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Key acts: Amy Winehouse, Adele, Duffy
The past two years in music have shown just how commercially potent blue-eyed soul remains, with singers such as Amy Winehouse and Duffy selling millions of albums around the world. A term originally coined in the 1960s to describe white singers and bands — such as the Righteous Brothers, the Rascals and Dusty Springfield — whose sound was indebted to rhythm and blues and soul music, it first became really big business in the 1970s and 1980s, when David Bowie, Hall & Oates, Rod Stewart, George Michael and Simply Red rode high in the charts with slick, soul-infused hits.
For some, the term will always be synonymous with a dilution of the form; and, at its worst, the genre has certainly lent weight to that argument. The Australian singer Gabriella Cilmi, who had a big hit last year with Sweet About Me, didn’t put a foot wrong in the song, which is a note-perfect facsimile of classic Motown — and in a sense, that’s the problem. Yet from Dusty in the late 1960s to Amy today, white artists with real emotional and vocal heft have proved that soul can come from anyone, as long as the song, and the performance, communicates a sense of rapture or pain that is authentic and searing. Now the singer and Mark Ronson collaborator Daniel Merriweather looks set to join the party with his debut album, due in April.
ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS
Recent: Amy Winehouse, Back to Black (2006); Adele, 19 (2008); Duffy, Rockferry (2008)
Classic: Dusty Springfield, Dusty in Memphis (1969); David Bowie, Young Americans (1975); Daryl Hall & John Oates, Daryl Hall & John Oates (1975)
Key track: Amy Winehouse, Love Is a Losing Game (2006)
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