Soul - Richard Cook welcomes back Smokey Robinson
Great pop voices come and go, they bloom and die away, but there is one that seems like it will go on for ever: the voice of Smokey Robinson. It has been here almost since pop began, with the Miracles' "Bad Girl", in 1959. I've often felt as if I've spent my whole life listening to him, from the helium-toned stylist of the earliest Motown hits through the series of incomparable grown-up soul albums of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1991, he released a debut record for an EMI label, SBK, called Double Good Everything, and if it wasn't his finest, there was still enough on it (the sublime "Rack Me Back", for instance) to suggest that he was entering this decade as sweetly as ever. But the record did about as much business as a car boot sale in Venice, and Robinson just slipped out of sight.
For a man who could surely live comfortably off his songwriting royalties, he could hardly have been begrudged a decent retirement. This has not been the age for an artist like Robinson. Though the 1990s have seen black music grow ever more powerful in industry terms, the force has been with rappers and rhythm men, not old soul goldies such as Robinson. He is part of an ancien regime that endures like a genteel class of old-time mafiosi, warriors of another age that the modern trade installs as trophy names: men like Ahmet Ertegun and Robinson's oldest ally, Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown and a long-time patron. Gordy sold off much of the Motown silver long ago but he keeps his hand in, and, after the dreadful times the company has endured lately, it needed a restorative stroke to bring back a bit of confidence. Who better than Smokey Robinson to remind people of Motown's magical tradition?
All well and good, but Robinson is pushing 60, and it would need a pretty extraordinary leap of faith to bring him back to the charts. Yet the first few seconds of "Sleepin' in", the opening track on Intimate (Motown), are like a sudden chill of recognition: when he croons the opening line, "I've got nowhere to go-ooohh . . . ", it's almost like he's never been away. Somewhere between a falsetto and a peculiarly chirpy tenor, his voice still sounds improbably young and free of wear. It should be an almost asexual voice, but when he gets to the line "Like butter on a biscuit, sssseepin' in . . . ", it's as lightly erotic as this gracious soul man has ever been.
The difference between Robinson and his contemporaries - Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Ernie Isley - is this ageless playfulness. Where the other soul men were satyrs, Robinson was a virtuous faun. Who could resist curling up with this smiling imp of a fellow who gave the impression that he never said a bad word and would rather whisper a sweet nothing than talk dirty? Even so, Robinson pioneered the idea of adult soul. His long string of albums after he finally left the Miracles are a textbook of intelligent songwriting, with tunes as diverse as "Virgin Man" and "What's in Your Life for Me" suggesting the range of a writer who always loved wordplay as much as he liked a swooning melody.
Most of the material on Intimate is a collaboration with producer Michael Stokes, and it settles for the easy route perhaps a shade too often to satisfy Robinson's amen corner. The music is glossy LA soul, but its easygoing quality is itself a relief in an age when most such material is overdriven to the point of exhaustion. Three songs co-credited to Berry Gordy and Michael Lovesmith seem especially thin, and there are moments when Robinson seems overprotected by synthesisers and backing vocals. But when he emerges from the digital brightness and gets some clear space to sing in, he works up the delirious emotions that have been the keynote of his whole career. Go to track seven, "The Bottom Line", and hear the entreaties of a man who seems incapable of growing old.
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