Music - Richard Cook on the flares and flair of the Isley Brothers

It's hard to decide if the Isley Brothers were the toughest or the most ridiculous soul group of their time. Although the central trio of Ronnie, Kelly and Rudy Isley began recording as far back as 1957, their time was really a ten-year stretch which opened in 1973 with 3+3 and ran out a decade later with the forgotten masterpiece of 1983, Between the Sheets. Tough, because they channelled a sense of black power into their records more convincingly than almost any other R&B group; ridiculous, because they are even now most vividly remembered as the band with the most preposterous wardrobe of all time. Wow, I thought, when I first bought their Showdown album in 1978. Look at the shocking finery of those sequinned mile-wide flares, those pearly-king jackets, that tonnage of gold chain. Then I snapped out of it, and remembered we were all punks over here now.

To its credit, It's Your Thing: the story of the Isley Brothers (Legacy, 3 CDs) doesn't shy away from the costumes (one article in the booklet offers a socio-political analysis of their clothes over 40 years). But the music's the thing. The Isleys really had four different bites at a lasting success. Their early R&B hits "Shout" and "Twist and Shout" were enormously successful covers for Lulu and the Beatles, but they were formulaic enough to lead nowhere at a time when black vocal groups - outside of the Tamla-Motown school - were struggling. So they joined Motown in 1966, to emerge with only a couple of hits and no real affinities with the lighter, poppier style of the Detroit hit factory.

The Isleys went back to their own label, T-Neck, and toyed with a hybrid of funk and socially aware pop that gave them a hit with "It's Your Thing" in 1969. Improbable covers of hits by Stephen Stills and James Taylor kept them fed until 1973, but then they encouraged their youngest brother, Ernie, to foreground his Hendrix-derived lead guitar (Hendrix had actually played in an Isleys band before going solo himself, and he can be heard toiling away in the background on a couple of early tracks here). The hugely successful 3+3 spawned at least three immortals in "That Lady", "Summer Breeze" and "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight", and though the clothes changed, the style stayed pretty much the same for the next ten years or so.

Ronnie Isley rarely gets the credit, but his lead vocals - a yelping high tenor that could turn into a snarl as often as it poured like syrup - are as significant a part of grown-up soul as Gaye's moody platitudes or Wonder's ecstatic black pop. The other voices did little more than toss in responses to Ronnie's lead, but it was the simplicity of their style that helped it endure across a dozen albums. They never used horns or strings or choirs. The band was the regulation family unit: Ernie played many of the drum parts as well as the guitar solos, and Marvin (brother number five!) and cousin Chris Jasper did the bass and the keyboards. They knew their own minds, because the band was already a generation old when they scored their major success.

The material is split two ways: terse sloganeering such as "Fight the Power" and oozing love tunes that were meant to melt any resistance and must surely have succeeded more often than not. The Isleys weren't enlightened thinkers on the role of women, but with their dandified duds and Ronnie's spaniel-eyed croon, they weren't so far removed from the Village People either. If it smoulders a lot of the time, this is fundamentally sweet music.

Like any fan with all the originals still on the shelf, I can quarrel with many of these selections - or at least the omissions. There's nothing from the tremendous Winner Takes All, which should at least have thrown in the great dance tune of 1979, "It's a Disco Night". And there should have been more from Between the Sheets, one of the most purely lascivious records ever spawned. With Kelly gone and Rudolph departed to the ministry, the remaining brothers have made one album in the 1990s, but I'll remember them this way. We are family.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website