Edwin Starr - Back Street

This was Edwin's second release on the Ric-Tic label back in 1965, and one of his all time beloved Northern Soul classics, from out of Detroit, which got absorbed by Motown. This became a record that over the decades, people cared about very passionately. We recut it in the 1990s and filmed him doing it in my old studio in Chiswick. The late great Mister Charles Hatcher, more commonly known as Edwin Starr, was one of the greatest artists in the history of soul music. While we were doing Motorcity, I wrote over a hundred songs with him, and I find it so hard to accept that he's no longer with us, that sometimes I almost want to pick up the phone to him, and have to stop myself. Someone like Edwin was so full of life and vigour and vitality, that it's easy to think he'll always be around, and that much harder to accept that he truly is gone. But never, NEVER, forgotten. We released six singles of Edwin's on the Motorcity label, and recorded about fifty songs in the end, and it's one hundred percent true to say that he really cared very deeply about what we were trying to do with Motorcity, and indeed, was our greatest ambassador for it, ceaselessly championing it everywhere he went. A true gentleman and a true friend.