The Best of The Stylistics

One evening recently, while the Good Wife was away helping her mother celebrate 89 years on Planet Rock, I took the opportunity to air a guilty pleasure. Michael McDonald's Motown. There, the cat's out of the bag. Not that I've anything really to be ashamed about: he sounds like a very decent, modest individual, who's tickled to death by younger generations' re-discovery of what has been dubbed 'yacht rock'. That is: something soft, slick and redolent of the '70s and '80s.

The voice is a slight bone of contention in this household. My wife thinks that there's something too knowingly crowd-pleasing about old McDonald's voice – in a kind of X-Factor way. In other words, she contends, he knows that he's got a great voice and milks it too self-consciously. She's got a point, so I don't foist it upon her. But a great voice is a gift that can't be helped. Besides, voices are a very personal thing, and personally his voice – knowing or not – still delivers a frisson. I've been listening to it since the early days of Steely Dan. Before he joined the Doobies, I thought the 'Brothers' were to be lumped with the ludicrous Lynyrd Skynyrd and other purveyors of greasy, long-haired, oily denim-ed American. Yes, one could argue that 'Minute By Minute' and all those songs that transformed the Doobies could be classified as music for the yachting fraternity, but let's not forget 'Ya Mo Be There' with James Ingram in the days when Quincy Jones was the producer of choice. Not to mention a ridiculously funky version of Stevie Wonder's 'Higher Ground'.

On Motown, moreover, he has the good taste to cover at least five Marvin Gaye numbers, possibly the greatest come-to-bed voice in anyone's lifetime. But it's his lovely version of 'Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)' that got me really excited – and homing in on my only (treasured) Stylistics' album. In fact, the song shouldn't be on Motown, since it's one of any number of brilliant melodies by the great song-writing team of Thom Bell and Linda Creed supplied to the likes of the Stylistics, the Delfonics and the Detroit Spinners. And none of them, if you ignore the Spinners' early days, were Motown artists.

I should at this point issue a government health warning. The Best Of album is not to be confused with Volume 2, by which time Thom Bell had taken off and the Stylistics became mere puppets of the Hugo & Luigi production team that happened to own the Avco label. Whereas this was the era of the album, all those black vocal groups – add to that previous bunch the Dells, the Detroit Emeralds, the Chi-Lites (and maybe a few more) – were primarily purveyors of singles. Which is probably my way of arguing for the occasional greatest hits collection in my vie en albums.

There was a time in my life, foolish youth, when I ridiculed the Stylistics each time they appeared on Top of the Pops. No doubt today's fans of gangsta rap and death metal would also sneer at the seersucker frock coats, the oversized bow ties, the ruffled shirt fronts, the cheesy dance routines and that dangerously high falsetto of Russell Thompkins jr. I was wrong.

By the time I was holding down a regular job – and after seeing the light cast by What's Going On? – I learnt to love the Stylistics (or maybe in truth the songs of Bell and Creed). I remember taking a train trip one day from Brighton to nearby Haywards Heath. In my capacity as training officer, I was to deliver startling news of some new rule or regulation about unemployment benefit to the manageress of the small office in that dormitory Sussex town. 

We sat in her backroom office, away from the gaze of 'The Great Unwashed' – as one troublesome member of staff used to refer to the unemployed – and we talked turkey. It wasn't very interesting and for some reason the conversation drifted onto the topic of the Stylistics. We discovered a shared passion (the holy grail of influencing skills) and pretty soon we were singing their greatest hits with gusto. God knows what the staff and their probably well-scrubbed clients thought on the other side of the door. So that's what civil servants do all day... taxpayers' money... pampered menials...

But who could blame us really? Benefits were boring, and what songs they are. Apart from their first hit, the rather ingenuous 'You're a Big Girl Now', and the slightly saccharine 'Let's Put It All Together', all of the other eight songs are Bell and Creed songs. And all bar the self-consciously jaunty 'Rockin' Roll Baby' (which does boast the gloriously daft couplet, 'Got a funky walk/In his little orthopaedic shoes') shimmer with the kind of sublime soaring melodies that Burt Bacharach used to write for Dionne Warwick. They kick off with 'You Make Me Feel Brand New', and that wonderful moment when Russell Thompkins nudges Airrion Love out of the lead-vocal spot ('Only you/Came when I needed a friend/Believed in me through thick and thin'), and they end with arguably the best of the lot – and certainly in terms of social commentaries almost the equal of Marvin Gaye's 'Inner City Blues' – the moody, magnificent 'People Make the World Go Round'.

In between, there's hit after hit: 'Betcha By Golly, Wow', 'Break Up to Make Up', 'I'm Stone in Love with You', 'Let's Put it All Together', 'You Are Everything' and 'Stop, Look, Listen...' I rest my case – and bring us back to Michael McDonald. He and Russell are about the same age. A little older than the Good Wife and me. When she gets back, I'll re-file  the former but give her a taste of the latter. We'll be up all night, singing love songs.