No Pain, no gain
N 1967, a promising R&B singer named Ural Thomas with a voice somewhere between the grit of Otis Redding and the silkiness of Smokey Robinson went into an LA studio to cut a single called “Pain Is The Name Of Your Game”. The song was a gut-wrenching tale of abandonment sung in searing, soulful style over a funk-fuelled arrangement by Gene Page. It deserved to be a hit but instead bombed, with the song’s title seeming to foretell Thomas’s life to come.
