What are your Top 5 Motown songs?

Will Stevie have a place in your Top 5?
Will Stevie have a place in your Top 5?

Motown Records is soon to celebrate its 50th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, Universal Music (which owns the company) is asking you to pick your Top 5 Motown songs.

You can make your choices at a special Greatest Motown Songs website, and once voting has closed, the results will be used to create the tracklisting for the forthcoming Motown 50 compilation.

You can see how voting is going on the site - as things stand, Marvin Gaye's version of I Heard It Through The Grapevine is the most favoured song. This would almost certainly be in MusicRadar's Top 5, too, though picking another four records would be very difficult indeed.

Fact is, the Motown back catalogue is bursting with classics - how do you choose between Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, The Jackson 5, Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, The Commodores, The Four Tops, Gladys Knight And The Pips and The Isley Brothers (to name but a few)?

To help guide you, the website also contains several Top 5 celebrity lists: we now know that The Cure's Robert Smith loves Mary Wells' My Guy, and that Seasick Steve can't get enough of Junior Walker & The All Stars' Shotgun.

Voting closes on Monday October 13, so you've got a few weeks of pondering time before you have to make your final selections.

Ben Rogerson

I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it.