The legendary songwriters run through their finest compositions – many inspired by their precarious love lives – for the Supremes, the Four Tops and more

‘I’m the kind of person who loves to be in a crowd and not get noticed,” says Eddie Holland, calling from a golf course in Los Angeles, where he is playing with his brother, Brian. Together with Lamont Dozier, the Hollands formed the legendary Holland-Dozier-Holland (HDH), the crack songwriting-production team whose songs for the likes of the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, the Temptations and Marvin Gaye made them, in Stevie Wonder’s words, “the foundations of Motown”.

They went mostly unnoticed compared with the stars, but seven years ago, a church minister convinced the siblings that, now they were in their 70s, it was time to tell their story. “He told me: ‘If you don’t write a book, someone else will, and they’re not going to write what you want them to,’” Eddie, 79, says. Thus, the Hollands have penned a revealing autobiography. Named after a song they wrote for the Vandellas, Come and Get These Memories shows how so much era-defining pop music came out of Motown boss Berry Gordy’s small house and studios on 2648 West Grand Boulevard in Detroit.

“If we’d been in New York, we’d have had all these places to go,” Eddie muses. “But in Detroit there wasn’t anywhere, so we ended up at Motown. It was our club. People could converse, play cards, but Brian and I had our own office because Berry didn’t want anything getting in the way of those hits.” Thirteen of them reached No 1 in the US, and many more remain radio and wedding-disco staples. Brian, 78, admits they never expected such longevity. “As we’ve got older, it feels like it was a miracle.” Here, they talk through some of those imperishable tunes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Martha and the Vandellas. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

When Brian was eight years old, the Ford Motor Company put on orchestral concerts and invited local kids. “I was greatly impressed by all the violins and bassoons,” he remembers. “It was like being taken out of myself.” Eddie recognised his brother’s ear for melody and the pair sang around the house. As teenagers, they came to the attention of Gordy, who had founded Tamla Records in 1959 and sister label Motown Records (short for “motor town”) the following year, housing both under the name Motown Record Corporation. A local singer friend recommended Eddie, who then told him about Brian’s blossoming musical talents. After Brian’s taste of success co-writing on the Marvelettes’ 1961 No 1 Please Mr Postman, he wanted more.

Eddie had started making music as a singer but was more interested in writing lyrics – and the greater riches in songwriting. Dozier was a Motown artist/arranger/songwriter/producer, but the trio realised that by pooling their talents – Eddie on lyrics, the others music – they could be greater than the sum of their parts. “We were young, aggressive and inspired,” Eddie says. “Our music was different. In school, people would tell Brian: ‘You can’t do a chord like that.’ He’d go: ‘But it sounds right.’”

He continues: “I would always examine a song as it happened and say: ‘Give me a few more bars on this.’ Brian would ask me why and I’d say: ‘Because I need the verse part.’ He was relating to it differently to how I was. He’d say: ‘Your lyrics are getting in the way of my instrumentation. Nobody listens to the lyrics anyway.’ We used to get into long-drawn arguments about that, the importance of words versus music, but then we realised that they meshed together.”

Heat Wave, their first smash, a song about erupting love, giddily sung by Martha Reeves, embodies the era’s spirit of excitement and liberation. “I realised that females bought the most records, and they always seemed to be falling in love with somebody,” Eddie says. “I was drawn to that sensitivity. I felt the combination of the music and the female voice would work.” It did. “Girls would come from Cleveland, Chicago, all over the place,” he chuckles. “They said: ‘We want to meet you because you understand us.’”

Martin Luther King’s 1963 speech – “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character” – resonated at Motown. Gordy had his own vision, of a black-owned, black-artist record company making music for all races the world over. The primary vehicle for achieving this, and inspiring generations of black women, were all-female trio the Supremes, although initially their nickname at the company was “the no-hit Supremes”.

“They needed a hit and we felt we could give them one,” says Eddie. “They weren’t grown women. They were teenage girls, so we wanted a song about an adult situation with a teenage delivery, and Diana Ross had the perfect voice for that.”

The inspiration for Baby Love, their second Supremes No 1 after Where Did Our Love Go, lay close to home. Brian, married with kids, had fallen for Ross, and the pair – as Eddie puts it – “cried on each other’s shoulders”. Brian admits they dated and is teased by his older brother. “Come on, Brian! You were in love with her!” Brian corrects him: “We were in love with each other.”

At the piano, Brian poured out his feelings for Ross and started singing “Baby love, oh baby love.” Eddie thought it was a silly title, but took it as the starting point for an exquisite tale of yearning that became a global smash. As for Ross’s unwitting role in the song’s conception, Brian chuckles: “She had no idea.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Four Tops on the TV show Ready, Steady, Go. Photograph: BIPS/Getty Images

Brian’s marriage to Sharon Pierce started as love at first sight when they were at school. They married when he was 18 and had two children, but she suffered from what we now call bipolar disorder, along with terrible mood swings and migraines. Sharon eventually killed herself, years after the pair had found themselves in a volatile, loveless marriage. “It was a very, very dark time,” he says. Hurt and rejected, he poured out his pain at the piano: “Baby I need your loving / Got to have all your loving …” Eddie, aware of the situation, wrote the remaining lyrics based upon his brother’s feelings.

The song wasn’t right for the Supremes or the Vandellas – “Brian had such feeling for it, but I didn’t know if anyone could sing it,” Eddie says. It went unused for two years until Motown signed another vocal group. “I remember it like yesterday,” he reminisces. “Mickey Stevenson [Motown’s A&R] came into the office and said: “Man, you got anything for the Four Tops? I said: ‘Yeah, we got something!’” Eddie had remembered this colossus of lyrical agony and melodic ecstasy, which Levi Stubbs sang perfectly to create the Tops’ first hit.

Baby Love starts with the distinctive “Ooh, ooh” intro and piles into the chorus; the follow-up hits the chorus from the off. Brian explains: “We always tried to grab people in the first 10 seconds.”

Dozier has said that he came up with the title of the Supremes’ third consecutive US No 1 when he was seeing two women. One confronted the other and he yelled: “Stop! In the name of love …” For the lyrics, Eddie drew on his own experiences. Like Brian, he had married young. After getting a neighbour, Almetta Fordham, “in trouble” (ie pregnant) he agreed to marry her to “get her stepfather off her back” on condition that “she would let me lead a free life, doing what I wanted. I was 16 years old and didn’t know who I was and she would agree with that.”

By the time the couple were divorcing, Eddie had started dating his future second wife, Vernelle Craighead, which inspired this heartbreak classic. Eddie explains that the chorus and lines such as: “Baby, I’m aware of where you go” represent his first wife, but the situation was further complicated by another girl who liked him and told Almetta about Vernelle to try and break them up. “A complex situation, but it sure made a good song.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Supremes. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

In 2015, Dozier told the Guardian that he came up with the song’s title after meeting a young soldier heading for Vietnam, who had had a premonition that he wouldn’t be coming home – and was subsequently shipped back in a body bag. Eddie says he was unaware of this and wrote the lyrics about being unable to escape an unhealthy romantic situation. “When people become emotionally involved, they have some kind of conflict with themselves,” he explains. “So the protagonist can’t run from her emotions.”

HDH generally tailored songs to an artist. This one was perfect for the emotional hurricane of Reeves’s vocals; the trademark Motown pounding beat was augmented with stomping feet and snow chains thumped against the studio floor.

The Vietnam connection endured. In 1988, Nowhere to Run hit the charts again after being used in the Robin Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam.

Although they mostly wrote songs in the office, HDH didn’t keep regular hours and would work anywhere that inspiration struck. This 1965 chart-topper (which replaced the Supremes’ HDH-penned Back in My Arms Again at No 1) derived from an expression Dozier’s grandfather would use when he was a kid.

By now, the trio were feeling the pressure of matching their stellar standards and were, as Eddie notes, “our own biggest critics”. Thus, the brothers remain grateful to the Funk Brothers, the crack team of musicians recruited by Stevenson to lay down the instrumentation.

“Mickey found them in the craziest places,” Eddie says. “But they were talented jazz guys. At first, they thought our songs were junk. They’d say: ‘Oh, easy money for us. Those songs are nuthin!’” Brian remembers first seeing seminal bass player James Jamerson lugging his upright bass in school. “I told him: ‘Why are you lugging that damned thing around? It’s the ugliest instrument I’ve ever seen.’ But he was one of the greatest.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Holland Dozier Holland. Photograph: Redferns

Disaster struck: the Supremes’ 1965 HDH-penned single Nothing But Heartaches only reached No 10 in the US. Gordy issued an astonishing memo that read: “We will release nothing less than Top 10 product on any artist and because the Supremes’ worldwide acceptance is greater than the other artists, on them we will only release No 1 records.”

“It gave us something to strive for,” Eddie says. “Reach for the stars! It was a psychological trigger.” It was one that worked. One night, Brian called Eddie to say he had come up with some elongated chords that “sounded sorta symphonic”. He then explained that Gordy wanted the song, which had no lyrics, for the Supremes – and that he wanted it finished and recorded in the morning.

“I said: ‘What?’” Eddie remembers. “Normally, it took us weeks to write a song. Twice I gave up on it and was going to call Brian and tell him: ‘I can’t do it. I’m tired. I’m burnt out.’ But I didn’t have the heart.” Instead, Eddie went to bed, gambling that he would write the lyrics in the morning. He finished it at noon. “I was still writing the lyrics while we were rehearsing Diana. I swore that I would never put myself through that again.” But it paid off with the Supremes’ sixth US chart-topper.

One of the last big HDH hits before the start of legal wrangles with Motown and, much later, Dozier’s exit from the team, this song’s dramatic, hurtling soul is also rooted in the trio’s colourful love lives. All three were seeing a different Bernadette (well, almost – Brian’s girlfriend’s middle name was Bernadette). So when Brian came up with an interesting melody and a title, Eddie said: “Are you serious? You can’t call it Bernadette!”

Eddie based the words on his girlfriend, who was “extremely attractive, with her own sense of style. The kind of girl that all the guys wanted. I was in love with her, but I didn’t want it to overpower me.” Thus, each Bernadette assumed the song was about them, and Eddie never confirmed the subject of his lyrics. “I should call her and tell her,” he jokes, and the septuagenarians hoot like teenagers.

“It was a great feeling to be part of that whole echelon,” sighs Brian. “We loved every minute of it.”

Come and Get These Memories is published on 18 October by Omnibus. To order it for £17.60 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 020 3176 3837. P&P charges may apply.