Frank Wilson, Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) (1965)

Artist: Frank Wilson
Title: Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)
Description: promo single; single
Label: Soul
Release date: 1965
First heard: 2002

What? No scan of the original 1965 sleeve on the Beat label to illustrate? Nor the 1979 UK reissue on Tamla Motown? No. The CD inlay of a compilation album from 2001. In the interests of full disclosure I am going to confess to you right now that the only “rare” record I own is the 7″ of Blur’s Wassailing Song, which I think is worth about £300 but I’m not selling it. I have never bought a record, in any format, as an investment. (The Blur one was given away after a gig.) I bought the singles I wanted, or could afford, as a teenager, and I still own every one of them. I sold the bulk of my 12-inch vinyl collection in the mid-noughties because, having moved house with it a number of times, I decided it was time to let it go and save my spine.

I’d acquired every album that mattered on CD and never played the vinyl, so off it went to Steel Wheels in Newcastle, where I hope it was redistributed to countless happy collectors via its shop and website. (Rob, the voluble guy who runs it, got back in touch some weeks after taking my collection away and informed me that he had found a “rare” Radiohead record among it which he hadn’t spotted when he priced it up at my house and he sent me a cheque for it. What an honest man. That’s how tuned in to the “rarity” of records I am!)

Frank Wilson’s unreleased pressing of Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) is the most valuable Northern Soul single ever. There are only a couple of copies of the 1965 original in circulation, which explains that. As it happens, it’s also one of the best known Northern Soul records. It’s in The 143 for neither of those two reasons. It’s in because I just love it; even a stint as the music to a KFC advert couldn’t destroy its magic. In common with every song knighted by northern treasure hunters, it has a chequered history and the power to make white men dance like loons.

Guess what? I didn’t really get a handle of what Northern Soul even was until the earliest days of working on 6 Music. I was aware of its importance in certain clubs in the North of England, thanks to the tales told by my friend Stuart Maconie, which had opened my eyes to the “scene”, but as for individual records? I was pretty clueless.

What’s particularly sweet about my long overdue conversion to the simple pleasures of obscure US soul cuts that had found new currency among DJs and scenesters in Wigan, Manchester, Blackpool and Stoke in the 60s and 70s, is that my magpie-like swoop on a kaleidoscope of musical genres in order to spice up the predominantly Caucasian 6 Music playlists in 2002-03 was overseen and encouraged by my producer, whose name – as older listeners will remember – was Frank Wilson. I took enormous pleasure in broadening my mind to reggae, ska, blues and old-style R&B through Frank’s deep love of black music, and snaffled up compilations aplenty – usually purchased with my own money round the corner at HMV on Oxford Street. The “show copy” of The Best Northern Soul All-Nighter Ever, a double-CD containing pretty much every key “side” at the top of the genre, became studio-worn very quickly, not least thanks to a simple feature called Northern Soul O’Clock. But some tunes would recur, and the “other” Frank Wilson’s was one of them.

Having read up on him, Wilson was a producer hired by Berry Gordy in ’65 who would go on to record the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations and the Four Tops, and this was his only vocal recording, whose demo copies were deleted either by Wilson or Gordy, hence the rarity. Typically of Motown soul recordings of the era, you can hear the room, with arrangement coming at you from every corner: those exquisite vibes, strings and brass rising up around Wilson’s carefree voice as he answers his own rhetorical query. The rat-tat-rat-a-tat drum signature hallmarks the kind of record later pressed into service on the sprung dancefloors of Lancashire, but it’s the chiming notes that single this song out. We must assume the sterling work of Motown house band the Funk Brothers throughout, but there’s accompaniment all over the place, creating a joyous, celebratory racket against the pre-Dolby hiss. You can really explore the space on headphones, but frankly, it’s designed to be heard at the hop, two and a half Detroit minutes of affirmation.

I am the same age as this record. I hope I have aged as well as it, although I suspect Do I Love You will be around forever more. Indeed I do.