大象传媒

From 'Hungry For Love' by San Remo Golden Strings to Laura Lee's 'Festival Time' - by Bob Stanley

Instrumentals were an integral part of the northern soul scene, from the Marketts' Stirrin' Up Some Soul to the Just Brothers' Sliced Tomatoes. Sometimes they were nothing more than backing tracks for vocal A-sides - the atmospheric, harp-led Sidra's Theme was the backing for Ronnie and Robyn's single As Long As You Love Me, and was apparently first played on the scene by Ian Levine in 1973. San Remo Strings' Festival Time, a big enough club hit to reach no.39 in Britain when it was re-issued in 1971, was initially just the instrumentation for Laura Lee's To Win Your Love in 1966 - the instrumental, intriguingly, proved to be much more popular.

San Remo Golden Strings, as they were originally known, were a combination of Motown's top session musicians and members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Arranger and jazz trumpeter Gil Askey manned their short run of singles, which started in 1965 with Hungry For Love, a US Top 30 hit.

Hungry For Love was big enough to necessitate an album - San Remo Golden Strings Swing - which included Askey's interpretations of chestnuts like Ol' Man River and Blueberry Hill.
Significantly, the Strings recorded for Ric-Tic rather than Motown - allegedly, the pay for session musicians at Motown wasn't great, and so they often moonlighted for other Detroit labels, notably Golden World (check the Debonaires' gorgeous How's Your New Love Treating You for another great Motown escapee) and its subsidiary Ric-Tic, which was also the initial home of Motown hero Edwin Starr. Ric-Tic was active from 1964 (when its first single was Gino Washington's wonderfully named Gino Is A Coward) to September 1968 when Motown acquired it along with Golden World, then promptly closed them down. The San Remo Golden Strings album was immediately re-issued on Motown and Edwin Starr's UK chart career exploded with two of his biggest Ric-Tic hits - Stop Her On Sight and Headline News - being re-issued as a double-A side, reaching no.11 in early 1969.

Most of the other Ric-Tic acts were casually discarded by Motown, but two of them - Laura Lee and the Flaming Ember - were picked up by Holland/Dozier/Holland's new Invictus/Hot Wax set-up in 1969. Their ensuing success must have rankled with Berry Gordy - after all, he'd only bought Golden World and Ric-Tic to shut down the opposition. Both H-D-H and Gordy neglected another abandoned Ric-Tic act, the Detroit Emeralds, who went on to score hits like Feel The Need In Me in the seventies. There was too much talent in the city to keep tabs on.
Laura Lee's vocal version of Festival Time would eventually earn itself a UK release on Tamla Motown in 1972. Gil Askey would go on to be the arranger on the Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings The Blues, before retiring to Australia where he died in 2014. Finally, a quick note on Festival Time itself - I'd advise any northern soul vinyl devotee to seek out the original Ric-Tic 45, as the UK Tamla Motown version was issued in stereo and sounds bloody awful. Call me a purist if you will.