I hated the sleeve, but had to go with it at the time. “I tried to hide the photo by large title lettering. The only fresh image available to Marshall showed the Tops performing by the Detroit River, outside the Roostertail club. Motown was great at creating music, but their art and publicity departments were pretty average, in my opinion.” However, I just couldn’t get a decent shot of the Tops that hadn’t been used before. “I wanted to make it more memorable in the racks and, of course, make it better value by including 16 tracks rather than 12. front cover featured no photo of the group, only the song titles. “What I remember is that America had put the Greatest Hits album out in a rather bland-looking grey sleeve,” said John Marshall, who had just been appointed as Tamla Motown label manager at EMI Records in London. And by the time Greatest Hits went to market in January 1968, the quartet had already accrued three Top 10 albums ( On Top, Live, Reach Out) and “Walk Away Renee” was riding high in the singles charts. Their debut London show was a milestone, followed in early 1967 by a hugely popular nationwide tour, which began with a pair of sold-out shows at the Royal Albert Hall. is no surprise, given their impact from late 1966 onwards, both in terms of hits – “Reach Out I’ll Be There” was the first of three consecutive Top 10 singles – and concert appearances. That the Tops should be the first Motown act with a Number One LP in the U.K. THE FOUR TOPS: Greatest Hits (Tamla Motown 11061) So here are the specifics, using data from the country’s Official Charts Company. It took another three years for a Motown album to go all the way to the summit. charts (if you don’t count Marv Johnson’s “You Got What It Takes” in 1960), but the first charted LP was Meet The Supremes, which peaked at No. With “My Guy,” Mary Wells was the first of Berry Gordy’s stars to score a single on the U.K. And despite the fact that Britain has historically been Motown’s largest and most loyal market outside the United States, there were some acts who never placed an LP on the best-sellers there, such as Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, the Marvelettes, and Jr. The former came close – he had three runners-up – while Gaye reached the Top 3, albeit ten years after his death. It must also be noted that, disappointingly, neither Stevie Wonder nor Marvin Gaye ever topped the U.K.
0 kommentar(er)
