DENIECE WILLIAMS – "Free"

Interior design in the 70s could be very oppressive.

Lovely record, I’d give it a 9 easy. The 6-minute version is just sublime, has the same sweet, floaty air as Minnie Riperton’s ‘Loving You’ (with the same glass-shattering, squeaky high notes too)

Pacific mid-seventies soul; not the upmarket hustle of Philly, but the cool, long-held gazes of things like Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness,” Smokey Robinson’s “A Quiet Storm” and Earth, Wind and Fire’s “That’s The Way Of The World,” for three.

Earth, Wind and Fire’s principal member Maurice White makes a good segue point, as he began his career (when not depping for Roger Blank in the Sun Ra Arkestra) as a studio drummer for Chess Records in the mid-late ’60s. There he encountered the writer, producer and arranger Charles Stepney, a name less celebrated than those of Gamble and Huff, or Whitfield, but a man equally eager to lead soul music into a new and vaguely opulent dawn. Stepney was responsible for some of the most sublime musical art of the first half of that decade; he oversaw and co-wrote for Minnie Riperton’s early group Rotary Connection (an avant-garde Fifth Dimension) as well as orchestrating their still astonishing reworkings of songs like “Respect,” “Sunshine of Your Love” and the Stones’ “Salt Of The Earth,” and also provided the ideal framework for such visionaries as Marlene Shaw and Terry Callier to produce their most committed work.

Stepney was another one of those who did not survive 1976 – he died that year, aged just 45 – and one of his last works, in collaboration with White, was “Free,” tailored for the then 25-year-old ex-Stevie Wonder backing singer Deniece Williams – ironically, “Free” went on to keep Wonder’s own “Sir Duke” at number two here in the UK. So the record is an elegy, of sorts, and though Williams seems already to be singing as a ghost for Riperton – the latter was still recording, but the breast cancer had already been diagnosed – the record sums up all that was warm and good about the best soul music of this period; the comforting conduit of bubble from the low-pitched electric piano, the distant but stalwart horns, the cloud-like non-motion of the song’s central harmonics – every element flows into each other, like rum into blackcurrant.

Williams’ voice doesn’t soar quite as high as Riperton’s, but her performance is radiant, albeit slightly impassive. Her expansive tributes to the power of good union (“Whispering in his ear/My magic potion for love,” “Teasing hands, all his might/Give our nights such mystery”) cleverly mask the fact that “Free” is a song about not wanting to be in love, turning away from commitment; thus “But I want to be free, free, free” is a plea for extrication, and the aura of impermanence is discreetly underlined by the couplet, “Let’s not waste ecstasy/’Cos I’ll only be here for awhile.”

Consider also the superhuman – but so generously so – version performed by Billy MacKenzie on the B.E.F. Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume 2 collection, where he finally becomes the bird he couldn’t quite draw on this pitiless and rather inadequate earth.

Sorry, it’s just not my cuppa. I’d give it 4.

Yes, it’s nice to see Tony Blackburn genuinely chuffed at Deniece’s success on the Youtube TOTP clip, but the BBC backing is crapola compared to the 45 and DW herself slightly overdoes it.

Blimey, it was a blue satin trouser SUIT!

Oh, sorry DJP, didn’t notice you’d already bagged the no.2 spot. Must concentrate.

Ah, six minute full-length version – that makes a lot of sense. My copy of this is on a Ronco 20 Chart Stars album and has always seemed a bit truncated.

Because if this record has one overriding quality its in its sense of expansiveness, of uncoiling and stretching, reaching outwards onto a higher and most ethereal plane of love. I always think of it and ‘At Last I Am Free’ by Chic together as a kind of internal medley in my head.

And like Chic, I have a feeling that once you know the full-length version, the radio mix will seem a bit hemmed-in thereafter.

We must be about to enter the period where some number ones have different versions on 12″s. Have you worked out a policy for which version you’ll be discussing when we get to them, Tom?

TOTP Watch: The Tony Blackburn YouTube clip comes from the edition of April 21st 1977. Also in the studio that week were; Eddie & The Hot Rods, OC Smith, Berni Flint, Lynsey DePaul & Mike Moran, Delegation, David Dundas and Peter Gabriel, plus Legs & Co’s interpretation of ‘Sir Duke’. That looks like a pretty good week to me!

Deniece also sings backing vocals on Minnie Riperton’s great (Stevie W-produced) ‘Perfect Angel’ album, she does some very strange high-pitched wailing on ‘Every Time He Comes Around’

This reminds me a little of ‘Emotions’ by Samantha Sang which came out the following year, same sort of high dreamy mood but mostly I think because both make me think of end-of-evening slow dances at high street discos and I always have places like that in my mind when I hear them.

Will #17: The picture sleeves we use tend to be from one European country or another, since UK singles hardly ever had them at this stage. So that explains the different B-Sides too.

I remember the start of that April 21st 1977 TOTP. Eddie & the Hot Rods did “I Might Be Lying” (with new member Graeme Douglas from the Kursaal Flyers). As soon as it finished, the whole audience kind of turned their backs on them, in a “Thank God that horrible racket’s over” sort of way, and flocked over to O.C. Smith’s stage as fast as they could. Naturally, I was aghast.

Which is really the problem that I’m having with making a fair assessment of most of these first-half-of-77 hits. So deeply was I entrenched in my “JOHNNY MOPED AND THE CORTINAS WILL SAVE US ALL!” bunker mentality that just about everything else passed me by.

In my memory, “Free” is a dreary gloop-fest for The Mindless Brainwashed Masses Who Cannot Or Will Not See THE TRUTH. So I’ll go away and do some work on that perception!

Incidentally, did Johnny Moped or The Cortinas even have a single out by now? I seem to remember them coming later in the year. I expect the Step Forward and Chiswick release dates are somewhere on the interwebs.

Re: 24. I’m fairly sure that Johnny Moped’s “No One”/”Incendiary Device” was out by now. (“STICK IT IN ‘ER LUG’OLE! STICK IT IN HER OTHER PARTS!” OK, so some of this stuff has worn better.) But yeah, The Cortinas’ first single wasn’t for another month or so.

I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of Deniece’s follow-up “That’s What Friends Are For”, and am a bit gob-smacked to find that it went Top Ten in July 1977. Of all the muscial obsessions that I’ve had over the years, punk seems to have been the only one that managed to kill, albeit temporarily, my continuing interest in the singles charts.

Re 28. Chart black-spots are intriguing. I’m sure Mike and I aren’t alone.

Mine were early/mid ’75 when my football/Subbuteo obsession overrode everything including, it seems, listening to the radio. I remember Honey by Bobby Goldsboro suddenly being no.2 and Mud’s Oh Boy being no.1 when I’d never heard either before; I blame this blanking out on a combination of Bye Bye Baby and Telly Savalas’s mind-numbing runs at the top.

My only other lapse was ’87. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Rod Stewart’s Every Beat Of My Heart (have I missed anything?). This was a point when I was deeply into fanzine/DIY culture, to an embarrassingly dogmatic degree.

Having said that, I don’t think I could have retrospectively picked two better moments to zone out.

By an odd coincidence, I heard on the radio today one of the last few I can think of that I hadn’t heard – but I’ll stop there as it’s fairly imminent.

I don’t actually think I’ve heard this one for a while, but in my head it’s an excellent tune. I looked it up on a download site and found that the Niecey album has a six-minute version and one at 2:50, so I presume the latter is the 7″ cut. The Pale Fountains version is quite good too.

Never heard that JMoped track until this morning: It’s on Mojo’s CD this month.

It sounds like that bloke on the anti-drink driving ads, the one with the barman doing all the voices.

A lot of chart music at this time seemed contrary to the punk scene, I thought it was Minnie at the time as well, I was 14 then, Noel Edmonds must have played this one as well.

Yes, another one that wasn’t my typical choice of listening back then, but was by no means unwelcome at the top. A quality piece of smooth soul, and you knew she meant it – can you say that of much RnB today? (cat amongst pigeons there possibly)

I was a kid when this was on the radio and I must admit I didn’t get it, but listening to it now reinforces why something as lush as this would sail over the heads of the pre-pubescent. There’s not a single aspect of the production, arrangement, performance or the song as a whole, that isn’t polished or out of place. Try to strip down the component parts, and there is quality right down to the twinkly bits. Deniece’s vocal technique isn’t the focus on this record, because she’s singing what she feels rather than singing what she wants us to think she feels, and I think that’s the main difference between Soul then and Soul now. There’s that gorgeous upstepping chord progression punctuating each verse which smoothes out leading to the chorus, where she cuts loose and plays with those high notes effortlessly. You feel it would be no trouble for her to match Riperton note for note, but like I said technique isn’t the focus, but feel is. If you concentrate on how it feels, then this is where it becomes a rewarding listen. Those smooth horns play alongside those bv’s and the barely-there but always-there bass and understated percussion carves a landscape of luxury where everything is bejewelled and opulent, but not garishly so. Close your eyes and she’ll take you there. You could lose yourself in such a landscape. A 9.

“Subtle”, certainly.

The previous commenters have categorized this record as “soul,” but to me there’s a strong jazz influence, and I also hear influences of Joni Mitchell in the swoopy vocals and key signatures. First time hearing it. I would give it 8.

US #1 at the time- the oh-so-70s “Hotel California.”