Cranking out material at a similar rate, serving a similarly booming market, the songwriters and producers at Motown were able to come up with a shocking number of artful, drum-tight little pop masterpieces. This was obviously self-serving bullshit, and the relative limpness of the SAW sound can really help you appreciate what the people at Motown were able to do. The times were different, he would insist, but the assembly-line model was the same. When British the press would complain about Stock-Aitken-Waterman’s merciless and unyielding dominance of the late-’80s UK charts, Pete Waterman would compare the trio to Motown. Unfortunately, Rick Astley is not the Supremes, and “Never Gonna Give You Up” is not “Where Did Our Love Go.” Stock-Aitken-Waterman were successful in their attempt to replicate the magic of “Never Gonna Give You Up,” but that really just means we’ve got two trash-ass #1 Rick Astley hits instead of one.
“Together Forever” became another trans-Atlantic smash. With “Together Forever,” that’s exactly what they did.
While working on Astley’s debut album Whenever You Need Somebody, the three of them decided that they didn’t have a song that sounded enough like “Never Gonna Give You Up.” They set out to write another cheery uptempo love song that would bang home Astley’s whole moony nice-guy image. The formula worked.Īfter the oaken-voiced young potato-face Rick Astley reached #1 on both sides of the Atlantic with his debut single “ Never Gonna Give You Up,” Astley’s songwriting and production team Stock-Aitken-Waterman figured they had a formula, too. Over the next few months, the Supremes cranked out the Holland-Dozier-Holland singles “ Baby Love,” “ Come See About Me,” “ Stop! In The Name Of Love,” and “ Back In My Arms Again.” All of those songs became #1 hits, and all of them sound a whole hell of a lot like “Where Did Our Love Go.” Since “Where Did Our Love Go” is a great song, and since the people involved were all genius-level professionals, nobody got mad about this group persistently hitting #1 with variations on the same theme. Holland-Dozier-Holland complied, and what followed was one of the all-time great pop-music runs. Gordy instructed Holland-Dozier-Holland, the songwriting and production team behind that song, to come up with a whole lot more songs just like that one. When the Supremes first reached #1 with their 1964 single “ Where Did Our Love Go,” Motown boss Berry Gordy knew he had something, and he quickly turned that something into a formula.
In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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