The Invisible Man

The Story of Rod Temperton, the 'Thriller' Songwriter

Jed Pitman

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780750983297
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica pop

'My favourite moment is when I finish a song, that is the moment I cherish.' – Rod Temperton The Invisible Man tells the remarkable story of how Rod Temperton worked his way up from a Grimsby fish factory to become one of the most successful songwriters of all time. Born in Cleethorpes in 1949, Temperton embarked on a career in music with the funk band Heatwave, for whom he wrote the international hits 'Boogie Nights' and 'Always and Forever', before his songwriting talent caught the attention of Michael Jackson's legendary producer, Quincy Jones.For Jackson's Off the Wall album, Temperton penned both the hit 'Rock with You' and the album's title track. Three years later, he started work on what would become the best-selling album of all time – Michael Jackson's Thriller – writing three songs, including the now legendary title track. And yet despite collaborating with some of music's biggest stars, including Donna Summer and Michael McDonald, Temperton was famously reclusive and seldom gave interviews. Having enjoyed unprecedented access to the great man for his Sony Award-winning radio documentary on Temperton, Jed Pitman presents the fully updated, definitive story of one of music's most talented individuals.

1

THE STAR OF A STORY

The future music business was to alter memorably after Les and Ida Temperton gave birth to a boy, named Rodney Lynn, on 9 October 1949. And the town that created this lad who was to become a musical genius, one who would write some of the world’s most famous songs? Not Hollywood, not LA, not New York, not even London, but Cleethorpes on the Lincolnshire coastline.

It was not long before Rod was introduced to the thing that would make him his fortune, if not the fame that should have gone with it – privacy was something he sought for much of his life, in spite of his enormous success. As Rod himself remembered:

My father wasn’t the kind of person who would read me a story before I went off to sleep so, even as a baby or when I was really young, one year old or something, he used to put a transistor radio into my crib, right on the pillow, and I would go to sleep listening to Radio Luxembourg. Remember that? 208 meters. And so I would listen all night long while I was sleeping to this, hearing tunes like ‘Love and marriage goes together like a horse and carriage’ by Doris Day and all this kind of stuff. And I think somehow that had an influence on me because my parents weren’t really musical. I mean my father had a good musical ear and played a bit of accordion at Christmas. My mother was not musical at all. So I think that having music by my ears while I was sleeping played a big part of my getting to love music. Well, I can’t think of anything else, anyway.

Rod’s first school was Reynolds Street in Cleethorpes, and it was there he first began to show off his talents:

When I was at junior school, we had a really good music teacher, a lady called Mary Boulders. She did a lot of choral things which I liked. So, she spoke to my parents about having singing lessons and I said that I wanted to do that. So, I worked with her for a while and she used to enter me into local singing competitions and I always came second, I don’t know why.

I really enjoyed that time. Mary was a really good teacher. I had started to play my first musical instrument, the drums. I used to skive off school occasionally and while dad was at work, I would get in the living room with my snare drum and my symbol, and play along to the test card on the TV. They put that up, with some girl, a doll and a chalk board because there were no TV programmes on until five o’clock. So I used to play along to the test card, which had all kinds of music which was played continuously.

But then, when I was 11, I went to boarding school and I lost that side of it but still retained some of it. They used to want me to sing in the choir at boarding school. And we were very lucky to have a great music teacher there. You see, I never wanted to take lessons. I wanted to be out playing with the lads. So they didn’t push me and neither did my parents, to do piano lessons or anything like that, but the piano teacher did used to give some additional lessons after school and then directly afterwards he would sit and take tea in one of the classrooms. And I used to always go and sit with him afterwards and just talk about music. He was desperate for me to take piano lessons but I said that I didn’t want to do that.

The boarding school in question was De Aston in Market Rasen and the schoolteacher he talked about was Ted Gledhill, who remembers Rod well:

It would have been in the early 1960s when I came across Rod for the very first time as a teenager. There would have been around 350 pupils at school in those days, all male. He was an average kind of boy but very keen on music. The school really excelled at sport particularly athletics, rugby and cricket but we also had active drama and music clubs – chiefly classical. I think Rod came into prominence when, during the annual music competition we had, I introduced a pop section. This was unheard of at the time because pop music at a grammar school was not encouraged. Rod formed a group for the competition and he was the drummer in it. The band did very well and that seemed to give Rod an outlet for what had to be an innate talent.

He was a good drummer but we had no formal drumming lessons at the school but he also had elementary piano lessons from a visiting piano teacher.

Rod added:

Ted Gledhill was great because we only used to have one music lesson a week but he used to come in and sit and do things like play a record and then we would all have to talk about it which was really exciting for me. It wasn’t just a question of ‘Oh let’s sing some hymns’, or something. Instead, Ted used to come in with things like West Side Story and Dave Brubeck and stuff like that. And that made it a lot of fun. And you know, my interest in music just grew and grew. I started to form this band and that band but I never thought I was a good enough drummer to be in them.

Ted Gledhill:

I’ve heard that Rod has said that hearing West Side Story in one of my lessons had a major impact on him. It thrilled him to bits because he had never heard anything like that before. Little did we know at the time how it would influence him but it’s a soundtrack that embodies melodies, rhythm and all sorts of harmonies, all things which Rod excelled at later on. I think, too, that the Beatles had a tremendous influence on Rod. They were the band that everybody talked about at school.

Life was moving along nicely for Rod in the early 1960s. Pop music was livening up, thanks to the Beatles, in his teenage years. The young man was happy at school. Ted Gledhill:

I think boarding life suited him. One of the great advantages of boarding school is that it teaches a bit of independence but also the need to work in a team. As the songwriter Rod became he mastered both of those things, writing songs alone but then working alongside stars like Quincy Jones and the engineers and musicians. I presume some of the early experiences he had at school helped him. It probably kept him the very modest man he became, too. He once sent me an LP of E.T. and on the cover you see there is a credit to Quincy Jones and to John Williams but you have to look in the small print inside where his name is relegated as a composer of a tune called ‘Someone in the Dark’ which was one of the tunes featured in the film. Rod also sent me a copy of Quincy’s Back on the Block and once again it is Quincy who gets all the credit but you mustn’t forget that Rod was the assistant producer, arranger and composer on that so you can see that a lot of his light has been hidden under a bushel. That’s boarding school for you!

The one thing I do remember from those very early days was that he had a wonderful sense of harmony in addition to an innate sense of rhythm and I’m sure that helped him tremendously because things start from a base and you work upwards, something he was able to do by adding layer upon layer of melody and counterpoint. Believe me, none of what he did was easy.

As for Rod, he remembers the first time he ever attempted songwriting while at school:

We were entered for a school music competition and there were six categories and one of them was original song. Well we won, purely for the fact that nobody else entered that category so there was three of us who wrote this song and … so that was kind of the beginning of writing I suppose.

By the time Rod left school in 1969, pop music had gathered a huge amount of momentum. Thanks to bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks and so on, many kids coming out of full-time education aspired to be in a group, trying to be the next big thing. Rod was no different from many others. Rod:

When I left school, I wanted to be in a local band and they had a drummer who was a friend of mine, who was really good. And they kind of said, ‘Well, we want you to be in the band’, and I said, ‘Well, nobody can afford to have two drummers, so what am I going to do?’

And they said, ‘Well, we’ve got an old Farfisa organ, why don’t you play that?’

I said, ‘Well, how do you play it? What do you do?’ It was the instrument used by Richard Wright on Pink Floyd’s early albums such as The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Ummugumma.

I remember one guy turning around to me and saying, ‘Well, three fingers make a chord’.

So I said, ‘Oh okay’.

And while they would sit with the sheet music to ‘Summertime’ or whatever it was we were learning, I would listen to them and then just figure it all out. And it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me because I think about eight months after that I was a professional playing an organ and arranging for a whole band. So, it was obviously meant to be.

The bands I started playing in in England were into progressive rock, bands like Yes and King Crimson, that kind of thing. It was all going OK with one of the bands I was in but I always felt a little lost if I’m honest. We would play only four songs in our session, each song lasting for about thirty minutes with fifteen key changes, time signatures, everything. Then the whole thing collapsed very quickly and I thought that was that.

Instead, Rod looked to be heading into the world of computers:

Yes, I had a proper job when I left school. Before then, during the summer holidays I had been a lifeguard at a holiday camp and I used to make great money doing that. I used to work all hours under the sun earning twenty-five pounds a week. When I started to work it was five pounds a week and I thought, ‘Blimey, how am I going to make do off this?’

So, when I finished school, during the first summer holidays after leaving, I had to have an idea of what I was going to do but the problem was that I just didn’t have a clue. I always remember my dad saying to me, ‘Get a job in computers, that’s the future’. He was a visionary it seems. So, we found a job in the paper for a company called Ross Group who did the frozen fish and everything. The job was in their head office for a trainee computer operator. So, I went to Grimsby and got the job. I worked there for a year in the office and then I got the chance to go professional as a musician. I just jumped at the opportunity. That’s what I really wanted to do, to try it and see if I could do it.

It’s funny how things stick to you in life. Years later, I remember when Michael Jackson toured England, and either the Daily Mirror or the Sun, I don’t remember which one, wanted to do a story on him every day he was in the country. And so they called me in LA and asked me if I would do an interview. I said no, I don’t really do interviews. So unbeknownst to me, they sent reporters up to my home town to find out whatever they could, and I think they found my aunty and she told them a few things and somebody sent me the story some weeks later after it had all been out and it was unbelievable. You know, bearing in mind what I said about working for Ross Group, they came up with what was a great headline. I opened the newspaper and there was a picture of me on one side and a picture of Michael Jackson on the other side and it said, ‘Grimsby Fish Filleter Reels in Fortune for Wacko Jacko’. Brilliant. But sadly wrong – I never filleted fish.

2

TOO HOT TO HANDLE

At the start of the 1970s – perhaps the greatest decade in terms of popular music through prog rock, glam rock, punk and disco, to name just four life-altering genres – Rod Temperton was a young man who had shown some musical talent from an even younger age but appeared to be heading into the new world of computers instead, in the north of England. By the end of it, he had written a number of international hits, most notably for a man who was to become one of the biggest stars in the world, Michael Jackson.

Music was, of course, still running through him and he became part of several bands in Hull including one called Hammer. The whole area – Hull, Grimsby and Cleethorpes – was to remain very close to the heart of Rod. As Simon Blow, a friend of Rod’s and former sports editor of the Grimsby Telegraph, says:

The first time I met Rod was at a performance by Heatwave at The Dunes, a small venue in Mablethorpe. The band around that time also played live at the Nunsthorpe Tavern in Grimsby. Rod once turned up at the Fisherman’s Pub in Sea View Street, Cleethorpes, to take in some live music.

Rod:

Cleethorpes has always been quite in front in music. I remember going to my first pop festival at the Boating Lake when they had the Animals and people like that, and that was before Woodstock. The Jazz Club in Grimsby always used to have groups before they were famous and I think Cleethorpes is always a groovy place compared to others.

A move to Germany in the early 1970s doesn’t sound like the start of a great love affair with music but, as so often happens in life, Rod just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Rod:

I was broke, stony broke, and I thought to myself that I had to get a job somewhere so I answered any job advertisements that I could find in the NME or Melody Maker. When I got to Germany, I joined a dance band called Sundown Carousel with Bernd Springer – I was the only one of us who spoke any English – and he and I had to play six hours a night on stage and it was all simple pop music, even though most of the things I had never heard of in my life. I remember getting there at one o’clock in the afternoon and they said, ‘Well you have to play tonight, you know … we just lost the organ player’.

So I said, ‘Okay.’

So I remember just getting all this material and learning the first two or three notes, you know, how it started out and thinking to myself, well I’m just going to have to wing it because there’s no way to learn that stuff in that amount of time, in a few hours. But because of the complexity of the music I had been playing before, the prog rock stuff with all the time signatures and so on, it was ki...