When I was a little girl I had a rag doll

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

08/08/71 : The Magnificent 7 - The Supremes & The Four Tops

Part of me feels I should reject this because it's an album of covers - but it's an album of covers from The Supremes & The Four Tops recording together, so it feels like it could be pretty special. And it's got to be better than the Diana Ross albums we've had this year, hasn't it?

Well, it might be an album of covers, but I knew remarkably few of them - "River Deep, Mountain High" and "Everyday People" obviously and there were a couple of others that rang a few bells, but mostly it was all new to me. And whilst it certainly didn't made the level of pretty special, it was all perfectly fine and definitely considerably better produced than Diana's offerings - but it was also all very forgettable.

We're at #24 in the charts this week on their last week of a seven week run, with it having peaked at #6 in its second week - oddly, this was its second run, with it having spent three weeks in lower chart positions before coming back. The top five this week were The Moody Blues (not sure they quite deserved that), Hot Hits 6, TOTP Vol 18, Simon & Garfunkel and The Rolling Stones with the highest new entry being Stephen Stills (#28).

WIkipedia tells us this is their first album together, but The Supremes had done two with The Temptations in the late '60s. I was wrong when I said it was an album of covers because it does have one original track on it ("Baby (You've Got What It Takes)") - I was also surprised to hear they weren't all covers of Motown tracks, with Laura Nyro amongst the other writers used. Wikipedia explains the lack of original material by telling us that Motown assumed it would sell anyway so just didn't care, which seems very plausible indeed. Critically, it was received well enough but commercially only really did anything here, only getting to #73 in Canada and #116 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for a fiver but the most you can spend on it is twenty quid - I can quite see that no-one's going to be particularly excited about this these days, particularly when so much of their separate output has stood the test of time so well. 

15/08/71 - Something a bit different


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