The Chris Clark Story

March 7, 2005, was an important day for soul lovers in general and Motown fans in particular, because that was the date that UK Motown issued a 2cd anthology on the formidable Chris Clark, a lady once referred to as a ‘White Negress’. What was particularly notable about the collection was the fact that the entire second cd was devoted to (twenty-five) previously unissued tracks. Chris may have made all her Motown recordings over a relatively short period between 1965 and 1969 but she became a prime mover behind the scenes through to 1982, as we will learn from her story, told to ‘In The Basement’, with frequent pauses for laughter.

Chris Clark was born Christine Elizabeth Clark in Santa Cruz, California on February 1, 1946. Although not aware of any specific musical inheritance, she recalled starting singing while very young. “I had an uncle,” she said, “well, I called him uncle but I suppose he was really a second cousin and he had a radio show. He would let me sing on his radio show when I was really really young. I remember one Thanksgiving, they asked me to sing a song and I innocently sang this dirty little ditty he’d taught me as a joke and got us both banned from the table. Growing up, initially I would sing songs like ‘Bony Moronie’ and whatever the rest of the kids were singing. When I was in eighth grade, I was singing with high school bands and then, when I was in high school, I was singing with college bands. I graduated early and, by that time, I was sitting in all over the place and I had been out on weekend bus tours. They would take three ‘names’ and three ‘no-names’ and the first summer I went out it was with Jan & Dean and Dick & Dee Dee and the Ventures and the next summer I was out with the Olympics and the Coasters, so I’d say my journey towards blues and jazz had begun.”

Once the record companies started showing an interest in her, Chris had her sights on just one particular company, as she explained... “I had been working nightclubs and I think I was about one step ahead of the vice squad all the time, because I was under age for the clubs. I had been a fair amount of time out there so I decided to get a manager. I got one and she got some interest from a few record companies but I was just dead set on going to Motown. I think the only reason she arranged an interview and audition [with Motown] was because she didn’t think that they would take me - but she was in for a surprise and so was I. Hal Davis was representing their West Coast office, so I went in and met him and he ended up putting my voice on three tracks, then put the demos in my hand and put me on a plane to Detroit to audition for Berry Gordy.”

Asked if Berry Gordy was expecting a six-foot-tall, statuesque white, blonde-haired lady when she walked in, she replied: “You know, I’m not sure what he was expecting but I know he let me sit in his office for about four hours and completely ignored me. He just continued doing his work, so I guess he was taking his time sizing me up. The joke was he listened to the material and he said, well, let me hear something live. I said, okay. He said, what are you going to do? I said, well, I’ve got a song I really love, an Etta James tune called ‘All I Could Do Was Cry’. And he said, oh okay. So I sat down at the piano - yes, I play piano, horribly but yes - and he said, do you want me to play it for you and I said, no, the chords are kind of complicated. But when I went ahead and sang that song and he stared at me so hard I felt he was trying to look down my throat. I can’t tell you how strange it was - and then he proceeded to take me around to all the producers’ offices and go through the same thing: ‘Here’s this li’l white girl, she’s going to sing a song for you. You sure you don’t want me to play it?’ And we went through the same thing, only now the producers were staring at me too. I found out why a year later - Berry had written that Etta James tune. I really didn’t know that at the time.”

The year was 1964 and Chris Clark achieved her goal of being a Motown act, an especially rare feat for a white artist. Signed to the company’s VIP subsidiary, Berry Gordy took a personal involvement in her initial recordings, penning and producing her debut release ‘Do Right Baby Do Right’ and ‘Don’t Be Too Long’. Although there was a ‘waiting period’ between joining the company and the December ‘65 release of ‘Do Right Baby...’, previously documented information that Chris served the interim working as a receptionist at ‘Hitsville’ were refuted. “That’s not true,” she said. “For some reason they say that about everyone.” A further ‘fact’ also required putting right, namely that the 1965 release on the L.A.-based Joker label, ‘My Sugar Baby’, credited to Connie Clarke, was actually our Chris. “That’s not me. I’ve listened to it because I’d been asked that before. It’s also not Connie Haines either; that’s who I’d been telling everyone it was.” [Connie Haines dropped off a version of Mary Wells’ ‘What’s Easy For Two Is So Hard For One’ at Motown in 1966.]

It was suggested to Chris that a number of writers have described ‘Do Right Baby Do Right’ as quite a tough-sounding number, especially for a white girl and not so typically soul-pop as ‘conventional’ Motown of the time. She responded: “You know, the first time I read that, I thought, yes, that’s right. I hadn’t realised it before because it wasn’t tough to me. You see, one of the places where I had been sitting in was Big Jimbo’s Bop City in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, so maybe I looked a lot tougher than I was.” And did Motown try to keep her colour a secret? “It just didn’t come up I think although, when it was revealed, maybe some radio stations might have thought something was trying to be put over on them. But the backlash wasn’t entirely their fault. I did a television show though for Robin Seymour - in fact I did it with Bobby Taylor - and, when I went to do it, a lady came over and she said, really hesitatingly, are you Chris Clark? I said, that’s right and she said, er, okay, fine and she went away and pretty soon she came back over and said, tell me Chris, are you with Motown? I said, that’s right! Then she looked confused and said, but I thought only black people were on Motown. I said - that’s right! I’ve always had a rather oblique sense of humour but the upshot was, when I got on the stage for the interview, Robin Seymour was so scared of what my background might be and what I’d say that he started talking to me about anything else he could think of and, since we’d just landed on the moon, that was pretty much what we discussed. Everybody had been so excited at Motown: you’re going on the Robin Seymour Show, he’s going to interview you and it’s going to be so cool, it’ll help people get to know you, blah, blah, blah but then, when the interview comes on, Robin Seymour looks like he’d rather be anyplace else in the world and we’re talking about moon landings. When I got back to the Company, everyone was saying, what the heck was that? What happened to Robin Seymour? And I just smiled and said, I don’t know.” [Laughs]

A report that Chris Clark was once booed on stage for being white also required amendment and clarification, as she advised: “No, I’ll tell you what was happening. We were playing the Fox Theatre and it was like the Apollo. We did five shows a day and in between each show they’d run a movie. This was in Detroit at the Fox theatre and we played it each year at Christmas so that the acts could be at home in town with their families. So there was always the Temptations, the Four Tops, Marvin Gaye and anyone else who could talk their way home for the holidays. And this was my first one. Anyway, the theatre would run a trailer with each movie, advertising the show and it would be like: ‘And there’ll be the Temptations!!!!’ A picture of the Temptations would show on the screen and the audience would go ‘Yeah’ and then the Four Tops’ picture would come on and everyone would scream and clap and so on until, at the end, they’d announce ‘Chris Clark!!!!’ and this white face would come up and the audience would boo and holler. When word got out about this, people at the Company started coming up to Berry and saying, look, you can’t let her perform on that show, they’ll tear her off the stage. And he would say, no, she can handle it. All this unbeknownst to me of course. By the time it came for me to go out there, he came backstage and he said, look, why don’t you start singing from off-stage? I said, why? He said, because I said so. I said, okay, so I started the song from off-stage and you could hear everybody clapping and whistling, then I walked out - and there was like this momentary hush - but, after that, there was no problem. In fact, I’ve never really had a problem any place I’ve worked.”

Although ‘Do Right Baby Do Right’ did not make quite the chart noise it deserved, her second single, ‘Love’s Gone Bad’, made the r&b listings, hitting #41 with both ‘Billboard’ and ‘Cashbox’. “That was wonderful. I heard it on the car radio and I almost drove off the road. The funny part though was that, because I really hadn’t listened to a lot of black music before, I didn’t know how to vamp my way out of a song. I was cutting that with [Brian] Holland-[Lamont] Dozier and I was so excited. We got down to the end and they said, okay now, just tear loose on it, do anything you want. I’d never done that before and the only thing I could think of was Wilson Pickett’s ‘In The Midnight Hour’ so I’m going [sings] in the midnight hour, in the midnight hour, love’s gone bad, in the midnight hour. Suddenly the music cuts out and Brian Holland says, you’re kidding me right? You can see how abruptly the song ends [now]. Love’s gone bad! That’s it. But it opened doors for me. I ended up working with most of the producers at Motown actually: Smokey [Robinson] and Mickey Stevenson and Clarence Paul... Everybody. It was great.”

Many of the results are on the 2cd anthology mentioned in the introduction to this feature but, according to Chris: “There’s much much more, my God, yes. But a bunch of things that are still in there [in the vaults] are maybe not as classically Motown. I remember, I looked in on one of those internet chat groups and people were talking about me coming over [to Britain last year]. I couldn’t stand just watching it and, after a while, I went on there myself and, in the course of that, I said I’m going to cut a new album - kind of a jazz/blues renditions of some Motown songs. I was sort of expecting them to say, oh when, when’s it going to come out but there was the biggest silence you’ve ever heard in your life. Finally, one kind soul ventured that he guessed, if I was going to do a new version of one my songs, he might listen to it. So it’s kind of a weird place there.”

Chris was learning that some fans like their artists ‘mummified’, a topic that would be returned to later in the conversation but she also had to be asked whether she had felt terribly frustrated at the time that she had recorded so much, yet so little was released. She replied: “No, because I was far from alone in that. It’s interesting, because I hear ‘all that stuff and they didn’t release it, all that stuff and they didn’t release it’ but, the other side of that is that you have to realise that every week, every month, when it came to releases there were the Temptations, Four Tops, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye... And it sometimes put the smaller acts, like me, on the back burner. Besides, I think the bigger point in that is, look at the great material some of the lesser acts got to record. It’s like I hear someone saying, oh yeah, that Berry Gordy ripped me off for millions and I think, please, make me some millions to rip off!” When it was suggested that sounded a very generous attitude, she laughed: “Ah well, I’m just a generous kinda girl!” Talking further about the 2cd anthology, she added: “But do you know the record company didn’t exactly let me know I had an album out. I actually came across it accidentally, on Amazon. I was looking to see what the new company I was with had done, where they had put the artwork that I do now and it came up that I just had this 2cd album released in the UK. I couldn’t believe it. I called up Berry and I said, I’ve got an album out. He said, you do? I said, yes. And then I got it and it sounded so good. I called him up and I said, you’re not going to believe this but it sounds better than when we cut it. Two weeks later I guess, he got a copy and he called me up and he said, can you believe the sound on this?”

Returning to the material that did get a release, her third single and a mutual favourite was ‘I Want To Go Back There Again’, a song generally credited to Berry Gordy Jr., alone but one which she co-wrote. “Well, he evidently didn’t register it with ASCAP,” she observed. “When I got the cd, I called him up and said, hey, didn’t I co-write this with you? And he said, yes. So I said, how come I don’t see me? I actually wrote several songs while at Motown. I wrote some tunes that I cut and some the Jackson 5 cut - and also I wrote one with Jermaine [Jackson], in fact we won the Tokyo Songwriting Music Festival. It was on an album [‘Jermaine’, 1980] and called ‘First You Laugh, Then You Cry’.”

After ‘I Want To Go Back There Again’, Chris was switched to the main Motown label, for her next single, ‘From Head To Toe’ and the album, ‘Soul Sounds’. Although that could have been said to signal promotion to the first division, her records were commercially viable but not translating to chart successes and it seemed to this outside observer that promotion-wise the company was not getting behind her the way they should have. “My mother thought the same thing,” she laughed, “but that’s a mother’s job. You know it’s hard. You never know what’s going to break and what’s not and I think, if I had only been a singer, it would have registered more. I think they would have concentrated more on that but they recognised I had other talents they could use too. I was so involved with other things as well so that it wasn’t as devastating a thing as it could have been. You see, I was doing a lot of other kinds of projects [by then]. Berry had taught me to use a camera, so I was doing a lot of photography. Plus I started a video centre and began taping anybody black that came on television, to see how the various folks were handling them. I was gathering material together so that, when an act went on, we could anticipate the reaction. Remember, this was during the time that doors were breaking down for black acts. And it took us a while because, for example, Bobbie Gentry, who’d had one hit record, would be hosting the Mike Douglas Show for a week, yet the Temptations, who’d had thirteen number one records, would come on and do a three-minute lip-sync. They were exciting times and I was being encouraged to diversify. Berry had an innate ability to find and nurture talent and [I] was proving to be on my way to being a creative monster. Wherever [Berry] pointed me, I would take it on and happened to be a fast learner. He knew that if he locked me in a room for two days I would come out with something. I loved that - and I was insatiable.”

Indeed, throughout his autobiography, ‘To Be Loved’, Berry Gordy’s references to Chris Clark always imply someone positive that he could rely on. He also suggests that at one stage they became closer than close. “Is that what he said?” reacted Chris, with laughter, adding “I would hope so,” when told the matter was being raised as politely as possible. “He was my mentor and I did end up working out of the office of the Chairman of the board. I got to work on so many projects. I remember doing the Jackson 5 ‘Going Back To Indiana’ special and Berry said, look, you’re always complaining about having to cut stuff and you hate the angles and blah, blah, blah, so I want you to go there and you tell the cameraman where you want them to set up. I said, okay, and so off I went. Come the concert, I was sitting backstage and the Commodores came on, which was great and just about the time that the Jackson 5 came on - I think they did one tune - and in the first five rows were all these special people, comp’ed tickets for the mayor’s wife and whatever but not really hard-core fans. So, on the second tune, Jackie [Jackson] said, look, relax, get into it, come up here closer. And suddenly there was this surge of people that went up and over the stage. The Jackson 5 dropped their instruments and ran for their lives. About that time, security notified Suzanne [De Passe] in the trailer that they were walking out. They said they wouldn’t be responsible for all this, it was Jackie’s fault. Suzanne was yelling over the headphones that the crowd was now rocking the trailer back and forth. The Jackson 5 got in their car and headed back to their hotel. So I went out there to meet with Suzanne and the people looked like they were literally going to be tearing out seats. We tried to talk the police into coming back and they said, no, absolutely not. Suzanne said, Chris, what are we going to do, shall we try and get the Jackson 5 back? I said well, have they sung ‘Going Back To Indiana’? She said, no and I said, what do we want to face, a riot or Berry Gordy? We decided, a riot but, when we walked back to talk to the Jackson 5, we found out they had already left for their hotel. We called them back and, while we were waiting, the Commodores’ manager, Benny, came out and talked to the crowd. And it was the coolest thing. He said, look, the police have walked out and we don’t have the security but the Jackson 5 really want to do this, so I want you to just settle in and let’s have a concert, how about it? And it was fantastic. The rest of the concert went off without a hitch.”

In February 1968, ‘Whisper You Love Me Boy’ had been taken from the ‘Soul Sounds’ album and paired with the same non-album 45 that sat on the ‘From Head To Toe’ b-side, ‘The Beginning Of The End’. To all intents and purposes, that was the last Motown outing for Chris Clark but aficionados knew better when, in November 1969, a rather mysterious album appeared on the company’s newly-created Weed label entitled ‘C.C. Rides Again’. The ‘C.C.’ was not directly identified as Chris Clark but it became a sort of open secret. It also became the subject of amazement. The brainchild of producer, Deke Richards, the whole thing was something of a peculiar hotch-potch, combining Beatles’ songs, contemporary numbers and the occasional Motown item, tracks being bound together by bursts of such classical items as the ‘William Tell Overture’ and ‘Also Spracht Zarathustra’ and the book-sleeve covers and liners being as odd as the content. “God love Deke Richards!” exclaimed Chris. “I think it was an attempt to make it like an underground thing but it was awful. His heart and his productions were in the right place but, oh dear. Perhaps Deke was torn between putting out a classical album and having to do one on me but it was an attempt to go for the hippie thing I guess. Because everything they said around Motown about not being able to keep shoes on me was the truth. I was always barefooted and I hated dressing up. They had to wrestle me into gowns. You know, I’ve been actually a little bit tentative about the northern soul fans because what I had heard was that, if you didn’t sing the song exactly the same way and wearing exactly the same costume, they’d throw you to the ground and buzz cut you and I think I’ve only got about four sequins left from that dress [the glamourous blue number that featured on the ‘Soul Sounds’ cover]. Chris laughed: “But however they want it, you know I’m going to try and give it to them. They will forever be my heroes, as they single-handedly created this new interest in a lot of the old Motown acts and, speaking for myself, I’d forgotten just how much I love performing this music. In fact, I think there’s been a resurgence of Motown on a general level. I feel like I’ve come full circle and it’s all due to them.”

Having somewhat dismissed the musical content of ‘C.C. Rides Again’, the conversation moved to the artwork. The front cover had Chris astride a donkey, while the back had her peering rather anxiously around atop an elephant, which was featured with its backside to the camera. “Oh God, that was scary,” she said. “Have you ever been on one? You can’t get your legs all the way round. And there was a little gentleman running by with what looked like a big hook, hitting him on the legs. I was trying to hold on and Deke was actually trying to get the guy to make the elephant get on its hind legs and for me to wave my hand. And the thing about the donkey was that it wasn’t a regular donkey, it was a mule. It worked in films but it didn’t go with reins work at all and this thing went down over the side of the hill with me and I was pulling on the reins and it wouldn’t stop. I think part of that animal thing on Deke’s part might have come because I had big cats for about twelve years, cougars and jaguars. In fact, anything with fur and feathers I would have down at my place. That’s why Michael Jackson got a zoo, because he came down to my place when he was very young and I had all these cats.” To add to the strangeness of the whole thing, inner sleeve pictures featured Chris taken in Hollywood’s Magic Castle, a venue for magicians. Questioned about the reason for such a concept, she laughed: “You’re asking me like I know why!”

Although Weed might have been intended as an ‘alternative’ label - slogan: ‘Your favourite artists are on Weed’; hardly synonymous with a company that liked to promote itself with such wholesome words as ‘The Sound Of Young America’ - Berry Gordy was also in the throes of launching an outlet aimed more at the prog-rock market, Rare Earth. There would be no room for two. Having suggested Weed was thus killed at birth, Chris had a witty retort: “I don’t think it was killed, I think it just went out and strangled itself on its own.” It was certainly an experiment that would prove a rare failure for Motown at the time but it would have been hoped that Chris could have returned to cutting more ‘conventional’ Motown material. “I surely could have,” she agreed “and the next step actually from there was that [Berry] let me cut a jazz thing and Tom Baird was the producer. Actually, he didn’t know it was going to be quite such a jazz thing however. We were cutting it with a 54-piece live orchestra and he walked in and first you could see he really liked it but then he suddenly realised it was in 5/4 time - and impossible to dance to. He almost killed us.”

Nevertheless, there would be other things in store for Chris Clark, as she picked up the tale... “I was working out of the office of the Chairman of the board - everybody hated me because I kept coming into their projects - but we weren’t actually getting along very well at the time. So, I was gone out of town for a while and I got a call from [Berry] and he said, you know I’m going into the film business - up to then we did not have a film division - and we’re going to do a film on your girl [Billie Holiday]. He called her that because he knew I liked Billie Holiday. I said, oh. And he said, usually we movie people don’t let anyone else read our scripts but I might just let you read this one. I said, okay and I got this script and it was... well, I won’t exactly say to go in print but I called him back and I said, you can’t do this, you can’t go out on the street with that. He said, well then, you come and rewrite it. I said, I can’t do that, I’m not a screenwriter. He said, all right then I’ll release it. I said, no, no, no you can’t do that, you’ll embarrass us all. And he said, then come back and rewrite it. I said I can’t, I don’t know anything about doing that, I don't know anything about the form. He said, I can hire people that know about the form. I said, well I can come back and try. He said, there’s a limo picking you up tomorrow morning at six a.m. and your flight is on such-and-such and so I got back there and started it and they had stopped production to let me swing into it and it was so close to the bone that literally I delivered the last scene on the day they shot it. It was that close.” The screenplay to ‘Lady Sings The Blues’ earned Chris and other credited writers, Terence McCloy and Suzanne De Passe, an Academy Award nomination. Although Chris confirmed it was something that made her feel really good, she added: “Do you know Berry had to fight to get me credit but then they put it to arbitration and it turned out that I had rewritten ninety percent of it.”

Rewarded by being given the position of Vice President of Creative Development, Chris ran Motown’s creative affairs department through the seventies and on to 1982, something of a revelation to those who had assumed she had left the company coincident with the cessation of her record releases. She continued her photographic work with Motown principals and artists - “Although most were of Berry because that’s who I was around the most!” - and, as the company broadened its activities, so did she. Chris advised: “I wrote or rewrote any scripts that came in. Before that, I had invested a lot of time in learning rather than making a name and, because of that, I was able to do a lot of different things and I think, if I had stayed just as a singer, to an extent I would have stopped growing then or a part of me would have stopped growing - and I never did. Now that some of the stuff is paying off, not just the music but the artwork, it’s kind of wonderful. I’m turning into the poster child for 99-year-old white ladies on the comeback trail!”

Chris left Motown in 1982. She married screenwriter/novelist, Ernest Tidyman on March 26 that year... “I moved to writing full time with him and I became Vice-President of his company.” Among Ernest Tidyman’s many accomplishments was being the creator of the ‘Shaft’ books and films and, for this work, he was one of the few white people to receive an NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People] Image Award. In addition, he won an Academy Award for his script for the film, ‘The French Connection’ and he also wrote the Clint Eastwood vehicle, ‘High Plains Drifter’. If there was any hankering that she maybe wished to have continued a singing career, she kept it under wraps. “I don’t think [Ernest] ever had a real sense of my being a singer,” she said. “I mean, I would sit in with Julie London’s husband, [songwriter/actor] Bobby Troup but I don’t think he had a sense of how much I was a singer. On the other hand, I was upstairs - it was really some while after we had been married - and I heard this violin and it was beautiful and I thought, wow, one of the PBS stations must have a concert violinist on there. Then it changed tune and went into ‘Second Hand Rose’ and I thought, what the heck and I walked downstairs and here’s my husband playing the violin. I don’t think I could have been any more startled had he done a standing back-flip in front of me. It was unbelievable, because that was a part of him I didn’t really know and I think it worked both ways.”

So, the only time in the latter part of the last millennium that Chris did return to the recording studio was a brief involvement with Ian Levine’s Motorcity project at the very end of the eighties, a mention of which was met with silence. “You see how quietly I let that pass,” she said ultimately. “I never did a final cut on [a remake of] ‘From Head To Toe’ but it got put out.” (Two other Motorcity recordings by Chris, ‘Break Down The Walls’ and ‘What You Doin’’ would seem to have remained unissued.)

Sadly, the marriage of Chris Clark and Ernest Tidyman was short-lived as he passed away due to complications from cancer on July 14, 1984. Chris had to move on with her life, as she related: “I went to try and sell scripts but I’m not a good salesperson. I did some rewriting and nothing was being made. And, at one point, I tried to write a ‘bodice-ripper’. I thought, how tough can it be, so I got an agent and I did like a fifty-page treatment and he called me back and he said, romance novels do not have wolves, they don’t have gangsters shooting people and the only person I liked in it died before the story started. So, at that point, I just took to the woods. I went off to Arizona and I lived up in the woods, in a cabin and, because I’ve always been an animal person, I got into animal rehab and also I worked with an organisation called TIPS [Trauma Intervention Programmes] which was trauma intervention. What they did was, you worked like twelve-hour shifts and whenever there was a death in an accident... It started with the firemen actually, because their job is to put out a fire and then leave and they just couldn’t stay with the people still left there. They were called like the secondary victims - the result of something like a car crash. So what the TIPS people did, we would go to where they were and just walk the survivors through the next few hours. It was tough but it was really interesting and it was great for me at the time.

“While I was marching about in the woods, I bought this camera that took double exposures. So I’d take a picture of a tree and a dog and you had to do them kind of on the fly. They were hard to do and I wasn’t very much into computers at the time but I thought, I wonder if you could take a page of a magazine, no I wonder if you could take two images of a magazine together. Then I got out my Motown pictures and I did these double-exposures and I sent them back to Berry and I said, look at this, can you believe how cool this is? Anything photographic, he was my guy on that and he said, hold that thought. And he sent out two computers and a dark room and just locked me up there. He said, keep on working until you can walk out of there with something. I really got into the artwork and he opened the Motown archives for me and it was the first time really that we had a hand in how the images were presented. Before, an outside photographer would come in and they would shoot pictures of what they felt the peoples’ images should be. And, at this point actually, people like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, they’ve become icons, there can be fine artwork of them and, because I knew them, I think I’ve brought more to it, through the things I’ve started to do. And I’m actually starting to make an impression. I had a big showing in New York, my very own 40-foot wall and he started a company called Hidden Dreams.” Examples of Chris Clark, the accomplished photographer, were originally featured on the Hidden Dreams web site (no longer active) and covered not just her work on Motown acts but of stunningly unconventional African themes. “I’m just an unconventional girl,” she admitted. “I will always go in a strange direction. In the course of stuff I did, I went to Africa and I did a lot of shooting over there. I left Hidden Dreams about six months ago and I came out to northern California. My sister, Jane Clark (she of Bank Of Gold Records, from her time at Motown as an engineer) now has her own studio and is just starting up her own label, so I’m doing some cutting out here but I’m still doing photography. It’s so funny you should ask about a book, because the topic of a possible tabletop book came up about two weeks ago. And I’m doing a few commissions, people who have seen my work and said, I want one of those of me. I’m just sifting around trying to find the right venue to throw me in. I’m still an amateur at it really.”

British audiences at the concert tour by the Temptations and Four Tops in November last year, must have been surprised to find the show opened by an unpublicised Chris Clark. Her first performing visit to the UK since coming at the time of ‘From Head To Toe’ as part of a tour with Bobby Taylor and Gladys Knight & the Pips - “I know I was terrified half the time.” - she was added to the bill after Berry Gordy had suggested to Temptations’ manager, Shelley Berger, that she ought to be out there promoting that 2cd anthology. “Otis [Williams of the Temptations] said I could come,” she joked. “I would say I was dragged back in. I think the only thing scarier would be skiing down Mount Everest and I haven’t done that yet. But I was the tour stepchild, the mystery support act. Do you see a little thread running through all this? I didn’t know anything about the lack of promotion on that, so I’m thinking I’m going to come out to these wild-arsed, enthusiastic, northern soul fans and, what happened was, there was all this anticipation in the audience waiting for the Temptations and the Four Tops and suddenly I came out. I opened the show and it was all kind of strange because nobody expected me but, once I got out there, they seemed to decide they liked it - and I loved it, I just loved it. Before I went, I thought, there’s just going to be a Temp, a Top and me, from right back in the day - sort of like ‘Dead Men Walking’. But, when I got there, the funny thing about not having all the original people there, it’s like it lets you focus on the music. It was really electric for me and the line-ups are so good: G.C. Cameron is with the Temptations... These groups have become something of an institution and you forget that until you get to see them perform. They really are spectacular. I loved them...again.”

Right now, as Chris herself says, things seem to have come full circle and she is due back in Britain in May to appear at the In Crowd Weekender at the Moat House, Northampton, 26-28 May, alongside ex- label mates Bobby Taylor and Tommy Good, plus the Falcons, Belita Woods and Almeta Latimore. There is also a revival of recording plans. “I was going to do an album of Motown tunes done another way with Chesky Records out of New York but that’s been delayed for a while,” she advised. “But I kind of don’t mind, because I’m going into my sister’s studio and cutting anyway, so hopefully I’ll be able to pick up another album deal.” So we’ve not heard the last of Chris Clark on disc? “Oh, no!”

Interview with Chris Clark: 3 March, 2006

In The Basement magazine covers all kinds of REAL soul music, from deep, southern and Motown through to Northern Soul classics. Click here for more information.