Dave Godin interview #1
[11th February 1995]
Where were you born & raised?
I was born in London, Lambeth. Raised in Peckham. Spent most of my childhood in Peckham until we were bombed during the war, then we were moved to Bexleyheath. Education was very disrupted. I got a scholarship place to a very posh grammar school, because of the changes that were taking place they had to take a few grotty scholarship students. It was a fee-paying school, a grammar school, but to keep their money flowing from the government they had to take a few working class scholars in, and I unfortunately was one. I didn’t want to go, but I went because my mum & dad were so pleased & proud that I’d passed. My dad was a milkman. And it was at Dartford Grammar School, of course, that I met Mick Jagger. And introduced him to black music, I’m ashamed to say. It’s ironic that as a result of meeting me he’s where he is today.
How did you find out about black music?
Until I was in my very early teens I had no interest whatever in popular music. If you think back to popular music in those days it wasn’t hard to understand: Doris Day, schmaltz & big bands. I was very keen on classical music right from when I was a child, and as a result of that I had wandered into what would now be called world music, which I think was then called ethnic music. It wasn’t very easy to hear. I went with a mate to see the Balinese Dance Company at Sadlers Wells – it was only a shilling to sit in the gallery, and for our shilling we’d go and talk to members of the troupe and the orchestra, it was marvellous.
There were a few records you could buy: Columbia had issued a series called Music of the World in Recorded Sound. There wasn’t much, but that was part of the fun, you’d have to order them specially and might take a fortnight for the record to come in, but the day would dawn that they’d say, oh, your special order has arrived. A 78rpm record, one side of music from Java, the other side music from Bali. And you’d waited so long for this music, you rushed home, played it and it was mind-blowing. Now I suppose people go along to Virgin and browse through about twenty CDs and take their pick. There’s a lot to be said for hunting down what you’re interested in.
Anyway, me and my friend, another vice we had was to skip dinner, save our dinner money and on Friday after school we would stuff as much of our school uniform as we could into our satchels, go into this low life dive called Silver Lounge Ice Cream Parlour and have a Knickerbocker Glory, which was 2/6, which in today’s money must be about £10.50, but on this one occasion we went in there and lo and behold, there was a brand new jukebox. It was American, it was full of 45rpm records which had only just been issued in Britain. There were some young men there who seemed terribly grown up to me, putting records on the jukebox and one record came on and I was gobsmacked, I had to go see what it was: Ruth Brown, Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean – I was trying to read it as it went round and this bloke saw that I was interested, and pointed it out on the list. I’d never heard a record like that before. It was so earthy, so real, and the words were so adult. I’d never heard people discussing sexuality in such a candid way. This young man – I wish I could go back and thank him because it changed my life, gave me about five sixpences, it was sixpence a play, and said, if you like this, you’ll probably also like this, and this and this. It’s called rhythm & blues music. Black American music. I scribbled down about three titles that day, of records that I really had to get. As luck would have it, cos I’ve always been avant garde, I’d just got a new three speed record player, with this mysterious 45 speed on it. So I thought right, I’m going to collect all these special black American records, and I’m going to collect them on 45 – which is a shame because Screamin Jay Hawkins’ I Put A Spell On You was never issued on a 45. Not all the record companies issued 45s to begin with. Decca were the first. I think Phillips were one of the very last to issue 45s…
In all the years of working with artists they always used to ask, you know, how a white guy in England got into black American music, and I always used to tell this story. And I always used to say if you ever cross paths with Ruth Brown, give her a big bear hug and a kiss from me, because she was the first and I owe it to her. Nobody ever did, but forty years later, I had a phone call from her.
…so although I’m a militant atheist, I’m prepared to concede the existence of guardian angels, cos I’ve had some remarkable strokes of luck. In a sense, people don’t realise how hard you have to work for good luck…
So you were a teenager at school and you started buying the records. What was the next stage? Going out to clubs?
No, there weren’t many clubs. In a sense, rhythm & blues fans, as we would call ourselves in those days, the word soul hadn’t been invented yet, were very lonely people. We were like missionaries who were always trying to convert people to the cause. I think that missionary instinct still prevails, to a degree, because soul music has never become fashionable in the way that some other fields have had their little moment. Soul came quite close to it in the sixties, but it didn’t sustain itself. What used to happen was we would read Record Mirror, which thanks to Norman Jopling – I don’t know where he is now but I have to give him credit because he was very interested in r’n'b music, he introduced an r’n'b chart – this was from about 1959 or 1960 – and he would cover black artists who were making it big in America, who were doing bugger all over here. I think he must also have been responsible for seeing that Record Mirror, unlike any other music paper, certainly not the Musical Express or Melody Maker – would actually print reader’s letters about r’n'b. What sprang from this was an underground network of contacts because you would have a letter printed – I had one printed because they had failed to review of Bo Diddley’s LP, Go Bo Diddley. I got about twenty letters from r’n'b fans from all around the country. The ones in London and the Home Counties I actually met and became friends with, it was like a brotherhood. The fact that someone was an r’n'b fan actually did make them a brother. I suppose we felt that we were experiencing what black America was going through, though obviously not on the same hideous level – but black music was so discriminated against. People said very nasty things about it. In a way we were like all orphans in a storm, you know. Glad to find a fellow soul brother.
Was it also a case of getting out of the English class system? Of getting to somewhere else?
Oh yeah. If we get to the politics and the subversiveness of black music we can come back to that. Most definitely.
Mike Ashby was in a very privileged position because in those days you couldn’t import American records, the copyright people had it stitched up. Mike had an aunty who lived in America, who would send him records and they would often get through. Mike was one of the people who had written to me, and I would go over to his house for the whole weekend, from the Friday night to the Sunday evening, and we would play records non-stop. Mike used to also get this magazine which his aunty would send over, like the r’n'b equivalent of Smash Hits. We’d see all these pictures of artists we adored. It was just called Rhythm & Blues, or perhaps Rhythm & Blues Monthly. But it had the lyrics, and pictures of people like Mary Wells and Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, and little press hand out stories, like, the day Chuck Berry nearly died. But what was great was to see pictures of people who were just a name on a record label.
But [talking of how available music is today] Mike called me one Monday when I was going to go visit him the next weekend, to say, guess what arrived this morning? The new Jimmy Reed album on VeeJam – I could barely sleep all week, for that Friday to come around. Ten tracks!
What did the people you were with at school make of all this?
Oh it was completely alien, like the Javanese music or the Russian Ballet music. They weren’t horrible about it it was just seen as a peccadillo. So it was nice to meet a fellow soul enthusiast, because – I suppose its like being gay, everybody thinks they’re the only gay person in the world until they realise there’s more out there. I’m left handed and I always notice other people who are left handed, actors and actresses on television…
Were you at school with Mick Jagger?
Yeah. He was younger than me, lower down the school, but we continued to talk to each other after I’d left. I was actually there at the conception of the Rolling Stones. Just as all cultural and social history gets distorted by hindsight, the person who had the idea, the concept and everything, was a boy names Bobby Beckwith. Now Bob was another r’n'b fan, who didn’t live far from me. It was around his house that the idea of starting some sort of group was formed. Poor old Bobby got railroaded out eventually. Keith Richard was there, and Brian Jones – horrible person, Brian Jones. Really odious, most disagreeable, no redeeming features at all. Very vain… very much a person ahead of his time, he was one of Thatcher’s children in the sixties. He was a friend of a friend, I’m not sure how he really came into it, but I thought it significant that he had been living with a friend who had this baby and when fame and fortune beckoned he just abandoned them to their poverty in New Cross.
Everything I’ve ever read says that they took the name from muddy Waters’ Rolling Stone Blues. This is only half true. The name came from a Muddy Waters record called Mannish Boy, which we were all crazy about. Halfway through, he sings, I’m a rolling stone… But everyone at that time was also mad on Bobby Bland, known as Bobby Blue Bland, and he had done a record called Little Boy Blue – and there was quite a bit of discussion about whether they should call themselves the Rolling Stones from Mannish Boy, or the Blue Boys from Little Boy Blue.
As far as I remember, all it was was these people were going to jam, you know, just play like the record. I can play harmonica, I can accompany every Howlin Wolf record, but I wouldn’t want to do that and take all the credit and leave poor Howling Wolf in the shadow. I was appalled when it came out that they were going to take advantage of the fact that a lot of these records were not going to be issued in Britain. I think that was the great divide, we were working on behalf of black America, and it seemed that they were working on behalf of themselves. This is why I’ve never forgiven them. If they can concede that, then why the fuck haven’t they done more for black America? Had they done a tenth of what I’ve done in my life, and they’ve got the wealth, the position and everything to do it.
I went to [Mick Jagger]‘s house once. He lived up a private road in a detached house and I remember his mother came home, god knows where she’d been, probably the local conservative club, and we were playing records and I clearly remember her saying, oh, I’ll leave you to it, I can’t stand these “darky” records. If you cut away all the artificiality from Mick Jagger, he’s not that far removed from Michael Portillo…
What was Keith Richard like?
He wasn’t a very cheerful boy either. Again, the immediate memory I have of him is that even after he had hit the big time, his poor old mum was still working at the local co-op. Personal hygiene wasn’t his strong suit either. No not my cup of tea, none of those three. Bobby Beckwith was a genuine guy. I think he would have gone along with them, but my friend David Stead was with us that night when Mick decided he was going to make his debut as a singer… you must bear in mind that r’n'b singing probably has the highest standard of vocal expertise of any other form of singing there is. Otis Redding was a mediocre singer who got some good material but as a vocalist he was no great shakes. I remember going home this one night when Mick had done his thing, and I said to David, I didn’t know where to put my face for embarrassment – someone should really tell him. I honestly thought in my ignorance that if he ever gave a public performance he’d be laughed off stage. What happened was Alexis Korner eventually started a blues club I think in Richmond…
Ealing.
…well that was the beginning of the r’n'b club scene. We didn’t mind Alexis Korner, he was quite authentic. We would never buy his records, of course, but there was that feel for the music, and there was a good selection of authentic r’n'b records that they would play in between performances. It was great. Anyway, Mick Jagger wormed his way in there… they started performing at the Richmond r’n'b club and we started drifting away then. I was working in an advertising agency then, and another big thing at the time was National Service, because I was a conscientious objector, and you had to go before a tribunal and if you couldn’t prove you were genuine they put you in prison. I was determined whether they put me in prison or not I wasn’t going in the armed forces. So I had that worry – I was arguing from a non-religious viewpoint. Ninety percent of the COs based their case on some sort of religious belief. Mine was simply that I didn’t want to learn how to murder people. They were terribly hostile to begin with, but I stood my ground, and part way through they seemed to shift their position, and in the end they congratulated me on how well I presented my case, and instead of going in the army I worked in a hospital for two years. The reason I mention the shift is that half way through the tribunal hearing they all realised that I’d got the gift of the gab, and this was the last sort of person they wanted in the armed forces, so thanks a lot Dave, for tipping us off.
What did your parents think of all this? Did they support you?
Yes, well, my parents had always supported me, even though they never understood my passions, or the music I liked, I think its part of that working class thing, our David right or wrong. I don’t think they would say that if I did something they considered wrong. But certainly with that, and my father had actually been a professional soldier.
But also about the time I bought that Ruth Brown record, at about nineteen, I decided to become a vegetarian. Again, in those days… I went two years before I met another vegetarian. But they were good on that as well. It wasn’t easy then being vegetarian. Of course in those days manufacturers didn’t list ingredients on their packets. All the energy you put in life in various struggles which once achieved you think, fucking hell, did we really… there was a campaign for years to get manufacturers to list their ingredients which they resisted tooth and nail. They didn’t want to. So as a result when my poor mum went shopping she had to think, well Kellogg’s Cornflakes are alright for Dave, but this other one isn’t. I really appreciated the fact that all through my eccentricities they never once complained. In fact I think they had secret sympathies with them, particularly on the animal issue…
So when you drifted away from the Ealing club where did you go to then?
I think we just started that network of contacts. Record Mirror and Norman Jopling was our rallying point. By then of course black music was starting to get more widely known. Remember that the Ruth Brown period things were pre-rock’n'roll, and by the time that the rock’n'roll thing happened, we had been on this rhythmic beat thing for quite a few years. So we resisted the term rock’n'roll, which we saw as hijacking the black music again, this time by white American artists. For us, Little Richard would always be rhythm & blues, we would never refer to him as a rock’n'roll performer.
Would Little Richard have been the first black star who was popular in Britain?
It would have been either him or Fats Domino. You had people like the Ink Spots already but they were black people who put out material that would have been palatable to white people. To put it crudely, they didn’t make race records. Whereas rock’n'roll was race music.
In the rock’n'roll fraternity there were a number of black artists who had one-off hits. Chuck Berry had some hits a bit later.
I don’t think things like Roll Over Beethoven could have been that big hits or the Stones and the Beatles couldn’t have got away with covering them.
Absolutely. And similarly with Cilla Black, the way she copied Dionne Warwick’s output, safe and secure in the knowledge that Dionne Warwick wasn’t going to get the airplay. There was only the BBC and Radio Luxembourg, which again wasn’t that daring or different because the yardstick by which everything was judged was popularity. Very few people would go out on a limb and try to break an unusual record. That was Norman Jopling’s great strength as a reviewer, he wasn’t afraid to say of an obscure record, this is great. In the sixties though we did also have a show in France that we used to pick up round about 5.30 called Salut les Copins, Hello kids. I think actually I’ve left a chunk out because when I finished national service in 1957, I went to the USA. I went to Toronto first, because I didn’t want to go through all the business of getting an American visa, because if I had I would have had to face conscription there. There was no conscription in Canada, and it was comparatively easy to get into Canada, and you can cross the border quite easily from Canada, especially if you’re white and European.
I remember one night I was fiddling with he radio and picked up a New Orleans r’n'b station. They were playing Thurston Harrison’s [indistinct] which had just come out. I went to a big rhythm & blues concert: LaVerne Baker, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Johnny & Joe, The Spaniels, all on one show. That was in Toronto.
Who was in the audience, was it black or white?
It was a white audience. Toronto didn’t have a big black population. There were black people in Canada, who basically were the descendants of runaway slaves. But not many made it that far up. It wasn’t until I got to America that the ratio shifted. I think this rhythm & blues show was all part of the rock’n'roll thing. Films like The Girl Can’t Help It had already come out.
Did the audience go crazy for it?
Oh yes, but then American audiences do, white or black. It was perpetual screaming. For us in Britain, I think Britain has only just in recent years caught up with that level of hysteria. Maybe the Beatles concerts were like that. But it was a different sort of hysteria, which is basically like a sexual thing, that was geared to the music. American audiences could always clap on the off-beat, that British audiences couldn’t. The thing you always have to bear in mind when you talk about pop music in Britain, is that its an alien input. Just as if we all had a passion for Japanese music. Its not natural to our ears. The music which is indigenous to Europe isn’t on the off-beat, its on the beat. Knees Up Mother Brown. The Hokey Cokey, the foot falls on the beat.
One of the great things that Britain suffered from since W.W.II – in many ways we lost that war. We emerged defeated. As a result of this and because of Americas role in the war, there’s that very mean jealousy & resentment of America which shows itself as an insidious anti-Americanism. In a sense my politics are very anti-American, but I don’t see why you should let this overlap into culture. I love American films and I love American music.
How long did you stay in America?
Two years. That was enough. As much as I love certain aspects of America there are other aspects that I really loathe…
Radio was just so different there. When I came to working records… how can kids be expected to buy the records if they never get the chance to hear them? All the while the BBC dominated the airwaves, the records weren’t being sold because people tend to buy that which they hear and decide that they like. Often soul fans would have to buy records blind, on the strength of an artist’s name.
When did you start getting involved in the industry?
That must be the early sixties, because Motown had had a few releases with Fontana, one of which I absolutely went potty on, which was Please Mister Postman. I played that record non-stop, ten times on the trot… I’m not saying Motown was the only great black American label, but there was something emerging which was distinctive.
A new confidence?
Yeah. Also Holland Dozier Holland. I saw Berry Gordy on television the other night and he never even mentioned them. This really annoyed me because when people talk about the Motown sound, the heyday of Motown, this is ninety percent Holland Dozier and Holland. Admittedly Smokey Robinson’s input was valuable and important, but HDH did the business. They were the people who created the sound, who brought strange things into the studio: chains taped onto tambourines, all sorts of weird experiments. Then Motown shifted to Oriole. Now Oriole was an independent label which had not had any involvement in black American music at all. It was a really strange choice, but the truth was, no-one else was interested. They’d had a couple of releases on London, then Fontana, then Oriole. On Oriole, the Mary Wells records came through, and again, Berry Gordy never even mentioned Mary Wells which was unforgivable. I wrote an article about Mary Wells, because no other bugger in Britain knew anything about her, and the title I gave it was “Girl Goddess of R’n'b Fans” because at that time she really was. I’ve often said that if you take a record like “Bo Diddley” by Bo Diddley, only the people who bought that record when it came out in 1955 can have any concept of the culture shock, it was beyond belief. Everything about it, you had never heard anything like this before. The excitement, the wildness, incredible. And of course what people like us found so exciting, other people found anathema. You’d play a record like that to non-r’n'b fans and it was, get that fucking racket off! It was too much for them. But Mary Wells represented the transition from r’n'b which was rooted in the rural tradition to the north, urban connotations, playing tricks with that.
Wasn’t r’n'b the sound of that move? Cos people like Muddy Waters had made that move from the country to the city…
What that was was the technological advantages that were available in the cities: guitars, recording studios, time to rehearse and work ideas out, jazzy night clubs – that’s another thing, we must never forget the input of jazz, particularly bebop, into black American music. Bebop was very influential, and the link between bebop and r’n'b and rock’n'roll is a lot more apparent than a lot of people think. It came from what was called jump blues, people like Louis Jordan, where the tempo suddenly went wild…
Bebop wasn’t just a music, it was a whole Afro-American thing, a way of life and an attitude…
Oh yeah, it was also playing tricks with the voice, and the vocal style – there was the short-lived thing called vout singing, where the voice was reduced to the level of an instrument. But with Mary Wells came the gradual emergence of what came to be known as soul music. It wasn’t exclusive to Motown because Maxine Brown had done All In My Mind, and if I’m pressed, I would always cite that as the first soul record.
Why is that the first soul record, how do you define it?
It had severed the traditional rural links. It was unmistakably city night club music. It had also moved on to a deeper perception of human psychology, almost as if the initial set of problems with the blues, were where’s the rent etcetera, survival. Things were still tough, but now we move on to all the problems of interpersonal relationships. The troubled mind thing. All In My Mind is a key record. To me its importance cannot be exaggerated. It was on NoMar in America, and London over here. There was a time when probably ninety percent of my collection was on the London America label.
All these Motown records were coming out on Oriole?
yes, and I just couldn’t stand it any longer, I actually sat down and wrote a letter to Berry Gordy, and said its terrible what happens to black American music over here, and I’d like to do something to help, I’d like to start a fan club, for Mary Wells and for all the Motown artists. I got a nice letter back, saying please go ahead. So I advertised in the Record Mirror and Norman Jopling gave me lots of free publicity, and people started writing in, joining up, and before I knew it, I had quite a sizeable army of followers. Then things started to happen. We switched to the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society, because we got wind that Mary Wells was going to leave Motown when he contract expired…
The American labels were Tamla, Motown, Gordy, Soul, Melody, Jazz Workshop… they had registered Soul as a potential gospel label, because that was what soul meant in those days. But when soul started to be used for this emerging new style of r’n'b, they were quite happy to use it. Of course they were quite lucky to have the word soul tied up.
Was there any policy about which records were on which label?
No. There was no identity.
One of the first recruits was Vicky Wickham, who worked on Ready Steady Go. She said, any soul artist who comes to Britain, we’ll have them on the show. She had everyone: Ike & Tina Turner before they’d done a thing, Inez and Charlie Foxx, Irma Thomas, everyone. The last time I saw Mick Jagger, actually, I was at Ready Steady Go with Marvin Gaye and Mick Jagger came over and it was hello, mister Godin, are you going to introduce me to Marvin Gaye then, and I said, he’s over there, you can fucking introduce yourself.
Unlike the Beatles, who I met when Kim Westwood was on the show. To get into the studio that day was like getting into Fort Knox. You needed pass upon pass upon pass, and they came in through the fucking roof. It was so ironic that there were kids out there who would have given anything to be in my shoes and because I was with Kim I got to meet them. I was so not into pop music, that before we went in, I had to get Vicky to bring a photo of the Beatles to me, to identify them so I wouldn’t get their names wrong. But they were very nice. And George said he read my column regularly.
Something that was very important back then was to always have the very latest releases. In those days you wouldn’t be caught dead listening to a record that was even a week old, let alone thirty years old as people do now…
So anyway, the Motown thing started. We had Norman Jopling and Vicky Wickham batting for us. Then out of the blue I got a five page telegram, from Motown, inviting me to go there as their guest, and meet everyone. This was 63 or 64. I was just gobsmacked, I mean for a start I never knew five page telegrams existed. They said, please phone to confirm your acceptance, which I had to do from a call box. They said they’d be sending me a airline ticket and there was a bloody postal strike on… looking back on it now, I think it was like an interview, and they offered me a job as their English rep, which I was glad to accept.
There was only one point where I crossed with Berry Gordy, and that was that he realised that Britain was not an extension of the USA, that it was a different market, that we had this weird broadcasting system, we didn’t have local radio, so when we talked Britain, we talked to Dave, what Dave advises us, and it worked. I came up with the concept that since Motown were already having lots of hits in America, all their big acts except the Supremes, and the problem with Britain was we had no way of knowing who it would be who made the breakthrough…
But you saw the breakthrough as inevitable?
I thought, sooner or later it had to happen. I’d go along with that because I was working for them and I wanted them to have a breakthrough. But I knew that a lot of marketing had to be don, and I came up with the idea of marketing them as a sound, and as a label. Everything else would be secondary to this, it would be Tamla Motown, then Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, then whoever. In a sense, this benefited everybody. Initially they were indifferent to the idea of getting their own label but I said it was critical because I was going to market the sound. The resistance – they were licensed at the time to Stateside, and the resistance at EMI, you wouldn’t believe. Because it was a new idea, it was lunatic, but to their great credit, berry Gordy and Esther Edwards said they would do it, and as they say the rest is history. With the name I wrote all the label names down on bits of paper, and jiggled them about, you know, Motown Tamla, Gordy Tamla – and I was a bit biased towards including the Gordy name into it, because he’d been so good to me, but when I got to Tamla Motown it did seem to roll off the tongue pretty well.
Two interesting things happened while I was in America. One they had this huge reception for me when I got there. Everyone who was everyone was there, it was like a three line whip to attend. Now the Supremes had made records called Let Me Go The Right Way, and When The Love Light Starts Shining. Now the Supremes were considered so second level that they were not even invited to this reception. I was chatting to Berry and said, are the Supremes here because I really liked those two records. He was very embarrassed and said, oh no, we didn’t invite them, and he went off and obviously it was desperate phone call and sure enough they turned up and as soon as I met Diane – not Diana then – I thought, you are going far, dear. She was so fawning and so flattered that I liked their little records…
So was it very hierarchical, Motown?
Oh yeah, very. Mary and Flo were sweet… I remember riding in Berry’s car with him and he had one of those things that you posted a 45 in and it played, and I think we were talking about the Supremes again, and he said oh, we’ve just cut a new side on them, it’s on the floor. There was this pile of white label 45s on the floor, and I picked this one up, and it was Where Did Our Love Go? I heard it and I said if this one doesn’t do anything there is no justice. Do he said, I’ll have some copies pressed up, cos they hadn’t released it in America, and you can take them back and see what you can do with them. Luckily, simultaneously with me coming back, Radio Caroline, the pirate station was starting up. Now they didn’t have an open doors policy to these records at all, I said, you pick any three black American records, which the BBC will not touch with a barge pole, and lean on them, and they go into the charts, that proves to all your advertisers that you are a force to be reckoned with. And it clicked, and this is what they did, and Where Did Our Love Go was a hit.
On Stateside?
Yeah, but that gave use the negotiating power for the next stage, which was Tamla Motown. Actually Mary Wells had broken through before, but we already knew she was leaving the company. Also at that time I wasn’t about to back track on Tamla Motown.
The other funny thing that happened while I was in Detroit. Berry said, as its such a special occasion, I’ve got three records by Martha and the Vandellas, and they’re all good and we’re going to issue all of them, but you pick the next release, and it was Dancing in the Street. At that same audition he also played me Jimmy Mack, and that didn’t come out until about three years later. I don’t remember what the third record was. It just shows how they keep them on the shelves. Dancing in the Street wasn’t a hit in Britain the first time around. Anyway we got the label. By this time too I’d also gone into journalism. I went in by default, there was a magazine called Home of the Blues, which was like a fanzine, which I think Mike Vernon was behind. He was very purist and old-time about it.
Where there was a big gap between me and a lot of the purists was it seemed to me that they wanted to keep black people in the past, like nigger minstrels or something, whereas I was all for black people joining us, catching up with us. You must not exclude from you work the impact of the film Carmen Jones – that was a huge hit both here and in America, against all the odds, an all black cast in a bloody film based on an opera. But what that film showed was that black people can be exciting, they can be sexy, everything. People went to see it and enjoyed it as they would any other film. And it had Dorothy Dandridge in it who was one of the most gorgeous creatures you ever set eyes on.
Anyway, Home of the Blues wanted an article on Mary Wells, but this was well before My Guy. I don’t know why they wanted it but I was about the only person in Britain who knew anything about Mary Wells, and then John Abbey… Mike Vernon’s magazine was called Blues Unlimited, and John Abbey started Home of the Blues which later became Blue & Soul, and John Abbey asked me to write about anything, and the first thing I wrote was about the girl soul singers, cos I’ve always favoured female singers. This was so successful that he asked me to write regularly, and I did that for donkey’s years. There’s a great underground trade in photocopies of my articles.
When did you leave the industry?
Fifteen years ago when I went to Sheffield to do my degree. I think its a working class thing that you’ve always got to be twice as good because there’s always someone who’s got a scrap of paper or a privileged position who gets it over you. When I was sixteen I came out of a culture that says you get out & work & earn money. So that’s what I had to do. I wanted to go to art school but I thought I’d save some money & go to America instead… but I think the music scene was changing, and I had been a teenager for donkey’s years. I was going to discotheques and feeling ill because they were so loud, and in a sense I’d said I wanted to say. Maybe also there was no cause anymore, and I’ve always been into causes. Perhaps I had reached some sort of menopausal stage where I thought, do I want to be in this groove like forever? I needed a change.
About three months before starting college I had a call from Harvey who had cut this record by Sylvester, and I agreed to work on it until September 15th which was when I started college. I told him they’d have to flip it for Britain, the a side had been Dance Dance Dance, and the b side had been Mighty Real, and eventually they flipped it in the states too. It got to number one for a week, and it was nice to go out on such a big hit. Number one with five days left. What was so funny was my first week in college all these kids were singing Mighty Real, and there I was thinking, if only you knew… that was nice.
Was the marketing of Sylvester as an out gay pop star the culmination of a lot of things?
Well I’d also worked very hard with Valentino with no luck, and I was advised by a staff writer at Blues & Soul not to review that record because if I did everyone would think I was queer. I thought, well, everyone thinks I’m queer anyway, what’s the odds, and it was a bloody good record.
Andy Peebles used to have a soul show on Radio Piccadilly, and once a month I used to go on the show as the star guest, and I would play five records of my choice. I went there this particular week and I showed him the Valentino record, and he said, I’m sorry I can’t play that, it’s been banned, and I said, if that record is banned then I am banned. I won’t go on the show I won’t be on the show ever again. It was brinkmanship, and it worked. He played the record, and it was the only time it ever got played on Radio Piccadilly
Why was it banned?
It was overtly gay.
Is that why it wasn’t a success?
I guess so, although I have seen legions of heterosexual soul fans singing along to it. I Was Born This Way. But I wonder if the brinkmanship had gone the other way, if Andy Peebles had said, too bad, good-bye, he wouldn’t have announced the reason why over the air, he would have said something like, oh Dave Godin is difficult to work with. And that would have been the end of it. People often don’t see life as it really is.
How long did you work for Motown?
About four or five years. Once they’d got the label, and hits started coming, that’s a dangerous time for me, because I’m an avant garde person, once something like that doesn’t need me anymore, you think well what’s the next challenge. I felt Motown didn’t need me anymore. I didn’t have a clash with Berry, but here was one occasion when Berry Gordy didn’t take my advice and I felt very bad about it. That was bringing the Motor Town Review over to Britain. Of course we wanted it in Britain, but it was wasted bringing it over when he did. Had we been able to do it a year later, to give us more time to work on the records and build up a following, it would have been much better. As a result, some of the places, when we played Cardiff there were more people on the stage than in the audience. It was awful. God knows how much money we lost on that. And because of this the media said, Motown is a two minute wonder. London was alright, there were enough hard-core soul fans to fill the Astoria… I’ve always had a pretty good idea of exactly how many hard-core soul fans there are in Britain. I think it comes of having access to record sales.
It seemed like an awful lot of work had been thrown away. I thought, I don’t think Motown needs me anymore, and there was a lot of good soul artists out there who perhaps do. So I split amicably with Motown and of course I was doing the column in Blues & Soul…
Would it be true that the success of Motown caused the flood of production of black American music?
Perhaps, it might have been there anyway. I wrote at the time that we were going through the Golden Age of black American music…
There were many factors. There was the civil rights struggle, it was the breaking down of barriers, not perhaps through good will or common sense as much as money. People began to see there was money in these records. It was also marked by a tremendous feeling of hope and optimism, almost like a post war euphoria permeating the music. There was hope and possibility, there was money, drugs hadn’t wreaked their horrendous toll on the scene. Basically it was still just a marijuana thing. This euphoria filtered down to all levels, even to people who weren’t presently enjoying it, and the truth was they never would. Nevertheless at the time they felt that they might. The music reflected all that.
What caused the end of the Golden Age?
Again I think it was success and money. Big record companies started signing up acts, trying to get on the band wagon. Columbia, although they’d always had their Okeh label, and to their credit you had more artistic freedom at Okeh than you ever did at Motown. This was by default because they understood nothing about the music and so they just put you in a studio and said, bring us a finished tape. This was great from the creative artist’s point of view. Columbia was so big they never cheated on royalties. Black America went through two phases. The first phase, they were very hostile to the white record companies, one, because they said the didn’t understand the music which was perfectly true, and also they wanted to support the black companies. But the black companies cheated with the royalties, and the white companies mostly didn’t. So you had a second phase, into the major black companies and so many people were signed up and got lost. What the fuck is Joe Tex gonna do on Dial, one of Columbia’s subsidiaries? Or Epic or whatever. Either you come up with the goods or you don’t. Also a lot of creativity in the early days, say from the early fifties to about 1970, you could call in favours, but once you start getting into corporations, that’s fatal.
Was it also to do with changes in black Americans, you start getting riots…
Drugs had a tremendously bad effect on creativity – I think they delude the artist into thinking it sounds good. Look at Tim Buckley, who took a very militant anti-drugs line, long before it was fashionable. When he did Starsailor, I just said, who is he kidding? That whole psychedelic thing, and the corporatisation of soul music, and of course they were only interested in black music for the money they could make out of it. When that stage had passed, where do they go? the little black labels have gone out of business, and you’ve got to start all over again. In a sense, that underground is still there. I bought a 45 a year ago which could have been made at any time between 1965 and the present day. House of Love by Carl Sims. I think what’s happening is that they really want to take stock and say what the fuck have we traded for these concessions? Have we been given so much? Separate developments like rap come from a totally different aspect of black America, they aren’t part of a continuum of soul music, they’re something which has erupted out of the black social spectrum. Rap doesn’t have roots in the sense that white people could have invented rap, as an indigenous cultural form it doesn’t draw to much on black roots…
…black music in some respects has also borrowed a bit from white music, although its appropriated it and made it its own, a rich field has been country & western. If you get a good country song, it ends up as a soul record. No doubt about it, and its country roots are indistinguishable by then. I’m all for that cross-fertilisation, but I think black music is so unique and so special that it deserves to retain that, and no more so than in the field of deep soul.
What do you call ‘deep soul’?
I coined that term at the same time as I coined the term Northern Soul. We had Soul City record shop then in Monmouth Street, and running a soul record shop like that is a bit like running a Catholic book shop. You suddenly realise that Catholicism consists of all kinds of different strands and ideas. Although for Joe Public the word soul might be enough, actually working in such a specialist atmosphere, I felt the need for a bit more vocabulary. Northern Soul was quite specific: we used to get a lot of northern fans coming into the shop on weekends. At that time the r’n'b scene would pretty much follow on from what was happening in America: what black America was happy to throw at us, we were happy to receive. But about that time there was a shift in the music, the trend was towards funky music: James Brown, after years of struggling was beginning to emerge as a really major influence…
So you’re talking about the idea of a groove rather than a song?
Yeah. Now because the soul fans in London tended to be… I hate to use the word sophisticated, but, in a general sense, more consciously hip, they would follow the follow the trends that were going on in America, or else feel very square… but what happened in the north was they dug their heels in and said no to this new trend, we like the urban soul of the big cities, Urban Uptempo Soul. Not a trace of funk within it. So I coined the term Northern Soul to differentiate those records which would appeal to those northern soul fans. Like Major Lance, Billy Butler, The Right Track, Darryl Hall, Open The Door To Your Heart, The Velvelettes’ These Things Will Keep Me Loving You, The Elgins’ Heaven Must Have Sent You
All 4/4?
Yeah.
And that difference has remained ever since?
Yeah. Although I would argue that the Northern Soul scene has gone through changes and would now accept records which twenty years ago would have been anathema. The soul scene generally is very conservative – I think its to do with loyalty. If you’re part of a minority, you have to be loyal, and any change represents a threat. I think one of the reasons I was popular was I actually ordered people to go out and buy records, and that’s what they wanted. I had readers who would buy any record that I say is good. And I think I was unpopular in the industry because I never once gave a favourable review to a record that I did not genuinely feel merited it.
I think there is much more of a concept in the north of a parallel to the black American thing about the Saturday Night. You see it in Sheffield that the streets are packed on a Friday and Saturday night, because its part of working class culture to go out at the weekend and have a good time at all costs. Whereas in London, while that existed in the 50s, over the years it has become spread out that much more. And I found that I didn’t go out at weekends because everyone else did. I stayed in at weekends.
Now Deep Soul is a direct line from the Maxine Brown, All In My Mind record, which is technically a deep soul record which is very stylised and mannered, very gospel rooted but totally secular. Very mind music, the words are very important. In a sense, it isn’t just a musical experience, its also a poem. Unfortunately for the world, deep soul is one of those genres which has never enjoyed that big a following, even in black America. Maybe people think its too heavy, maybe its music for neurotics, I’m working on that theory. I wouldn’t regard myself as an altogether stable character. But by God does it speak to my condition.
I think the term, “speaking to my condition” is a very good yardstick to use with culture. Perhaps Deep Soul is like the Radio 3 of the soul spectrum. I think perhaps in a hundred years this might turn out to be seen as the most breathtaking art form, I really do.
When did the term “soul” come in?
It would have been about 62/63, and Billboard were responsible for it. The term r’n'b came to be used because records used to be listed in the Race Chart, i.e. black records selling to black people, and Billboard didn’t like the racist connotations of that. They decided they had to come up with a new term, and everyone in the office put their brains together, looked at all the records and decided that they were all either rhythm or blues records, and so it was. Rhythm & Blues. By the time the 60s came along, rhythm & blues which was meant to be a liberating term, had in fact taken on a racist flavour. For a record to be classified as r’n'b ghettoised it, as in, “This radio station does not play rhythm & blues”. So Billboard decided to drop the term for its racist connotation, and adopt the term soul.
Was the point of Soul City Records to get attention for deep soul records?
No, oddly enough, originally I had planned Soul City to be a blanket label like Stateside, as a conduit for black American music of all sorts. That’s why the labels slogan was “Soul as Deep as You Like, And Then Some”. We were gonna cover the full spectrum. But then with our second release, which was Gene Chandler, Nothing Can Stop Me, we had a top hit. As a result the label was given an identity by the public, and as we’d made quite a bit of money with that record, and as deep soul was my passion, I said, we will now issue a Deep Soul label. I saw that as the first time ever that black music was given its proper respect. There’s always this association between black music and sleaze and low life and all that sort of shit. I though, why not the concert hall, why not rococo, why not gowns and gilt and cherubs and everything? Let’s give it The Works.
We went bust eventually, it was inevitable. My trouble always was being ahead of my time. Admittedly it give s you a reputation, but it don’t give you no money. It leaves you with poverty and the ability to say, told you so. Which is not bad?
Do you think the English contribution to pop music is in packaging and synthesis?
Yes. I think we reflect back. I think we could do a lot more. There are all sorts of reasons, like the Musician’s Union, for years they kept black America out, until the British groups wanted to get bookings, then they soon changed their tune. I hate all that, anything which stands in the way of development…
So what is the English relationship with black music?
I don’t want to use the word academic. It is the recording angel of black American music. I have an American book somewhere and it’s talking about records made at Chess, and being very vague, and says, if you really want to know these details, you have to go to Britain. Also there’s a sexual thing, and this should be noted. Soul music in Britain is a ninety percent male thing. I think there’s a reason for that, but I don’t really want to share it with you, and waste it on this interview. I’ve got to save something original for my book!
Why do people become purist about this music?
Maybe its aesthetic. I find that when you get into a passion about anything, you get into a refining process. If you were paid to see every film… if you’re exposed to a lot of something, your taste becomes refined. You become conscious of what you prefer, and with soul music, it is so much more than just music. It is also part of black American history. It’s as if some cultural thing had been developed in Grimsby, which totally reflected Grimsby, and lived and thrived in Grimsby for two hundred years before it began to seep out, there would always be a Grimsby authenticity, we would always be able to tell what was just pretend.
Another point is that a lot more talent goes into soul music than goes into non-soul music, and there are reasons for this. It is all part of black Americans being denied. What goes into soul music is a huge reservoir of frustrated acting talent, poetry and writing talent, which previously could not find any kind of commercial outlet: “You want to be a poet? What kind of a job is that for a fucking nigger?” This all goes in. There’s a lot more psychology there. There is a gay consciousness which is definable because it is denied a natural surfacing within the mainstream of dominant ideology. So there is a definite gay subculture. Similarly with soul music, once you become aware of what the subculture is, you recognise it in the music more and more. People who have bought a record unaware, like the Gene Chandler which went pop, it was played on the BBC, loads of people must have bought it and not identified it as a soul record. But maybe it did to some people what the Ruth Brown record did to me. You step across the threshold of soul music and until you cross that threshold you have no idea that it consists of many kingdoms. It’s just soul.
What is the subversiveness of soul music, particularly in an English context?
I would see it particularly as a weapon in the sexual revolution – which is the Freudian struggle to liberate sexuality from taboos and neuroses, to stop sexual fear grabbing a hold of people and thus wreck their lives endlessly. There was a pioneering book in the 50s called The American Sexual Tragedy, and I think that summed up with anarchist, Reichian politics. People liberating themselves from all those neurotic, anti-life constraints that have been placed upon them. I think people become neurotic because in our mechanistic, materialistic western world, one has to recognise that there is an irrational dimension within us. There are psychological longings and yearnings which western society says are reprehensible, particularly for men. Tenderness, softness, emotion, sentiment. Soul music, because they were a minority, turned in on their own resources, never jettisoned this sense of care, mutual aid, the real depth of unhappiness. Issues which black America constantly had to face. Because of this its kept certain spiritual values going which we jettison at our peril. I stress that there is no need to rush to religious irrationality. That is equally disastrous. We become too sophisticated for our own good. In the west we end up sneering at everything. Everything in time becomes camp. If you could hypnotise people or give them a truth drug or something, all they would really want is some love and tenderness. Soul music reflects this. It is so personal, which goes to the core of my being, to the extent that I would be embarrassed to discuss it.
James Brown sang, “if I sing a part/ that stings you in your heart” and that’s it. One of his early big hits. ["Lost Someone" - the version I have is on Live at the Apollo Vol. I, and the line appears on the continuation of the track on side 2... - m.].