One of the first pop songs I noticed as a child - and liked.
Aretha had a comeback in the early Eighties with a more contemporary club-friendly sound - this was one Stubbs used to play as a deejay. Bass and synth from Marcus Miller.
And she was around in the culture then as inspiration and talisman
Michael Clarke providing the "dance deficit" left by Green (check out other Scritti videos for artful compensations and evasions - lots of sitting down - rivaled only by Whitney Houston's craftily edited vids!)
Oh and there's a subtle Aretha nod in "The Word Girl" too - "She found a place for you / Along her chain of fools"
Wrote about the whiteBrit thing for blackAmerican soul, with specific reference to Green, here
"Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin)" prefigured in many ways by these meta-soul beauties:
And this too, where the explicit citation is Percy Sledge
"A Slow Soul" though was a duff track on Songs To Remember - a song to forget!
"Soul" - alongside "funk" - was very much a highly libidinized term in the post-postpunk / early new pop discourse (from Dexys onward, if not earlier). So I had already been listening to Stax and JB (could only find a live-in-Japan-circa-79 album, everything else was out of print!) and other things (including an Aretha Greatest, naturally) for a while by the time I read this beautiful testimonial to "lost soul" by Barney Hoskyns in June '82 - but it certainly propelled me deeper. Peaking really with buying into the whole Bobby Womack as "Last Soul Man Standing" oversell (see also this great BH profile from '84).