100 Best Albums Of All Time

Produced by Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, Smokey Robinson, Norman Whitfield and Robert Gordy

01 Where Did Our Love Go

02 Run, Run, Run

03 Baby Love

04 When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes

05 Come See About Me

06 Long Gone Lover

07 I’m Giving You Your Freedom

08 A Breathtaking Guy

09 He Means the World to Me

10 Standing at the Crossroads of Love

11 Your Kiss of Fire

12 Ask Any Girl

Where Did Our Love Go was the album that not only made the Supremes America’s leading vocal group, it also transformed Motown from a successful record label into a brand name with universal recognition. It was the first album in the history of the Billboard charts to have three #1 singles featured on the same record, and by the time it had finished conquering one audience after another the pop landscape was irrevocably changed. By the time the album had hit internationally, the trio were the equals of the Beatles in America and black music had done its bit in helping bring the colour barrier to an end.

It was, in many ways, the articulation of the ambitions and plans long held and actively fostered by Motown boss, Berry Gordy. The only difference was that the Supremes were not the group anyone expected to deliver such precedents. They had begun as a quartet in 1958 in Detroit’s Brewster–Douglass housing projects, and initially the three core high school students – Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard – were knocked back by Gordy as being too young and inexperienced.

At the beginning of 1961 Gordy relented and signed the group. What followed was an unmitigated run of failure. Motown released eight singles from the Supremes over two years and not one of them was a hit. At a label that obsessed over successful 45s, that was a cardinal sin. The ‘No-Hit Supremes’ was how they were unofficially referred to inside Motown. However, at the end of 1963 there were several crucial changes, with Gordy designating Ross as the group’s lead singer, displacing Ballard (a move that would sow the seeds of bitter rivalry and eventual dissolution), and he made them the recipient of a song from his best songwriting team. The Holland–Dozier–Holland composition ‘When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes’ was a modest hit, beginning the run of success that would be captured on Where Did Our Love Go.

Another Holland–Dozier–Holland tune, ‘Run, Run, Run’, failed in February 1964, but it moved the group’s sound from R&B towards pure pop, and everything came together in the middle of the year with ‘Where Did Our Love Go’. The Marvelettes rejected the song and the Supremes initially weren’t keen on it, but by August 1964 it was a #1 single in America. The foot-stomping beat is reportedly a pair of boards being used as percussion, and they created a primal appeal for the sweet melody and juke-joint raw sax break.

Diana Ross couldn’t hit the vocal heights of Florence Ballard, but she had a modern approachability to her voice that mirrored the new teenage demographic. Ross could wend together the adolescent dreams suggested by Eddie Holland’s lyrics, and she could make a track such as ‘Come See About Me’ both gently vulnerable and firmly defiant. These were first kiss songs, especially the singles, and true love trumped sexual desire in every instance, even though there were expressive peaks and valleys in the arrangements and production of Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland.

There’s a gentle, semi-acoustic ballad in the form of ‘I’m Giving You Your Freedom’, while the Smokey Robinson-penned ‘Long Gone Lover’ has a sly R&B groove (Motown’s house band, the Funk Brothers, were on duty) and some evocative handclaps. But nothing can top the voodoo and pure delight of ‘Baby Love’, where Ross pursues a wayward love via an effervescent rhythm track. The song, like the Supremes, proved to be irresistible, and almost 50 years on these are some of the simplest and purest pop songs ever cut. Come see about them.