1967 The Foundations: Baby Now That I've Found You

You don't see too many home-grown bands imitating Motown. Whilst many sixties acts were happy to plunder American blues and R&B then put the likes of Muddy Waters and Bobby Womack through their own filters and make them more palatable to a white audience, Motown tends not to be so open to the same effect. Why? Well probably because a song and performance like 'It's All Over Now' offers scope enough for the rough edges to be knocked off (watered down even) and replaced by architraves anew that are part imitation, part imitation. But to apply the same process to the more poppy sounds from the motor city will give you......what exactly? In more often than not already offering insanely catchy pop, the main stars of the label never were an acquired taste and we Brits were happy to take them to our hearts exactly as they were; we didn't need a Mick Jagger to re-interpret and sell it back to us as a second hand knock off.

On 'Baby Now That I've Found You', British band The Foundations embraced the Motown sound with such a crushing hug that it comes as no small surprise to find out that they ARE in fact British. From the off, The Foundations pitch up as the missing link between The Four Tops and The Temptations and in going about their business here they are utterly convincing. And I think that's an important point to make; after writing the entry for '(Reach Out) I'll Be There' the other week, I listened again to the first four Four Tops albums back to back and I'm confident in saying that 'Baby Now That I've Found You' is better than at least 50% of the material on them (and as good as 75% of it).

In terms of the complete package that is - Clem Curtis's vocal falls somewhere between the sandpaper intensity of a Levi Stubbs and the sweetness of an Eddie Kendricks, but he's not called on to carry this alone; the finest of Motown recordings would be held together by an iron mesh of space filling harmony vocals, but here Curtis is constantly buoyed by a claphappy white boy stomp that almost pre-empts the bash of glam but not to the point of swamping the soul.

Glam yes - there's a definite seventies aura surrounding The Foundations and 'Baby Now That I've Found You', it's exactly the sort of one shot at the title performance that would appear on and win New Faces or Opportunity Knocks in much the way that other Brit soul bands The Real Thing and Sweet Sensation would in that decade. But whereas the faint whiff of cabaret pegged both of these acts as being from these shores, The Foundations (on this at least) managed to hold a mirror up to their inspirations and play them at their own game.