QX Magazine

Is Joe Public – gay or straight – irredeemably thick? Though it’s beyond sad to even think it, beefballs worldwide still download, and pay for, the slop called pop in 2012!

Why? Who needs starved slags in pantyhose squeaking to backing tracks? If that’s music, let’s shove microphones up our butts and sample diarrhoea as a breakbeat! Yes, but seriously, kids, whatever happened to pop music as a force of steaming, hormonal nature, the killer riffs –and vocals – you’d wank your heart apart for back in the day, and we’re talking the 60s and early 70s, the peak of soul and real R&B, with superlative talents spurting up faster than teenage zits!

See, from Otis Reading to Sly & The Family Stone, George Clinton to Stevie Wonder and hundreds more, no musos worth the name clung to formulaic ruts. Bubbling with the fierce, polyrhythmic passion of displaced African roots and chiselled by the icy bigotry of racism, black music cross-pollinated with the call-and-response frenzy of gospel to create, simply, the finest urban music ever recorded.

But it wasn’t just the boys that kicked ass –way before Beyonce, demolition divas like Tina Turner, Ronnie Spector and the stellar Martha Reeves taught guys how to grow a pair!

No mincing Miss Priss like fellow Motown signee Diana Ross, Martha boasted street-tough sass and raw, steamroller vocals dripping with vaginal angst! Still, in an industry even then crammed with soul-queen clones, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas matched –and arguably, surpassed – Ms Ross and the Supremes, their only remotely credible rivals.

No handed fame-on-a-plate reality show retard, Martha’s stand-out hits – ‘Heatwave’, ‘Jimmy Mack’, ‘Dancing In The Streets’, etc – reflect both her growing assurance as an artist and proto-feminist icon, a role-model for ballsy drag queens ever since!

Me, I think of her as a Judy Garland with sure-fire, gasoline grooves; yep, she’s got that level of Grand Diva gravitas, so no wonder she was headlining at Ronnie Scott’s, London’s premier arbiter of musical excellence!

Never been there? Go! With a sunken, oval stage cosily showcasing the artists de jour, Ronnie’s is flanked by tiers of red-lit, intimate tables, spiced with a distinct sense of 1960s, jazzy bohemianism.

And Martha? Frankly, she’s beyond wild, kids, a massively assured, human volcano, oozing pure vocal lava that builds and builds to seemingly impossible eruptions of ecstasy! Gee, no wonder awe-struck Mods in 1964 creamed their little panties, because tonight, I’ve done just the same!