David Gimour’s favourite Motown song: “I’m gonna need to dance”
While he may be largely responsible for some of the most iconic and headbanging guitar solos, David Gilmour brought a lot of soul to the Pink Floyd sound. His songwriting was steeped in sentimentality, and when delivered with his almost breezy vocals, he could steep the otherwise expansive in profound soulfulness.
When Gilmour introduced the band, he immediately injected his more R&B-influenced sensibilities into the sound, taking the band’s already strong psychedelic footprint set out by Rogers Waters and Syd Barrett and turning it into something more contemporary.
While the burgeoning worlds of blues and psychedelic rock were running rampant in Britain, soul was becoming a defining genre for 1960s America. Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and Nina Simone, whom Gilmour described as “one of the true great originals”, were artists spearheading the movement. Thanks to the steamroller operation that was Motown Records, their discographies made their way to Gilmour’s hands.
While Motown played host to a number of iconic songs, there seems to be one track that has a universal effect on all listeners. Be it in the kitchen, in a pub, or perhaps most commonly, a wedding dancefloor, it has a hypnotic ability to get people of all ages dancing. Martha Reeves and The Vandellas classic ‘Dancing in the Street’ is just that song.
Written by Marvin Gaye, William Stevenson, and Ivy Jo Hunter, the 1964 track is a quintessential shimmy-and-shake Motown song whose chorus sentiment reads like a mission statement to all listeners. But its encouragement to dance grew into something more profound, as the track became a civil rights anthem during the mid to late ‘60s.
Rather predictably, the song’s humanitarian spirit sowed a seed of resentment within the British press, and Reeves became the subject of a nasty campaign that accused her of using the song to incite episodes of violent rioting.
Reeve’s biographer, Smith, notes: “The British press aggravated Reeves when someone put a microphone in her face and asked her if she was a militant leader. The British journalist wanted to know if Reeves agreed, as many people had claimed, that ‘Dancing in the Street’ was a call to riot. To Reeves, the query was patently absurd. ‘My Lord, it was a party song,’ she remarked in retrospect.”
To Gilmour, the song does indeed represent the ultimate “party song”. While appearing on BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Reeves’ single was listed in the eight tracks that Gilmour would take with him to a hypothetical desert island. But perhaps more interestingly, when pressed to give one song upon which he would save from the oncoming shores, it was ‘Dancing In The Streets’.
“I’d just have to take Martha and the Vandellas, I think, for the dancing,” he said. “I’m gonna need to dance. I don’t do it very often, of course, at my hugely advanced age. But I need a little bit of Tamla Motown sort of dance music to accompany me on this beach, wherever I am,” he concluded.
Reeves’ effort beat The Kinks, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and The Lemonheads, who all featured elsewhere on Gilmour’s listing. Perhaps a surprising choice to many listen given Gilmour’s position as prog-rock forefather, but ultimately the song is a reminder of the more fundamental purpose of music, once the thrills of experimentation all fall away; to simply incite movement.
