Sunday Notes

 My Cultural Fix is a questionnaire filled in by guest well-known people in The Times on Saturdays. It has been going long enough for patterns to have emerged, like most people who can't play the piano wish they could, a lot of people think Leonard Cohen should be taken seriously and those that have tried but failed or not even tried to read Ulysses or Proust think they should have. They're not as hard as you'd think but I feel the same about The Faerie Queen and Paradise Lost.

Two recent answers have impressed, though. This week Philippa Gregory says, in answer to 'the poem that saved me', that she's only been saved once and 'a poem would have been no use at all'. I've been surprised by all those previous respondents who considered themselves 'saved' by a poem. Colm Toibin nominated Buxtehude's choral music as 'under-rated' and good for him.

Of course, most are tempted to give fine-sounding answers to these questions about cultural reference points and are unlikely to cite Sugar, Sugar by the Archies but R4's quiz Counterpoint asks contestants to declare the first record they bought. Top marks to the lady that said Clog Dance by Violinski. We can be appalled or fascinated by other people's enthusiasms and occasionally agree to a large extent. A similar thing happens with the various Top 10's listed in Calling Out Around The World: A Motown Reader ed. Kingsley Abbot.

I know as much as I need to know by now about the hit factory, its history, personalities and process. It is mainly about 'being any good' but there's way of making sure you are and business is business. But the Top 10's, and the Top 100 voted for by the Motown fan club, diagnose some divergence between my long-established idea of top Motown and the more insider view. 

My Girl, with the Temptations singing Smokey is perhaps the most ubiquitous selection but after that I don't think I'm purist enough to agree with the dedicated afficiandos. Nobody likes I'm Still Waiting and the only list it appears in is the best-sellers, with the likes of Lionel Richie. Walk Away Renee is not generally regarded as a Four Tops essential. Others of mine are eclipsed by the likes of Dancing in the Street which is obviously not as good as Nowhere to Run. But it's not a time trial and one person's idea of 'best' is another's also ran.

No, there's no need to ask. My Top 8 Tamla Motown are so long carved into me that they can't be erased. In no order, because one couldn't-

Diana Ross & the Supremes - Stop ! in the Name of Love

The Four Tops - Walk Away Renee

The Temptations - Just My Imagination

The Isley Brothers - This Old Heart of Mine

The Jackson 5 - I Want You Back

Diana Ross - I'm Still Waiting

Martha Reeves & the Vandellas - Nowhere to Run

Smokey Robiinson & the Miracles - The Tracks of My Tears

 

at least five of those have at one time or another been said by me to be the greatest pop record of all time, most recently the Jackson 5.

The Elgins, Heaven Must Have Sent You is making a case for itself for a place in the last two but the heartbreak comes in having to leave so many masterpieces out. Many of What Becomes of the Broken-hearted, I Heard it Through the Grapevine, My Girl, Stoned Love, Baby I need Your Lovin and more of the unashamed glamour of Miss Ross & the Supremes and Brenda Holloway can't be in a 10. Twenty would still mean leaving out so many gorgeous things so the Top 10 is left open at the end, like all the first drafts or abandoned projects I leave to go back to on some unspecified future date.

 

Which I hope won't include The Church Fair, the slight period comedy that I've gradually compiled over the winter with all its derivative inter-textual references to All Gas and Gaiters, Oscar Wilde, Fawlty Towers and The Two Ronnies. Books are made out of other books. But I'll have achieved it if I can do more with Act 5 than reprise all that's been written so far.

Writing should be written because it needs to be, not because one is aiming for a word count, but I'd like it to be a bit more than a pilot for a sitcom. Somebody at school once timed an ITV episode of Thirty Minute's Worth, starring Count Arthur Strong's ancestor, Harry Worth, at 17 minutes. Guidance on the internet suggests that 130 per minute gives an idea of duration. I doubt if I'll make it an hour's worth but it'll do.

One day I might have the capacity, ability and inclination to publish kindles on Amazon. The Collected Poems, the Collected Essays, the play. Never mind the music writing. Now, there's something to look forward to.