the chi lites the coldest days of my life

THE CHI LITES THE COLDEST DAYS OF MY LIFE FULL

The Stylistics – Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart) The Delfonics’ second album was titled Sound of Sexy Soul, but this was, in the best possible sense, sexless: a chaste devotional, offering the purest possible hymn to Her.Ģ. And when the vocals do start, they are the quintessence of yearning, a choir of near-castrati.

THE CHI LITES THE COLDEST DAYS OF MY LIFE FULL

The classically trained Bell brings his full arsenal – piano, harp, woodwinds, strings – to bear on this achingly slow, sepulchral near-instrumental.

So props to Mr Bell, who reaches some kind of apogee on this track from the Delfonics’ third album (from 1970), the Sgt Pepper of sumptuous sorrow – opener Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) isn’t even the best track, which should give you some idea of the delights therein. “The records Bell made with the Stylistics, and with the Delfonics, the Spinners, Deniece Williams and others, are surely as close as soul music ever came to the subtlety, complexity and sheer beauty of Bach or Mozart,” he wrote in 2007, describing him as “the pre-eminent genius of symphonic soul”. The music writer Barney Hoskyns is one of the few – aside from all those who bought the records – to acknowledge Bell’s daring, breathtaking arrangements. Anyone would be be a bit peeved if they had co-written and/or produced this little lot and nobody seemed to notice any more: La-La (Means I Love You), Ready or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide from Love) and (Didn’t I) Blow Your Mind This Time for the Delfonics Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart), You Are Everything, Betcha By Golly, Wow, I’m Stone in Love With You and You Make Me Feel Brand New for the Stylistics I’ll Be Around, Could It Be I’m Falling in Love, Ghetto Child and They Just Can’t Stop It (The Games People Play) for the Spinners, among dozens of other mini-masterpieces of the symphonic soul genre. When I interviewed Richard Carpenter – another underrated figure in the annals of strings-drenched anguish – in the late 90s Bell’s name came up, and Carpenter immediately remarked on how angry Bell was at being effectively written out of pop history, in spite of his dominance of the scene from the late 60s on (right up to Elton John’s Are You Ready for Love? from 1979 and Deniece Williams’s Waiting by the Hotline from 1982). But there is a third man who often gets overlooked, and his name is Thom Bell. The Delfonics – Delfonics Theme (How Could You)īurt Bacharach and Brian Wilson are usually considered the kingpins when it comes to providing lush accompaniment to heartache.

The chi lites the coldest days of my life