Martha Reeves & The Vandellas

19/07/2010

Hitsville anthems @ The Arches, Glasgow

The Arches
Glasgow
4/5

Martha Reeves is 69 today and revelling in the party atmosphere inside The Arches; a cover of Van Morrison’s ’70s soul tribute ‘Wild Night’ kicks things off and is followed by the crowd singing ‘Happy Birthday’. So far, so good; but the question is, can the Vandellas really offer anything other than a hint at former glories or is this just another nostalgia-fest for the numerous 50-somethings in the audience? Candi Staton closed the last ever night of the much-missed Tryptich festival at the same venue with a tight, energetic set but Ronnie Spector was so poor that at times I prayed she had been incarcerated rather than her flaky former husband.

The Vandellas have been reshuffled, re-imagined, picked up and put down by Martha a few times over the decades but her sisters Lois and Delphine, who flank her tonight, have been a constant for some years now. And Reeves has always tried to promote Motown’s place in music history, with a varying degree of success. A low point was the Motorcity Records farrago of the late ’80s/ early ’90s when Reeves was persuaded by fantasist fan-boy Ian Levine to contribute to his dream of resuscitating Motown’s legacy. He attempted some weird reanimation of the label’s sound by using original Motown writers, producers and artists; but he chose to replace the musicians with Fairlight synths. The seemingly evergreen ‘Sound of Young America’ for once sounded aged and worn.

Tonight, however, Reeves is joined by a full band, brass section and all, and the carefully orchestrated set keeps to the basics and keeps the fringes, bobs and bald-heads moving almost non-stop throughout. Despite being stage-managed and MCed by a guy who looks like a marketing manager in a safari suit, there is little that is sterile tonight and the audience are rapt. ‘Jimmy Mack’ is the perfect example; an extended intro has Reeves exhorting the equally ‘emotional’ crowd to bid her lover from ‘Nineteen-Sixty-uh…’ back. “He’s an old man now,” she shouts; the knowingness could be cloying but it works, for tonight at least.

The Hitsville anthems come thick and fast; ‘Nowhere to Run’ and ‘(Love is Like a) Heatwave’ are joyous and there’s even time for a medley comprising The Four Tops’ ‘I Can’t Help Myself’, Stevie Wonder’s ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours’ and Eddie Floyd’s ‘Knock on Wood’. It all leads, inevitably, to Motown’s unofficial anthem; ‘Dancing in the Streets’. Reeves lists the dozens of artists who have covered the song before launching into an impressively spry rendition of her own much loved version to close the night. There was little room for improvisation tonight but there was also no room for error; we got what we came for and that’s not always easy to say. Ask Ronnie Spector.

Derek Kennedy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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