

The music I'd associate with those visions was that unique strand of, shall we say, pacific soul; not the upmarket hustle of Philly, but the cool, long-held gazes of things like Kool and the Gang's "Summer Madness," Smokey Robinson's "A Quiet Storm" and Earth, Wind and Fire's "That's The Way Of The World." Part of this was no doubt due to imagining that I was Pacino as Serpico, hurtling hairily but placidly through streets of stoned sun (and the International Herald Tribune; I neglected to mention my daily consumption of that newspaper - ah, even the smell of that paper, its inherent authority, the feeling that in those pre-internet days you were connecting with the world by just holding a copy in your palm).
Earth, Wind and Fire's principal member Maurice White makes a good segue point, as he began his career (when not depping for Roger Blank in the Sun Ra Arkestra) as a studio drummer for Chess Records in the mid-late sixties. There he encountered the writer, producer and arranger Charles Stepney, a name less celebrated than those of Gamble and Huff, or Whitfield, but a man equally eager to lead soul music into a new and vaguely opulent dawn. More than equal; the man was a fucking genius.
Stepney was another one of those who did not survive 1976 - he died in May of that year, aged merely forty-five - and one of his last works, in collaboration with White, was "Free," tailored for the then 25-year-old ex-Stevie Wonder backing singer Deniece Williams - ironically, "Free" went on to keep Wonder's own "Sir Duke" at number two in the UK. So the record is an elegy, of sorts, and though Williams seems already to be singing as a ghost for Riperton - the latter was still recording, but the breast cancer had already been diagnosed - the record sums up all that was warm and good about the best soul music of this period; the comforting conduit of bubble from the low-pitched electric piano, the distant but stalwart horns, the cloud-like non-motion of the song's central harmonics - every element flows into each other, like rum into blackcurrant.
Williams' voice doesn't soar quite as high as Riperton's, but her performance is radiant, albeit slightly impassive. Her expansive tributes to the power of good union ("Whispering in his ear/My magic potion for love," "Teasing hands, all his might/Give our nights such mystery") cleverly mask the fact that "Free" is a song about not wanting to be in love, turning away from commitment; thus "But I want to be free, free, free" is a plea for extrication, and the aura of impermanence is discreetly underlined by the couplet, "Let's not waste ecstasy/'Cos I'll only be here for awhile." As, regrettably, are we all. Billy MacKenzie, who gazed at the song under the British Electric Foundation's 1990 remit (Music Of Quality And Distinction Volume 2) realised that more and sooner than most. Dundee in the blackberried haze.