This review made an impression when I read it in the Christmas 1983 issue of NME. The concept of this page "The Ghost of Live Past" is reviews not of concerts from the preceding week but from years ago - writers revisiting gigs that had a profound impact on them.
In this case, NME legend Charles Shaar Murray remembers a 1975 concert by Ohio Players he saw in Detroit. The first part of it is simply a well-observed live review (I should imagine that unless he has phenomenal powers of recall, CSM had been there to do a feature on the band and consequently had some old notes that he could draw on).
Where it gets interesting is when he gets into meta-talk about how black music works for its audience - an Ohio Players performance as the performing of a community service, the sound and the stage show communicating with the band's primary fans on a vibrational level that necessarily bypasses even the most informed and sensitive white listener.
Earlier in the 1970s, CSM did a round-up review of a bunch of soul and R&B records, criticizing some (Isaac Hayes for instance) in a fairly standard for the time white rock critic way: too slick, too over-produced / too over-arranged, too close to showbiz. As a fan of blues (later to write books about John Lee Hooker and Jimi Hendrix), he would have had that preference for the gritty, the raw, the raspy - and an antipathy for the mellifluous and the polished. Here, though, just a few years later, he grasps the power of slickness and tightness, the sheer commitment to entertainment manifested by Ohio Players.
There's a phrase in this review - "their murderous and militant elegance" - that I assimilated so deeply I must have come to believe I'd thought it up all by myself, reusing it sometimes almost word for word and other times in adapted form (e.g. "lethal panache") many times over the years.
A few years later, I would have a similar revelatory experience to Charlie Murray's when I went to review Zapp for Melody Maker. A show so militantly - no, militarily - tight and professional I went to see the band perform it again at the same venue the very next night.
