The pop genius from a fish finger factory
You’ve never heard of him, but a boy from Cleethorpes wrote Jacko’s greatest hits
ROD TEMPERTON liked to say that he had a lazy dad to thank for launching him on the path to musical glory. ‘My father wasn’t the kind of person to read you a bedtime story. He used to put a transistor radio in the crib, right on the pillow,’ he recounted. ‘I would go to sleep listening to Radio Luxembourg. I think somehow that had an influence.’
For some, that might have spawned a lifetime of insomnia, but for the boy from the Lincolnshire town of Cleethorpes, it was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary — and most obscure — success stories in modern music.
The world of pop is full of secrets, but none perhaps so surprising as the fact that the uncrowned king of disco, the man who reinvented rhythm and blues, and who put Michael Jackson on the path to megastardom with Thriller, was a former Grimsby frozen fish factory worker.
The announcement yesterday that Temperton had died aged 66 in London last week, after what his music company described as a ‘brief aggressive battle with cancer’, was met with heartfelt tributes from singers and musicians, but a deafening silence from the public.
He was responsible for many of the funkiest tunes in pop history — writing hits for Jackson including Thriller, Rock With You and off The Wall, as well as for Mariah Carey, donna Summer, Aretha Franklin, Karen Carpenter, George Benson, Herbie Hancock and Mica Paris, not to mention the instantly recognisable Boogie Nights hit that he wrote for his own band, Heatwave.
Yet the songwriter nicknamed The Invisible Man was a modest recluse barely known outside the music industry.
Born in 1947 into a middle-class family, as a pupil at grammar school in Lincolnshire he formed a pop group in which he was the drummer.
His former teacher, Ted Gledhill, with whom Temperton kept in touch throughout his life, recalled: ‘In those days pop music was a bit frowned upon, I suppose.’
SELF-TAuGHT, the young Temperton would skive off school while his father was at work and, setting up his drums in front of their blackand-white TV, practise playing along to the music on the BBC test card. on leaving school, he got a job with the frozen food company Ross in Grimsby. But he was drawn back to music.
Having moved from drums to keyboards, he played in several dance bands before — completely broke — he answered an advert looking for a keyboard player to join a soul band set up by a former u.S. serviceman.
The band, Heatwave, was based initially in Germany where some of its founders had been serving in the u.S. military. Temperton moved to the German city of Worms before writing the band’s successful album, Too Hot To Handle.’
As well as Boogie Nights, it spawned another international hit, the ballad Always And Forever. But there was nothing romantic about its origins — Temperton wrote it in his tiny one-room German flat on a Wurlitzer organ which was perched next to his dirty washing.
He admitted he hated writing lyrics, but the smoochy lines to that hit marked the start of a career in which he supplied both music and words.
Temperton’s songs sounded rooted in black rhythm and blues, so radio DJS in the UK who interviewed him were shocked to discover he was white. They recalled him as looking undernourished, exhausted and with a cigarette permanently hanging out of his mouth — ‘like he worked in a fish and chip shop’, as one recalled.
He dressed like doctor Who, in a trench coat with a long scarf, and had an accent — which he never lost — that sounded almost exactly like William Hague.
But, after he decided his future lay in writing songs not playing them, his image didn’t matter. And Heatwave caught the ear of the veteran u.S. music mogul Quincy Jones, who in 1979 was tasked with recording child star Michael Jackson’s first adult album. He recruited Temperton to write three songs for it, which — including the hit single Rock With You — were all used on the album, off The Wall.
The record was a monstrous international success and a solid partnership with Temperton was born.
In 1982, by which time he had left Germany for Beverly Hills with his British girlfriend, Kathy, Temperton wrote three songs for Jacko’s next album, Thriller.
Temperton had dreamed up the title of the singer’s first album, so Jones asked him to try again with the new one. ‘I went back to the hotel, wrote two or three hundred titles and came up with Midnight Man,’ Temperton recalled. ‘The next morning I woke up and I just said this word [Thriller].
‘Something in my head just said: “This is the title.” You could visualise it on the top of the Billboard charts, you could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as “Thriller”.’
He then wrote all the words to the album’s iconic title song ‘ very quickly’, dashing out by hand the song’s unique gothic rap — delivered by horror film star Vincent Price — in the taxi on the way to the record- ing studio. The Thriller album, by far the most successful album in pop history, went on to sell more than 40 million copies, while Temperton and Quincy Jones established themselves as America’s hottest hit-making partnership.
Although the down- to- earth Temperton hated living in glitzy Los Angeles, he and Jones forged a solid bond.
‘I’m from Cleethorpes and he’s from Seattle — where’s the meeting of minds?’ he said years later. ‘But as soon as we met, it was like I’d known him all my life. I love him to death.’
It helped that they shared a ‘vampire’ work ethic, according to Jones, working through the night and chainsmoking their way through 160 cigarettes during a single session.
Soon, the pair moved into writing music for the screen, Temperton’s credits ranging from the oscar-nominated soundtrack for the 1985 film The Color Purple to the theme tune for oprah Winfrey’s TV chat show.
‘There are simply no words to express how heavy my heart is at the passing of my friend, brother and colleague,’ Jones said last night. ‘To say his talent was insane was an understatement.’
So pervasive was his influence over modern music that he was ‘like the air we breathe’, in the words of jazz star Patti Austin. Yet pop’s Invisible Man remained so far removed from the public gaze that he earned a reputation as a recluse.
Rarely sighted in public, he hardly ever spoke to the media, although he finally opened up to BBC Radio 2 in 2006. He said of his life outside the recording studio: ‘I watch a bit of telly, catch up on the news, and — who knows — maybe somebody will phone. Hopefully.’
Those who knew him over the years say he remained ‘a really, really nice guy’.
AMuLTI-MILLIoNAIRE, he and Kathy — by now his wife — never had children, but they amassed homes in Switzerland, the French Riviera, an entire island in Fiji, on LA’s famously secluded Mulholland drive and in Kent, where the couple moved a few years ago when they finally returned to the UK.
Temperton had reportedly been working with Michael Jackson on his grand comeback concerts in London when the performer died in 2009.
In 2012, he and Kathy made a rare appearance at a Teenage Cancer Trust concert at the Royal Albert Hall. It remains unclear whether at the time the former chainsmoker had any inkling he would himself fall victim to the disease.
As journalists discovered whenever they visited Cleethorpes, Temperton wasn’t even famous in his home town. But he remained quietly proud of his roots.
When Jackson toured the UK in the 1990s, one newspaper made much of his songwriter’s background, Temperton recalled with delight: ‘It was a great headline and I’ve still got it: “Grimsby fish filleter reels in fortune for Wacko Jacko”!’