The Monday Long Player #6

The Four Tops - Still Waters Run Deep

Nov 10, 2025

I came across this record in 2021, via my good friend Joe who at that point was mid-way through writing about every record in his collection on his Instagram page. His (far superior) writing was a big influence on me and I picked up countless albums via his recommendations. This album is one that I’m pretty sure I’d never have taken a second look at unless someone had pointed me in it’s direction. The Four Tops are in many ways the quintessential Motown act - a vocal group that had some of the biggest hits of the 60s and were the perfect vehicle for Holland-Dozier-Holland’s unrivalled writing and production talents, Berry Gordy’s business acumen and the The Funk Brothers ever-willing musical engine room.

Tracks like Reach Out I’ll Be There and I Can’t Help Myself are embedded into the musical canon, and were among the first soul tracks that I and millions of others would have discovered through the Motown compilations that seemingly every household owned in the 70s and 80s. A quirk of the band is that lead vocalist Levi Stubbs never struck out on his own in the way that Smokey Robinson or Diana Ross had from The Miracles and The Supremes. He refused to have top billing and even turned down numerous offers of a solo career out of loyalty to his bandmates Lawrence Payton, Obie Benson and Duke Fakir. Indeed the Four Tops (or Four Aims as they were first known) remained a group from their inception in 1954 until Payton died in 1997. They’re technically still a going concern today with Payton’s son now singing his Dad’s parts in very Sugababes-esque incarnation of the group.

Still Waters Run Deep came after the band’s peak years of the mid sixties, and at a point where they were no longer working with the hit machine of Holland-Dozier-Holland. Remarkably it was one of three records they released in 1970, including an album of duets with a now Diana Ross-less Supremes. This record tips their classic Motown sound into a more psych-soul direction, with scuzzy guitars, gutsy bass and floating strings underscoring their signature vocal style.

It’s a quietly influential record too; Marvin Gaye cites it as a reference point for his own What’s Going On which came out a year later. I hadn’t realised until today that Obie Benson co-wrote What’s Going On and Save The Children on Marvin’s album - tracks that I assumed Marvin had penned himself.

Back to the album itself; I love their take on The Supremes’ Reflections - drenched in reverb and angular guitars with a suitably dramatic vocal from Stubbs. Their version of It’s All In The Game is a rarity in The Four Tops’ canon with all four singers taking turns to lead in the top 40 selling single.

However, the most notable thing I learnt from digging into this album was the history of writer-producer Frank Wilson. This LP was one that cemented him as a producer of note in the Motown stable - although by the time he worked on Still Waters… he’d already worked on tracks for Stevie Wonder, Ike & Tina Turner, The Miracles, The Temptations and Marvin Gaye. It’s into the 70s that he really hit his stride though, working on classics including Stoned Love and Nathan Jones for The Supremes as well as Girl, You Need A Change Of Mind, Keep On Truckin and Boogie Down for Eddie Kendricks.

More remarkably (at least to me), was Wilson’s short-lived career as an artist. In 1965 he recorded a track that would go on to become one of the most popular Northern Soul cuts of all time. After getting 250 demo 45s of Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) pressed up by Motown subsidiary Soul he decided he wanted to focus on writing and production and had the demos destroyed. (edit: seems like this decision was at least 50% Berry Gordy’s as he didn’t like his producers having dual careers as artists). Of the two known copies that survived, one went on to sell for over £25,000 back in 2009, making it one of the rarest records in history. I can’t really get my head around this; Do I Love You is one of my favourite songs and the idea that it’s creator would willingly try and make sure it never saw the light of day is wild to me. Credit to whoever snuck those couple of copies out of the dumpster - they went on to become a building block of an entire scene.

In fairness to Wilson, it’s hard to quibble with his decision when you hear tracks like Still Water (Peace); as gorgeous a slice of late-era Motown soul as you’re likely to hear.

The Monday Long Player is a weekly newsletter from me, Aly Gillani aka Gilla. I’m a radio host, DJ, A&R and writer. I run First Word Records and am the Artist and Label Outreach Lead at Bandcamp. You can listen to my latest radio show on Rinse FM just here, check out my fortnightly Bandcamp Selects show here and buy my zine The Long Player just here. Subscribe to get a weekly write up of a record I’ve been listening to this week as well as news from my musical world.