R.I.P. Aretha Franklin

Had a dreadful feeling her shows last year was a big mistake, she was not up to it from the start and looked gaunt and awful. But she still had that voice, and probably the knowledge she wasn’t going to be around for much longer made her decide ‘ah, the heck with it, let’s go.’

But now I knew how those Queen fans must have felt all those years ago after Freddie Mercury died and the ‘These Are The Days Of Our Lives’ posthumous single video – shot four months before his death – came out and saw the state he’d been reduced to.

Her last major UK hit was her cover of ‘A Deeper Love’ in 1994 (No.5 in the UK), but she’ll be best remembered over here for her duet with George Michael ‘I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)’ (ironic that she outlasted him, and the title somewhat ironic in itself), ‘Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves’ with The Tourists Eurythmics (Annie Lennox’ All Men Are Bastards number after Dave Stewart dumped her for one of the Bananarama bimbos) and of course for  ‘R – E -S – P – E – C – T’.

Me? I’ll remember her most of all for that appearence in The Blues Brothers movie (which I may have watched a few million times) as the matriarch of the Soul Food Cafe selling ‘the best damned chicken in the state!’ – unless you were after her husband and staff as band members, whereupon you could get the hell out, ‘without your dry white toast, without your four fried chickens, and without Matt Guitar Murphy!’ before belting out the showstopper ‘Think!’

All you wannabe R ‘n’ B divas who don’t know jack shit what R and B originally stands for – this is real talent. No computerised voice gimmickry. No freaking bullshit. Learned the hard way of solid graft belting out in the gospel halls where so much fantastic music from America originated.

We shall not see her like again.