The Tamla Motown Revue 1965: When Motown Toured the UK to Half-Empty Theatres
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In March 1965, some of the biggest names to ever come out of Detroit squeezed onto a single coach and set off round Britain in the cold. The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, and a fourteen year old Stevie Wonder played 21 towns in 24 days, all in the name of launching a record label that most British record shops hadn't even stocked yet. It should have been a triumph. Instead it turned into one of the strangest nights out British pop fans never quite showed up for.
Why Motown Needed a UK Tour at All
Up until March 1965, there was no such thing as a Tamla Motown record in British shops. Everything Berry Gordy's Detroit label put out had been licensed to Britain's Stateside label, part of EMI. Motown's sound was already sneaking into British music through cover versions, too. The Rolling Stones had cut Can I Get A Witness, and The Beatles put three Motown songs on their album With The Beatles.
By late 1964, Gordy had leverage. Mary Wells' My Guy and The Supremes' Baby Love had both become genuine UK hits, with Baby Love reaching number one in November 1964, the first chart-topper any Motown act had scored in Britain. Gordy persuaded EMI to stop burying his artists inside Stateside and instead launch a dedicated label under his own brand name, combining Tamla and Motown, two of his Detroit imprints. The launch date was set for 19 March 1965, when EMI released the first six Tamla Motown singles at once, opening with The Supremes' Stop! In The Name Of Love under the now-famous black and silver TMG 501 catalogue number.
A label launch needed noise behind it, so Gordy arranged a full UK tour to coincide, built around four of his prime acts: The Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Stevie Wonder.
Twenty-One Towns, Twenty-Four Days, One Coach
The touring party landed at London Airport on 15 March 1965 to a welcome organised by the British Tamla-Motown Appreciation Society, then checked into the Cumberland Hotel overlooking Marble Arch. The Detroit musicians were introduced to the peculiarly British delights of warm beer, watercress sandwiches and waxy loo roll, none of which were to their liking. Before the road tour even started, they taped a one-hour Ready Steady Go! special called The Sound Of Motown at Rediffusion's Wembley studios, hosted by Dusty Springfield, who reportedly only agreed to front it after a fight to convince Associated Rediffusion to hand over an hour of British television to American soul acts.
The road tour opened on 20 March 1965 at London's Finsbury Park Astoria and ran almost nightly through to 12 April, calling at theatres across England plus Cardiff and Glasgow. The whole touring party travelled together in a 52-seat coach along ordinary A-roads, since the M4 motorway between London and Bristol wouldn't fully open until 1971. Berry Gordy and the three Supremes eventually broke off to hire a private car for the rest of the run, but everyone else, including support act Georgie Fame and his band the Blue Flames, stayed on the bus and by most accounts bonded properly over three exhausting weeks.
On the way to Birmingham the coach was ‘held up’ by masked men, a prank staged by compere Tony Marsh, who was unaware that the Motown Revue had been shot at by Ku Klux Klan in the US.
Each night followed the same running order: the Earl Van Dyke Sextet, then Martha and the Vandellas, a comedy spot from northern comedian Tony Marsh, and Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames closing the first half. After the interval came Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, then Little Stevie Wonder, before The Supremes closed the show. On many nights the whole cast came back out for a joint finale of Mickey's Monkey.
Why Georgie Fame Was On a Motown Bill
Georgie Fame's presence puzzled some fans at the time, since he had no connection to Motown at all. His single Yeh Yeh had just hit number one in the UK charts, and promoters Arthur Howes and Harold Davidson added him to the bill purely because advance ticket sales for the Motown acts weren't strong enough on their own. It didn't please everyone. One member of the Tamla-Motown Appreciation Society complained in the club's newsletter that British promoters shouldn't be allowed to inflict homegrown acts on fans who had come to see what he called the real thing from America.
The Motown artists themselves took a different view. Miracles member Pete Moore later said he was blown away meeting Fame, remarking that America simply didn't have white performers with that level of soul. The friendship stuck. Stevie Wonder turned up unannounced at Fame's Lansdowne recording sessions the following year, bringing along an unfinished instrumental. Motown material, including a cover of My Girl, ended up on Fame's 1966 album Sweet Things, which became the first Top 10 record of his career.
Half-Empty Houses and a Backstage Romance
For all the star power on that stage, ticket sales stayed stubbornly soft. Supremes singer Mary Wilson recalled, years later, looking out from the wings night after night at half-filled theatres, a jarring contrast to the packed houses the group was used to back home. She said it was disheartening seeing an empty house but that nobody on the tour ever gave less than their best, whether they were playing to five people or five hundred. British crowds reacted completely differently to American ones too, often staying silent through a song before applauding only once it finished, which unsettled performers used to constant screaming. Wilson later told the New Musical Express the tour had been too specialised for British audiences, and there was no use denying it had flopped commercially, even though the reviews from critics who did turn up were glowing.
The tour also became personal for Berry Gordy. According to accounts from those on the coach, Gordy and Diana Ross clashed badly backstage in Manchester over a song he wanted her to perform, which she initially refused to his face before doing it anyway that night. By the time the tour wound down in Paris, Gordy sent the rest of his family home and stayed on at the Hotel George V with Ross for two more days, the start of a relationship that would run for six years.
The Slow Payoff
Commercially, the tour didn't achieve what Gordy had hoped for straight away. Of the first six Tamla Motown singles released to coincide with the launch, only Stop! In The Name Of Love cracked the UK top ten, peaking at number seven. It took another eighteen months before the label properly broke through, first with Stevie Wonder's Uptight, then decisively in autumn 1966 when The Four Tops' Reach Out I'll Be There became a genuine mainstream smash.
The Supremes kept climbing the UK chart regardless of how the tour itself had gone down, and by the second half of the sixties Motown's grip on British pop was total, feeding directly into the sound British groups were chasing on record and copying on stage. It's the same period that saw George Harrison and the rest of The Beatles soaking up American soul influences that would shape their own songwriting for years to come, right through to a scene that would eventually curdle into John Lennon's blistering 1971 letter to Paul and Linda McCartney.
The tour closed with a show at the Paris Olympia on 13 April 1965, later released as the live album Recorded Live: Motortown Revue In Paris. It captured a touring party that, by all accounts, never let a thin house change how hard they worked. Within two years the label they'd been sent to sell would be inescapable on British radio, even if nobody in those half-empty theatres in March 1965 could have known it yet.
