Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasure
In Pop’s millenial time travel, the compilation has become an art form in itself: a highly practical method of mapping a history that is still up for grabs. Like all the best compilations, Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures matches scrupulous research with passionate, first hand knowledge: the product of a highly personal vision, this astonishing collection of mid to late 60’s soul, like the music that it encodes, makes you see the world in a different way.
‘What is Soul’, Ben E.King once demanded, and these twenty five slices of melodrama offer the satisfying answer: more than you could ever have thought. Unlike the usual info-free, dubbed from disc CD’s of ‘Northern’ stompers, Deep Soul Treasures offers a variety of exquisitely (and expensively) produced protests and ballads. Some songs, like Raw Spitt’s Songs to Sing, offer a definitive Blackamerican critique of the Vietnam War, but the real heart of the collection lies in songs like Kenny Carter’s Showdown and Jimmy Holiday’s The Turning Point: wracked accounts of love’s sheer, heartbreaking exhilaration.
In Irma Thomas’ 1964 Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand), you can hear a world turned upside down. Here is a record made by people who knew exactly what they were doing, performed by a singer pushed to the limit of her considerable powers – a perfect balance between heart and head. Backed by a sparse production of piano, celeste, clucked guitar and a female chorus, Thomas sets off on her tale of addictive love: more victim stuff, you might think, but then you hear the strength and control in her voice. Then, in the second verse, Thomas breaks through: ‘I feel so sorry for the ones who pity me’, and the tables are turned. Never mind what the world thinks: with a little self-analysis and emotional honesty, the underdog can become the winner.
As Dave Godin writes in his introductory manifesto, this ‘is certainly the music of the outsider. Some might say that Deep Soul is by, for and about losers, but in claiming this they miss the main point, which lies deeper beneath the surface. For Deep Soul occupies exactly the same role as Greek Tragedy did in those far off days: it is cathartic; a form of therapy through art by which we are brought face to face with the worst thing we think could happen to us, but, by experiencing it through the artistic metaphor, we learn the lesson but avoid the actual pain and the actual hurt. It is didactic. Sex is so easy, but love …? Well, that takes a bit more learning…’
This is not what you’d expect from the standard fanbase annotation of Sixties Soul, but then Dave Godin occupies a unique place in British pop history. In 1964, he became Berry Gordy’s UK representative, coining the phrase Tamla Motown and brokering the label’s first consistent UK success. While running the Soul City record shop in the late sixties, Godin also coined the phrase Northern Soul – used to describe a split in the soul audience between the South East and the rest of the country. In the late seventies, he also worked on two breakthrough gay disco records, Valentino’s I Was Born This Way and Sylvester’s (You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real: two more examples of the ‘tireless endeavours in the furtherance and development of soul music in the UK’ which won him a special award from Blues and Soul Magazine in 1983.
If the century long importation of Blackamerican music has been one of the best things to happen to Britain, then its effect has been to make a notoriously stiff nation feel mighty real. In his own life, Godin reflects the tectonic social shifts that have made this relaxation of feeling and sexuality possible: a lifelong vegetarian, anarchist, and Esperanto enthusiast, he remains a tireless polemicist and campaigner against cinema censorship. Believing that music is indivisible from its social conditions, Godin is rare among pop analysts in that he walks it like he talks it. ‘This is my nature,’ he says; ‘I’m a champion of the underdog and the avant-garde’.
In his donnish demeanour, there is little hint of Dave Godin’s origins, save an accent that can only be described as cockney camp. Born in Lambeth (‘My father was a milkman’, he says proudly), he won a scholarship to Dartford Grammar School, where he met several of the future Rolling Stones. His particular Blackamerican epiphany happened in 1953: ‘I just wandered into the Silver Lounge ice cream parlour in Bexleyheath, and they had a new jukebox which must have come from an American army base. It was chock full of records I’d never heard of. Some young men who were working on a building site put these records on, and that was the first black American music I’d heard: Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean, Ruth Brown’.
‘I couldn’t believe it. One of the first impressions that hit me was that here was a record in the popular music vein that was so adult, so gritty. I went over and asked one of these young men what the record was, and he pointed it out, and he asked me if I liked it, and I said I thought it was amazing, what was it ? He said it was Black American music called Rhythm and Blues, and that if I liked that one, I’d probably like this, and punched up records by Smiley Lewis and Fats Domino. I’d never heard people discussing sexuality in such a candid way. I wish I could go back and thank this young man because he changed my life.’
A conscientious objector to National Service, Godin worked his two year service as a hospital porter while saving to go to America. ‘All the new culture was coming from America. I went with a friend. We bought a van for $40 and drove it round the whole of the USA, did the whole Dharma Bums thing. We saw some marvellous Rhythm and Blues revues: LaVern Baker, Fats Domino, Clyde McPhatter and that really changed me for ever more. That was when I got that slight missionary zeal: I thought it was wrong that there was so much talent in the US, and hardly anybody in Britain had heard of these people. So in the early sixties, I started writing for Blues Unlimited as a fan: the first thing I wrote was about Mary Wells.’
‘At that time, Motown’s records were coming out on all sorts of different labels. It annoyed me that these records were being literally thrown away. I wrote to Berry Gordy and started a fan club, where I linked two of his labels together for the first time ever, the Tamla label and the Motown label, as the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society. We started very humbly. Then I got this telegram out of the blue asking me to go over to Motown and visit everybody. It was high summer 1964: very hot. We were whisked off to Detroit and everyone was there: Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, the Marvellettes, Martha and the Vandellas, all the big names. There was great embarrassment because I said, “Where are the Supremes, because I’d really like to meet them”, and they’d not been considered important enough to ask. Somebody made a quick phone call and said “put on your glad rags and come over”.’
‘I remember riding in Berry’s car, and he had one of those gizmos where you post the record into it, and he played this white label 45. It was Where Did Our Love Go and I said, “This record has just got to be a hit. It really has a chance in Britain, if we could get the airplay.” The BBC controlled airplay then, but the pirate radio stations had just started, and when I got back, I went to see them and said, “Why don’t you start playing some records which the BBC won’t play. Then if these records get into the charts, then you will know you’ve got the listeners.” They did this, and we got an amazing response. Where Did Our Love Go was a massive hit, and that was down to the pirates: along with Mary Wells’ My Guy, it put us in a very strong position when we negotiated the deal with EMI for the Tamla Motown label’.
Within a year, however, Godin stopped working for Motown. ‘I felt that when the hits started coming, I’d done what I needed to do. They could steam ahead and didn’t need me anymore. ’ In 1967, he opened up the Soul City record shop with two partners: it quickly became a leading soul mecca and, soon after, a record label. Soul City’s second release, Nothing Can Stop Me by Gene Chandler, made the charts in May 1968 – an early example of the revived popularity of high sixties soul – and the money was ploughed back into a sequence of re-releases, like the Valentinos’ It’s All Over Now that showed exactly where the British beat groups got their ideas.
‘That’s when the term Northern Soul started. It was just shorthand for customer awareness. What happened was that London and the home counties fans, wishing to be seen as all things hip and up to the minute, would tend to follow what was going on in the American charts. Black American music was taking a new direction in the US, towards what we later called Funk. James Brown’s influence was enormous. Now at weekends particularly, Soul City was a target for fans from the north, who would often travel down to follow their football teams, and they dug their heels in and said no to this new trend, we like Urban Uptempo Soul. Not a trace of funk. So I coined the term Northern Soul to differentiate those records that they would like.’
‘They were records by Major Lance and Billy Butler, songs like The Velvelettes’ These Things Will Keep Me Loving You, the Elgins’ Heaven Must Have Sent You, Chubby Checker’s At The Discotheque. Some of these were rereleased in the late sixties and became hits. The beat was on the fours: in a sense almost the same kind of thing as ballroom dancing. Because I was writing at the time, I’d just say “this record will particularly please northern soul fans”, and it became in effect a generic term. I think there is much more a concept in the North of a parallel to the Blackamerican thing about the Saturday night. You see it in Sheffield, where I now live, in that the streets are packed on a Friday and Saturday night, because it’s part of working class culture to go out at the weekend and have a good time at all costs. ’
In his current concentration on Deep Soul, Godin has returned to what has, over a thirty year period, made him a legend in soul circles: pursuing a taste to the point where it becomes a vision.If the twenty five tracks on the CD sound as startling as they did on first release in the 60’s, Godin attributes it to ‘a divergent, Blackamerican culture which values other, abstract things like tenderness, generosity of spirit, of love. Why these records have found an echo in so many hearts – and it is mainly male hearts – is that men are brought up in our society to despise the feelings that these records represent. That doesn’t eradicate them. So there’s a recognition, like a coming home, and a realisation that yes, this is how we should interact with one another. Yes, we should put a value on love, and that yes, human relationships are damned difficult. It doesn’t mean that you’ve got to stop trying to achieve this. And you have to say yes to these feelings and teach people not to be ashamed of them’.