The Four Tops :
“He had them sounding like The Temptations”
IN 2001, Whitfield announced that he had been working on an album with The Four Tops for five years – and it was “the greatest thing anybody’s ever heard”. But no-one’s heard it yet. It was the Tops’ management’s idea, Whitfield’s right-hand man Duane Moody remembers, intriguing the producer, as they had been Holland-Dozier-Holland charges while he was at Motown. Whitfield funded, wrote and produced the result – which proved to be a final hurrah both for Whitfield and the original Four Tops. “It’s a very powerful, completed album,” Moody reveals. Its title, 911, after the US emergency number, indicates the socially radical direction Whitfield intended to pursue. “The title track is the twin brother to ‘Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone’,” Moody explains. “It tells that kind of a story. Norman Whitfield has The Four Tops sounding like The Temptations!”