Also of note: Cloud Nine, one of the few songs Knight was never able to get “inside”, she felt, because she had no experience of drugs. To conclude, a few words from Brenda: “While I was signed to Motown I was constantly in and out of the studio.

Ultimately, Levi Stubbs’s voice conquers all: strong, beseeching, teetering on the edge of heartbreak, bursting with the thrill of new love, that explosive tenor joyfully roaring out “Bernadette!The Tempts take the epic acid funk workouts of 1970’s Psychedelic Shack and stretch out the centres and soften the edges, pulling you down into a lush paradise of swirling strings and vocal harmonies. The latter is another staging post on Wonder’s political journey, a deceptively honeyed assault on the self-serving representatives of a white American status quo who “killed all our leaders” but will bring themselves down through their own iniquity. Every bit as fine as the album’s hit ballads, last track A Fork In The Road is no ordinary ‘road’ song. Like all legends, it’s probably rubbish, but listening again to this euphoric heat-haze of an album, it kinda makes sense. The promise of Gaye’s sophisticated loving is all in his voice, coarser than the crystalline angeltone he employed on What’s Going On, but no less exquisite, and similarly augmented by a crosstalk of Marvindubs and brilliantly inventive backing vox (the impressionistic, dove-like coos from 3:50 in Let’s Get It On are astonishing).

It must be the weirdest ever song to carry co-writing credits by a husband and wife, but Anna Gaye (sister of Motown boss Berry Gordy) had already ceded her position in the Marv bedroom to Janis Hunter, jazz legend Slim Gaillard’s 17-year-old daughter.Next came the expansive, biographical, slow ghetto groove of Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone but before that the group lost their sweet heartbreak vocal sound when Eddie Kendricks went solo, and on August 17, 1973 the deeply troubled Paul Williams was found in a deserted parking lot near Hitsville USA, dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. When they came over to Motown while their last Ric Tic hit was scaling the charts, bigger things looked set to follow.

There was no ‘punk’ as any MOJO reader might recognise the term in James’s hybrid, which was actually funk-rock-pop; while his image was more Hollywood Pimp. The insistent sermonising shuffle of Higher Ground (written and recorded in an astonishing three-hour whirlwind) and the jazzy uplift of Don’t You Worry ’Bout A Thing both prove that in the world of Stevie Wonder, hope continued to spring eternal.

Some top notch carnal music would follow, but none would come close to What’s Going On for forceful relevance and game-changing ambition. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.