The great Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, talks to Mick Brown about the stars he discovered, from Stevie Wonder to Michael Jackson, and his enduring love for Diana Ross

How did a failed boxer go on to found Motown, one of the most successful record labels of all time? As a new musical based on his life story opens in London, Berry Gordy reminisces with Mick Brown about the legends he created, from Diana Ross to Michael J

In 1959, with an $800 loan from his family, Berry Gordy put down a deposit on a small two-storey house in a run-down area of Detroit, on a street where his neighbours included a funeral home and a beauty parlour, and laid the foundation stone for an empire.

Gordy was 30, an erstwhile boxer, failed businessman and car-factory worker, who had enjoyed modest success as a song writer, and who now dreamed of running his own record company. He conver ted the garage of his new proper ty into a recording studio, and the kitchen into a control room. Gordy and his wife lived upstairs. Over the front door, in a spirit of vaunting ambition over realism, he erected a sign reading hitsville usa.

Gordy now lives at the top of the world, in a Beverly Hills mansion. From the terrace, you look across a screen of trees to the Pacifc Ocean. At the bottom of a sloping lawn, an ornately shaped swimming pool and a pergola await a warmer day.

Berry Gordy is the greatest record man in American music history. From that modest wood-frame house in Detroit he built Motown Records, which in the 1960s and ’70s grew to become the most successful independent record label in America, producing some of the greatest, most uplifting and most enduring popular music in history.

In the wood-panelled librar y in his home, photog raphs hang on the walls and line the shelves, providing a vivid record of his life, and of the artists whose careers he built. There is Gordy with Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson…

At 86 Gordy is an improbably sprightly and energetic man. He has spent the morning playing tennis and is still dressed for the court in shirt, shorts and sneakers. He evinces a particular lightness of being and laughs often, elaborating his stories by quoting a verse or two of song lyrics, humming a

Its combination of emotional excitement, romanticism and elegance was to redefne not only black music, but all pop music from then on

Berry Gordy outside his Hitsville studio in Detroit, 1964