1971 Diana Ross: I'm Still Waiting

Talent and ego can make for a formidable combination when brought together in one package. Talent alone is good enough too, but ego by itself rarely butters any parsnips. Which leads me to Diana Ross. As a Supreme, she was one third of a set of spark plugs firing an unstoppable engine primed to deliver a series of classic pop singles that have passed into legend. Within the trio, her thick and sickly phrasing complimented Florence Ballard's joyous gospel yell and Mary Wilson's soaring soprano by providing a cloyingly sweet middle ground, a combination that made songs like 'Baby Love' so arresting.

But it wasn't to last, the whisperers without and within told Ross she deserved better than that and her first solo releases were a prime indicator of the way the cookie was going to crumble from now on. No more the short, sharp, singalong blasts of old, the grown up 'Reach Out And Touch (Somebody's Hand)' was followed by 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough', an updating of the Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell single complete with spoken word passages and full orchestration that played the ego massaging 'for sophisticated adults' joker for all it was worth. Nothing wrong with that in essence, except of course where aspiration falls short of ability; Ross was never a powerhouse of emotion in the vocal stakes and taken without the complimentary support of Ballard and Wells, her voice is forever a plate of salt and vinegar minus the chips.

'I'm Still Waiting' continued in the same direction and is so doing threw up the same problems. A tale of childhood love lost, Deke Richards’ song comes drenched with an over fussy string arrangement that aims for the high class but instead becomes, if not quite mutton dressed as lamb, then certainly hogget. Ross recounts her remembrance of a ten year old boy telling her five year old self "Little girl, please don't wait for me. Wait patiently for love, someday will surely come" with wistful breathlessness that, if taken literally, borders on the parody. Sure, you can claim the theme is metaphorical, with Ross doomed to a lifetime alone through a tragic yearning for an ideal of love that will never come, but metaphor works best when suggested, not laid out in the clear terms of this song which plays like an Aesop Fable re-drafted to novel length.

Fair play to Ms Ross, she recognises the limitations of the source material and never goes balls out to create drama from thin air (not that she could anyway, she was never that kind of singer). But her lightness of touch combined with the jellyfish spine of the arrangement and awkward key changes means that instead of the low key charm it could have had, 'I'm Still Waiting' has little substance, less consequence and disperses in its ending like clouds on a summer's day.