When she was a pupil at Camden School for Girls in the 1970s, Olivia Lichtenstein and her classmates would spend their breaktimes formation dancing to soul music in the school hall.
Among the artists to which they side-stepped and span was Teddy Pendergrass, the biggest male R&B artist of the day, even bigger, that is, than his closest rivals, Marvin Gaye and Barry White.
If You Don’t Know Me By Now and Don’t Leave Me This Way, the hits of the tall and handsome Black Elvis, as he was known, were the soundtrack to the girls’ youth. And when school was out it was, says Lichtenstein, his husky, soulful voice that urged them towards intimacy with the teenagers with whom they slow-danced, clockwise, cheek-to-cheek.
“People said his vocals could melt a woman’s clothes off her body!” says Lichtenstein. Or as one of the singer’s former managers, Danny Markus, puts it: “It took Teddy 11 seconds to get to the point with a girl that would take me two dinners and a trip to meet her parents.”
Almost half a century later and now one of Britain’s foremost documentary filmmakers, Lichtenstein had just started listening to Pendergrass again when she saw a programme about Shep Gordon, the legendary Jewish artist manager who worked with everyone from Blondie to Alice Cooper — and the Black Elvis.
“The documentary included a little bit about him working with Teddy and it made me realise that I didn’t know what had happened to him. And it also made me consider how even though his songs have been covered by the likes of Simply Red and The Communards and artists who’ve sampled him include Kanye West and J-Lo, people often don’t know those hits were originally his.”
These reckonings gave the Bafta award-winner “a strong, instinctual sense that I had to make a film about Pendergrass . I’ve had that feeling a few times in my life and when it hits I almost feel I have no choice in the matter — I have to tell the story.”
So she contacted Gordon who agreed to join the project as an executive producer. A short trailer was enough to sell the idea to BBC Films who co-financed the production. The ensuing 106-minute documentary, Teddy Pendergrass: If You Don’t Know Me, includes rarely seen footage of the soul superstar’s performances as well as intimate and candid interviews with co-performers, friends and family including his ex-wife, his mother and his widow.
“They were very keen to tell his story. Many of them are now in their 70s and 80s, and I think there was this sense of if I don’t talk about this now, I never will.”
During the course of those interviews with the people who knew him best, Lichtenstein was often both the only white person and the only Jew in the room. Was her ethnicity ever a talking point?
“I think my Jewishness came up now and again. But in a good way. I felt very, very accepted for who I am.”
This is not her first film about a musician but it’s fair to say that her early years in South Africa, where her parents, like many other Jews of the day, were active in the anti-apartheid movement, drew her to a theme that lies at the heart of this singer’s life, and which she explores in the documentary: black artists’ fight for parity in a profession where they were taken advantage of by just about everybody.
In Pendergrass’s case the good fight was fought shoulder to shoulder with his Jewish manager. Together he and Gordon broke what was known as the Chitlin Circuit, a network of clubs where African-American artists could perform that was run by black promoters who engaged them for next to no money. When they left the circuit the men got death threats: it is no exaggeration to say they risked their lives to make it easier for African-American artists who came after the Black Elvis
Lichenstein’s strong Jewish identity — “I’m not religious at all but I’m very Jewish” — seeps into all of her work in some way, she says.
“My parents were what you might call bohemian academics, and the humour, the bookishness, the emphasis on education and learning was the perfect childhood for a future filmmaker and writer (she is also the author of two novels).
“And I also think that as a Jew one has this feeling of never quite belonging which means you are always sort of looking in — and that’s probably helpful if you want to tell stories for a living.”
Teddy Pendergrass:If You Don’t Know Me is on at selected cinemas
