Review for Stevie Wonder: Biography Channel

Stevie Wonder takes his name from a comment by Berry Gordy, owner of Motown Records, when as a young teenager, 'Little Stevie' would turn up and play any one of a variety of instruments on whatever was being recorded at the time. As a 'boy wonder' the surname stuck.


Blind since birth and growing up in an abusive home with a Dad who was happy to pimp the services of his poor mother, the young Stevie Wonder defied all the odds and became a virtuoso musician with little training from anyone else. Signing with Motown at the tender age of 11, Wonder went on to record more than 30 U.S. top ten hits, winning 22 Grammys and enjoying album sales of over 100 million units. From his political activism to his near-fatal car crash to his appearance at President Barack Obama's Inauguration Day concert, he seems to leave a great impression on all those who have known or worked with him.


Years ago, in the mid-80's, some friends of mine were recording at an 8-track studio in Leicester when they were asked to curtail their session as the great man was in town and needed to lay down some demos. When he turned up he was so embarrassed that a session had been stopped on his behalf that he insisted on them finishing the number, on which he played harmonica (in his distinctive style) completely free of charge. On the strength of this, the band got a live slot on 'The Word' before sinking without trace. The story always stayed with me. Despite the enormity of his fame and fortune, here was a man who understood the importance of creating music even by the unknown. Like Ray Charles before him, Wonder seems to radiate an incredible positivity, despite being dealt a bad deck at the outset.


I'm not a fan of all his music. For me, 'Innervisions' and 'Talking book' (both from the early 70's with my two favourite Wonder tracks on; 'Superstition' and 'Living in the City' respectively) were his finest hour, though it would be surly to ignore the huge success that was 'Songs in the Key of Life'.
Tracks like 'Happy Birthday', 'Isn't She Lovely' and 'Ebony and Ivory', however, don't personally float my boat and serve only to tarnish an otherwise incredible pedigree.


This release from the Bio channel is something of a disappointment on many levels for fans as it is nothing more than the most cursory overviews, peppered with interviews from those who knew him, and those who merely like him, condensing the best part of 50 years into a very measly 40 minutes.


Criminally it includes only the tiniest selection of Stevie Wonder tracks, even mentioning one or two songs like 'Ebony and Ivory' without even a whisper as to how they sounded, presumably as a result of lack of budget.


It's all put together nicely, as you would expect, but has very little to justify the expense of a single DVD. Fans will discover nothing new, and newcomers will find the piece so cursory that it's difficult to know who would consider the disc of value.


Stevie Wonder completists may buy it for the sake of having exclusive interviews (though none with the man himself) but for me, this would have been far more acceptable as one episode on a box-set profiling other rock acts too.


Picture quality is fine throughout and there is so little here in the way of archive footage that this doesn't create any quality issues. Photos are nicely presented, and the audio if fine. There are no extra features - and not even any way to play the very few (and always incomplete) performance pieces either. One to be avoided I'm afraid.