‘He Was Really Sayin’ Something’: The Motown flop that became a pop hit in 1982
Timelessness is not a quality that is coveted in the modern-day pop charts, but when you look back on the landscape of Motown Records, which dominated the transatlantic singles charts of the 1960s, it is remarkable just how evergreen a lot of the label’s output has turned out to be – even in terms of records that bombed on their initial release.
Not every Motown release, after all, could be a chart-topping R&B classic; for every ‘Baby Love’ or ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’, there was a multitude of Hitsville releases that fell below the radar, or didn’t get the dues it quite deserved. Berry Gordy’s label simply released too many records for each and every one of them to command the undivided attention of the musical mainstream, which perhaps explains the career of The Velvelettes, who never really took off in a major way, despite their undeniable talents.
Signed to the ranks of Hitsville USA back in 1962, The Velvelettes spent much of their time at Motown in the shadow of more successful girl groups, The Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas being the two key examples. Even when they did manage to break into the pop charts, with their biggest triumph ‘Needle In A Haystack’, it languished around in 45th place, which was hardly something to write home about in comparison to the chart-topping Supremes.
Although they weren’t the most commercially successful group on the label, The Velvelettes managed to amass some cult success in the rare Motown and northern soul circles of the world, and the songwriting behind their output was pretty hard to denounce.
Their 1964 track ‘He Was Really Sayin’ Something’, for instance, wasn’t a major hit, but the songwriting power of Norman Whitfield, Mickey Stevenson, and Edward Holland Jr gave it something far more important than commercial potential: a sense of timelessness.
After peaking at a disappointing ’64, making it the band’s second most successful offering, the VIP single quickly resigned itself to relative obscurity within the Motown realm, and it remained that way for multiple decades. Then, in a bizarre turn of events, a new version of the song appeared in the early 1980s and quickly entered the upper echelon of the UK singles chart with its new, neon-hazed pop rendering.
It was the infallible pop trio Bananarama behind that new 1982 version of the Motown flop, giving it an air of new wave expression and a distinctly more modern sound than the R&B roots of the original. At its core, though, it was the songwriting of the original that spurred on the cover, and the fact that Bananarama’s version managed to break into the UK top five goes to show just how powerful the songwriting prowess of peak Motown was.
Exactly why Bananarama chose that specific Motown track to cover is something of a mystery; surely there was a deluge of more prominent, more successful tracks from the 1960s that sprang to mind before a flop single from an obscure vocal group.
Then again, perhaps its relative obscurity was part of the draw, in a similar fashion to Bananarama’s cover of the hippie psychedelia-infused Shocking Blue track ‘Venus’, which also eclipsed the success of the original. Either way, ‘Really Saying Something’ and its dominance of those 1982 pop charts remains an excellent summary of the lasting power of Motown’s golden age.
