Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, co-founder and last surviving original member of the Four Tops, giants of Motown – obituary

Abdul “Duke” Fakir, who has died aged 88, was the last surviving member of the classic Four Tops line-up; one of Motown’s most successful bands, they had more than 20 hits on both sides of the Atlantic.

While Levi Stubbs handled most of the lead lines with his yearning baritone, Fakir’s high, smooth tenor added bright, sumptuous harmonies alongside Lawrence Payton and Renaldo “Obie” Benson. Their success was rocket-fuelled by the songwriting and production skills of Lamont Dozier and the Holland brothers, Brian and Eddie, and alongside the likes of the Supremes, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5 they took the Motown sound around the world.

“We felt part of something,” Fakir recalled in 2022. “It’s like God planted a musical seed right in that area of Detroit and it just blossomed into a world-loving flower.”

Abdul Kareem Fakir was born in a rough area of Detroit on Boxing Day 1935; his Muslim father Farah was a factory worker from what is now Bangladesh, while his mother Rubyleon, née Wren, was a minister’s daughter from Georgia.

At Pershing High School he had early sporting ambitions, excelling at basketball, American football and athletics, but his performances in his church choir sent him in another direction. He got to know Levi Stubbs at local football games, and the two became closer after Fakir saw Stubbs performing on stage with the bandleader Lucky Millinder.

In 1953 he and Stubbs invited Lawrence Payton and Renaldo Benson to join them following an ecstatically received performance at a party, Fakir turning down a college scholarship in favour of the music. They called themselves the Four Aims, to mark their desire to get ahead.

They were all from tough backgrounds, but “once we started singing, our whole perspective of life changed,” Fakir recalled in 2022. “We just started looking at the beauty of life and travelling and being able to sing to the world and making people happy.”

They signed with the Chess label, who reminded them that there was another vocal band around, the Ames Brothers, so they switched to the Four Tops. To their frustration, there was, though, a decade of thwarted hopes and unsuccessful stabs at success, playing the supper-club circuit, often to segregated audiences – “The blacks had to stand up in the balcony and everybody else would be on the floor dancing and having fun,” Fakir recalled.

Although they knew Berry Gordy, they were initially reluctant to join his new Motown label, “because in Detroit, a black company was like – down the toilet, you know?” But once they threw in their lot with him in 1963 their trajectory shot off in an upward direction.

“Motown was breaking through and we wanted the public to know that we were good people,” Fakir recalled. “It was helping civil rights a lot because our music was seeping into people’s houses.”

Their first album, the jazzy Breakin’ Through, did not break through, and for a while they were confined to laying down backing vocals for other Motown artists, but when Gordy teamed them up with Holland-Dozier-Holland, success came quickly. Baby I Need Your Loving narrowly missed out on the Top Ten, but a string of hits followed: I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) and the deathless classic Reach Out I’ll Be There, with its passionate vocals, symphonic sweep and supremely funky bassline.

The hits kept on coming – including Standing in the Shadows of Love, It’s the Same Old Song, Bernadette and Ask the Lonely – and between 1964 and 1968 they had 12 Top Ten singles in the US. The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein helped to break them in Britain when he brought them over on a promotional tour, Fakir recalled.

“On the last night, before we went onstage, he said: ‘Fellas, if you can give me the best show you’ve ever done, I guarantee I will make you as big here in the UK as my Beatles are in the USA’.” They duly obliged, and as they came off stage following a string of encores, he told them: “You’ve done it! Now watch what happens.”

At the aftershow party at Epstein’s Mayfair townhouse they were feted by the Fab Four and the Rolling Stones. “The party was extremely wonderful!” Fakir recalled. “On the first floor, it was wine-drinking and some whisky. On the second floor, it was a little heavier with maybe some drugs. There was a third floor – but I didn’t make it that far!”

They repaid Epstein’s faith by knocking Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band off the top of the UK charts with their Greatest Hits, Motown’s first UK No 1 album.

They left Motown in 1972, declining to leave Detroit when Berry Gordy moved the operation to Los Angeles, and though they never reached the heights they had scaled in the previous decade they were still a solid chart presence and a surefire live attraction, and in 1988 they reached No 7 in the UK with Loco in Acapulco, written and produced by Phil Collins.

They carried on until Payton’s death in 1997, though Fakir, who owned the rights to their catalogue, resumed touring with a line-up that included Lawrence Payton Jnr, and in 2022 they toured the UK with the Temptations – though Fakir admitted that he was having to cut back on his dance moves. That year he published a memoir, I’ll Be There: My Life with the Four Tops.

Obie Benson died in 2005 and Levi Stubbs in 2008. Duke Fakir is survived by his second wife and six children as well as 13 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Another child predeceased him.

Abdul “Duke” Fakir, born December 26 1935, died July 22 2024