion, but there was always the possibility of a surprise union inspection, and one turned up while Mickey Stevenson was cutting "I'll Have to Let Him Go". Mary Wells wasn't there, and knowing that his secretary could sing, Stevenson grabbed her and got her to go into the studio and sing the song while the musicians played. Martha decided to give the song everything she had, and Stevenson was impressed enough that he decided to give the song to her, rather than Wells, and at the same session that the Vandellas recorded the songs with Gloria on lead, they recorded new vocals to the backing track that Stevenson had recorded that day: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "I'll Have to Let Him Go"] That was released under the Martha and the Vandellas name, and around this point Gloria left the group. Some have suggested that this was because she didn't like Martha becoming the leader, while others have said that it's just that she had a good job working for the city, and didn't want to put that at risk by becoming a full-time singer. Either way, a week after the Vandellas record came out, Motown released "You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)" under the name The Vells.  Neither single had any chart success, but that wouldn't be true for the next one, which wouldn't be released for another five months. But when it was finally released, it would be regarded as the beginning of the "Motown Sound". Before that record, Motown had released many extraordinary records, and we've looked at some of them. But after it, it began a domination of the American charts that would last the rest of the decade; a domination caused in large part by the team of Holland, Dozier, and Holland. We've heard a little from the Holland brothers and Lamont Dozier, separately, in previous episodes looking at Motown, but this is the point at which they go from being minor players within the Motown organisation to being the single most important team for the label's future commercial success, so we should take a proper look at them now. Eddie Holland started working with Berry Gordy years before the start of Motown -- he was a singer who was known for having a similar sounding voice to that of Jackie Wilson, and Gordy had taken him on first as a soundalike demo singer, recording songs written for Wilson so Wilson could hear how they would sound in his voice, and later trying to mould him into a Wilson clone, starting with Holland's first single, "You": [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, "You"] Holland quickly found that he didn't enjoy performing on stage -- he loved singing, but he didn't like the actual experience of being on stage. However, he continued doing it, in the belief that one should not just quit a job until a better opportunity comes along. Before becoming a professional singer, Holland had sung in street-corner doo-wop groups with his younger brother Brian. Brian, unlike Eddie, didn't have a particularly great voice, but what he did have was a great musical mind -- he could instantly figure out all the harmony parts for the whole group, and had a massive talent for arrangement. Eddie spent much of his early time working with Gordy trying to get Gordy to take his little brother seriously -- at the time,  Brian Holland was still in his early teens, and Gordy refused to believe he could be as talented as Eddie said. Eventually, though, Gordy listened to Brian and took him under his wing, pairing him with Janie Bradford to add music to Bradford's lyrics, and also teaching him to engineer. One of Brian Holland's first engineering jobs was for a song recorded by Eddie, written as a jingle for a wine company but released as a single under the name "Briant Holland" -- meaning it has often over the years been assumed to be Brian singing lead: [Excerpt: Briant Holland, "(Where's the Joy) in Nature Boy?"] When Motown started up, Brian had become a staffer -- indeed, he has later claimed that he was the very first person employed by Motown as a permanent staff member. While Eddie was out on the road performing, Brian was  writing, producing, and singing backing vocals on many, many records. We've already heard how he was the co-writer and producer on "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] That had obviously been a massive hit, and Motown's first number one, but Brian was still definitely just one of the Motown team, and not as important a part of it as Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, or Mickey Stevenson. Meanwhile, Eddie finally had a minor hit of his own, with "Jamie", a song co-written by Barrett Strong and Mickey Stevenson, and originally recorded by Strong -- when Strong left the label, they took the backing track intended for him and had Holland record new vocals over it. [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, "Jamie"] That made the top thirty, which must have been galling at the time for Strong, who'd quit in part because he couldn't get a hit. But the crucial thing that lifted the Holland brothers from being just parts of the Motown machine to being the most important creative forces in the company was when Brian Holland became friendly with Anne Dozier, who worked at Motown packing records, and whose husband Lamont was a singer. Lamont Dozier had been around musical people all his life -- at Hutchins Junior High School, he was a couple of years below Marv Johnson, the first Motown star, he knew Freda Payne, and one of his classmates was Otis Williams, later of the Temptations. But it was another junior high classmate who, as he puts it, "lit a fire under me to take some steps to get my own music heard by the world", when one of his friends asked him if he felt like coming along to church to hear another classmate sing. Dozier had no idea this classmate sang, but he went along, and as it happens, we have some recordings of that classmate singing and playing piano around that time: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood"] That's fourteen-year-old Aretha Franklin, and as you can imagine, being classmates with someone who could perform like that caused Lamont Dozier to radically revise his ideas of what it was possible for him to do. He'd formed a doo-wop group called the Romeos, and they released their first single, with both sides written by Lamont, by the time he was sixteen: [Excerpt: The Romeos, "Gone Gone Get Away"] The Romeos' third single, "Fine Fine Fine", was picked up by Atlantic for distribution, and did well enough that Atlantic decided they wanted a follow-up, and wrote to them asking them to come into the studio. But Lamont Dozier, at sixteen, thought that he had some kind of negotiating power, and wrote back saying they weren't interested in just doing a single, they wanted to do an album. Jerry Wexler wrote back saying "fair enough, you're released from your contract", and the Romeos' brief career was over before it began. He joined the Voice Masters, the first group signed to Anna Records, and sang on records of theirs like "Hope and Pray", the very first record ever put out by a Gordy family label: [Excerpt: The Voice Masters, "Hope and Pray"] And he'd continued to sing with them, as well as working for Anna Records doing odd jobs like cleaning the floors. His first solo record on Anna, released under the name Lamont Anthony, featured Robert White on guitar, James Jamerson on bass, Harvey Fuqua on piano, and Marvin Gaye on drums, and was based on the comic character "Popeye": [Excerpt: Lamont Anthony, "Popeye the Sailor Man"] Unfortunately, just as that record was starting to take off, King Features Syndicate, the owners of Popeye, sent a cease and desist order. Dozier went back into the studio and recut the vocal, this time singing about Benny the Skinny Man, instead of Popeye the Sailor Man: [Excerpt: Lamont Anthony, "Benny the Skinny Man"] But without the hook of it being about Popeye, the song flopped. Dozier joined Motown when that became the dominant part of the Gordy family operation, and signed up as a songwriter and producer. Robert Batemen had just stopped working with Brian Holland as a production team, and when Anne Dozier suggested that Holland go and meet her husband who was just starting at Motown, Holland walked in to find Dozier working at the piano, writing a song but stuck for a middle section. Holland told him he had an idea, sat next to him at the piano, and came up with the bridge. The two instantly clicked musically -- they discovered that they almost had a musical telepathy, and Holland got Freddie Gorman, his lyricist partner at the time, to finish up the lyrics for the song while he and Dozier came up with more ideas. That song became a Marvelettes album track, "Forever", which a few years later would be put out as a B-side, and make the top thirty in its own right: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Forever"] Holland and Dozier quickly became a strong musical team -- Dozier had a great aptitude for coming up with riffs and hooks, both lyrical and musical, and rhythmic ideas, while Brian Holland could come up with great melodies and interesting chord changes, though both could do both. In the studio Brian would work with the drummers, while Lamont would work with the keyboard players and discuss the bass parts with James Jamerson. Their only shortfall was lyrically. They could both write lyrics -- and Lamont would often come up with a good title or hook phrase -- but they were slow at doing it. For the lyrics, they mostly worked with Freddie Gorman, and sometimes got Janie Bradford in. These teams came up with some great records, like "Contract on Love", which sounds very like a Four Seasons pastiche but also points the way to Holland and Dozier's later sound: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, "Contract on Love"] Both Little Stevie Wonder and the backing vocalists on that, the Temptations, would do better things later, but that's still a solid record. Meanwhile, Eddie Holland had had a realisation that would change the course of Motown. "Jamie" had been a hit, but he received no royalties -- he'd had a run of flop singles, so he hadn't yet earned out the production costs on his records. His first royalty statement after his hit showed him still owing Motown money. He asked his brother, who got a royalty statement at the same time, if he was in the same boat, and Brian showed him the statement for several thousand dollars that he'd made from the songs he'd written. Eddie decided that he was in the wrong job. He didn't like performing anyway, and his brother was making serious money while he was working away earning nothing. He took nine months off from doing anything other than the bare contractual minimum, -- where before he would spend every moment at Hitsville, now he only turned up for his own sessions -- and spent that time teaching himself songwriting. He studied Smokey Robinson's writing, and he developed his own ideas about what needed to be in a lyric -- he didn't want any meaningless filler words, he wanted every word to matter. He also wanted to make sure that even if people misheard a line or two, they would be able to get the idea of the song from the other lines, so he came up with a technique he referred to as "repeat-fomation", where he would give the same piece of information two or three times, paraphrasing it.  When the next Marvelettes album, The Marvellous Marvelettes, was being finished up by Mickey Stevenson, Motown got nervous about the album, thinking it didn't have a strong enough single on it, and so Brian Holland and Dozier were asked to come up with a new Marvelettes single in a hurry. Freddie Gorman had more or less stopped songwriting by this point, as he was spending most of his time working as a postman, and so, in need of another writing partner, they called on Eddie, who had been writing with various people. The three of them wrote and produced "Locking Up My Heart", the first single to be released with the writing credit "Holland-Dozier-Holland": [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Locking Up My Heart"] That was a comparative flop for the Marvelettes, and the beginning of the downward slump we talked about for them in the episode on "Please Mr. Postman", but the second Holland-Dozier-Holland single, recorded ten days later, was a very different matter. That one was for Martha and the Vandellas, and became widely regarded as the start of Motown's true Golden Age -- so much so that Brian and Eddie Holland's autobiography is named after this, rather than after any of the bigger and more obvious hits they would later co-write. The introduction to "Come and Get These Memories" isn't particularly auspicious -- the Vandellas singing the chorus: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Come and Get These Memories"] Hearing all three of the Vandellas, all of whom have such strong, distinctive voices, sing together is if anything a bit much -- the Vandellas aren't a great harmony group in the way that some of the other Motown groups are, and they work best when everyone's singing an individual line rather than block harmonies. But then we're instantly into the sound that Holland, Dozier, and Holland -- really Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, who took charge of the musical side of things, with Eddie concentrating on the lyrics -- would make their own. There's a lightly swung rhythm, but with a strong backbeat with handclaps and tambourine emphasising the two and four-- the same rhythmic combination that made so many of the very early rock and roll records we looked at in the first year of the podcast, but this time taken at a more sedate pace, a casual stroll rather than a sprint. There's the simple, chorded piano and guitar parts, both instruments often playing in unison and again just emphasising the rhythm rather than doing anything more complex. And there's James Jamerson's wonderful, loping bass part, doing the exact opposite of what the piano and guitar are doing. [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Come and Get These Memories”] In almost every record in the rock and roll, soul, and R&B genres up to this point -- I say "almost every" because, as I've said many times before, there are always exceptions and there is never a first of anything -- the bass does one of two things: it either plods along just playing the root notes, or it plays a simple, repeated, ostinato figure throughout, acting as a backbone while the other instruments do more interesting things. James Jamerson is the first bass player outside the jazz and classical fields to prominently, repeatedly, do something very different -- he's got the guitars and piano holding down the rhythm so steadily that he doesn't need to. He plays melodies, largely improvised, that are jumping around and going somewhere different from where you'd expect.  "Come and Get These Memories" was largely written before Eddie's involvement, and the bulk of the lyric was Lamont Dozier's. He's said that in this instance he was inspired by country singers like Loretta Lynn, and the song's lyrical style, taking physical objects and using them as a metaphor for emotional states, certainly seems very country: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Come and Get These Memories"] "Come and Get These Memories" made number twenty-nine on the pop charts and number six on the R&B charts. Martha and the Vandellas were finally stars. As was the normal practice at Motown, when an artist had a hit, the writing and production team were given the chance to make the follow-up with them, and so the followup was another Holland/Dozier/Holland song, again from an idea by Lamont Dozier, as most of their collaborations with the Vandellas would be. "Heat Wave" is another leap forward, and is quite possibly the most exciting record that Motown had put out to this point. Where "Come and Get These Memories" established the Motown sound, this one establishes the Martha and the Vandellas sound, specifically, and the style that Holland, Dozier, and Holland would apply to many of their more uptempo productions for other artists. This is the subgenre of Motown that, when it was picked up by fans in the North of England, became known as Northern Soul -- the branch of Motown music that led directly to Disco, to Hi-NRG, to electropop, to the Stock-Aitken-Waterman hit factory of the eighties, to huge chunks of gay culture, and to almost all music made for dancing in whatever genre after this point. Where "Come and Get These Memories" is mid-tempo, "Heat Wave" races along. Where "Come and Get These Memories" swings, "Heat Wave" stomps. "Come and Get These Memories" has the drums swinging and the percussion accenting the backbeat, here the drums are accenting the backbeat while the tambourine is hitting every beat dead on, four/four. It's a rhythm which has something in common with some of the Four Seasons' contemporary hits, but it's less militaristic than those. While "Pistol" Allen's drumming starts out absolutely hard on the beat, he swings it more and more as the record goes on, trusting to the listener once that hard rhythm has been established, allowing him to lay back behind the beat just a little. This is where my background as a white English man, who has never played music for dancing -- when I tried to be a musician myself, it was jangly guitar pop I was playing -- limits me. I have a vocabulary for chords and for melodies, but when it comes to rhythms, at a certain point my vocabulary goes away, and all I can do is say "just... *listen*" It's music that makes you need to dance, and you can either hear that or you can't -- but of course, you can: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, "Heat Wave"] And Martha Reeves' voice is perfect for the song. Most female Motown singers were pop singers first and foremost -- some of them, many of them, *great* pop singers, but all with voices fundamentally suited to gentleness. Reeves was a belter. She has far more blues and gospel influence in her voice than many of the other Motown women, and she's showing it here. "Heat Wave" made the top ten, as did the follow-up, a "Heat Wave" soundalike called "Quicksand". But the two records after that, both still Holland/Dozier/Holland records, didn't even make the top forty, and Annette left, being replaced by Betty Kelly. The new lineup of the group were passed over to Mickey Stevenson, for a record that would become the one for which they are best remembered to this day. It wasn't as important a record in the development of the Motown sound as "Come and Get These Memories" or "Heat Wave", but "Dancing in the Street" was a masterpiece. Written by Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, and Ivy Joe Hunter, it features Gaye on drums, but the most prominent percussive sound is Hunter, who, depending on which account you read was either thrashing a steel chain against something until his hands bled, or hitting a tire iron.  And Martha's vocal is astonishing -- and has an edge to it. Apparently this was the second take, and she sounds a little annoyed because she absolutely nailed the vocal on the first take only to find that there'd been a problem recording it. [Excerpt: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Dancing in the Street"] That went to number two in the charts, and would be the group's cultural and commercial high point. The song also gained some notoriety two years later when, in the wake of civil rights protests that were interpreted as rioting, the song was interpreted as being a call to riot -- it was assumed that instead of being about dancing it was actually about rioting, something the Rolling Stones would pick up on later when they released "Street Fighting Man", a song that owes more than a little to the Vandellas classic. The record after that, "Wild One", was so much of a "Dancing in the Streets" soundalike that I've seen claims that the backing track is an alternate take of the earlier song. It isn't, but it sounds like it could be. But the record after that saw them reunited with Holland/Dozier/Holland, who provided them with yet another great track, "Nowhere to Run": [Excerpt: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, "Nowhere to Run"] For the next few years the group would release a string of classic hits, like "Jimmy Mack" and "Honey Chile", but the rise of the Supremes, who we'll talk about in a month, meant that like the Marvelettes before them the Vandellas became less important to Motown. When Motown moved from Detroit to LA in the early seventies, Martha was one of those who decided not to make the move with the label, and the group split up, though the original lineup occasionally reunited for big events, and made some recordings for Ian Levine's Motorcity label. Currently, there are two touring Vandellas groups. One, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, consists of Martha and two of her sisters -- including Lois, who was a late-period member of the group before they split, replacing Betty in 1967. Meanwhile "The Original Vandellas" consist of Rosalind and Annette. Gloria died in 2000, but Martha and the Vandellas are one of the very few sixties hitmaking groups where all the members of their classic lineup are still alive and performing. Martha, Rosalind, Betty, Annette, and Lois were all also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, becoming only the second all-female group to be inducted.  The Vandellas were one of the greatest of the Motown acts, and one of the greatest of the girl groups, and their biggest hits stand up against anything that any of the other Motown acts were doing at the time. When you hear them now, even almost sixty years later, you're still hearing the sound they were in at the birth of, the sound of young America.  

Episode one hundred and eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Heat Wave” by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginnings of Holland-Dozier-Holland. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “My Boyfriend’s Back” by the Angels. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—-   Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.  For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I’ve used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Martha and the Vandellas. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier’s autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers’. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including Martha and the Vandellas. And Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva  by Martha Reeves and Mark Bego is Reeves’ autobiography. And this three-CD set contains all the Vandellas’ Motown singles, along with a bunch of rarities.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take a look at the career of one of the great girl groups to come out of Motown, and at the early work of the songwriting team that went on to be arguably the most important people in the definition of the Motown Sound. We’re going to look at “Heatwave” by Martha and the Vandellas, and the beginning of the career of Holland, Dozier, and Holland: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Heatwave”] By the time she started recording for Motown, Martha Reeves had already spent several years in groups around Detroit, with little success. Her singing career had started in a group called The Fascinations, which she had formed with another singer, who is variously named in different sources as Shirley Lawson and Shirley Walker. She’d quickly left that group, but after she left them, the Fascinations went on to make a string of minor hit records with Curtis Mayfield: [Excerpt: The Fascinations, “Girls Are Out To Get You”] But it wasn’t just her professional experience, such as it was, that Reeves credited for her success — she had also been a soloist in her high school choir, and from her accounts her real training came from her High School music teacher, Abraham Silver. In her autobiography she talks about hanging around in the park singing with other people who had been taught by the same teacher — Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, who would go on to form the Supremes, Bobby Rogers and Claudette Robinson, who were founder members of the Miracles, and Little Joe Harris, who would later become lead singer of the minor Motown act The Undisputed Truth. She’d eventually joined another group, the Del-Phis, with three other singers — Gloria Williams (or Williamson — sources vary as to what her actual surname was — it might be that Williamson was her birth name and Williams a stage name), Annette Beard, and Rosalind Ashford. The group found out early on that they didn’t particularly get on with each other as people — their personalities were all too different — but their voices blended well and they worked well on stage. Williams or Williamson was the leader and lead singer at this point, and the rest of the DelPhis acted as her backing group. They started performing at the amateur nights and talent contests that were such a big part of the way that Black talent got known at that time, and developed a rivalry with two other groups — The Primes, who would later go on to be the Temptations, and The Primettes, who had named themselves after the Primes, but later became the Supremes. Those three groups more or less took it in turns to win the talent contests, and before long the Del-Phis had been signed to Checkmate Records, one of several subsidiaries of Chess, where they released one single, with Gloria on lead: [Excerpt: The Del-Phis, “I’ll Let You Know”] The group also sang backing vocals on various other records at that time, like Mike Hanks’ “When True Love Comes to Be”: [Excerpt: Mike Hanks, “When True Love Comes to Be”] Depending on who you believe, Martha may not be on that record at all — the Del-Phis apparently had some lineup fluctuations, with members coming and going, though the story of who was in the group when seems to be told more on the basis of who wants credit for what at any particular time than on what the truth is. No matter who was in the group, though, they never had more than local success. While the Del-Phis were trying and failing to become big stars as a group, Martha also started performing solo, as Martha LaVelle. Only a couple of days after her first solo performance, Mickey Stevenson saw her perform and gave her his card, telling her to pop down to Hitsville for an audition as he thought she had talent. But when she did turn up, Stevenson was annoyed at her, over a misunderstanding that turned out to be his fault. She had just come straight to the studio, assuming she could audition any time, and Stevenson hadn’t explained to her that they had one day a month where they ran auditions — he’d expected her to call him on the number on the card, not just come down. Stevenson was busy that day, and left the office, telling Martha on his way out the door that he’d be back in a bit, and to answer the phone if it rang, leaving her alone in the office. She started answering the phone, calling herself the “A&R secretary”, taking messages, and sorting out problems. She was asked to come back the next day, and worked there three weeks for no pay before getting herself put on a salary as Stevenson’s secretary. Once her foot was in the door at Motown, she also started helping out on sessions, as almost all the staff there did, adding backing vocals, handclaps, or footstomps for a five-dollar-per-session bonus.  One of her jobs as Stevenson’s secretary was to phone and book session musicians and singers,  and for one session the Andantes, Motown’s normal female backing vocal group, were unavailable. Martha got the idea to call the rest of the DelPhis — who seem like they might even have been split up at this point, depending on which source you read — and see if they wanted to do the job instead. They had to audition for Berry Gordy, but Gordy was perfectly happy with them and signed them to Motown. Their role was mostly to be backing vocalists, but the plan was that they would also cut a few singles themselves as well.  But Gordy didn’t want to sign them as the Del-Phis — he didn’t know what the details of their contract with Checkmate were, and who actually owned the name. So they needed a new name. At first they went with the Dominettes, but that was soon changed, before they ever made a record What happened is a matter of some dispute, because this seems to be the moment that Martha Reeves took over the group — it may be that the fact that she was the one booking them for the sessions and so in charge of whether they got paid or not changed the power dynamics of the band — and so different people give different accounts depending on who they want to seem most important. But the generally accepted story is that Martha suggested a name based on the street she lived on, Van Dyke Street, and Della Reese, Martha’s favourite singer, who had hits like “Don’t You Know?”: [Excerpt: Della Reese, “Don’t You Know?”] The group became Martha and the Vandellas — although Rosalind Ashford, who says that the group name was not Martha’s work, also says that the group weren’t “Martha and the Vandellas” to start with, but just the Vandellas, and this might be the case, as at this point Gloria rather than Martha was still the lead singer. The newly-named Vandellas were quickly put to work, mostly working on records that Mickey Stevenson produced. The first record they sang on was not credited either to the Vandellas *or* to Martha and the Vandellas, being instead credited to Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas – Mallett was a minor Motown singer who they were backing for this one record. The song was one written by Berry Gordy, as an attempt at a “Loco-Motion” clone, and was called “Camel Walk”: [Excerpt: Saundra Mallett and the Vandellas, “Camel Walk”] More famously, there was the record that everyone talks about as being the first one to feature the Vandellas, even though it came out after “Camel Walk”, one we’ve already talked about before, Marvin Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, “Stubborn Kind of Fellow”] That became Gaye’s breakout hit, and as well as singing in the studio for other artists and trying to make their own records, the Vandellas were now also Marvin Gaye’s backing vocalists, and at shows like the Motortown Revue shows, as well as performing their own sets, the Vandellas would sing with Gaye as well. While they were not yet themselves stars, they had a foot on the ladder, and through working with Marvin they got to perform with all sorts of other people — Martha was particularly impressed by the Beach Boys, who performed on the same bill as them in Detroit, and she developed a lifelong crush on Mike Love. But while the Vandellas were Motown’s go-to backing vocalists in 1962, they still wanted to make their own records. They did make one record with Gloria singing lead, “You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)”: [Excerpt: The Vells, “You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)”] But that was released not as by the Vandellas, but by the Vells, because by the time it was released, the Vandellas had more or less by accident become definitively MARTHA and the Vandellas. The session that changed everything came about because Martha was still working as Mickey Stevenson’s secretary. Stevenson was producing a record for Mary Wells, and he had a problem. Stevenson had recently instituted a new system for his recordings at Motown. Up to this point, they’d been making records with everyone in the studio at the same time — all the musicians, the lead singer, the backing vocalists, and so on. But that became increasingly difficult when the label’s stars were on tour all the time, and it also meant that if the singer flubbed a note a good bass take would also be wrecked, or vice versa. It just wasn’t efficient. So, taking advantage of the ability to multitrack, Stevenson had started doing things differently. Now backing tracks would be recorded by the Funk Brothers in the studio whenever a writer-producer had something for them to record, and then the singer would come in later and overdub their vocals when it was convenient to do that. That also had other advantages — if a singer turned out not to be right for the song, they could record another singer doing it instead, and they could reuse backing tracks, so if a song was a hit for, say, the Miracles, the Marvelettes could then use the same backing track for a cover version of it to fill out an album. But there was a problem with this system, and that problem was the Musicians’ Union. The union had a rule that if musicians were cutting a track that was intended to have a vocal, the vocalist *must* be present at the session — like a lot of historical union rules, this seems faintly ridiculous today, but no doubt there were good reasons for it at the time.  Motown, like most labels, were perfectly happy to break the union rules on occasion, but there was always the possibility of a surprise union inspection, and one turned up while Mickey Stevenson was cutting “I’ll Have to Let Him Go”. Mary Wells wasn’t there, and knowing that his secretary could sing, Stevenson grabbed her and got her to go into the studio and sing the song while the musicians played. Martha decided to give the song everything she had, and Stevenson was impressed enough that he decided to give the song to her, rather than Wells, and at the same session that the Vandellas recorded the songs with Gloria on lead, they recorded new vocals to the backing track that Stevenson had recorded that day: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “I’ll Have to Let Him Go”] That was released under the Martha and the Vandellas name, and around this point Gloria left the group. Some have suggested that this was because she didn’t like Martha becoming the leader, while others have said that it’s just that she had a good job working for the city, and didn’t want to put that at risk by becoming a full-time singer. Either way, a week after the Vandellas record came out, Motown released “You’ll Never Cherish A Love So True (‘Til You Lose It)” under the name The Vells.  Neither single had any chart success, but that wouldn’t be true for the next one, which wouldn’t be released for another five months. But when it was finally released, it would be regarded as the beginning of the “Motown Sound”. Before that record, Motown had released many extraordinary records, and we’ve looked at some of them. But after it, it began a domination of the American charts that would last the rest of the decade; a domination caused in large part by the team of Holland, Dozier, and Holland. We’ve heard a little from the Holland brothers and Lamont Dozier, separately, in previous episodes looking at Motown, but this is the point at which they go from being minor players within the Motown organisation to being the single most important team for the label’s future commercial success, so we should take a proper look at them now. Eddie Holland started working with Berry Gordy years before the start of Motown — he was a singer who was known for having a similar sounding voice to that of Jackie Wilson, and Gordy had taken him on first as a soundalike demo singer, recording songs written for Wilson so Wilson could hear how they would sound in his voice, and later trying to mould him into a Wilson clone, starting with Holland’s first single, “You”: [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “You”] Holland quickly found that he didn’t enjoy performing on stage — he loved singing, but he didn’t like the actual experience of being on stage. However, he continued doing it, in the belief that one should not just quit a job until a better opportunity comes along. Before becoming a professional singer, Holland had sung in street-corner doo-wop groups with his younger brother Brian. Brian, unlike Eddie, didn’t have a particularly great voice, but what he did have was a great musical mind — he could instantly figure out all the harmony parts for the whole group, and had a massive talent for arrangement. Eddie spent much of his early time working with Gordy trying to get Gordy to take his little brother seriously — at the time,  Brian Holland was still in his early teens, and Gordy refused to believe he could be as talented as Eddie said. Eventually, though, Gordy listened to Brian and took him under his wing, pairing him with Janie Bradford to add music to Bradford’s lyrics, and also teaching him to engineer. One of Brian Holland’s first engineering jobs was for a song recorded by Eddie, written as a jingle for a wine company but released as a single under the name “Briant Holland” — meaning it has often over the years been assumed to be Brian singing lead: [Excerpt: Briant Holland, “(Where’s the Joy) in Nature Boy?”] When Motown started up, Brian had become a staffer — indeed, he has later claimed that he was the very first person employed by Motown as a permanent staff member. While Eddie was out on the road performing, Brian was  writing, producing, and singing backing vocals on many, many records. We’ve already heard how he was the co-writer and producer on “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] That had obviously been a massive hit, and Motown’s first number one, but Brian was still definitely just one of the Motown team, and not as important a part of it as Berry Gordy, Smokey Robinson, or Mickey Stevenson. Meanwhile, Eddie finally had a minor hit of his own, with “Jamie”, a song co-written by Barrett Strong and Mickey Stevenson, and originally recorded by Strong — when Strong left the label, they took the backing track intended for him and had Holland record new vocals over it. [Excerpt: Eddie Holland, “Jamie”] That made the top thirty, which must have been galling at the time for Strong, who’d quit in part because he couldn’t get a hit. But the crucial thing that lifted the Holland brothers from being just parts of the Motown machine to being the most important creative forces in the company was when Brian Holland became friendly with Anne Dozier, who worked at Motown packing records, and whose husband Lamont was a singer. Lamont Dozier had been around musical people all his life — at Hutchins Junior High School, he was a couple of years below Marv Johnson, the first Motown star, he knew Freda Payne, and one of his classmates was Otis Williams, later of the Temptations. But it was another junior high classmate who, as he puts it, “lit a fire under me to take some steps to get my own music heard by the world”, when one of his friends asked him if he felt like coming along to church to hear another classmate sing. Dozier had no idea this classmate sang, but he went along, and as it happens, we have some recordings of that classmate singing and playing piano around that time: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood”] That’s fourteen-year-old Aretha Franklin, and as you can imagine, being classmates with someone who could perform like that caused Lamont Dozier to radically revise his ideas of what it was possible for him to do. He’d formed a doo-wop group called the Romeos, and they released their first single, with both sides written by Lamont, by the time he was sixteen: [Excerpt: The Romeos, “Gone Gone Get Away”] The Romeos’ third single, “Fine Fine Fine”, was picked up by Atlantic for distribution, and did well enough that Atlantic decided they wanted a follow-up, and wrote to them asking them to come into the studio. But Lamont Dozier, at sixteen, thought that he had some kind of negotiating power, and wrote back saying they weren’t interested in just doing a single, they wanted to do an album. Jerry Wexler wrote back saying “fair enough, you’re released from your contract”, and the Romeos’ brief career was over before it began. He joined the Voice Masters, the first group signed to Anna Records, and sang on records of theirs like “Hope and Pray”, the very first record ever put out by a Gordy family label: [Excerpt: The Voice Masters, “Hope and Pray”] And he’d continued to sing with them, as well as working for Anna Records doing odd jobs like cleaning the floors. His first solo record on Anna, released under the name Lamont Anthony, featured Robert White on guitar, James Jamerson on bass, Harvey Fuqua on piano, and Marvin Gaye on drums, and was based on the comic character “Popeye”: [Excerpt: Lamont Anthony, “Popeye the Sailor Man”] Unfortunately, just as that record was starting to take off, King Features Syndicate, the owners of Popeye, sent a cease and desist order. Dozier went back into the studio and recut the vocal, this time singing about Benny the Skinny Man, instead of Popeye the Sailor Man: [Excerpt: Lamont Anthony, “Benny the Skinny Man”] But without the hook of it being about Popeye, the song flopped. Dozier joined Motown when that became the dominant part of the Gordy family operation, and signed up as a songwriter and producer. Robert Batemen had just stopped working with Brian Holland as a production team, and when Anne Dozier suggested that Holland go and meet her husband who was just starting at Motown, Holland walked in to find Dozier working at the piano, writing a song but stuck for a middle section. Holland told him he had an idea, sat next to him at the piano, and came up with the bridge. The two instantly clicked musically — they discovered that they almost had a musical telepathy, and Holland got Freddie Gorman, his lyricist partner at the time, to finish up the lyrics for the song while he and Dozier came up with more ideas. That song became a Marvelettes album track, “Forever”, which a few years later would be put out as a B-side, and make the top thirty in its own right: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Forever”] Holland and Dozier quickly became a strong musical team — Dozier had a great aptitude for coming up with riffs and hooks, both lyrical and musical, and rhythmic ideas, while Brian Holland could come up with great melodies and interesting chord changes, though both could do both. In the studio Brian would work with the drummers, while Lamont would work with the keyboard players and discuss the bass parts with James Jamerson. Their only shortfall was lyrically. They could both write lyrics — and Lamont would often come up with a good title or hook phrase — but they were slow at doing it. For the lyrics, they mostly worked with Freddie Gorman, and sometimes got Janie Bradford in. These teams came up with some great records, like “Contract on Love”, which sounds very like a Four Seasons pastiche but also points the way to Holland and Dozier’s later sound: [Excerpt: Little Stevie Wonder, “Contract on Love”] Both Little Stevie Wonder and the backing vocalists on that, the Temptations, would do better things later, but that’s still a solid record. Meanwhile, Eddie Holland had had a realisation that would change the course of Motown. “Jamie” had been a hit, but he received no royalties — he’d had a run of flop singles, so he hadn’t yet earned out the production costs on his records. His first royalty statement after his hit showed him still owing Motown money. He asked his brother, who got a royalty statement at the same time, if he was in the same boat, and Brian showed him the statement for several thousand dollars that he’d made from the songs he’d written. Eddie decided that he was in the wrong job. He didn’t like performing anyway, and his brother was making serious money while he was working away earning nothing. He took nine months off from doing anything other than the bare contractual minimum, — where before he would spend every moment at Hitsville, now he only turned up for his own sessions — and spent that time teaching himself songwriting. He studied Smokey Robinson’s writing, and he developed his own ideas about what needed to be in a lyric — he didn’t want any meaningless filler words, he wanted every word to matter. He also wanted to make sure that even if people misheard a line or two, they would be able to get the idea of the song from the other lines, so he came up with a technique he referred to as “repeat-fomation”, where he would give the same piece of information two or three times, paraphrasing it.  When the next Marvelettes album, The Marvellous Marvelettes, was being finished up by Mickey Stevenson, Motown got nervous about the album, thinking it didn’t have a strong enough single on it, and so Brian Holland and Dozier were asked to come up with a new Marvelettes single in a hurry. Freddie Gorman had more or less stopped songwriting by this point, as he was spending most of his time working as a postman, and so, in need of another writing partner, they called on Eddie, who had been writing with various people. The three of them wrote and produced “Locking Up My Heart”, the first single to be released with the writing credit “Holland-Dozier-Holland”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Locking Up My Heart”] That was a comparative flop for the Marvelettes, and the beginning of the downward slump we talked about for them in the episode on “Please Mr. Postman”, but the second Holland-Dozier-Holland single, recorded ten days later, was a very different matter. That one was for Martha and the Vandellas, and became widely regarded as the start of Motown’s true Golden Age — so much so that Brian and Eddie Holland’s autobiography is named after this, rather than after any of the bigger and more obvious hits they would later co-write. The introduction to “Come and Get These Memories” isn’t particularly auspicious — the Vandellas singing the chorus: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Come and Get These Memories”] Hearing all three of the Vandellas, all of whom have such strong, distinctive voices, sing together is if anything a bit much — the Vandellas aren’t a great harmony group in the way that some of the other Motown groups are, and they work best when everyone’s singing an individual line rather than block harmonies. But then we’re instantly into the sound that Holland, Dozier, and Holland — really Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, who took charge of the musical side of things, with Eddie concentrating on the lyrics — would make their own. There’s a lightly swung rhythm, but with a strong backbeat with handclaps and tambourine emphasising the two and four– the same rhythmic combination that made so many of the very early rock and roll records we looked at in the first year of the podcast, but this time taken at a more sedate pace, a casual stroll rather than a sprint. There’s the simple, chorded piano and guitar parts, both instruments often playing in unison and again just emphasising the rhythm rather than doing anything more complex. And there’s James Jamerson’s wonderful, loping bass part, doing the exact opposite of what the piano and guitar are doing. [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Come and Get These Memories”] In almost every record in the rock and roll, soul, and R&B genres up to this point — I say “almost every” because, as I’ve said many times before, there are always exceptions and there is never a first of anything — the bass does one of two things: it either plods along just playing the root notes, or it plays a simple, repeated, ostinato figure throughout, acting as a backbone while the other instruments do more interesting things. James Jamerson is the first bass player outside the jazz and classical fields to prominently, repeatedly, do something very different — he’s got the guitars and piano holding down the rhythm so steadily that he doesn’t need to. He plays melodies, largely improvised, that are jumping around and going somewhere different from where you’d expect.  “Come and Get These Memories” was largely written before Eddie’s involvement, and the bulk of the lyric was Lamont Dozier’s. He’s said that in this instance he was inspired by country singers like Loretta Lynn, and the song’s lyrical style, taking physical objects and using them as a metaphor for emotional states, certainly seems very country: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Come and Get These Memories”] “Come and Get These Memories” made number twenty-nine on the pop charts and number six on the R&B charts. Martha and the Vandellas were finally stars. As was the normal practice at Motown, when an artist had a hit, the writing and production team were given the chance to make the follow-up with them, and so the followup was another Holland/Dozier/Holland song, again from an idea by Lamont Dozier, as most of their collaborations with the Vandellas would be. “Heat Wave” is another leap forward, and is quite possibly the most exciting record that Motown had put out to this point. Where “Come and Get These Memories” established the Motown sound, this one establishes the Martha and the Vandellas sound, specifically, and the style that Holland, Dozier, and Holland would apply to many of their more uptempo productions for other artists. This is the subgenre of Motown that, when it was picked up by fans in the North of England, became known as Northern Soul — the branch of Motown music that led directly to Disco, to Hi-NRG, to electropop, to the Stock-Aitken-Waterman hit factory of the eighties, to huge chunks of gay culture, and to almost all music made for dancing in whatever genre after this point. Where “Come and Get These Memories” is mid-tempo, “Heat Wave” races along. Where “Come and Get These Memories” swings, “Heat Wave” stomps. “Come and Get These Memories” has the drums swinging and the percussion accenting the backbeat, here the drums are accenting the backbeat while the tambourine is hitting every beat dead on, four/four. It’s a rhythm which has something in common with some of the Four Seasons’ contemporary hits, but it’s less militaristic than those. While “Pistol” Allen’s drumming starts out absolutely hard on the beat, he swings it more and more as the record goes on, trusting to the listener once that hard rhythm has been established, allowing him to lay back behind the beat just a little. This is where my background as a white English man, who has never played music for dancing — when I tried to be a musician myself, it was jangly guitar pop I was playing — limits me. I have a vocabulary for chords and for melodies, but when it comes to rhythms, at a certain point my vocabulary goes away, and all I can do is say “just… *listen*” It’s music that makes you need to dance, and you can either hear that or you can’t — but of course, you can: [Excerpt: Martha and the Vandellas, “Heat Wave”] And Martha Reeves’ voice is perfect for the song. Most female Motown singers were pop singers first and foremost — some of them, many of them, *great* pop singers, but all with voices fundamentally suited to gentleness. Reeves was a belter. She has far more blues and gospel influence in her voice than many of the other Motown women, and she’s showing it here. “Heat Wave” made the top ten, as did the follow-up, a “Heat Wave” soundalike called “Quicksand”. But the two records after that, both still Holland/Dozier/Holland records, didn’t even make the top forty, and Annette left, being replaced by Betty Kelly. The new lineup of the group were passed over to Mickey Stevenson, for a record that would become the one for which they are best remembered to this day. It wasn’t as important a record in the development of the Motown sound as “Come and Get These Memories” or “Heat Wave”, but “Dancing in the Street” was a masterpiece. Written by Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, and Ivy Joe Hunter, it features Gaye on drums, but the most prominent percussive sound is Hunter, who, depending on which account you read was either thrashing a steel chain against something until his hands bled, or hitting a tire iron.  And Martha’s vocal is astonishing — and has an edge to it. Apparently this was the second take, and she sounds a little annoyed because she absolutely nailed the vocal on the first take only to find that there’d been a problem recording it. [Excerpt: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, “Dancing in the Street”] That went to number two in the charts, and would be the group’s cultural and commercial high point. The song also gained some notoriety two years later when, in the wake of civil rights protests that were interpreted as rioting, the song was interpreted as being a call to riot — it was assumed that instead of being about dancing it was actually about rioting, something the Rolling Stones would pick up on later when they released “Street Fighting Man”, a song that owes more than a little to the Vandellas classic. The record after that, “Wild One”, was so much of a “Dancing in the Streets” soundalike that I’ve seen claims that the backing track is an alternate take of the earlier song. It isn’t, but it sounds like it could be. But the record after that saw them reunited with Holland/Dozier/Holland, who provided them with yet another great track, “Nowhere to Run”: [Excerpt: Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, “Nowhere to Run”] For the next few years the group would release a string of classic hits, like “Jimmy Mack” and “Honey Chile”, but the rise of the Supremes, who we’ll talk about in a month, meant that like the Marvelettes before them the Vandellas became less important to Motown. When Motown moved from Detroit to LA in the early seventies, Martha was one of those who decided not to make the move with the label, and the group split up, though the original lineup occasionally reunited for big events, and made some recordings for Ian Levine’s Motorcity label. Currently, there are two touring Vandellas groups. One, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, consists of Martha and two of her sisters — including Lois, who was a late-period member of the group before they split, replacing Betty in 1967. Meanwhile “The Original Vandellas” consist of Rosalind and Annette. Gloria died in 2000, but Martha and the Vandellas are one of the very few sixties hitmaking groups where all the members of their classic lineup are still alive and performing. Martha, Rosalind, Betty, Annette, and Lois were all also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, becoming only the second all-female group to be inducted.  The Vandellas were one of the greatest of the Motown acts, and one of the greatest of the girl groups, and their biggest hits stand up against anything that any of the other Motown acts were doing at the time. When you hear them now, even almost sixty years later, you’re still hearing the sound they were in at the birth of, the sound of young America.  

In a crossover worthy of Marvel comics, Ben and Mark are joined by Dylan and Jack from 'Doctor Who: Too Hot for TV' to discuss fake invasions, hollow pastiches, dodgy American accents and much more by way of 'The Return of Doctor Mysterio' and 'Invaders from Mars'. Under discussion: letting an old man in through your window, awkward sex stuff, nostalgia for the Eighth Doctor era, feeling protective over Mark Gatiss and whether or not Steven Moffat has actually seen a superhero film since the 1970s. Also: A definitive decision on the best War of the Worlds, Dylan pitches a documentary about Ian Levine, there's a chocolate surprise from listener Andy Moore and another round of DICS sees everyone gargle with gravel. You can listen to 'Doctor Who: Too Hot for TV' here You can listen to Ben's new podcast 'That, But Funny' here You can buy us a pint here

Episode ninety-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Please Mr. Postman" by the Marvelettes, and the career of the first group to have a number one on a Motown label. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Take Good Care of My Baby" by Bobby Vee. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Erratum After recording this, I happened to discover that in 2017 Katherine actually came out of retirement and formed a new “Marvelettes”, who recorded in the UK in 2017 with someone called “Hitsville Chalky”.   Resources This week's Mixcloud playlist is split into two parts, because of the number of Marvelettes songs. Part one, and part two. The Original Marvelettes: Motown's Mystery Girl Group by Marc Taylor is the only biography of the group. Sadly it currently goes for silly money. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Katherine Anderson Schaffner. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this three-CD set contains the group's complete discography up to mid-1966 -- the Gladys Horton years.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Tamla Motown family of labels, a couple of months back, they'd finally had their first big hit with Barrett Strong's "Money", and the label was starting to pull together the full creative team that would be responsible for its later successes. But while "Money" is a great record, it's not a record with what would later become known as the "Motown Sound" -- it sounds far more like a Ray Charles record than the records that would later make Motown's name. So today, we're going to look at the first number one to come out of Motown -- a record that definitely did have the Motown sound, and which established the label as the sound of young America. Today, we're going to look at "Please Mr. Postman": [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] The story of the Marvelettes starts with Gladys Horton, who lived in the small town of Inkster in Michigan. When Horton was only fourteen, she had formed a group called the Del-Rhythmettes, who made one single, "Chic-A-Boomer": [Excerpt: The Del-Rhythmettes, "Chic-A-Boomer"] That had got a little bit of airplay on local radio, but had otherwise been unsuccessful, and the Del-Rhythmettes had split up. But Gladys still wanted to make music, and she started looking around for other people to sing with. One who caught her eye was a young girl who would appear in the High School talent contests, named Georgia Dobbins. By the time Gladys got to high school herself, Georgia had graduated, but Gladys persuaded her to join a group she put together for her own talent contest entry. The group she formed originally jokingly named themselves the Casinyettes -- because they "can't sing yet" -- and that was the name under which they performed at the talent contest. There was a reason that Gladys wanted Georgia for this talent contest -- this one had, as its first prize, the chance of an audition at Motown. Motown was still a small label, but it had started to have hits, and everyone in Michigan with an interest in music knew about Berry Gordy. In particular, Motown had just released "Shop Around" by the Miracles. Smokey Robinson had written that song, and it had been released to no real effect. The record had been pulled, and another version released. THAT had had no success either, and then at three o'clock in the morning Berry Gordy had suddenly realised that the record needed a new, faster, arrangement. He'd phoned up Smokey and told him to get the group together and into the studio, before he lost the inspiration, even though it was the middle of the night. They did, and the second version of "Shop Around" was pulled and replaced with the new third version, which went to number two on the pop charts and sold a million copies: [Excerpt: The Miracles, "Shop Around"] So Motown were now in the big leagues, and the chance of recording for them was an exciting one, and one that the girls, and Gladys in particular, wanted. The Casinyettes at this point consisted of Gladys, Georgia, Georgeanna Tillman, Katherine Anderson, and Juanita Cowart -- I've also seen Juanita's name reported as Wyanetta, and can't find anything which definitively says which it was. At the talent show, they sang "Maybe" by the Chantels: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] The group came fourth -- but one of their teachers, Shirley Sharpley, knew the person from Motown who was arranging the auditions, and persuaded them to offer auditions to the top five, rather than just to the winners. The Cansinyettes went to their audition, and Motown were interested, but told them they had to come up with something original before they'd be signed. They went back to Inkster and got to work. A friend of Georgia, William Garrett, had started a blues song about a postman, and Georgia worked on his idea, writing most of the lyrics and recasting it as something less bluesy. But then Georgia had to quit the group. Her father hadn't known she was singing until she brought the record contract home for him to countersign -- as she was under twenty-one, she needed a parent to sign it, and her mother was too ill. Her father believed the entertainment industry to be sinful, and wouldn't sign. She was so depressed that she gave up singing altogether, and by her own account didn't sing a note until 1978. By the time they came back to Motown with the beginnings of a song, Georgia had been replaced by Wanda Young, though the remaining group members were still singing her song. The song was decent, but it needed work. The group were assigned to Brian Holland, who had a listen to the song and had a brainwave. Holland and his brother Eddie were both on Motown staff at the time, but before joining Motown Holland had been in a group called the Fidelitones. The Fidelitones had recorded some tracks for Aladdin, produced by Gordy, in the late fifties but they'd never been released: [Excerpt: The Fidelitones, "Is It Too Late?"] Holland had stayed in touch with Freddie Gorman, another member of the group. Gorman still had musical ambitions, and he would pop into Motown every day after he finished work -- as a postman. So when Gorman popped in that day, Holland asked him to chip in ideas for the song and use his experience to make it more realistic -- though there's nothing much in the finished song that would seem to require expertise. Gorman became one of five credited writers on the song, along with Holland, Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, and Holland's normal songwriting partner Robert Bateman, who worked with Holland as a songwriting and production team called "Brianbert". Before moving into production, Bateman had been a member of the Satintones, who had made several unsuccessful records for Motown, including this one that was a knock-off of "There Goes My Baby": [Excerpt: The Satintones, "My Beloved"] The Casinyettes weren't the first girl group to be signed to the label -- Motown had already signed one girl group, a group called the Primettes, who had been renamed and who had so far released two singles: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "I Want a Guy"] But the Supremes, as they were renamed, wouldn't become successful for several years, and were generally regarded as a joke among the Motown staff, who thought -- not entirely without reason -- that they had been signed more because Berry Gordy was attracted to Diane Ross, one of the members of the group, than because of any talent they had. One of the girls, though, Florence Ballard, was very popular at Motown, and was generally regarded as being helpful and friendly. She worked with Gladys on her lead vocal part, and helped her craft her performance. The production that Brian Holland crafted for the song was very heavy on the percussion -- along with piano player Popcorn Wylie, guitarist Eddie Willis, and bass player James Jamerson, the backing musicians included a percussion player, Eddie "Bongo" Brown, and two drummers -- the normal session drummer on most of the Motown recordings, Benny Benjamin, and a young man who had been a member of the last lineup of the Moonglows before Harvey Fuqua had moved over to working for the Gordy family labels, and who was now doing whatever he could around the studio, named Marvin Gaye. There was one final change that needed to be made -- The Casinyettes was obviously a joke name, and they needed a better one. The name they were eventually given supposedly came after Berry Gordy heard them sing and said "those girls are marvels". The Marvelettes were born, and their first single was the catchiest thing Motown had put out to that point: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Please Mr. Postman"] "Please Mr. Postman" became the second million seller from Motown, and its first number one on the pop charts. It only stayed there for one week, but that one week was all that was needed -- Motown was now a label that everyone in the industry had to notice. And "Please Mr. Postman" was the record that saved Motown. I've talked before about how a hit record could put a small label out of business -- they had to pay for the records to be pressed up and distributed, but it would be many months before the distributors would actually pay them the money they were owed. And many distributors would not pay at all -- they reasoned that a small label wasn't going to be able to do anything about it if they didn't pay, so why bother? The only leverage a small label with a big hit had was a second big hit. If they had another record the distributors wanted from them, then they could tell the distributors they wouldn't get it until they paid up. And after "Shop Around" sold a million copies, Motown's follow-ups had all sold poorly. They were running out of money, and they needed another hit quickly before they went bankrupt altogether. Berry Gordy had, early on, given the label a slogan -- Create, Make, and Sell -- because he wanted to make great records and then have them sell a lot of copies -- but around this time he realised that there was no point in selling the records if they didn't get paid for them. So reasoning that "create" and "make" were near-synonyms, he changed that slogan to Create, Sell, and Collect. By being a second million-seller for Motown, "Please Mr. Postman" ensured that they got paid for the first one. If it hadn't come along, it's possible that Motown would just be a footnote in histories of Chess Records -- "Chess also distributed a handful of records from a small Detroit label owned by Harvey Fuqua's brother-in-law, who co-wrote several hits for Jackie Wilson, before that label went bankrupt." But as it is, the Marvelettes were now big stars. For the followup, Berry Gordy wanted to do something that was as close to the hit as possible . This would be the policy from this point on with Motown -- if someone had a hit, the same producers and songwriters would be assigned to come up with something that sounded like the hit, and the artist would only go in a different direction once they stopped having hits with their original formula. In this case, the Marvelettes' second single was designed not only to capitalise on their original hit, but on the popularity of the Twist craze, and so they released "Twistin' Postman": [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Twistin' Postman"] "Twistin' Postman" went top forty, but it didn't do anything like as well as "Please Mr. Postman". But just as with their first single, one of the group brought in a new song which brought them back to the top ten, if not number one. This time it was Gladys, who came up with a song called "Playboy", which Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, and Mickey Stevenson rewrote, and which made number seven on the pop charts and number four on the R&B charts. [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Playboy"] Meanwhile, Freddie Gorman had continued working with Brian Holland as well, and had put out a single under his own name, "The Day Will Come": [Excerpt: Freddie Gorman, "The Day Will Come"] Unfortunately, that wasn't a success, and Freddie had to continue on his post rounds. That also meant that his songwriting partnership with Holland came to an end -- Freddie kept finding that when he came round to Hitsville after work, if Brian Holland had had an idea for a song, he'd already finished it -- usually with the help of his brother Eddie and their new writing partner Lamont Dozier. And there were problems brewing for the Marvelettes, too. They'd felt all along that they were looked down on a bit by the people from Detroit, who thought of them as hicks from the sticks because they came from Inkster. They were so self-conscious about this that it led to the first member leaving the group. They appeared on American Bandstand, and Juanita said that Detroit was a suburb of Inkster, when she'd meant to say that Inkster was a suburb of Detroit. She felt so bad about this slipup and the way she was mocked for it that she had a breakdown, and ended up leaving the group. That didn't bother Motown too much -- when "Please Mr. Postman" had been a hit but the girls had been at school, it had been suggested that they could just send any five girls out on the road as the Marvelettes, until the girls put their foot down about that. Not only that, but at one point when Wanda had been pregnant, Motown had replaced her on the road with Florence Ballard from the Supremes -- the contracts for that tour had specified five Marvelettes, the Supremes were the least successful group on Motown at the time, and the girls got on well with Florence. If Motown were willing to do that, they were definitely willing to have the group just carry on with one member gone, and just make sure the contracts said there would be four Marvelettes. They carried on as a four-piece group, and had a few more records, mostly written and produced by Smokey Robinson but with others like Mickey Stevenson and Marvin Gaye sometimes contributing, but while those records did okay on the R&B charts, they didn't have much success on the pop charts, mostly getting to around number fifty. At one point, Motown started to wonder if they needed to change things up a little -- they put out a single by the group with Gladys and Wanda singing a dual lead, and with the group joined by Motown's in-house backing vocal group The Andantes. The record was put out under the name The Darnells, but was unsuccessful: [Excerpt: The Darnells, "Too Hurt Too Cry, Too Much In Love To Say Goodbye”] Unfortunately for them, they missed the chance at a really big hit. Holland, Dozier, and Holland had written a song for them, but Gladys didn't like it, she thought it was too simplistic, and so they took it to the group who were still known within Motown as the no-hit Supremes. We'll be looking at "Where Did Our Love Go?" in more detail next year. Eddie Holland did cowrite a hit for them with Norman Whitfield, though -- though it wasn't a monster hit like "Where Did Our Love Go?", it did give all the girls a chance to have a solo spot, a rarity for them: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Too Many Fish in the Sea"] That took them back into the top thirty, and made the top five on the R&B chart. It would be the last hit that they would have with Georgeanna in the group, though -- she'd been diagnosed with sickle-cell anaemia as a child, and the constant strain of touring made her more ill. The tours had been a shock for all of them, to be honest. Their first major national tour was the first Motor Town Revue in 1962 -- a tour with a lineup that seems preposterously good these days. All of Motown's major acts, and several acts that weren't yet major but soon would be, were on the same bill -- the Miracles, Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, the Temptations, Marv Johnson, Stevie Wonder, the Contours, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes, and Singing Sammy Ward. The girls had grown up in Michigan, and while they had an intellectual understanding that the South was different, they were unprepared for the realities of segregation, of not being able to use public toilets or eat in the same restaurants that white people did. That was awful enough, but there was also the fact that all those acts were on the same bus. And starting the year before, there had been the phenomenon of Freedom Riders -- black people from the North who had been coming down to the south to sit in whites-only seats on Greyhound buses, to protest segregation. In several places in the South, the sight of a lot of black people on a bus brought the Freedom Riders to mind, and people actually took pot-shots at the bus. A couple of years living like that took an immense toll on Georgeanna's health, and she started suffering from unexplained fatigue. Eventually it was realised that she had lupus, an autoimmune disease which is now largely treatable if not curable, but at the time was often a death sentence. She retired from music, going to work for Motown as a secretary instead. She died in 1980, aged only thirty-six. The remaining three carried on as a trio, and they were about to have a second commercial wind. After a couple of flop follow-ups to "Too Many Fish in the Sea", Smokey Robinson took over their production, and decided to start using Wanda as the lead vocalist, rather than Gladys, who had sung lead on their hits up to that point. "Don't Mess With Bill", their first single of 1966, became their first top ten pop hit since "Playboy" in early 1962: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Don't Mess With Bill"] Robinson also wrote the marvellous "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game" for the group: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game"] Or, at least, he wrote it for Wanda. By this point, while the records were getting released as by "the Marvelettes", Robinson was only using Wanda for lead vocals, and having the Andantes sing all the backing vocals. The explanation for this was generally that the group were on tour all the time, and it was easier to make the records without them and then get Wanda just to sing the lead, and the other members reluctantly accepted that, but it rankled. There were other problems, too. Juanita and Georgeanna had been the glue holding the group together -- they'd been the ones who had been friends with all the others. Katherine, Gladys, and Wanda, hadn't known each other before forming the group, and they started to discover that they weren't hugely fond of each other now. At first, they still worked well together, each having their assigned area of responsibility -- Gladys was a combination musical director and choreographer, working out the group's setlists and dance moves, Katherine was the spokesperson in interviews, and looked after the group's money, and Wanda was the lead singer. This worked for a while, but as Katherine would later put it, when there had been five of them, they'd been friends. Now they were somewhere between acquaintances and co-workers. And then in 1967, Gladys decided to leave the group. This made the group an even lower priority for Motown -- while Wanda was by now the undisputed lead singer, within Motown they were thought of as Gladys' group, as she'd been the leader in the beginning. Motown did decide to get someone else in to replace her. They could cope with the group going from five members to four, and from four to three -- three women, after all, was still a girl group. But once they'd got down to two members, they needed a third. Harvey Fuqua suggested Ann Bogan, who he'd discovered a while before and recorded a few duets with: [Excerpt: Harvey and Ann, "What Can You Do Now?"] Ann was a sort of general utility singer around Motown -- she'd sung with the Andantes and the Challengers Three, and she'd also gone out on the road with Marvin Gaye, subbing for his duet partner Tammi Terrell, when the latter had become sick with the brain tumour that eventually killed her. Ann replaced Gladys, and the group made two further albums, and Ann was at least allowed to sing on album tracks. The group continued having R&B hits, but while they kept releasing great records like "Destination: Anywhere", they were by now barely scraping the hot one hundred on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Destination: Anywhere"] And Wanda was having problems. She'd been doing too much cocaine and drinking too much, and was starting to act strangely. Then in 1969 her younger sister was shot dead, by her other sister's estranged husband (who seems to have thought he was shooting the other sister), and to compound matters while the group were on tour in Europe someone spiked Wanda's drink. She was never the same again, and has had mental health problems for the last fifty years. The group split up, though nothing was announced -- they just didn't get booked on any more tours, and went their separate ways. Bogan went on to join a group called Love, Peace, and Happiness, who had a minor hit with a song that had been, coincidentally, co-written by Katherine, who wrote it for Gladys Knight: [Excerpt: Love, Peace, and Happiness, "I Don't Want to Do Wrong"] That group then joined with Harvey Fuqua in a seventeen-piece funk band called New Birth, with Bogan singing on their hit "I Can Understand It": [Excerpt: New Birth, "I Can Understand It"] Motown decided to give the Marvelettes one more try, and in 1970 they got Wanda in to record an album titled The Return of the Marvelettes. This was essentially a solo album, produced by Smokey Robinson, but they did try to get Katherine to appear on the cover photograph. She told the label that if she wasn't good enough to sing on the record, she wasn't good enough to appear on the cover, either, and so the cover, like the record, only featured Wanda of the original Marvelettes. Over the next few decades, various groups toured under the Marvelettes name, none featuring any of the original members -- Motown, rather than the women, had owned the group name, and had sold it off. Gladys, Katherine, and Juanita were busy being homemakers, and Wanda and Georgeanna were too ill to consider a music career. Then in the late 1980s, Ian Levine entered the picture. Levine is a British DJ who at the time owned and ran Motor City Records, which put out new recordings by people who had released records on Motown in the sixties. He got over a hundred former Motown artists to record for him, and one album he put out was a Marvelettes reunion of sorts -- he managed to persuade Gladys and Wanda out of retirement to make a new Marvelettes album with two new backing vocalists, Echo Johnson and Jean Maclean. The new record was a mixture of remakes of their old hits and new songs by Levine, like "Secret Love Affair": [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, "Secret Love Affair"] Wanda was still too ill to perform regularly, but Gladys went out on tour on the oldies circuit, singing her old hits as "Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes", as none of the group owned the original name. She and Katherine were in the process of suing to regain the name under the Truth in Music Act, when she died of a stroke in 2011. Of the other Marvelettes, Katherine and Juanita are retired, though Katherine still gives regular interviews about her time with the group, and Wanda's mental health has apparently improved enough in the last few years that she can perform again. They're all apparently happy with their situations now, and don't miss the old life. They do miss the recognition, though. For the twenty-fifth, fortieth, fiftieth, and sixtieth anniversary celebrations of Motown, TV specials were produced featuring many of the label's acts, and honouring the label's history. None of the members of the first group to hit number one on the label were invited to be part of any of them.

Episode ninety-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Please Mr. Postman” by the Marvelettes, and the career of the first group to have a number one on a Motown label. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Take Good Care of My Baby” by Bobby Vee. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum After recording this, I happened to discover that in 2017 Katherine actually came out of retirement and formed a new “Marvelettes”, who recorded in the UK in 2017 with someone called “Hitsville Chalky”.   Resources This week’s Mixcloud playlist is split into two parts, because of the number of Marvelettes songs. Part one, and part two. The Original Marvelettes: Motown’s Mystery Girl Group by Marc Taylor is the only biography of the group. Sadly it currently goes for silly money. Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown.  To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy’s own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown, including Katherine Anderson Schaffner. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown’s thirty-year history. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 693 tracks released on Motown singles. There is a Complete Motown Singles 1959-62 box available from Hip-O-Select with comprehensive liner notes, but if you just want the music, I recommend instead this much cheaper bare-bones box from Real Gone Music. And this three-CD set contains the group’s complete discography up to mid-1966 — the Gladys Horton years.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Tamla Motown family of labels, a couple of months back, they’d finally had their first big hit with Barrett Strong’s “Money”, and the label was starting to pull together the full creative team that would be responsible for its later successes. But while “Money” is a great record, it’s not a record with what would later become known as the “Motown Sound” — it sounds far more like a Ray Charles record than the records that would later make Motown’s name. So today, we’re going to look at the first number one to come out of Motown — a record that definitely did have the Motown sound, and which established the label as the sound of young America. Today, we’re going to look at “Please Mr. Postman”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] The story of the Marvelettes starts with Gladys Horton, who lived in the small town of Inkster in Michigan. When Horton was only fourteen, she had formed a group called the Del-Rhythmettes, who made one single, “Chic-A-Boomer”: [Excerpt: The Del-Rhythmettes, “Chic-A-Boomer”] That had got a little bit of airplay on local radio, but had otherwise been unsuccessful, and the Del-Rhythmettes had split up. But Gladys still wanted to make music, and she started looking around for other people to sing with. One who caught her eye was a young girl who would appear in the High School talent contests, named Georgia Dobbins. By the time Gladys got to high school herself, Georgia had graduated, but Gladys persuaded her to join a group she put together for her own talent contest entry. The group she formed originally jokingly named themselves the Casinyettes — because they “can’t sing yet” — and that was the name under which they performed at the talent contest. There was a reason that Gladys wanted Georgia for this talent contest — this one had, as its first prize, the chance of an audition at Motown. Motown was still a small label, but it had started to have hits, and everyone in Michigan with an interest in music knew about Berry Gordy. In particular, Motown had just released “Shop Around” by the Miracles. Smokey Robinson had written that song, and it had been released to no real effect. The record had been pulled, and another version released. THAT had had no success either, and then at three o’clock in the morning Berry Gordy had suddenly realised that the record needed a new, faster, arrangement. He’d phoned up Smokey and told him to get the group together and into the studio, before he lost the inspiration, even though it was the middle of the night. They did, and the second version of “Shop Around” was pulled and replaced with the new third version, which went to number two on the pop charts and sold a million copies: [Excerpt: The Miracles, “Shop Around”] So Motown were now in the big leagues, and the chance of recording for them was an exciting one, and one that the girls, and Gladys in particular, wanted. The Casinyettes at this point consisted of Gladys, Georgia, Georgeanna Tillman, Katherine Anderson, and Juanita Cowart — I’ve also seen Juanita’s name reported as Wyanetta, and can’t find anything which definitively says which it was. At the talent show, they sang “Maybe” by the Chantels: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Maybe”] The group came fourth — but one of their teachers, Shirley Sharpley, knew the person from Motown who was arranging the auditions, and persuaded them to offer auditions to the top five, rather than just to the winners. The Cansinyettes went to their audition, and Motown were interested, but told them they had to come up with something original before they’d be signed. They went back to Inkster and got to work. A friend of Georgia, William Garrett, had started a blues song about a postman, and Georgia worked on his idea, writing most of the lyrics and recasting it as something less bluesy. But then Georgia had to quit the group. Her father hadn’t known she was singing until she brought the record contract home for him to countersign — as she was under twenty-one, she needed a parent to sign it, and her mother was too ill. Her father believed the entertainment industry to be sinful, and wouldn’t sign. She was so depressed that she gave up singing altogether, and by her own account didn’t sing a note until 1978. By the time they came back to Motown with the beginnings of a song, Georgia had been replaced by Wanda Young, though the remaining group members were still singing her song. The song was decent, but it needed work. The group were assigned to Brian Holland, who had a listen to the song and had a brainwave. Holland and his brother Eddie were both on Motown staff at the time, but before joining Motown Holland had been in a group called the Fidelitones. The Fidelitones had recorded some tracks for Aladdin, produced by Gordy, in the late fifties but they’d never been released: [Excerpt: The Fidelitones, “Is It Too Late?”] Holland had stayed in touch with Freddie Gorman, another member of the group. Gorman still had musical ambitions, and he would pop into Motown every day after he finished work — as a postman. So when Gorman popped in that day, Holland asked him to chip in ideas for the song and use his experience to make it more realistic — though there’s nothing much in the finished song that would seem to require expertise. Gorman became one of five credited writers on the song, along with Holland, Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, and Holland’s normal songwriting partner Robert Bateman, who worked with Holland as a songwriting and production team called “Brianbert”. Before moving into production, Bateman had been a member of the Satintones, who had made several unsuccessful records for Motown, including this one that was a knock-off of “There Goes My Baby”: [Excerpt: The Satintones, “My Beloved”] The Casinyettes weren’t the first girl group to be signed to the label — Motown had already signed one girl group, a group called the Primettes, who had been renamed and who had so far released two singles: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “I Want a Guy”] But the Supremes, as they were renamed, wouldn’t become successful for several years, and were generally regarded as a joke among the Motown staff, who thought — not entirely without reason — that they had been signed more because Berry Gordy was attracted to Diane Ross, one of the members of the group, than because of any talent they had. One of the girls, though, Florence Ballard, was very popular at Motown, and was generally regarded as being helpful and friendly. She worked with Gladys on her lead vocal part, and helped her craft her performance. The production that Brian Holland crafted for the song was very heavy on the percussion — along with piano player Popcorn Wylie, guitarist Eddie Willis, and bass player James Jamerson, the backing musicians included a percussion player, Eddie “Bongo” Brown, and two drummers — the normal session drummer on most of the Motown recordings, Benny Benjamin, and a young man who had been a member of the last lineup of the Moonglows before Harvey Fuqua had moved over to working for the Gordy family labels, and who was now doing whatever he could around the studio, named Marvin Gaye. There was one final change that needed to be made — The Casinyettes was obviously a joke name, and they needed a better one. The name they were eventually given supposedly came after Berry Gordy heard them sing and said “those girls are marvels”. The Marvelettes were born, and their first single was the catchiest thing Motown had put out to that point: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Please Mr. Postman”] “Please Mr. Postman” became the second million seller from Motown, and its first number one on the pop charts. It only stayed there for one week, but that one week was all that was needed — Motown was now a label that everyone in the industry had to notice. And “Please Mr. Postman” was the record that saved Motown. I’ve talked before about how a hit record could put a small label out of business — they had to pay for the records to be pressed up and distributed, but it would be many months before the distributors would actually pay them the money they were owed. And many distributors would not pay at all — they reasoned that a small label wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it if they didn’t pay, so why bother? The only leverage a small label with a big hit had was a second big hit. If they had another record the distributors wanted from them, then they could tell the distributors they wouldn’t get it until they paid up. And after “Shop Around” sold a million copies, Motown’s follow-ups had all sold poorly. They were running out of money, and they needed another hit quickly before they went bankrupt altogether. Berry Gordy had, early on, given the label a slogan — Create, Make, and Sell — because he wanted to make great records and then have them sell a lot of copies — but around this time he realised that there was no point in selling the records if they didn’t get paid for them. So reasoning that “create” and “make” were near-synonyms, he changed that slogan to Create, Sell, and Collect. By being a second million-seller for Motown, “Please Mr. Postman” ensured that they got paid for the first one. If it hadn’t come along, it’s possible that Motown would just be a footnote in histories of Chess Records — “Chess also distributed a handful of records from a small Detroit label owned by Harvey Fuqua’s brother-in-law, who co-wrote several hits for Jackie Wilson, before that label went bankrupt.” But as it is, the Marvelettes were now big stars. For the followup, Berry Gordy wanted to do something that was as close to the hit as possible . This would be the policy from this point on with Motown — if someone had a hit, the same producers and songwriters would be assigned to come up with something that sounded like the hit, and the artist would only go in a different direction once they stopped having hits with their original formula. In this case, the Marvelettes’ second single was designed not only to capitalise on their original hit, but on the popularity of the Twist craze, and so they released “Twistin’ Postman”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Twistin’ Postman”] “Twistin’ Postman” went top forty, but it didn’t do anything like as well as “Please Mr. Postman”. But just as with their first single, one of the group brought in a new song which brought them back to the top ten, if not number one. This time it was Gladys, who came up with a song called “Playboy”, which Brian Holland, Robert Bateman, and Mickey Stevenson rewrote, and which made number seven on the pop charts and number four on the R&B charts. [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Playboy”] Meanwhile, Freddie Gorman had continued working with Brian Holland as well, and had put out a single under his own name, “The Day Will Come”: [Excerpt: Freddie Gorman, “The Day Will Come”] Unfortunately, that wasn’t a success, and Freddie had to continue on his post rounds. That also meant that his songwriting partnership with Holland came to an end — Freddie kept finding that when he came round to Hitsville after work, if Brian Holland had had an idea for a song, he’d already finished it — usually with the help of his brother Eddie and their new writing partner Lamont Dozier. And there were problems brewing for the Marvelettes, too. They’d felt all along that they were looked down on a bit by the people from Detroit, who thought of them as hicks from the sticks because they came from Inkster. They were so self-conscious about this that it led to the first member leaving the group. They appeared on American Bandstand, and Juanita said that Detroit was a suburb of Inkster, when she’d meant to say that Inkster was a suburb of Detroit. She felt so bad about this slipup and the way she was mocked for it that she had a breakdown, and ended up leaving the group. That didn’t bother Motown too much — when “Please Mr. Postman” had been a hit but the girls had been at school, it had been suggested that they could just send any five girls out on the road as the Marvelettes, until the girls put their foot down about that. Not only that, but at one point when Wanda had been pregnant, Motown had replaced her on the road with Florence Ballard from the Supremes — the contracts for that tour had specified five Marvelettes, the Supremes were the least successful group on Motown at the time, and the girls got on well with Florence. If Motown were willing to do that, they were definitely willing to have the group just carry on with one member gone, and just make sure the contracts said there would be four Marvelettes. They carried on as a four-piece group, and had a few more records, mostly written and produced by Smokey Robinson but with others like Mickey Stevenson and Marvin Gaye sometimes contributing, but while those records did okay on the R&B charts, they didn’t have much success on the pop charts, mostly getting to around number fifty. At one point, Motown started to wonder if they needed to change things up a little — they put out a single by the group with Gladys and Wanda singing a dual lead, and with the group joined by Motown’s in-house backing vocal group The Andantes. The record was put out under the name The Darnells, but was unsuccessful: [Excerpt: The Darnells, “Too Hurt Too Cry, Too Much In Love To Say Goodbye”] Unfortunately for them, they missed the chance at a really big hit. Holland, Dozier, and Holland had written a song for them, but Gladys didn’t like it, she thought it was too simplistic, and so they took it to the group who were still known within Motown as the no-hit Supremes. We’ll be looking at “Where Did Our Love Go?” in more detail next year. Eddie Holland did cowrite a hit for them with Norman Whitfield, though — though it wasn’t a monster hit like “Where Did Our Love Go?”, it did give all the girls a chance to have a solo spot, a rarity for them: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Too Many Fish in the Sea”] That took them back into the top thirty, and made the top five on the R&B chart. It would be the last hit that they would have with Georgeanna in the group, though — she’d been diagnosed with sickle-cell anaemia as a child, and the constant strain of touring made her more ill. The tours had been a shock for all of them, to be honest. Their first major national tour was the first Motor Town Revue in 1962 — a tour with a lineup that seems preposterously good these days. All of Motown’s major acts, and several acts that weren’t yet major but soon would be, were on the same bill — the Miracles, Mary Wells, the Marvelettes, the Temptations, Marv Johnson, Stevie Wonder, the Contours, Marvin Gaye, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes, and Singing Sammy Ward. The girls had grown up in Michigan, and while they had an intellectual understanding that the South was different, they were unprepared for the realities of segregation, of not being able to use public toilets or eat in the same restaurants that white people did. That was awful enough, but there was also the fact that all those acts were on the same bus. And starting the year before, there had been the phenomenon of Freedom Riders — black people from the North who had been coming down to the south to sit in whites-only seats on Greyhound buses, to protest segregation. In several places in the South, the sight of a lot of black people on a bus brought the Freedom Riders to mind, and people actually took pot-shots at the bus. A couple of years living like that took an immense toll on Georgeanna’s health, and she started suffering from unexplained fatigue. Eventually it was realised that she had lupus, an autoimmune disease which is now largely treatable if not curable, but at the time was often a death sentence. She retired from music, going to work for Motown as a secretary instead. She died in 1980, aged only thirty-six. The remaining three carried on as a trio, and they were about to have a second commercial wind. After a couple of flop follow-ups to “Too Many Fish in the Sea”, Smokey Robinson took over their production, and decided to start using Wanda as the lead vocalist, rather than Gladys, who had sung lead on their hits up to that point. “Don’t Mess With Bill”, their first single of 1966, became their first top ten pop hit since “Playboy” in early 1962: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Don’t Mess With Bill”] Robinson also wrote the marvellous “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game” for the group: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game”] Or, at least, he wrote it for Wanda. By this point, while the records were getting released as by “the Marvelettes”, Robinson was only using Wanda for lead vocals, and having the Andantes sing all the backing vocals. The explanation for this was generally that the group were on tour all the time, and it was easier to make the records without them and then get Wanda just to sing the lead, and the other members reluctantly accepted that, but it rankled. There were other problems, too. Juanita and Georgeanna had been the glue holding the group together — they’d been the ones who had been friends with all the others. Katherine, Gladys, and Wanda, hadn’t known each other before forming the group, and they started to discover that they weren’t hugely fond of each other now. At first, they still worked well together, each having their assigned area of responsibility — Gladys was a combination musical director and choreographer, working out the group’s setlists and dance moves, Katherine was the spokesperson in interviews, and looked after the group’s money, and Wanda was the lead singer. This worked for a while, but as Katherine would later put it, when there had been five of them, they’d been friends. Now they were somewhere between acquaintances and co-workers. And then in 1967, Gladys decided to leave the group. This made the group an even lower priority for Motown — while Wanda was by now the undisputed lead singer, within Motown they were thought of as Gladys’ group, as she’d been the leader in the beginning. Motown did decide to get someone else in to replace her. They could cope with the group going from five members to four, and from four to three — three women, after all, was still a girl group. But once they’d got down to two members, they needed a third. Harvey Fuqua suggested Ann Bogan, who he’d discovered a while before and recorded a few duets with: [Excerpt: Harvey and Ann, “What Can You Do Now?”] Ann was a sort of general utility singer around Motown — she’d sung with the Andantes and the Challengers Three, and she’d also gone out on the road with Marvin Gaye, subbing for his duet partner Tammi Terrell, when the latter had become sick with the brain tumour that eventually killed her. Ann replaced Gladys, and the group made two further albums, and Ann was at least allowed to sing on album tracks. The group continued having R&B hits, but while they kept releasing great records like “Destination: Anywhere”, they were by now barely scraping the hot one hundred on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Destination: Anywhere”] And Wanda was having problems. She’d been doing too much cocaine and drinking too much, and was starting to act strangely. Then in 1969 her younger sister was shot dead, by her other sister’s estranged husband (who seems to have thought he was shooting the other sister), and to compound matters while the group were on tour in Europe someone spiked Wanda’s drink. She was never the same again, and has had mental health problems for the last fifty years. The group split up, though nothing was announced — they just didn’t get booked on any more tours, and went their separate ways. Bogan went on to join a group called Love, Peace, and Happiness, who had a minor hit with a song that had been, coincidentally, co-written by Katherine, who wrote it for Gladys Knight: [Excerpt: Love, Peace, and Happiness, “I Don’t Want to Do Wrong”] That group then joined with Harvey Fuqua in a seventeen-piece funk band called New Birth, with Bogan singing on their hit “I Can Understand It”: [Excerpt: New Birth, “I Can Understand It”] Motown decided to give the Marvelettes one more try, and in 1970 they got Wanda in to record an album titled The Return of the Marvelettes. This was essentially a solo album, produced by Smokey Robinson, but they did try to get Katherine to appear on the cover photograph. She told the label that if she wasn’t good enough to sing on the record, she wasn’t good enough to appear on the cover, either, and so the cover, like the record, only featured Wanda of the original Marvelettes. Over the next few decades, various groups toured under the Marvelettes name, none featuring any of the original members — Motown, rather than the women, had owned the group name, and had sold it off. Gladys, Katherine, and Juanita were busy being homemakers, and Wanda and Georgeanna were too ill to consider a music career. Then in the late 1980s, Ian Levine entered the picture. Levine is a British DJ who at the time owned and ran Motor City Records, which put out new recordings by people who had released records on Motown in the sixties. He got over a hundred former Motown artists to record for him, and one album he put out was a Marvelettes reunion of sorts — he managed to persuade Gladys and Wanda out of retirement to make a new Marvelettes album with two new backing vocalists, Echo Johnson and Jean Maclean. The new record was a mixture of remakes of their old hits and new songs by Levine, like “Secret Love Affair”: [Excerpt: The Marvelettes, “Secret Love Affair”] Wanda was still too ill to perform regularly, but Gladys went out on tour on the oldies circuit, singing her old hits as “Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes”, as none of the group owned the original name. She and Katherine were in the process of suing to regain the name under the Truth in Music Act, when she died of a stroke in 2011. Of the other Marvelettes, Katherine and Juanita are retired, though Katherine still gives regular interviews about her time with the group, and Wanda’s mental health has apparently improved enough in the last few years that she can perform again. They’re all apparently happy with their situations now, and don’t miss the old life. They do miss the recognition, though. For the twenty-fifth, fortieth, fiftieth, and sixtieth anniversary celebrations of Motown, TV specials were produced featuring many of the label’s acts, and honouring the label’s history. None of the members of the first group to hit number one on the label were invited to be part of any of them.

This episode Suzie discusses the career of Robert Coates and Trevor rocks out with Doctor in Distress WHAT THE HISTORY? Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast, or find us on iTunes.… Continue reading "The Cracked Actor and The Distressed Doctor"

This episode Suzie discusses the career of Robert Coates and Trevor rocks out with Doctor in Distress WHAT THE HISTORY? Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast, or find us on iTunes.… Continue reading "The Cracked Actor and The Distressed Doctor"

Episode 119 of the Doctor Who: Alhambra Podcast, featuring Brett, Liam, Humphrey, and Legeon. In this podcast we: Introduction (00:00:00) Series 11 reflection (00:03:54) War Master Box Set (00:13:44)  "I don't like the mastering...but please look past the special effects" talk (00:16:39)  Canon talk from previous podcast, referencing previous podcasts (00:20:45)  Podcast 100 & Katerina talk (00:30:53)  Main Range release Black Thursday and the other one (00:37:12) Sorchies and forcing one another to listen/watch things that are the absolute worst...stay tuned as this could be something we are doing for patreon. (00:42:16) Proposing the idea for Ryan doing a Dodo (00:48:02) Extra noises (00:49:17) Ravenous 3 & UNIT: INCURSION...the sound of us actually reviewing something! (00:51:21) Primords & John Dorney & Canon...OH MY! (00:56:53) Further Odd moments from the podcast, including Humphrey's Dalek Voice, LINDA Volume 1, (01:05:25)  Big Finish Fan Page/Juliet Landore controversy (01:12:13) Primords & John Dorney & Canon...OH MY! (00:56:53) Further Odd moments from the podcast, including Humphrey's Dalek Voice, LINDA Volume 1, (01:05:25)  Big Finish Fan Page/Juliet Landore controversy (01:12:13) Ian Levine, My Wife, Big Finish curing cancer, and Liam predicting the future (01:23:50)  Humphrey loses it and Copyright and Contact (01:29:35) *** We are looking to add a "Mail Section" or "Listener Response Talk" to our show, where you, the listener pose questions about one of our thoughts, revisit previous takes, or perhaps you have an original take that you would like to share...whatever it is, we'd love to hear it!   Email the show at: alhambraaudio@gmail.com  Send the show a message or a DM on Twitter to either Brett @Mavic_Chen or The Show @AlhambraPodcast.  You can also Tweet the other hosts: Liam @djNezumi and Humphrey:@HumphGPC Visit our website: AlhambraPodcast.weebly.com

EP 110 of The Doctor Who: Alhambra Podcast featuring Brett, Liam, Humphrey, and Legeon. *** We are looking to add a "Mail Section" or "Listener Response talk to our show, where you the listener pose questions about one of our thoughts, revisit previous takes, or perhaps you have an original take that you have, whatever it is, we'd love to hear it!  You may email the show at: alhambraaudio@gmail.com. Send the show a message or a DM on Twitter to either Brett @Mavic_Chen or The Show @AlhambraPodcast.  You can also Tweet the other hosts: Liam @djNezumi and Humphrey:@HumphGPC Visit our website: AlhambraPodcast.weebly.com In this episode, Brett, Liam, Humphrey, and Legeon have perhaps the most candid podcast ever!  We briefly talk about Emissary of the Daleks & 8th Doctor Time War Box Set 3, Twitter insanity from Ian Levine, the Whittaker and Chipnall oddness.  Then we list our favorite New Who companions throughout the podcast. We talk about BF's script writing news and what we'd do if we could write a script. Many off topic conversations ensued, ending with laughing at one another and throwing in some drops.  

Take 2 all-time favourite companions, add '70s plot tropes, '80s lighting and the musical stylings of Ian Levine. What could go wrong? Mary Helen Norris joins us to talk K-9 And Company. But can it work its witchcraft on our hearts?   Mary Helen is the editor of the new anthology: Defending Earth: The Adventures of Sarah Jane Smith, available digitally now or pre-order your physical copies by mid-March at https://defendingearth.bigcartel.com/

This is a special musical presentation of Freedom is Coming by the Chancel Choir at Faith Lutheran Church in Okemos, Michigan with percussionist Ian Levine.

the goods: https://catandcloud.com/ Welcome to the most annoying episode ever. You're welcome. Wilbur Curtis: https://www.wilburcurtis.com/ Steeped Coffee: https://steepedcoffee.com/ Hat by ex-housemate Ian Levine: https://makekanyekanyeagain.org/

Tune in for part two of two, as Ian Levine makes his debut on the debut of Cat and Cloud's newest endeavor - the podcast full of caffeine and friendship.

Happy New Year (eve) everyone and to help you bring in the new year in style we release our second minisode / cutaway! The 28th February 1985 saw the first attempt at the cancellation / postponement/ hiatus / whatever of the classic series starring the then Doctor, Colin Baker. To protest (at this let's be honest ludicrous move) in March of that same year Ian Levine harnessed the vocal talents of many a Z list celebrity to 'sing' for the series return to the small screen in a musical opus called Doctor in Distress. To celebrate the upcoming 30th anniversary of this particular single, Rob and Mark again follow the podcasting herd and proudly release their first DVD commentary to accompany the music video for this fine recording. And just like U2's middling recent album we are giving it away free! So get your New Years Eve party rolling in style, for as a special bonus we include the instrumental version of this classic for everyone to sing along! Follow along with us via http://goo.gl/EpzkVK 42 to Doomsday will return in 2015!

Happy New Year (eve) everyone and to help you bring in the new year in style we release our second minisode / cutaway! The 28th February 1985 saw the first attempt at the cancellation / postponement/ hiatus / whatever of the classic series starring the then Doctor, Colin Baker. To protest (at this let's be honest ludicrous move) in March of that same year Ian Levine harnessed the vocal talents of many a Z list celebrity to 'sing' for the series return to the small screen in a musical opus called Doctor in Distress. To celebrate the upcoming 30th anniversary of this particular single, Rob and Mark again follow the podcasting herd and proudly release their first DVD commentary to accompany the music video for this fine recording. And just like U2's middling recent album we are giving it away free! So get your New Years Eve party rolling in style, for as a special bonus we include the instrumental version of this classic for everyone to sing along! Follow along with us via http://goo.gl/EpzkVK 42 to Doomsday will return in 2015!

In this episode Phil & Paul return once again to the world of Big Finish with a look at the 2002 story Spare Parts starring Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton.  This story is widely regarded as a classic of the Big Finish range so it was with much trepidation that they recorded this review.  Will they agree on its classic status or is it a fuss over nothing and the hype machine has worked overtime?  Listen to find out but beware, this review is full of spoilers! And in the news this week, casting news for series 8, a cancellation of a Doctor Who tour down under, DVD news and Phil and Paul give their opinion on the missing episodes spat between Ian Levine and himself.  And in a short, sharp trip to Omega's Tat Corner there is future tat!!  Well, maybe.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: , Ian Levine (born 22 June 1953, in , ) is an , , and . He is also a well-known fan of the long-running television show . Levine attended in Blackpool from 1963 to 1970. In 1996 Levine traced over 660 members of his own family on his mother's side and organised the enormous Cooklin family reunion, on 21 July in London. This has been called the biggest family reunion of all time[], and was covered on the BBC Evening News, and, extensively, in . Between 1997 and 1999 Ian Levine produced and directed the documentary film The Strange World of Northern Soul, an anthology of the underground music cult. This was a video box set, containing over 12 hours of footage with booklet and CD, and incorporating 131 performances by the legendary American soul acts who had, in most cases, never been filmed before. The event premiered at the King George's Hall in to an audience of 1300 in July 1999. The Strange World of Northern Soul was released on DVD as a six-disc box set, replete with extras, in 2003. In May 2000, Levine organised the reunion of his entire school class from the 1960s at in Blackpool. All 30 members of class 3A were found and brought together to experience lessons, in the gym, a rugby match, and an assembly with their original teachers, all in original style school uniform. The reunion was filmed and shown by the BBC. Contents Music career Levine is most noted for his work in the genres of , , , and . Earlier in his career he was a disc jockey at the , and became an avid collector of soul, , and . In the mid-1970s he also produced for disco, leading into the genre's evolution into Hi-NRG. Levine was also a resident DJ at the legendary gay disco , an important venue in 1980s gay . He and songwriting partner were among the main figures in the development of the Hi-NRG style and its moderate success in , writing and producing "So Many Men, So Little Time" by (two million sales), and "" by (seven million sales). During the 1980s and 1990s he mixed a number of hits for a variety of artists, including , , , , , , , and . He also founded his own groups: Seventh Avenue, which featured two members of ; ; and . He also wrote and produced for the successful , and for . He has written and produced several TV themes including "Discomania", "Gypsy Girl", "ITV Celebrity Awards Show", "Christmasmania" and "Abbamania". In 1987, Levine began recording some former artists from . By 1989 the project had grown in size and a reunion of 60 stars in , outside the original building, attracted attention from several media outlets. was launched as a record label, initially distributed by PRT and later Pacific, then Charly and finally . By the time the project ended in the mid 1990s, over 850 songs had been recorded by 108 artists who had all been formerly signed to . As an album range, the project continues to be released to this day, but the most successful single was by an artist who hadn't recorded for twenty three years, , with "Footsteps Following Me", co-written with Levine and Ivy Jo Hunter, the man who wrote "". In 2007, Levine formed the label Centre City Records, on which he has released four albums: , Disco 2008, Yesterday and Tomorrow (a collection of his 30 greatest hits, re-interpreted by his current roster of artists) and Northern Soul 2008. In 2010 Ian Levine formed a new boy band called "Inju5tice". The band launched their career with the song "A Long Long Way From Home" which was a commercial failure. Ian backed away from the project shortly after. Inju5tice later went on to become ELi'Prime. Doctor Who Levine is well known as a fan of the television series Doctor Who. Levine was, in part, responsible for the return of a number of missing episodes of the show to the BBC's archives, and was involved in stopping the destruction of further serials after he learnt that they were being discarded. He also retained many off-air recordings. An unofficial continuity consultant during the early 1980s, some observers have speculated that the monster played by in the Doctor Who episode "" was based on Levine and reflects his role in fandom. The Abzorbaloff design was created by "Design a Doctor Who Monster"-winner William Grantham. "Doctor in Distress" In 1985, when the BBC announced that the series would be placed on an eighteen-month hiatus, and the show's cancellation was widely rumoured, Levine gathered a group of actors from the series, together with a number of minor celebrities, to record a protest single called . The participants included the series' two lead actors, and , as well as other actors associated with the series such as and . Also involved were members of the bands , and . was one of the musicians involved in the record's production. Levine has since claimed that the song was originally the brain child of , a production manager at the BBC and partner of , the producer of the show at the time. The single was released under the name “Who Cares?”, and was universally panned. Levine himself said later, "It was an absolute balls-up fiasco. It was pathetic and bad and stupid. It tried to tell the Doctor Who history in an awful high-energy song. It almost ruined me.” Later history In recent years he has claimed that he co-wrote the story with series script editor , although the writer's credit is officially given to “Paula Moore”, a pseudonym for Saward's then girlfriend, . Levine's claim is that he wrote the story outline and that Saward wrote the script, with Woolsey contributing nothing. This version of events was flatly denied by Eric Saward in a interview, as well as by Woolsey herself when she was interviewed by , and for their series of Doctor Who reference books. Levine at one time worked in close collaboration with the on various DVD releases of classic Doctor Who serials, though he no longer produces documentaries for them. Levine's efforts to locate missing episodes of Who continue. On 20 April 2006, it was announced on the BBC children's show that Levine would purchase a life-sized for anyone who would return one of the 108 missing episodes; details were provided on Blue Peter's website. DVDs Ian Levine has also been responsible for producing a number of extras on the Doctor Who releases: the documentaries "Over the Edge" and "Inside the Spaceship" were included on the 3-disc set "The Beginning", while "Genesis of a Classic" appeared on the release for . Levine has also contributed to many other classic series DVDs, appearing as an in-vision interviewee on occasions, and by allowing the Restoration Team access to his private collection of rare studio footage and off-air recordings. K-9 and Company He also composed the theme music for , an unsuccessful pilot for a proposed Doctor Who spin-off series featuring the robotic dog and . American comic books Levine also possesses one of the world's great collections of American comic books. He claims to have the only complete set of in the world, with at least one copy of each DC comic book sold at retail (i.e., not including promotional or giveaway comics) from the 1930s to present. The last vintage comic book he obtained for his collection was a copy of New Adventure Comics #26, which he acquired at the in July 2005. Although Levine's complete DC comic book collection does not include all of the hundreds of different promotional (non-retail) and giveaway comic books that DC released over the decades (the particular identifying information for many of them has been lost due to DC not retaining decades-old licensing information), his DC promotional and giveaway collection contains the vast majority of all of the DC promotional and giveaway comic books currently known to have existed, and is perhaps the most complete DC promotional and giveaway collection currently in existence. The writer and comic book expert Paul Sassienie began cataloging, grading and certificating 'The Ian Levine' collection in May 2011. References ^ Levine, Ian (7 February 2007). . Ian Levine's MySpace blog. Retrieved 11 October 2010. Bailey, David (1 April 2009 (cover date)). "The Fact of Fiction: Logopolis". (, : ) (406): 57. Phipps, Tim (8 August 2006). . . Retrieved 25 November 2006. "I've no idea if [Russell T. Davies] was explicitly thinking of Ian Levine when he wrote the Abzorbaloff, but I can't help but suspect that Levine was bouncing somewhere around the back of his head." Petridis, Alexis (24 November 2006). (free registration required). . Retrieved 25 November 2006. McGurk, Stuart (22 October 2005). (free registration required). . Retrieved 25 November 2006. Levine, Ian (26 November 2006). (free registration required). forum. Retrieved 26 November 2006.[] . Blue Peter website. . 19 April 2006. Archived from on 31 August 2006. Retrieved 25 November 2006. Zurzolo, Vincent (9 August 2005). . Comic Zone. World Talk Radio. Retrieved 25 November 2006. Levine, Ian (15 July 2005). . Collectors Society Message Board. Retrieved 25 November 2006. External links at the

The Three Who Rule covered the gamut of Whoish happenings this week, from the shocking revelation that Meglos will return for David Tennant's finale (unconfirmed) to Ian Levine's rather tenuous grasp on the the fundamental underpinnings of the internet (hint: don't fear the link.) And amongst this madness was revealed the Miniscope, a new weekly feature examining a writer, producer or other behind the scenes chieftain whose drive and talent brought us the Classic Who episodes we love so dearly. Up first is Robert Holmes, or at the very least his contribution to the ouvres of Mr. Troughton and Mr. Pertwee. Enjoy, dear listeners.

More news than you can shake a stick at and a highlight of the Eccleston era (Rob Shearman's "Dalek") being commented upon, the Three Who Rule blather on for an hour and a half about the happenings in the Who world for the past week (including a discussion on new companion Karen Gillan), and touch on the introduction of a Classic Series icon to NuWho. All this and the latest on Ian Levine and Lizo Mzimba at your fingertips on Radio Free Skaro!Check out the show notes on www.radiofreeskaro.com.

The Three Who Rule deal with a dearth of real news the best way they know how,: with inane chatter involving the likes of superfan Ian Levine and his escapades on Twitter, Warren's continuing animosity toward the McCoy era and coming to grips with our loving hatred of other Doctor Who podcasts all while dealing with technical issues that forced actual editing. Come join the fun!

The Third Guy had a first rate week, and he recounts to both Warren and Steven (and you, dear listeners) how he met Doctor Who scribe Steven Moffat, Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, superfan Ian Levine, and many many others in his ongoing adventures in the UK. We also have some bits of news and commentary, speculation about the upcoming Christmas special, and the usual tomfoolery and nonsense. All this and there isn't even anything Who related on the air...except us, of course.