The producer made scores of hits, paved the way for disco and recorded big cats for Dionne Warwick. He was like no other
Thom Bell, along with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, was part of the holy trinity of Philly soul – the lustrous, aspirational sound that bossed the US R&B charts between the peaks of Motown in the 60s and disco in the late 70s. Bell was a supremely confident, classically trained songwriter and arranger who introduced the celeste, the french horn and the harpsichord to soul music. The results were classicssuch as Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) for the Delfonics, Back Stabbers for the O’Jays and You Make Me Feel Brand New by the Stylistics.
He was born in Kingston, Jamaica, but his parents moved to Philadelphia when he was very young. His upbringing was solidly middle-class and he was playing piano from the age of four. By the time Bell was nine he could also play drums and flugelhorn. Rock’n’roll largely passed him by; instead, he idolised Burt Bacharach and the writer and arranger Teddy Randazzo. The local Cameo-Parkway label gave Bell his first employment as an arranger in 1965, and in no time his sound became instantly recognisable. “Nobody else is in my brain but me,” he told me. “Which is why some of the things I think about are crazy – I hear oboes and bassoons. An arranger told me: ‘Thom Bell, Black people don’t listen to that.’ I said: Why limit yourself to Black people? I make music for people. I wouldn’t care if they had a horn in their head.”