It’s easy to look at a photo of Berry Gordy outside Motown’s Hitsville USA head- quarters and consider the label’s rise to prominence an inevitability. With Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland installed as hit-writing machines for Marvin Gaye, the Four Tops, the Temptations, Mary Wells, Stevie Wonder and the Supremes, how could it have failed? Compare the weatherboarded building and its definitive statement with a British hitmaker, Joe Meek, and his thwarted desire to paint a sign that read “Welcome to Meeksville” on the railway bridge next to his Holloway Road studio in North London. A cute idea, but kitsch and mildly embarrassing.

Gordy’s self-belief, however, has us fooled. That he converted his seductive skills into forming the greatest empire pop has seen can be found in The Complete Motown Singles, an exhaustive, self-explanatory series of seven box sets; yes, it includes B-sides.

When the former assembly- line worker began Tamla in 1959 he had only a few hundred dollars. He had started out as a songwriter — hitting paydirt with Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite — and was a hustler of the highest order. Still, this hardly distinguished him from owners of other Detroit indies such as Lupine and Anna, labels that couldn’t even be called footnotes in pop history.

Where Tamla — and its sister labels Motown, Soul, and Gordy — differed was in its network of genuine pop enthusiasts: the receptionist Janie Bradford doubled as a talent scout; the singer Mable John drove Gordy around before he owned a car, selling his sounds to local disc jockeys; William “Smokey” Robinson concocted answer songs to recent hits such as Get a Job and The Purple People Eater.

This balance of nous and a lack of shame stood them in good stead once they began to succeed. Gordy and Bradford wrote Money (That’s What I Want) on the office piano — it was their first hit, for Barrett Strong, in 1959. The Miracles’ Shop Around was their first million-seller in 1960, the Marvelettes’ Please Mr Postman their first No 1 in 1961. Fast work, by any standards.

These landmarks all appear on the first set, which is the most fascinating and experimental, but the least enjoyable. The latest set — six discs of 1966’s output — beggars belief. Inside a fortnight that summer Motown issued, consecutively, the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love, Marvin Gaye’s Little Darlin’ (I Need You), the Temptations’ Beauty is only Skin Deep, and the Four Tops’ Reach Out (I’ll Be There). “We got so hot that tracks would pile up on my desk,” recalls Eddie Holland, who co-wrote the lot. “I would write for three hours, go to sleep, wake up, write some more, go back to sleep, wake up and do it again. I’d write for two or three days at a time.”

Even the acts who came and went after two minutes and 40 seconds were of merit. The 1966 set includes Frances Nero: she entered a talent contest at Detroit radio station WCHB, just to spite her husband who reckoned no one would sign a 22-year-old with two kids. Motown did, even if they only released one single — Keep on Loving Me — in three years. Nero spent two decades raising a family, then came back with Footsteps Following Me in 1991, and showed that she could also make it on to Top of the Pops as a grandmother. The Mynah Birds were an interracial Canadian band who had a more compact career, splitting after one garage rock single called It’s My Time.

The guitarist Neil Young and bassist Bruce Palmer then headed for California and struck gold in Buffalo Springfield; the singer Ricky Matthews re-signed to Motown at the end of the 1970s and became the funk star Rick James.

“If someone wasn’t confident, or didn’t have it,” recalls Neil Young in the liner notes, “they wouldn’t say, ‘Let’s work on this.’ Some guy would come in who had it, and an amazing thing happened — we sounded hot. They’d Motown us.”

This Motowning effect has also been wielded as a criticism of the golden period with its hit formula and its perma-beat. Individual talents such as Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, some say, were steamrollered by the rhythm section, known — quite erroneously — as the Funk Brothers. Yet when Norman Whitfield produced the Temptations’ Ain’t too Proud to Beg he worked David Ruffin so hard the singer “nearly sweated his glasses off his face”.

If this makes it sound a little like boot camp, quite likely it was. In July 1966 Gordy sent out this memo to his staff: “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 release only No 1 records.” No time for thank- yous, no complacency.

Motown also had a stranglehold on the black music market that made it near impossible for other independent labels to compete. Motown would withdraw favours if radio stations and distributors didn’t toe its line. The label simply bought out and shut down its Detroit rivals Golden World and Ric Tic.

Shrine Records had been co-founded in 1964 by Raynoma Gordy Singleton, also known as Miss Ray, who had founded Motown with Berry before they divorced. After a promising start, Shrine noticed a sharp fall in airplay and demand from shops: conspiracy theorists could have a field day. The label’s logo was an eternal flame — after it closed down in 1967 all of Shrine’s stock was destroyed in a warehouse fire.

It was only when Gordy moved Motown’s base to Los Angeles in 1972 that the formula began to falter. His guile and sleepless dedication to pop had created a Detroit assembly line turning out singles that can still pack a dancefloor anywhere in the world. California may have made good business sense, but it tore the heart out of the music. Motown was left standing in the shadows of multinationals.

The Funk Brothers play at Ronnie Scott’s, London W1, (www.ronniescotts.co.uk 020- 7439 0747), Thur to Jan 20