Top notch club soul
Laurence Upton | Wilts, UK | 01/01/2008
(4 out of 5 stars)
"Rather like Orson Welles, Inez and Charlie Foxx achieved such success at the outset of their careers that there was nowhere to go but down. In the Foxxes case, it was their first single together, Mockingbird, that sold a million and became their albatross.
The hit song, adapted from a traditional American lullaby known as Hush Little Baby, came out on Juggy Murray's Symbol label, a subsidiary of Sue Records, in 1963, and in the UK was chosen by Guy Stevens to be the first single of the British Sue label, licensed by Chris Blackwell for Island Records. The nursery theme was pursued for their follow-up single Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, though subsequent very strong singles such as Hurt By Love and La De Da I Love You showed there was more than one string to their bow. One wonders how more diverse their records might have been had Mockingbird not been such a success.
As it is, they frequently returned to their debut single for inspiration with rewrites like Confusion and Competition, and songs with titles like Jaybirds, Hey Diddle Diddle, Hummingbird and Yankee Doodle Dandy (the last two both containing many references to mockingbirds), often again featuring Inez Foxx's sassy and throaty vocals calling to her brother Charlie for response, and leading to comparisons with the R&B duo Ike and Tina Turner, though on songs like I See You My Love and the rather kitsch ballad The Angels Got Together she shows a far wider range, veering into the soul ballad territory as favoured by labels like Scepter and Wand. Much of their material was written by Charlie Foxx, who also plays guitar on the records and in their stage act, and sings lead on two songs here on which Inez does not appear. My Momma Told Me is slightly reminiscent of Sugar Pie Desanto's Soulful Dress, while La De Da I Love You contains traces of Four Tops and Supremes songs of the period, though are none the worse for that.
This collection is subtitled Phase One: The Complete Sue Recordings and contains their complete output between 1963 and 1965 (subsequent recordings for Musicor and Dynamo are collected on Ace's The Dynamo Duo). It includes in full their two albums Mockingbird (1964) and Inez And Charlie Foxx (1965), though the running order is seriously randomized. Mockingbird can be recreated by programming tracks 1, 10, 17, 15, 18, 16, 19, 3, 20, 2, 21 and 22; while Inez And Charlie Foxx consists of 4, 12, 9, 5, 11, 14, 13, 8, 6, 7, 16, 1, 24. The other tracks are non-album singles from their 11 US releases (UK singles followed a different pattern). Four of the tracks from Mockingbird and two of the B-sides have been transferred from vinyl sources, as is explained in the liner notes, though do not suffer unduly.
Hurt By Love unfortunately appears in its truncated single edit; the longer album version can be found on The Soul of Sue: The UK Sue Label Story, Vol. 3.
Most of these tracks would go down a storm at any sixties club soul event and this collection demonstrates that Inez and Charlie Foxx deserve to be as well remembered as many of their more high profile contemporaries."
Track Listings (29) - Disc #1