The Chi-Lites – Have You Seen Her?

 

At school, at the bottom of a dingy staircase that led from the end of the corridor where Room 5 was, where nothing much good ever happened even though it wasn't used for science, down to the library where the best books were locked away in the Head of English's private room under lock and key (and I only mean the contemporary poetry), there was a noticeboard on which one could post 'for sale', or other notices, once approved by the prefect in charge of it.

It was a bit like the adverts in the back of Disco 45 magazine in which traders would hope to sell or swap the records, or maybe even press cuttings, of the pop heroes they felt they'd outgrown in order to obtain material relating to their latest heroes, like,

Would like to swap Sugar Sugar by The Archies for Machine Head by Deep Purple.

If that doesn't look like a misguided business deal to you by now, it does to me and I'd take up Debbie from Derby on her offer if only I had the LP she was so desperate to get. We might think we live in difficult times now but in those days, actually having your favourite records was a luxury for many of us. You chose very carefully which to buy and cherished those you had. Which is why it came as a shock to see Have You Seen Her? by the Chi-Lites for sale by somebody so rueful that they thought it was 'the worst record they ever bought'. I might not have had the 30p required to take on the masterpiece but heaven only knows how much I wanted to take it off his hands because I loved it.

Otherwise, until many years later, routinely adding The Chi-Lites and all their other gorgeous songs like Oh, Girl and Stoned Out of My Mind, you do always get what you wanted except it's a bit after the fact.

I will never know who it was that bought Have You Seen Her? and regretted it so much. I will never know if he saw the error of his ways. I've changed my mind about music in the almost 50 years in between but one thing I never doubted was Eugene Record and the Chi-Lites, who came from Chicago, not from Detroit or Philadelphia, but at least they retrieve something for that city from the dismal band that borrowed its name for their dreary million-selling records.

Have You Seen Her? is a spoken poem that rises to song. You can call it kitsch or sentimental all you like but I'm word perfect on it, it is embedded in me and I know I can't hide from a memory though day after day, I've tried