Why is Motown so big in the UK?

[Tailspinner]

While I can't deny that we're all subject to environmental and socio-economic influences, I've never ever considered my musical tastes in that context.

Perhaps I am an exception, however, or perhaps I'm not. I dunno. My mother was a musician and music teacher born and raised in Cambridge, and trained at the Royal College of Music in London. She had a very mixed opinion of pop music, so I had classical influences from her and pop influences from radio and TV. Hence I remember running along the beach when I was about 4 or 5 singing the main melody from the Light Cavalry Overture by Suppe, and then a year or two later singing "The Young Ones" by Cliff Richard to our dog. [[Sadly, it died not long after. Perhaps I caused it.)

A few years later, after the Beatles had arrived, pop music kind of grew up and my mother took a greater interest in it. She really liked some of the West Coast harmonies employed by Mamas and Papas and The Association, plus Scott Walker. And she really loved "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" by Marvin Gaye, as well as a lot of George Benson.

Pop music was also a means to get her pupils at school to engage in music lessons. Hence "Minuetto Allegretto" by The Wombles turned out to be very handy both in engaging her pupils and in teaching them a little bit about classical music.

As for me, Motown really started to appeal as I hit my teenage years. I loved "Reflections" by DRATS, for instance. When I was 14, I bought my very first Tamla Motown single, "Don't Know Why I Love You" by Stevie Wonder, and it went from there while all the time Tony Blackburn was playing Motown to the whole nation.

As I grew more mature, the emotional content of Motown really started to call to me, and I developed a great love for tracks such as "My Whole World Ended" by David Ruffin. And it wasn't just Motown. I also loved a lot of other soul music, as well as liking some Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin alongside pure pop such as "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" by Steam, "Sugar Sugar" by The Archies, "Space Oddity" by David Bowie and loads of other stuff across the spectrum. Plus I also liked some classical music.

My sister, meanwhile, was into Stones and Zepp and Sabbath and Curved Air etc. My younger brother loved bands such as The Police, Rush and Duran Duran and became a [[very good) drummer for a while.

I never ever considered my musical taste in the context of where I lived or the environment in which I grew up, and I still wouldn't like to attribute my musical preferences to anything other than what floats my own personal boat.

That's my experience. Yours is clearly different, so let's agree to hold different views and get back to the music itself.

Sure, variety is the spice…

Yours is an interesting bio. I guess such a wide range if influences is quite rare. I wish I’d had a similarly broad education, musically speaking. My granddad played piano, first in an orchestra, then in cinemas for the silent movies, before the work dried up and he got steady job in the stores on the Scunthorpe steel works! I’d hear him play at his home whenever we visited as a family. But apart from that I never heard proper live music until I was a teenager, at the Top Rank in Doncaster... not at a Motown special, but to see Bowie on tour as Ziggy!

My town was Goole [[though we lived just outside). You’d say it was a working-class town, a bit like a pit town but with a port instead. A fairly prosperous hard-working, hard-drinking place, where most people had a connection with the docks or some light industry nearby.

As a teenager, Northern soul and Motown were massive, and you heard the tunes everywhere you went. There was no real venue locally, so fans set up bus trips to the all-nighters on Wigan, Stoke and other places.

Tho’ I was immersed in soul and Motown I couldn’t identify at all with its image or sentiments. I wore the clothes – high waistband bags, stax shoes / loafers, fred perry's, Ben Shermans, button down collars, rolled up sleeves…. but always found the heavy and progressive bands more exciting to listen to – they seemed subversive and dangerous, and just seemed to attract more like minded souls [[no pun intended).

But, it wasn’t until much later that I began to understand more about soul/Motown and their origins and appeal. I think it probably started in the mid-1980s, when, browsing in the York University library, I came across something about Berry Gordy [[can’t remember the title) and I was amazed that a book had actually been written about Motown, and that it had been created in the way it was!

Later on, and after so watching so many tv docs about pop in general - y'know BBC4 on Friday nights, I began thinking about the thread title - why it took off in the UK the way it did - and with a bit of sociological imagination, the pieces began to fall into place, particularly when you wonder why soul/Motown weren’t appropriated by the blacks in Britain of the 60s and 70s, who mostly preferred reggae, because it was the music of the marginalised which seemed to speak to their cultural present in Britain at the time, as well as reflecting their cultural past.

I think to understand the production and consumption of culture and the arts in Britain, it’s important to understand the role played by class, something which has been long understood by marketing people as well as sociologists.

It has got a lot harder now, given the fragmentation of class through the loss of traditional industry with its heavy reliance on manual labour, and the shared attitudes, values and so on of that labour. There’s also multiculturalism; immigration from around the world, and of course feminism, and the rise of social media and the internet, which has changed the ways we relate to one another and created a ‘supermarket’ of style, taste, and of course, of music.

Any road, rambling here, and I’ve got some chips on! Thanks for the chat, interesting stuff…