Al Green had his first big hit with Tired Of Being Alone in 1971, introducing me to soul music for the first time. Here he is at his performance peak.

I didn’t know what “soul” music was back in 1971 but looking at this performance anyone can see that Al Green had it in… can I say spades? (I don’t mean that in the sense it was used in Blaxploitation films of the 1970s and hard-boiled thrillers of the 1940s and ’50s, where people of colour were routinely referred to as ‘spades’ – not least by each other). 

Al was so effortlessly cool, so smooth, so sexy, so damn soulful that he could probably have sung his shopping list and made it sound like an undying declaration of love that sent women (and probably not just women) weak at the knees. Then there’s the music – the sinuous slinkiness that snakes through that rock-solid beat, the sultry embrace of the horns, and Al’s inimitable voice soaring and seducing and occasionally swooping into that effortless falsetto. 

It’s one of those songs whose lyric you don’t need to understand, or even listen closely to, because you can FEEL the meaning of the words – he emotion is all in Al’s voice. The title says it all. And boy did he know about heartbreak. The sixth of ten children, Al was singing in a gospel group by the age of nine but, in his early teens, his religious sharecropper daddy caught him listening to Jackie Wilson and threw him out of the family home, leaving the boy to move in with a local prostitute.

By then his musical tastes had moved on from gospel singers like Mahalia Jackson to “hip-shakin'” singers like Wilson Pickett and Elvis Presley. He later said: “When I was 13 I just loved Elvis Presley” (a point Kym Mazelle might like to ponder after calling out white singers for “cultural appropriation” the other day) and, like Elvis, it was in Memphis that he found his musical muse, mentored by Willie Mitchell. 

The first great soul singer of the Seventies, Al was also arguably the last of the great Southern soul singers, bridging the gap between the deep soul of the South and the smoother sound of Philly soul that came along at the end of the Sixties and blossomed to become the dominant force in black music over the next decade. 

In the mid-Seventies, however, Al turned his back on the secular music that made his name and became a preacher, in a reversal of his early life. The Reverend Al Green established his own church in Memphis and it’s a lasting regret of mine that I once turned down the opportunity to go there and interview him. 

This was his first big hit. It’s faultless.