Rod Temperton, songwriter behind Thriller, passes

British songwriter and record producer Rod Temperton – best known for writing Michael Jackson’s hits Thriller, Off The Wall and Rock With You – died in London after a short and aggressive battle with cancer. He was 66.

Starting out as keyboard player and songwriter for London R&B band Heatwave (the best known being Boogie Nights and Always And Forever), Temperton went on to writer some of pop and R&B’s best-known hits.

For Jackson he also penned Burn This Disco Out from Off The Wall and, also for the Thriller album, Baby Be Mine and The Lady In My Life.

Among his many hits were George Benson’s Give Me The Night, Quincy Jones’ The Dude, Rufus’ Masterjam, Patti Austin’s Do You Love Me?, Herbie Hancock’s Lite Me Up, Donna Summer’s Livin’ In America, The Manhattan Transfer’s Mystery, Mica Paris’ You Put A Move On My Heart, Siedah Garrett’s Grooverre of Midnight (originally a demo for Michael Jackson’s Bad), James Ingram and Michael McDonald’s Yah Mo B There, and Aretha Franklin’s Livin’ In The Streets.

His publisher Warner Chappell Music’s Chairman and CEO Jon Platt noted affectionately that he was often referred to as “The Invisible Man”.

Temperton said music was his life from an early age. “My father wasn’t the kind of person who’d read you a story before you went off to sleep – he used to put a transistor radio in the crib, right on the pillow, and I’d go to sleep listening to Radio Luxemburg and I think that had an influence.”

Michael Jackson’s producer Quincy Jones loved Heatwave’s sound and arrangements. In 1979 he asked Temperton to contribute to Jackson’s first solo album for Epic Records. Among the three recorded for Off The Wall was Rock With You, which was the second US chart topping single off the album.

He also contributed three songs, including the title track, to the follow-up, Thriller. The album sold over 30 million copies in the US alone (and 100 million globally) and continues to sell 100,000 copies a year Stateside.

Coming up with the title he recalled, “I went back to the hotel, wrote two or three hundred titles and came up with Midnight Man. The next morning I woke up and I just said this word. Something in my head just said, ’This is the title’.

“You could visualise it at the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as ’Thriller’.”