Weird charm can only take you so far, and this isn’t great – it’s a mess, really, and probably an unsalvageable one at that – but it’s not completely horrific, and I keep finding myself strangely drawn to play it again. (4)
A first little glimpse into Brenda’s future, the role she’d go on to play now that the A-list superstar masterplan Motown had mapped out for her lay scrunched up in the trash. Bear this one in mind the next time we meet Miss Holloway. (6)
Quite astonishing on every level, this is the standard by which every other all-or-nothing romantic epic should henceforth be judged. Magnificent. (10)
For Motown fans, Lisa Miller will always be remembered as a failed attempt at replacing Stevie Wonder as the company’s resident child star. This is a bad record, but even on this evidence, she deserved a better fate than that. (2)
It’s a pity that there were no more singles, that we don’t get to track her development into a mature artist here on Motown Junkies; this isn’t great, it’s silly and annoying, but there’s enough here to suggest this might have been an interesting story to watch. (3)
Genuinely terrible, the sort of thing that gives all French pop music a bad name (as well as leading directly to the likes of Peter Sarstedt), and completely unforgiveable. (1)
An irrelevant jaunt for Motown here at the height of their mid-Sixties powers, perhaps – the label’s own writers and singers were coming up with better pop records than this one in-house – but the whole thing ends up being sneakily likeable, and I’ve no quarrel with it at all. (5)
I’m left with the feeling that, were you able to somehow scrape Tony off of this, along with some of the Hollywood excesses of the LA orchestra, the end result might actually come out as quite a nice little song. Of course, we can’t, and it doesn’t, but the failure’s not as ignominious as it might have been. (2)
Ridiculous, but there’s the tiniest kernel of understanding buried in here along with the finger-snapping tune; not enough for Tony to really embrace his inner ham in the style of Bobby Breen, and he’s not a good enough singer to tease out the dignity in schlock a la Billy Eckstine, but enough to make me steer away from giving it the lowest score possible. (2)
Yet again when writing about a Stevie 45 from this weird between-the-wars period, this feels like something of a pointless exercise. (4)
At worst, this is several older men indulging themselves at a starlet’s expense; at best, it’s some people we don’t really know all that well having a blast at someone else’s party, while we turn up late and then stand by the punch bowl and try to work out who’s who. (4)
Motown Junkies 