Stephanie's Pillowbook

I love disco.

1) Risco Connection – Ain’t No Stopping Us Now. A Jamaican extended remix of the McFadden & Whitehead classic. The song itself is dispatched pretty quickly and we are left with a loping bass-line, a chugging reggae rhythm on the guitar, latin-y drums and pans, and soaring over it all the most fabulous strings. This is the sexiest track ever!

2) Sparkle – Handsome Man. Mixed by Larry Levan and about scoping a… handsome man, this also has a slight Caribbean feel.

3) Air Power – Welcome to the Disco. Ten minutes more of gloriously swooping strings.

4) Aquarian Dream – Fantasy. Produced by Norman Connors, a short, sharp, punchy track.

5) Loleatta Holloway – Love Sensation. One of the great divas of the disco era. This song has been sampled on a hundred house tracks (most notoriously, perhaps by Black Box on Ride on Time). This is the Tom Moulton mix. Sheer ecstasy.

6) Inner Life – Moment of my Life. Another track on Salsoul and featuring another great diva, Jocelyn Brown.

7) Musique – Glide. A Patrick Adams production – sort of deliriously drag-queeny in style!

8) Metropole – Miss Manhattan. A wonderful piece of Italo-Disco from 1981. I immediately fell in love with it a couple of years ago when I first heard it and it has probably been my most played track ever since. A gorgeous song, excellently orchestrated – and like all good disco its sound and atmosphere strikes a perfect balance between hedonism and melancholy.

9) The Fantastic Aleems – Hooked On Your Love. The deepest bass line, chunky guitars, soaring strings, Leroy Burgess’s sexy voice, feverish girl backing singers, and congas playing like butterfly kisses down your spine. Is there any better dance music?

10) Silver, Platinum and Gold – I Got a Thing. An incredibly powerful track sung by three very feisty women. Get ready to be blown away!

Now tell me disco was all a load of kitsch!!

Some time ago Becky kindly recommended a post of mine on her blog. One of her readers followed the link here and obviously didn’t like what she saw (on my last.fm charts which I used to display) as she felt compelled for some reason to leave a sneering comment on Beckysweb along the lines of “Ewww, she listens to Ashford & Simpson…” While I was irked at the time – I mean, who wants a stranger laughing in public at our lamentably poor taste in music? – that wasn’t the chief cause of my irritation. No, what puzzled me most, and still does, was the implication that Ashford & Simpson are naff! I’ve never heard such a thing before. Perhaps, as someone said, she had been irritated by one too many renditions of Solid at wedding receptions? The truth is that Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson are quite rightly held in the highest esteem in the world of Motown, soul and disco as performers, writers and producers – as I shall prove to you with this compilation of favourite tracks.

1) One of their earliest hits was a song written for Fifth Dimension called California Soul. Probably better-known now is this version made shortly after by Marlena Shaw.

2) When Ashford & Simpson joined Motown they wrote and produced most of the tracks made by, among many others, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell who, of course, recorded their own version of California Soul. Gaye and Terrell also sang the first of several wonderful versions of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, here in a remix done, I believe, by Simpson’s brother, Jimmy.

3) In 1971 Valerie Simpson made a solo album for Motown called Exposed. From it this is the soulful and punchy song I Just Wanna Be There.

4) Another group the pair worked with a lot at Motown was Gladys Knight and the Pips. Here, with the catchiest hook, is the Ashford & Simpson-penned Taste of Bitter Love.

5) They wrote many songs for Diana Ross including Remember Me, Reach Out and Touch (Somebody’s Hands), all bar one of the songs on the album, Surrender, and perhaps best of all they wrote and produced The Boss (easily her best album after Diana). And that’s not to forget her glorious version of Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. Anyway, my favourite track off The Boss is No One Gets The Prize – here in the re-edited remix by Jimmy Simpson which draws the track out to a heavenly nine minutes.

6) An instrumental track called Bourgie Bourgie had been created for their 1977 album Send It. Gladys Knight & The Pips did a version with vocals which was then taken up by the John Davis Monster Orchestra with the involvement of Ashford & Simpson to make a version that is both beefier and glossier than the original.

7) Flashback was one of the stronger songs from the album Is It Still Good To Ya. Here is an extended remix of this tuneful and rather ecstatic track.

8) The title track of the 1979 album Stay Free is just classic, pure, joyous disco with soaring strings and gospelly, positive vocals. I love it!

9) While Ashford & Simpson were making all these albums in their own name they continued to work with an incredible number of other artists in all kinds of capacity. To mention just one they were involved with: Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman (Nickolas Simpson it was, surprisingly enough, who wrote the words). Here is a great extended remix of the song with Chicago House drum and bass and 70s disco strings that goes on forever.

10) And they are still active today. Amy Winehouse’s album Back to Black contains a new and delightful Ashford & Simpson song, gorgeously orchestrated (it is, of course, the backing from Ain’t No Mountain High Enough), Tears Dry On Their Own, which strangely makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time.

First posted in August 2007