For Services to Motown
VICKI WICKHAM DELIVERED FOR THE HITSVILLE GENERATION
In one photograph, she is being honoured by the future King of England. In the other, she is laughing with the monarch of Motown.
Both images reflect the remarkable life and times of Vicki Wickham, who has died at the age of 87. “I forgot,” she told me some years ago, “that they answer the phone and say, ‘Buckingham Palace.’ It just knocks me out completely.”
It was 2013, and Wickham was to receive the Office of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to music. The telephone conversation was with Rachel Wells, assistant secretary at the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood, to firm up when she would be presented with the medal at the Palace. “I got an email [from Wells] the next morning, saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I forgot to remind you that we’d met when you came to pick up Dusty’s OBE.’ ”
Chuckling with the chairman in 2015
Wickham’s deep, lasting friendship with Dusty Springfield has been noted in the many obituaries which have appeared since Wickham’s death last Friday (31), including the New York Times and the Guardian. Here, it’s the singer’s devotion to Motown which is most relevant. When Associated-Rediffusion, the London-based TV station where Wickham once worked, was mulling over whether to make a special show with the Motown stars who were soon to tour the country, it was Springfield’s participation which persuaded them.
“We knew the Motown revue was coming over,” said Wickham, and several of the acts had already appeared on Rediffusion’s culture-defining weekly television show, Ready Steady Go! But the company’s entertainment head, Elkan Allan, had to contend with conservative management, who in 1965 would have questioned the wisdom of making a one-off programme featuring black American acts – only one of which, the Supremes, was familiar in the United Kingdom.
“It was Elkan who thought that if we put on Dusty,” recalled Wickham, “it would be more palatable.” And so Allan, with Wickham as programme editor, created The Sound of Motown, which was broadcast in the U.K. on April 28, 1965. Springfield was its host.
The TV special has since become a milestone of Hitsville history, both for its exciting performances and for its role in joyously delivering Motown’s magic to an overseas audience. (Had The Sound of Motown been televised before the start of the ‘65 tour, the latter would likely have been a greater commercial success.)
‘THERE WERE JUST NO DRAMAS’
“It was absolutely done in the same way we would have done a Ready Steady,” said Wickham of the 45-minute special. “Rehearsed on the day and then shot in the evening. There were no retakes, no stopping, it was recorded live. I don’t remember there being any arguments. Normally, somebody’s sound isn’t right, but the only baby trauma was looking for Diana [Ross], who disappeared, and who was asleep somewhere at the back. There were just no dramas.”
The acts involved – Stevie Wonder, Martha & the Vandellas, the Temptations, the Miracles and the Supremes, all backed by Earl Van Dyke’s band – rehearsed at Rediffusion’s HQ in central London on March 16-17, 1965. On the second of those two nights, they relocated to its Wembley studio for a sound rehearsal. Then, on March 18, there was an all-day camera rehearsal, followed by the show’s recording at 9 p.m.
Even so, Springfield wasn’t nervous, according to Wickham. “Funnily enough, not at all. She was like the ambassador, she’d take [the artists] into the canteen and show them how to get a cup of tea. She also had input in terms of the songs, the length of the songs. She was hands-on. Really, if it hadn’t been for Dusty, we couldn’t have done it.”
Receiving her royal recognition from the (then) Prince of Wales
Wickham’s skills and enthusiasm played their own part. Before joining Associated-Rediffusion, she worked for BBC Radio, and was involved in “wonderful documentary programmes with music and speech – I had a lot of fun.” Through a friend, she was introduced to Elkan Allan in 1963, “and by July of that year, we were doing a pilot of Ready Steady Go! and by the time we got on the air in September, I was producing it, booking the acts, sweeping the floors and everything.”
She has fond memories of the Friday night show’s early days, broadcasting live. “Solomon Burke fell off his riser. Not that I’d wish him to fall off, but it’s more interesting than just performing. It’s thrilling when something’s live because what happens, happens. It was hell to do, because it was a very tight schedule, and you had people in those days who weren’t terribly used to being somewhere on time.” The Who’s Roger Daltrey came to her mind. “He was blowing his hair dry. I said, ‘You know, you can’t do that now, you’re on.’ ”
Motown’s first act to appear on RSG! was Little Stevie Wonder on December 27, 1963, who Wickham, Springfield and the latter’s then-manager, Vic Billings, had seen perform in Paris a few weeks earlier. “It was freezing cold, and it was snowing. Dusty had on a rabbit fur coat, which she thought was quite posh, in white. But it shed, so every time Vic and I got anywhere near her, we were both going, ‘That coat!’ We walked in backstage, and loved the fact that there was a bar there. And yes, it was Little Stevie Wonder and Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles and more.
“Vic and I knew the music because Dusty had played it for us, but we’d never seen any of these artists perform. We were used to the Beatles, but I’d never heard songs – that I loved and played to death on record – sung live. It really was life-changing.”
JB LIGHTS UP THE PHONES
As Ready Steady Go! soared in popularity, an increasing number of American acts were featured when visiting Britain. After Wonder but before The Sound of Motown, there were appearances by Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, Martha & the Vandellas, Kim Weston and the Miracles. “The only time race came into anything that I really remember,” said Wickham, “was when we had James Brown. He had the whole show, the Flames and everything. It was a great, great show, but the phones rang off the hook: ‘How could you have that monkey on television?’
“Poor Rediffusion went through the wringer. It was horrifying. James Brown was black, no doubt about that – everything about him, which was nothing like the Supremes, who were rather pretty and wore the right dresses. I think for England, even my father would have complained about James.” There were no such complaints about The Sound of Motown. “The only thing we got was HMV calling to tell us they were selling lots of records.”
Wickham at work circa 1965
After Ready Steady Go! wrapped up its run at the end of 1966, Wickham worked briefly with the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, in running London’s Saville Theatre. Later, she relocated to New York and directed the career of Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles, who evolved into Labelle, scoring a transatlantic hit in 1975 with “Lady Marmalade.” Later still, Wickham took over Dusty Springfield’s management and helped bring her back to the U.K. and U.S. charts with “What Have I Done To Deserve This,” a duet with the Pet Shop Boys.
When I spoke to Wickham in recent years, she bemoaned the treatment of the Ready Steady Go! legacy. “You know that lots of the tapes were wiped way back. They were large and expensive, so to save money, they were used to tape over. Criminal. But nobody really knew what they would become.” (She also had few kind words to say about the subsequent owner of some of the surviving tapes, Dave Clark.) The only legitimate copy of The Sound of Motown was released on VHS in 1985; it has never officially been on DVD.
And Vicki’s memorable moment with Berry Gordy?
It took place on October 3, 2015, when a special show to mark the 50th anniversary of The Sound of Motown was made in London for BBC Radio 2 by Sue Clark Productions. Clark and Wickham had worked together on a number of radio documentaries, many of which were about Motown acts, culminating in that anniversary edition. “She was a great inspiration to me,” said Clark, “and a wonderful collaborator. It was always such fun, and how lucky I was that she introduced me to all the artists who had been my idols as a teenager.”
For the 2015 special, Wickham and the Motown founder were engagingly interviewed in London by veteran radio personality Paul Gambaccini. In addition, there were performances of Motown classics by various young singers, including Dionne Bromfield, a protégé of the late Amy Winehouse, and Shaun Escoffery, a British soul singer and actor. The programme was broadcast on December 26 that year.
“The Sound of Motown was a big moment for us,” Gordy told author Andy Neill for his definitive Ready Steady Go! book, “because it brought our music and our artists to the U.K.’s national television audience for the first time.” Crediting the “wonderful Vicki Wickham,” he continued, “We will always remember and appreciate the love and loyalty of the British people and the part Ready Steady Go! played in our success around the world.”
As for Wickham’s Buckingham Palace appointment to receive her OBE from the Prince of Wales – now King Charles III – she said she truly appreciated the royal recognition. “And my mum would have been pleased.”