Hey, Love

The Stepney approach here basically sounds like Godspell or Hair, and I have no idea how close the musical theater world was to the Stepney world, or who influenced who. “I Am the Black Gold of the Sun” survived partly because of the rhythm section—it’s one of the most bubbly and active of Stepney’s beats, and it’s not the same backing band as before. Bassist Sydney Simms and drummer Donny Simmons have, in fact, very few other credits, but with a song this epic, you may not need other credits.

Rotary Connection’s run of late sixties/early seventies albums are some of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic in popular music. Featuring ambitious, often drastic reimaginings of popular songs and boundary-pushing musical experimentations, they’re shifting melanges of symphonic soul, jazz, rock, and psychedelia that occasionally veer off into genres like folk and country too, all characterised by Charles Stepney’s baroque-esque orchestration. Hey, Love, while still big, bold, and theatrical, has more R’n’B and jazz to it than lots of their previous work, and so feels more cohesive and is perhaps their most accessible album. It certainly gains many points for the inclusion of “Black Gold of the Sun” and “Love Has Fallen On Me”, a pair of instantly-classic songs still much loved and covered five decades on. 

Summing up Hey, Love is tricky simply because there is so much to it: there are hints of Bacharach and David style songwriting, acid-rock fuzz guitar solos, orchestration to make you swoon, massed celestial vocal lines, funk drums, fluttering flutes, classicalesque piano flourishes, often all in the same song. But somehow it added up to a fresh, new, regal vision of what could lie beyond the traditional boundaries of soul music.