As a first step, Gordy envisaged the Supremes performing in classy nightclubs and on Broadway. But Ross, he says, always balked at his proposal that the group should broaden their repertoire by singing standards as well as their hits. (At that point it seems that not even Gordy had realised that their hits would become standards.)

He tells the story of how on the tour of Britain in 1965, at the first show in Manchester he finally persuaded her to sing You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You. ‘The crowd didn’t like it. And she said, I’m not doing it any more. I was devastated. We’d argued before, but she’d always done everything I said. And this time she said no. And I didn’t realise the effect this would have on my heart, my soul, everything. I knew at that moment that managing Diana Ross was my life, and if I couldn’t do that, what do I do? Go home? Quit the business?’ He laughs. ‘That’s why Manchester means so much to me, because I thought at that moment my life was over.

‘So she got out there and did her first couple of numbers. Smokey was beside me at the side of the stage and I was asking him, what do I do? He said, what are you talking about? You’re going to quit the whole business? What about Motown? What about the rest of us? I said, she’s my life, Smoke, you don’t understand. And as I was saying that, in the background she started singing You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Loves You. I thought I was dreaming. And she sung it better than she ever did. She walked off the stage, and I said, “Diana, you don’t know how much that meant to me.” She kept walking right past me, then she stopped and said, “I did it for you.” ’

At the end of that tour, while the rest of the Motown artists returned to Detroit, Gordy took Ross to Paris, beginning a six-year love affair. He gave her top billing within the group – renaming them Diana Ross and the Supremes – and then launched her on a solo career.