Eddie Kendricks

Of his ten planets, four sit in fire signs, three in earth, three in water and not one in air. Air is the element that stands back and talks the thing over, and this chart has none of it. Kendricks sang in the Temptations, which is a group where several voices divide one song between them and nobody gets the whole of it.

The Moon, Mars and Jupiter group across seventeen degrees of Pisces, with Jupiter on the final fifteen minutes of the sign, while the Sun sits late in Sagittarius. Pisces dissolves the edge between one thing and the next; Sagittarius heads out and announces itself. For a singer whose job was to blend into four other voices and then step out of them, those two signs between them are the working description.

A grand trine holds Mercury, Jupiter and Pluto, which is the rarest of the named figures and the most self contained: three planets in easy agreement with nothing asking anything of them. Against it, a T-square holds the Sun, Jupiter and Neptune with no outlet. Mars makes easy contact with Uranus at just over a quarter of a degree. Saturn, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets at his birth. For a singer in a group, a figure that needs nothing from anybody is a strange thing to carry into a five part harmony.

He died in Birmingham on 5 October 1992, at fifty two. Jupiter rules his Sagittarius Sun, and that day it stood directly opposite its own birth degree at four fifths of a degree, which is the halfway mark of a circuit rather than the close of one. Venus and Mars both made easy contact with his natal Moon inside a third of a degree. The Moon that day was at its first quarter and seventy per cent lit, a phase that acts decisively. The Sun had reached Libra, air, the element his chart never had.