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When there I
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was rioting in the street
Fifty years ago, as Martha Reeves sang Motown anthems, Detroit was burning. Jeff Karoub charts the days when the music stopped 8 days from on l £1,199pp y
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t wasn’t music that brought the singer Martha Reeves to the microphone at the Fox Theatre in Detroit on 23 July 1967. It was a brutal new reality: Motown was burning. Headlining a string of shows for a hometown crowd, Reeves, the singer of “Heatwave,” “Dancing in the Street” and other hits, announced that rioting had spread throughout the city. Leave calmly, she told the audience, and return safely to your homes. Fifty years later and the leader of Martha and the Vandellas (inset below) still cannot quite believe what happened over a period of five days during the summer of 1967. “Imagine going out there light-hearted and ready to work,” she said. “My heart was beating so fast after returning to the dressing room.” In the days that followed, the “sound of young America” pioneered by Motown was silenced, replaced by sirens, gunshots, fires and military tanks along Detroit’s streets. For a week, as the city was convulsed in violence that began when police arrested black customers at an illegal after-hours bar, the studio went dark. Motown was near the epicentre of the violence but largely spared during unrest that enveloped 25 city blocks and claimed 43 lives. Detroit wasn’t the first of the riots in the summer of 1967, and it was far from the last. In the course of the summer, more than 150 cases of civil unrest erupted across the US. What happened in the streets of Detroit was a wake-up call for many at a label that churned out hits by the Vandellas, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, the Four Tops and many others. The rioting raised consciousness and even recalibrated the music alongside the Vietnam war and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jnr and Robert Kennedy. The events of July 1967 are the subject of Detroit, a new film by Kathryn Bigelow, Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. The film premieres at the Fox Theatre on 25 July. At the time of the riots, Motown was “Hitsville USA”. According to author and Motown expert
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An exiled Indian boy king’s life of luxury in Norfolk My grandfather enjoyed a game of cricket with the Maharajah, writes John Clarke
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Police guard firefighters tackling a fire during riots in Detroit on 25 July 1967 AFP/GETTY
Adam White, the labels that comprised the company had eight singles in the Billboard Hot 100 that week, including two in the top 20. Although Motown tunes continued to be played on the radio during those deadly days of unrest, it was the first time in years that the studio, famous for manufacturing music around the clock, had gone quiet for such a long period. Pat Cosby, who worked in the studio’s tape library, recalled that she and her colleagues were met and “basically turned around at the door” by
Motown founder Berry Gordy Jnr. The man who founded the label in 1959 with an $800 family loan told his employees that, much to his dismay, the sonic assembly line had stopped. “Berry said: ‘You’re putting your lives in danger. What are you doing here?’ ” Cosby recalled. “He was both proud that we were remaining true to the task, but at the same time it was like: ‘You better get in safe harbour.’ ” Otis Williams, the lone surviving original member of the Temptations, recalled hearing “a 50-calibre machine gun being
‘It’s one of the only things that comes naturally to me’ ‘Bake Off’ winner Candice Brown shares secrets of her success in a cookbook of classics. By Ella Walker
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inning Bake Off, the ultimate show for those who pride themselves on the quality of their lemon drizzle and the sturdiness of their pie crust, would, you’d think, prepare a
IQ 30-39
person for automatic cookbook domination and a tasty TV career. However, the 32-year-old former PE teacher Candice Brown is still utterly gobsmacked. In fact, when she got the call confirming her book deal, she was wandering around Fortum
& Mason, staring at the meat in the butcher’s section – and had to hang up to gaze, stunned, at the carcasses for a while longer, while the news sunk in. Three manic months of writing, cooking and developing later, and the result is Comfort, a collection
fired” on the street where he lived. “My girlfriend and I laid down on the floor of the apartment building – we didn’t want to be hit,” he said. A few days later, he remembered taking a drive through “the city that was under fire and on fire,” and he wanted to see for himself “if they didn’t burn down Motown”. “Amazingly enough... it was untouched,” said Williams. “I could not believe that Motown didn’t suffer. It was almost like somebody said: ‘No, you can do whatever else to Detroit, but leave Motown alone.’ ” Claudette Rogers Robinson, a member of the Miracles who was then married to Smokey Robinson, recalled living on the city’s north-west side blocks from
Livernois Avenue, a riot-stricken major thoroughfare. “This guy was rolling a baby grand piano out of the store and down the street,” she said. The rioting left its mark on Motown’s hit makers. Chris Clark – among a small handful of white artists signed to Motown – was moving to Detroit but would have to wait several days until things had calmed down before she could make music. She recalled that recording engineers ran out of Studio A with two-inch master tapes, gunfire erupting around them, “in case the building burned”. Wade Marcus, a Motown musician, producer and arranger, soon saw the futility of musicmaking amid the mayhem. “What
we tried to do, the first day or so... we tried to make things stay normal – but we just couldn’t,” he said. For Marcus, the events are still vivid. He lived on Clairmount Street, down an alley from where the riots began. He recalled seeing a sniper across the street from his home shooting at police officers and National Guard troops. He saw people rampaging through stores and the streets, “young guys” pulling into gas stations and filling cans to set fires, “some fella” in an alley trying on a pair of shoes among many he had stolen from a store. “What was scary about Detroit was it... just grew and grew and grew,” he said. “I’m still feeling the effects of the ordeal – it scared the hell out of me.” AP
of Candice’s tried-and-tested home classics. Squidged between snaps of her pug, Dennis, the recipes are huge, decadent and sometimes borrowed treats – think an enormous, bubbling shepherd’s pie, sausage rolls the size of bricks and her beloved nan’s boiled fruit cake. “Everything has a story,” she explains. “I’m so proud of it – it’s big flavours, it’s big pots.” Keeping track of her ingredients was something of a challenge, though, as Candice admits she’s “bloody awful at writing them down” while she’s making new creations. “I do what I call a ‘guessa-cake’ – I just whack
everything in and hope for the best. But then, if it works really well I’ll be like: ‘Argh, what did I put in that?’!” And if it goes horribly wrong? “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “You either don’t tell anyone and start again, or you turn it into something else and say it was supposed to look like that – that’s how I get by a lot of the time.” Minor mishaps aside, Candice, who was baking by the age of five, considers it “one of the only things that comes naturally to me”, but still doesn’t fully comprehend how she won Bake
Off. “I don’t think I was the best baker in the tent. Some days I still don’t know how I did what I did. “It’s crazy, it’s stressful, intense, it’s tiring – but I’d do it 100 times over,” she says, recalling how demanding it was manning an oven while at the mercy of Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood’s taste buds. “I was going to work and, on lunch breaks, going down to town either to buy ingredients or popping into antiques shops [for props].” Then she was coming home, baking until the early hours, snagging a few hours sleep and then going back to her teaching job come morning. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.” ‘Comfort: Delicious Bakes And Family Treats’ by Candice Brown (Ebury Press, £20)
t Didlington Hall, an 18th-century stately home eight miles from Swaffham in Norfolk, William “Bill” Clarke worked as a de facto head engineer, fixing everything from hothouse boilers to hand-pushed grass cutters. One summer day in the late 1880s, Bill, an accomplished sportsman, was invited to join a cricket match at Elveden Hall, just across the county border in Suffolk. The sprawling hall was the home of a man of great contradiction, famous throughout the land, a boy king who became the plaything of Queen Victoria, Maharajah Duleep Singh. My grandfather Bill, like many in Victorian England, was unsure what to make of the Maharajah whose story continues to fascinate today. In 1849, when Punjab was annexed to British India, the Maharajah was removed from the throne, aged 10. He was separated from his mother, Maharani Jind Kaur, who was imprisoned, and he was taken away from his home in Lahore. Placed under the guardianship of army surgeon John Spencer Login and his wife Lady Login, the boy was given a Bible and converted to Christianity. Five years later, in 1854, he was exiled to England, where he was befriended and admired by Queen Victoria. “Those eyes and those teeth are too beautiful,” she wrote after meeting him. For the next 10 years, the Maharajah lived a life of luxury, travelling with the royal family across Europe. He first settled in Scotland, where he became known as “The Black Prince of Perthshire”. But he eventually moved, in 1863, to the estate at Elveden. It was there that he met my grandfather Bill at the cricket match between Didlington Hall and Elveden Hall. During the match, Bill Clarke had to throw to the ball to the Maharajah. Stumped as to whether to call him “Your Highness”, “Your Majesty” or just plain “Sir”, he came up with: “Here’s the ball, Your Duleep”. It is not known whether the Maharajah
greeted this with a smile or a scowl. But Bill’s dilemma was understandable, for few really knew what to make of the Maharajah. Historians tend to describe him as having enjoyed his new life in England, but a new film, The Black Prince, tells his story from an Indian point of view. The English-Hindi film is written and directed by Indian filmmaker Kavi Raz and stars Punjabi singer, songwriter and poet Satinder Sartaaj as the Sikh king. The film begins with the loss of his throne and his Punjabi kingdom and follows his exile to Britain. Reports tell of him dripping in jewels, although perhaps his family’s most famous possession, the 105-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond was snaffled by the British to become part of the Crown Jewels. Sartaaj sees the film as a chance to tell a vital if largely forgotten piece of Sikh history. “The film tells how he was exiled as a child, how he struggled to take back
‘Those eyes and those teeth are too beautiful,’ Queen Victoria wrote after meeting the Maharajah his kingdom, and how he sacrificed everything to regain what was rightfully his,” he says. Today, the Sikh community remains divided over whether the Maharajah’s remains should be returned to India for cremation. In 1886, he set sail for India along with his family to reclaim his land. When the ship docked in Aden, en route to India, the Maharajah was detained and placed under house arrest. His family returned to Britain. For those opposed to his remains being returned, they say the Maharajah’s will makes matters clear. “I wish to be buried wherever I die,” he wrote. For now, the Maharajah remains buried at Elveden, not far from where he once bamboozled Bill Clarke during a cricket match. ‘The Black Prince’ will be released internationally tomorrow
Satinder Sartaaj as the Maharajah and Amanda Root as Queen Victoria