Ace Plays Its Cards Right

FIFTEEN YEARS OF SERVING THE HITSVILLE LEGACY

Has any independent record label, anywhere, tapped into the Motown vaults more extensively, imaginatively and responsibly than Ace Records?

This is not to disregard or diminish the work of other fine indies, such as SoulMusic, Elemental and Big Break, but simply to recognise how remarkable has been Ace’s output in recent times. Obviously, the current owner/custodian of the Motown catalogue, Universal Music Group, deserves praise, too – not least for how it honoured Hitsville U.S.A. with The Complete Motown Singles from 2004-2013, a series which truly deserved a special Grammy award (tut, tut, to the Recording Academy for not so doing).

But that aside, it’s been Ace – under license from UMG – which has showcased many of Motown’s second-tier stars (and would-be stars) as seldom done elsewhere. The firm’s 25-album output over the past 15 years has included compilations of the Contours, the Monitors, the Spinners, the Fantastic Four, Shorty Long, the Satintones, Marv Johnson, the Undisputed Truth, Brenda Holloway and Syreeta. Plus, the much-loved Motown Guys and Motown Girls series, sparkling with gems and only a few mediocrities.

Ace was founded in the U.K. some 50 years ago – an anniversary which it has been celebrating through 2025 – by Ted Carroll, Roger Armstrong and Trevor Churchill. During that time, it has sourced and reissued repertoire drawn from many of America’s most influential indie labels of the 20th century, and acquired not a few of them, too.

Although Ace had periodically leased individual Motown tracks from Universal for inclusion on themed compilation albums, the London-based company did not begin what Armstrong described to me as “the Motown reissue project” until 2010. That year, it licensed the rights for a limited-edition (3,000 copies) CD entitled The Satintones Sing! This featured all the short-lived group’s Tamla and Motown singles, including alternate takes, and 11 previously-unreleased tracks.

“The Satintones was Keith Hughes’ dream project,” says Mick Patrick, who held a staff post in Ace’s origination department for many years, and was involved in almost all of its Motown releases, “supervising label copy, proof-reading liner notes, sourcing illustrations, commissioning and checking package artwork and so on.” The two of them compiled 16 of the 25 CD titles over 15 years, while most of the balance was originated by Hughes (who died in 2024) and Tony Rounce (who could not be reached for this article). One exception: Psychedelic Soul, a collection of Norman Whitfield productions, compiled and sleeve-noted by Bob Stanley.

A LIMITED EDITION, FOR STARTERS

At first, Ace’s sales team was tough to persuade about the virtue of the Satintones’ release. “A whole CD of this group that no one’s ever heard of? That’s how it was regarded at first,” Patrick recalls. “In the end, I managed to convince them that having some previously-unissued tracks was appealing. They agreed in the end, with the understanding that the way to guarantee that the album would break even was to do it as a limited-edition. And they had to instigate a new prefix [CDLUX] and a new price range.”

Overall, the majority of Motown releases from Ace (many on its Kent imprint) have sold between 2,000 and 3,000 copies each, according to Patrick. The two best-sellers were 2013’s Finders Keepers: Motown Girls 1961-67 and 2017’s Nothing But The Truth, the latter being a two-disc, 36-track set by the Undisputed Truth, compiled by Rounce.

Other titles which performed well were Love & Affection: More Motown Girls; Say You! The Motown Anthology 1963-1968 by the Monitors; and The Lost Motown Album by the Fantastic Four. The poorest sellers? A coupling of 1962-63 albums by Mary Wells, The One Who Really Loves You and Two Lovers, and The ‘Sound’ Of The R&B Hits, a 28-track, expanded edition of 1964’s first U.K. compilation of Motown studio recordings.

Recalling his musical youth, Ace co-founder Armstrong (in the R&B Hits reissue’s sleeve notes) wrote of the original, “Looking back, it is an odd compilation in many ways, but when we only had a handful of [Motown] records, each one was played over and over again, and the whole album became indelibly embedded in the mind.” He added, “In doing the audio research for this release, it was great to find a source for ‘Money’ without the rather splashy reverb all too often added; this was the track as I knew it, on an album that is still close to my heart.”

Exemplifying what came to be common practice for Ace’s subsequent Motown output was Keith Hughes’ insightful booklet essay for The Satintones Sing! album, drawn from first-hand interviews with members of the group. The compilation was mastered from the original analogue tapes by Universal Music’s Ellen Fitton, with assistance from Keith’s audio engineer son, Richard Hughes.

“Dad started working on projects with Ace in 2009-2010,” he remembers, “whilst still working with Universal VP Harry Weinger on the last few volumes of The Complete Motown Singles. I had already been mixing unreleased Motown material directly for Universal under Harry’s supervision for the ‘unreleased’ sets they put out.

CREATIVE AND AUDIO QUALITY

“I had some technical know-how, but dad had the ear for authenticity, so we’d go back and forth on mixes, trying to get them closer to sounding like they would have if released in the ’60s.” Both father and son have acknowledged the commitment of Weinger and others in UMG’s catalogue team, including Andy Skurow, to high standards of creative and audio quality for vintage Motown, especially previously-unissued material. “There was often audio cleaning to do,” says Richard, “but I tried to be as gentle as possible and retain elements that were present on original releases – very light tape hiss, for instance – and not make them sound too clinical.”

On one occasion, Mick Patrick remembers making a flying visit to Universal Music in New York. “I was there briefly in the studio and heard other things in passing while scrolling through tapes, looking for the right track. And I thought, ‘Oh, we might need some of that in future.’ It helped that Keith and I had similar tastes in Motown – we were both interested in the early stuff.”

The experience with the Satintones swiftly led to the flow of further authorised compilations, including four in 2011 alone (the Contours, the Monitors, Marv Johnson and Patrice Holloway). Dance With The Contours contained 24 unissued masters in all, followed by the Monitors’ Say You! (12), Holloway’s Love & Desire (10) and Johnson’s I’ll Pick A Rose For My Rose (5).

Patrick adds that with assistance from Al Abrams, Janie Bradford and other Motown contacts, Keith Hughes interviewed original members of the Contours, the Spinners and the Monitors, as well as the Satintones. Also, Eddie Holland for 2012’s two-disc, 56-track It Moves Me, which included the singer/songwriter’s pre-Motown sides for Kudo and Mercury.

Hughes’ work co-producing The Complete Motown Singles was also useful with regard to the Ace project. Richard, too, learned from the series. “As I developed a career in audio, I got the opportunity to sit in on mix sessions [with his father] and understand more about how the Motown sound was recorded, edited and mixed,” he says.

Moreover, the junior Hughes came to understand how his father felt about the opportunity to be involved with preservation of the Motown legacy. “I always had a sense that he couldn’t quite believe he’d arrived in a position of professional responsibility in maintaining that legacy. But he also felt a sense of determination: to do well and live up to the job. Coupled with his meticulous attention to detail, and formidable ability with databases, it became his life in his final two decades.”

Ace Records and Universal Music were among the beneficiaries, as were all who have bought the U.K. independent label’s Motown releases since 2010. And what was Keith Hughes’ own suggestion for the title of the last Ace compilation that he (and Mick Patrick) worked on? Lucky Lucky Me.

Visual notes: part of what makes Ace’s Motown CDs so memorable (with the sleeve notes) are the images and the packaging design. Many of the artist photographs are drawn from the peerless Eric Charge Collection, while kudos for design is due to Jools Williamson.

Independent notes: Ace and the other labels cited above have seen newcomers joining their ranks recently with licensed Motown material, among them, West Grand in the U.K. and Soul 4 Real in Spain. The former’s first vinyl compilation, A Cellarful Of Motown!, pays tribute to the series of the same name initiated by Paul Nixon in 2002 and released by Universal Music’s U.K. company. Meanwhile, the Spanish firm has newly issued Just To Keep You Satisfied on vinyl, featuring various Motown male soloists as well as the Originals, who sing the title track.

West Grand Blog

Ace Plays Its Cards Right