A success all round, then, leaving aside the nagging curiosity as to what might have happened with just a couple more days’ work: a fitting way to cap the best year so far in the Motown careers of both Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, now restored to their full powers. Roll on 1966. (8)
Genuinely excellent, the sort of thing that helps give Motown its good name. And it’s better than anything the Miracles have ever done in this mode until now, there’s no doubt about it. Excellent. Just not quite as excellent as some of the Miracles’ 1965 highlights. (8)
It’s hard to see this as anything other than filler, both on the album and on this single – once again, I doubt many fans have this at the top of their lists of Miracles favourites – but at least it’s very pretty filler. (5)
It’s not bad, and I’ll never turn down the chance to hear the golden-era Miracles doing what they do best. It’s just that after all the riches they’ve given us recently, and with all the riches they’re going to be giving us just around the corner, this feels like a stopgap, and therefore something of a let-down. (5)
Sumptuous in its beauty, quietly devastating in its lyrics… I don’t know how he’s doing this. (8)
For the second time in a row, the Miracles are shafted out of a (10) simply because I’ve only got fifty to award, and I’d run out of them. But, again, if you were to say this one was your favourite Miracles single, favourite Motown single, even… I’d get it. (9)
A listener at the end of 1964 might well have wondered, with good reason, whether the Miracles really had a place in Motown’s brave new world of corporate greed and thundering cash registers. This pair of sides not only put such doubts to rest, but showed the Miracles to be at the vanguard of the company’s very best acts. Quite exceptional stuff. (8)
At a Q&A event in a high school classroom later in the year, Berry Gordy was asked by one of the students: “How do you find guys like Smokey Robinson?” His reply was curt: “You don’t find guys like Smokey Robinson.” (9)
After the bland rock-out blind alley of the A-side, it’s just good to hear the Miracles back on something like their usual form. (7)
A waste of the talents of everyone involved, wafer-thin and surprisingly ill-suited to its lead singer; even Smokey isn’t taking this seriously, so there’s really no reason we should bother. (3)
Too slow and gentle, and (more importantly) too meandering, for commercial success, and lacking the killer hook to take it to the very top level – but it’s beautiful and it’s honest, and if a record has those things going for it, you can’t really say too much against it. (7)
