Michael Jackson: How Rod Temperton invented Thriller

Ref : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/michael-jackson/5646675/Michael-Jackson-How-Rod-Temperton-invented-Thriller.html

The songwriter behind Thriller, Michael Jackson's most successful album, is a man from Cleethorpes called Rod Temperton.

Published: 8:30AM BST 26 Jun 2009

He came up with the title Thriller after being asked to work on the album by Quincy Jones, the American music producer.

Originally Temperton had called it Starlight but Jones asked him to come up with another title.


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Death sparks Google and Twitter frenzy Temperton once said: ""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'."

Thriller has sold an estimated 109 million copies worldwide.

Jones had got it touch after hearing Boogie Nights, which Temperton had written as the debut single for Heatwave, a disco band he joined after spotting a local newspaper advertisement.

At the time he joined Heatwave, Temperton had been working in a much less glamourous industry - in the Ross Foods frozen fish factory in Grimsby, Lincs.

Now 61, Temperton has made himself rich by writing a string of hits not only for the King of Pop but also for other stars including Donna Summer, Mariah Carey and Mica Paris.

He lives on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, which boasts the actors George Clooney, Jack Nicholson and Bruce Willis as residents.

He also has homes in the South of France, Switzerland, Fiji, and a Kent.