Whoever thought the day would come when
the Foundations would be honored with a three-CD set? Now that it's found us, though, the job's certainly been done with admirable completeness, the 60 songs including everything they did for Pye -- a period that covers virtually everything of interest the band recorded, mostly dating from 1967-1970. That means there's not only everything from their singles and albums (including the whole of the late-'60s live LP Rockin' the Foundations), but also five solo tracks (most or all of them from the early '70s) recorded by original
Foundations lead singer
Clem Curtis; the mid-'70s single by
the New Foundations, led by
Curtis; and an unnecessary 12" 1989 remix of "Baby Now That I've Found You." Like many such vault-cleaning anthologies of bands with one or two big hits, though, it's musically erratic. At their best,
the Foundations credibly emulated horn-backed American vocal group soul, often mixed with mainstream British pop influences, flecked with a hint of ska/bluebeat and
Georgie Fame here and there. But it's those one or two big hits -- in their case, "Baby Now That I've Found You" and "Build Me Up Buttercup" -- that are easily the best items here. Too many of the other songs have lesser echoes of those two hits, which may be unsurprising given that so many of their recordings were written by the
Tony Macaulay-John MacLeod team who wrote "Baby Now That I've Found You" (
Macaulay co-wrote "Build Me Up Buttercup" too, though with
Mike d'Abo, not MacLeod). For those inclined to dig this deep, there are indications of unusual and interestingly different dimensions to the group on some of the relatively infrequent original compositions, like the ominous psychedelic-influenced "New Direction,"
Curtis'
Sam Cooke-like "Tomorrow," Colin Young's funky "Give Me Love," and the mighty progressive funk of the instrumental workouts "In the Beginning" and "Where the Fire Burns." Pat Burke's "A Walk Through the Trees," moving the latter's tenor sax into a rare center-stage spot, is also worth hearing, and this group's version of "That Same Old Feeling" (later a hit for their Pye labelmates
Pickettywitch) is also worth hearing, if only for the relative prominence of
Alan Warner's chiming rhythm guitar. Most admirers of the group will be content with a single-disc greatest-hits collection, but for more serious fans this roundup is a valuable service, and the live album -- promised for reissue on CD in the late '90s -- comes off better here and more credible than most of us remember it. The absence of original release date information (except for the year of issue) for each track is unfortunate, however, and the annotation is a bit disappointing -- on most of these Castle/Sanctuary vault raids of the Pye vaults, there's almost too much information, but here there's too little. ~ Richie Unterberger & Bruce Eder