Dave Godin interview #2
[July, 1997]
How did you actually get involved in the music industry?
It wasn’t by any design or plan. I’m not a planner I started off as a fan. I think it was Mike Burnham who asked me to write an article on Mary Wells. I think I got asked to do that by default, because I appeared to be the only person in Britain who knew anything about her.
When was this?
It must have been the very early sixties, ’61 or ’62. I think Mike Burnham was running a magazine called Blues Unlimited. One of the problems about black American music is that it’s always been filtered through what I called the Black American Establishment, which is run by white commercial people. As a result of this, coming from a different background and a different political mindset, in a sense these people were as problematic as anything else. When you deal with record companies you’re dealing with one mindset, and when you’re dealing with black music establishment, their attitude was verging on the patronising. I’m sure they’d be very shocked and hurt to hear me say that…
I think an example of that is something you said in the sleeve notes to Deep Soul, where you talked about these songs having that extra added something which is acting ability. The works deliberately against the concept of authenticity in black music. Most people think that true, Deep Soul is true, unvarnished expression, with no mediation…
Yes, that is whitey’s interpretation, what white folk have imposed on the music. It was just the same in the civil rights movement. White people come along and instead of listening, they want to take control… and sure you can see it, you can empathise with it, but you cannot know it. You had to have lived it… what I felt was that the musical establishment at that time wanted to keep black American music in that pigeonhole of blues purism. Which is a white person’s concept. I took a different angle. I remember being derided for liking the Chantelles, the Believers (?) by the black music establishment… I don’t like to mention names, cos I think they were victims of their own culture..
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And they’d already made quite a leap to get as far as they had anyway…
…and now I see them writing sleeve notes for records which when they first appeared they would never have dreamed of regarding them so enthusiastically. But we have to remember that black American music is an import like any other, and if you live with it and become close to it, it’s very easy to lose sight of this. I think people need to be constantly reminded that this is an alien culture, and in a sense we are all guests at the wedding, and it ill behoves the guests to decide how the bride and groom should organise the party, what tunes the band should play and so forth… in a sense I’ve always had that very clearly in the back of my mind. Maybe I have an advantage there because I come from that era. I never went through a pop music stage. I went straight form classical to black American music…
How did that happen?
I just wandered into an ice cream parlour, and they had a new juke box in there, which must have come from an American army base, it was chock full of records I’d never heard of… that was in 1953, in BexleyHeath, the Silver Lounge ice cream parlour. Me and my friend had saved our dinner money to buy a knickerbocker glory on a Friday afternoon after a school trip, for a treat. We went in there and there were some young men who must have been working on a building site, and they put these records on, and that was the first black American music I’d ever heard. Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean. Ruth Brown. I couldn’t believe it. I think one of the first impressions that hit me was that here was a record in the popular music vein, and it was so adult, so gritty… I went over and asked one of these young men, who I later got to know, what the record was, and he pointed it out, and I made a note in my school notebook, 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 then he said, if you like that, you’ll probably like this one. He was obviously quite knowledgeable he gave me the two shillings to play some more. There was a Smiler Lewis record and I think a Fats Domino record… what’s nice, forty years later, after all this time in the music business, I never had the opportunity to meet Ruth Brown, or to meet anyone who knew her. And when she came to perform at Ronnie Scott’s club, she actually telephoned me and after forty-odd years, I was able to thank her.
When you were called to write about Mary Wells in the early 60s, what were you doing then? Were you working?
well, I come from the generation that had the life disruption of conscription, which wasn’t optional. I’d already decided when I was about fifteen that I was going to be a conscientious objector. So in one sense that presented a problem, a big potential threat that I would have to face… so I thought to myself that what I would do is go to America and get this whole American thing, not just the music, there was the films, and I needed to get all that out of my system.
America was a very powerful dream here after the war?
Oh yes, and in a sense all the new culture was coming from America, Britain was producing very little. That probably worked against black American music, there was a strong wave of anti American feeling swept through Britain… I don’t think it really faded until the 60s. I think what ended it was when the Americans took the British acts to their hearts, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. I think the war had a lot to do with it. I have this theory that we actually lost the war, spiritually. We had such a body blow… there was such resentment that Britain had undergone such hardship during the war, and then came out with nothing, and in debt to America, who seemed to come out of the war pretty unscathed, untouched.
That was when America became an Imperial power…
Exactly, Gore Vidal was spot on…
So when did you go to the States, Dave?
1957. I took a job in an advertising agency. Basically I just wanted to earn some money for the trip. A friend I knew at school was keen to go too, so we went together. But he didn’t want to explore America as much as I did. Fortunately we met up with some other English people out there and we became friendly, and one of them wanted to go the route, so we in fact toured the whole of America, did the Dharma Bums thing. We bought a van for about 25 dollars and we simply drove it right around the whole of the USA. We saw some marvellous things, rhythm and blues revues. Great people like Laverne Baker, Fats Domino, Clyde McPhatter, and that really charged me forever more. Maybe that was when I got that slight missionary zeal in me. I thought it was wrong that there was so much talent here, and hardly anybody had heard of these people. To give London records their due, they did their best. I think what motivated them was the American airforce bases that were here, that was a considerable market for them. I think maybe the bulk of the records went there.
You could never just walk into a record shop and buy records like these, they always had to be ordered, which is a real deterrent, especially for young people, because then as now, you want it now…
The kind of people you were seeing in the USA, which very few people had heard, were also the previous generation… was Mary Wells the first person indicative of a change in black American music?
No, I don’t think so. I think the change came towards the end of the 60s… the crucial period was the years 1960 to 1970. It was the golden age of black American music. The reason, of course, if you study the social history of black America at that time, that contributed. Also at that time, and maybe we shouldn’t refer to this too directly, because we don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but you know Mafia money in America is a very potent force, and Mafia money was always ready to go into areas of speculation where respectable money can’t. All this tosh about Berry Gordy setting up Motown with a $800 loan from his father.. that wouldn’t even have paid for the labels on Barrett Strong’s first hit record… no, nearly all record companies kept double accounts, and I don’t think people here realise the extent to which organised crime infiltrated into American society.
It’s the immigrant’s revenge, isn’t it?
Mmmm… Mmmmm!
So when did you first note the change?
I think the keynote change was probably Maxine Brown’s ‘All in My Mind’. I think that was in 1964… primarily because it was a hit in America. Everything revolves around that. Bob and Earl had a hit in Britain with ‘Harlem Shuffle’ but it didn’t really benefit their career much in the States. This happens occasionally. I think why ‘All in My Mind’ was such a key record was that it almost sounds like an experimental record. They were bringing in influences that had been brought into black music, but hadn’t produced hits. I mention Bob and Earl. They made a remarkable record in 1962, Don’t Ever Leave Me, which I would have to say was probably the first soul record. But Maxine Brown had this huge hit, and that made everyone sit up and take notice.
What were the influences?
Church, gospel. And also black America had finally come out of the down-home, poor boy ghetto thing. This was a gorgeous black woman in a sequinned dress who was going to take no shit from no white man, and no black man either come to that. It reflected the emancipation that was taking place. Not just taking place, because it hadn’t fully happened, but the demand that it was like throwing the cards on the table. And it was black people taking control of their own culture. Previously there had been white record companies which would dictate what they thought was fitting black music, and even if it had the artistic freedom, it was not expected to sell outside the black market. It was the growing integration of the R&B chart. ‘All in My Mind’ could have been number one, it was on the R&B chart, it was that it went to twenty in the pop chart. Then people realised that rock’n'roll, which had always had problems of acceptability, I think some people thought of All in My Mind as a rock’n'roll record. I think everyone sat up and thought there was money to made with black artists, people don’t not buy a record because it was a race record, as they once did.
So after that was the next breakthrough the Supremes?
Yeah, well I think Motown in general. The Supremes certainly did remarkable work, but the first big hit Motown had as a proper company was the Marvellettes’ Please Mister Postman. They had a number one in the pop chart before anyone else… and the ball was rolling then. Motown then had an established network of airplay. In the 60s one way of marketing black records was to use the R&B chart as a springboard into the pop chart. Before that you had the attitude that, we don’t play race records on this station, and during the 60s that all broke down. It’s quite remarkable when you look at the American pop charts then, they were more liberal and cosmopolitan than ours ever were… I think it was tied up with the growing awareness and consciousness of the teenager that was happening. Hollywood was helping in that. There was a focus on being a teenager than hadn’t existed before Teenage culture was beginning to emerge. Also teenage buying power, and teenagers were starting to be aware of their own power, they could decide what records were going to become hits.
What in black American music specifically spoke to teenagers? The emotional directness?
I think the tunefulness, we should never forget that. It’s difficult to talk about melody and catchiness, but the lyric content too, yes. I think this was one of the strongest things in black American music. I can remember people arguing all evening over just one word, whether it should be this or that. Which goes to show how important these things were regarded. I find with so many black American records, especially on the Deep Soul CD is that the words seem so utterly perfect, you know. A good example is the Irma Thomas track, which was released in stereo and mono versions, and I held out for the mono cut, because on the stereo re-recording, instead of singing, I feel so sorry for the ones who pity me, she sings I just feel so sorry for the ones who pity me. And as I said somewhere along the line, there is no “just” about Deep Soul. I think what Deep Soul is is the idealistic factor in black American music. A few of these records would end up on b-sides. I get the feeling that in an ideal world, people are saying that this is my serious side, the real me. Maybe it’s like people saying to you, do you regard your journalism as important as your books? When in actual fact both take as much effort, both are just as valuable, they just take a different form. Why should there be any gap? Like all this rubbish about high-brow/middle-brow/low-brow art…
How did you get involved with Motown in an official capacity?
I was doing various articles and bits and pieces, and Motown’s records were coming out over here on Oriole, and various others. Some with London, and with Philips, and they put a few out on Fontana. It really annoyed me that these records were being literally thrown away. So I took it upon myself to write to Berry Gordy, and put all my thoughts down on paper, and he wrote a very nice letter back, saying he appreciated it, and I’d said what I would like to do is to start a fan club, and I linked the two labels together for the first time ever, the Tamla label and the Motown label, as the Tamla-Motown Appreciation society, and what I thought was valuable about this was to get an idea of how many people there were or weren’t out there who were into it. We started out very humbly. Then I got this telegram out of the blue asking me to go over to Motown and visit with everybody. So off I went, in the summer of 1964. The Supremes hadn’t had any hits, they’d put out When the Love Light Starts Shining… I think that was the only one. They were nothing, they weren’t considered important enough to be invited to my reception. It was a great embarrassment, because I was a great admirer of that record, and also I’d heard a track they’d done on an LP called Let Me Go The Right Way, and I said, where are the Supremes, cos I’d really like to meet them, and there was great embarrassment because 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…
Who was there?
I was met at the airport by the Spinners, and Emily Dunn from the office, and also one of the Fascinations, who was working as a secretary at Motown, Fern Gletler, a lovely person… then we were whisked off to Detroit and everyone was there. Marvin Gaye was there, Kim Weston, Stevie Wonder, the Marvellettes, Martha and the Vandellas, all the big names at that time.
Holland and Dozier?
Yeah…
Smokey?
Yes! And Claudette, his wife. She’d just become pregnant again, and she told me she was planning to retire, because she’d lost a couple of babies before. She said she really wanted to have this one. I saw Claudette not long ago, and the daughter she was carrying then is working her way through medical college now. But that was really great, and the upshot of all this was that Berry Gordy put me on the payroll. That was always confidential, I don’t know if I should break that confidentiality now… I’m never sure about confidentiality. Maybe we should just refer to it obliquely.
I was their link man. They’d asked me over to check me out, that I was sound, and reliable. I was a cultural shock for them. One, I had a beard. In those days if you had a beard in the states you were either a revolutionary or a college professor. Two, I was a vegetarian. They’d planned this huge meal at the Playboy club for me… and in the event all I could eat was garlic bread. That was still a culture shock as far as Britain was concerned.
Harvey Fouquar was there, and I’ve always got a lot of time for Harvey.
He produced the Temptations later, didn’t he?
Yeah he did a lot of work. He was married to Berry Gordy’s sister Gwen at the time. Anna was Marvin Gaye’s wife. They subsequently all divorced. Berry divorced, because he started having an affair with Diana Ross, which I found out about quite by accident. I kept that confidence for years and years. In fact I didn’t break that confidence until Diana Ross did. I knew as soon as I met Diana Ross that nothing would stand in her way. Ruthless. I’m an intuitive person, or such a monster myself, that when monster meets monster, there’s that bond of recognition…
Did you like her?
Not particularly. I liked Florence, and I loved Mary too. Florence was a little bit shy. Their background in a sense was very similar to mine. Ordinary working class, low expectations drummed into you from day one, and my status although I was guest of honour, it was just my moment of fame for a few days. I wasn’t going to come back to Britain and be a household name, but they were already approaching that standard. They had hits. They were going to go places and this can be quite daunting, that can be one of the big problems with fame, there’s no training for it. You’re just thrown in the deep end, and all you’ve got to help you is the degree of philosophy you’ve accrued up to that point. That’s why people fall to pieces and go crackers. That’s why I should open my fame school. Be prepared for fame. I can train people for fame in my old age, train people to handle it and make the most of it. Get the most from it. Like so many other things in life, when it comes, you dream about it, you wish for it. only to find that when you’ve actually got it it’s quite different to how you imagined it.
Success sets up a whole new set of problems not least of which is dealing with money.
Like people who dream of great wealth, sure, this will sweep a lot of present problems away, only to replace it with new ones. You worry about whether your accountants are cheating you. Anyway, with the Motown thing, they trusted my judgement completely. One thing they were looking for, and this was darn sensible of them, was they needed someone here who they could trust who knew this market. They were smart enough to realise that this market was different to the American market, what happened there might happened very differently here. It was my idea to go for the label. The reason I thought of that was that here were all these people having hits in America, and who could tell which of these already established American artists – Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Martha and the Vandellas, The Marvellettes, the Miracles and the Temptations – seven top line acts who’d all had smash hits in America. Which of them might have the first hit over here? In the event, it was Mary Wells. So my idea was to market this collectively as a sound. As an abstract thing, this Motown family of artists that make records in this identifiable style. What musical historians tend to forget, and I think I tended to forget it at the time, was that that which we were subsequently marketing, had already peaked when I was there in 1964. From then on, Motown began to change. It wasn’t so rapid or so noticeable.
I think Motown went off in 1967. You had those records like Reach Out, and You Can’t Hurry Love very complicated and melodramatic, as being the equivalent of what you call Deep Soul. There’s an element of life instruction in there. That didactic thing…
I think there was Berry Gordy’s concept that here he was as a poor boy from the ghetto, he had built and established in black America, then in white America, and I think perhaps he had delusions of grandeur, though I wouldn’t put anyone down for going this way, if you go that route, and it all goes horribly wrong, don’t come running back complaining. Or claiming I’m a soul brother all along. That poisoned chalice thing. A good example is Diana Ross, once she’d been the white fox fur roué, then suddenly she noticed that in the black market her sales were plummeting, and suddenly she comes out with that album where she was like a little street urchin, you know, a skinny little black kid in shorts… no way.
So you went back to the UK… what was your title?
I don’t think I had a title. I was promoting. Basically anything to do with Motown would come through me. It all went swimmingly until the Motortown Revue. It had been such a huge success in America, and they wanted to bring the Motortown Revue to Britain, and I said that in my opinion, Britain wasn’t yet ready for it. Far more important to work on establishing the label. It’s interesting, again, the fact that Motown had that confidence in me, because this had never been done before. Nobody had ever sold records on the strength of a label. there was tremendous resistance to this within the industry. EMI thought we’d all taken leave of our senses, but Motown to their credit said if Dave thinks this is what we should do, we’re going to go for it.
You were already having hits on Stateside, weren’t you, after you came back…?
Oh yeah. One of the things I did when I came back… Where Did Our Love Go hadn’t quite been issued yet when I got back. It was on the verge of being issued in America… he said we had a good record coming out on the Supremes, he had a white label 45, and he had one of those gizmos that you post the record into it, and he played it, and it was Where Did Our Love Go – and I said, this record has just got to be a hit. He was really taken with that, he was confident it was going to be a hit in America, but I said it really had a chance in Britain, if we could get the airplay. The situation was that the BBC controlled everything in Britain, and if you don’t get the airplay, the records won’t sell. Simple as that. So what we did, he gave me some copies to bring back with me, and the pirate stations had just started up then, so I went to see them and said why don’t you start playing some records which the BBC will not play. And then if these records get into the charts, you will know that you’ve got the listeners. There was a saying then that nobody really listens to the pirates, they’re marginal. And that really sparked their imagination. So they did this, and this is how we got the most amazing response. We got Etta James in the charts, Howling Wolf, people like Sonny Boy Williamson were scraping into the bottom of the chart. And of course the rest is history. This forced the BBC to change their playlist policy, and it also was so valuable for the pirates, because they could see that they had the power to make a hit record in Britain. Where Did Our Love Go was done to the pirates, they made it a hit record.
Mary Wells had a hit with My Guy on Stateside, this puts us in a very strong negotiating position with EMI.
Baby Love was on Stateside too, quite late, wasn’t it?
Yeah. the hits were coming. The implication was that if you don’t give us our own label, we’ll up and go somewhere else. Obviously any other company would have been only too happy to give us our own label. But Motown, and the music, had friends within EMI. People like Peter Prince, who was a wonderful guy, and it might have been quite different without Peter. he was sympathetic to my idea, although privately i think he probably thought I was a bit crazy, and it might not work. This is one of the problems with cultural history, people forget the resistance there was. You pull something off and it’s successful. One example, and you needn’t incorporate this, one of the things that makes me really annoyed about British pop history is that everyone has collective amnesia and forget that the Beatles’ first American tour was a flop. We get the Cinderella story now, and this is not to knock their achievement or whatever, in fact it perhaps makes their achievement even greater. But they went to America, they flopped, and so they thought right, we’ll have another go, and they did it. Why rewrite it, the fairy story that they went to America and took it by storm? No way.
There were reasons why they were a success the second time, they had a lot of different people working for them who had a great vested interest in them being successful. Quite rightly too, you’re selling product, and it was well sold the second time.
So you got the Tamla-Motown label off the ground in 1965, and basically you could then release whatever you wanted. Did you have a hand in what singles should be released and what not? Or was that EMI A&R?
No, I had a hand, one or two of the back catalogue things I scooped up on Motown memories. I did a compilation LP, and things like that, but it was the Motown Revue that caused the [indistinct] – I was adamant that Britain wasn’t ready for it. Berry overrode my judgement, which would have been okay, other than I was proved right. And as always, it was a case of kill the messenger. I think for the first time ever in his career… in a sense it was no skin off my nose. We could always dress it up as being too ahead of its time, which it was. It hadn’t had long enough to sink through. We were making inroads, but not on any mass scale. The Beatles probably found this early on. They’d had one hit and they were still playing places like the Granada Woolwich, places they’d subsequently never dream of playing. Interestingly enough, they toured with Mary Wells… but it was so disastrous, the Motown Revue, that when they played Cardiff there were more people on stage than there were in the audience. This really hurt Berry. Anyway, we soldiered on.
In a way I felt that when the hits started coming, I’d done what I needed to do. This is the nature of me, I’m a champion of the underdog, or the avant garde, or whatever. One of the real dreads I have in my life was that with the Anvil, if we’d built it up and it was running smoothly and we weren’t making any loss, let me out. Absolutely. I cannot enjoy success.
So when did you stop working for Motown Shortly after the Motortown Revue?
Yeah, it was soon after. I felt in one sense that I shouldn’t be giving all my time to just one company. I felt that I’d done my bit, they could steam along and they didn’t need me anymore. On the other hand there were hundreds of other black acts out there making equally great records which did need a helping hand. And about that time, John Abbey, who had established Blues&Soul magazine invited me to contribute. I remember the first thing I wrote for him was called The Girls with Soul Are the Greatest. And that was like a hit Dave Godin record, they got so much fan mail over that article. It wasn’t that great an article at all, but I’d touched a nerve that most people didn’t know existed, an appetite for black American music in general. As a result of this John asked me to write regularly.
Who else was writing about black music at the time?
Jenny Cummins, Penny Valentine was fairly simpatico to black music. Norman Jopling at Record Mirror. We must try and get in a namecheck for Norman Jopling.
Were you doing anything else apart from the Blues & Soul thing? Any freelance promotion or anything?
I was doing some freelance work with some record companies, in a sort of consultant capacity, sort of listening to records and advising on whether they had a chance to be a hit, often lying through my teeth just to get the records released.
Then me and a few friends decided to open Britain’s – in fact the world’s – only exclusive Soul records shop. Soul City. That would have been n 1967. We started out in Deptford High Street, but that was such a long trek out that we moved to the west end, and we moved to Monmouth Street, number 17. That was fairly successful. It was still very difficult to import records from America in those days. The concept of free trade was still a bit dodgy. Everyone wanted a piece of the action: MCPS, BPS, you can’t issue this one, it’s not been published over here. But we did the best we could. Then we decided to start a Soul City record label, and one of the people involved in getting this off the ground was Trevor Churchill, who was working at EMI, and funnily enough Trevor is now a director of Ace Kent Records, who helped bring about Deep Soul Treasures. What this label was about was mopping up good American records that weren’t getting issued, or reissuing records that had had far too short a catalogue life, and were coming in demand again. parallel to this we have to remember there was an emerging disco scene. Which we covered on your channel four thing. And there was the schism which was to become Northern Soul and the rest. We reissued Gene Chandler’s Nothing Can Stop Me, which had had a very brief life on Stateside, and to our utter amazement, it went into the charts. We had a hit. The money, because Soul City operated as a workers co-op, I proposed that the money we made from the Gene Chandler hit, should be ploughed back into the cause which was the cause of black American music. That’s how the Deep Soul label happened, and all those records lost money, and we ended up going bust. But we had a wonderful run. I think we put out about sixteen altogether. Soul City was going to be a blanket label for the whole of black American music, the motto of the label was Soul as deep as you like, and then some. Meaning that you’re going to get the full spectrum – but when we had the hit with Gene Chandler, by default the control of the image of the label was taken away, you’ve no longer got the steering wheel in your hands. I felt this undermined my original intention that it was going to be a blanket thing. As was subsequently termed Deep Soul, records that I wanted to put out because no-one else would, I thought, in that case what I termed Deep Soul would now go on its own label.
A lot of thought went into the design of that label, to get away from that image of black American music that it was sleazy, down-home… I can’t describe it properly. This music had got class. I was aware that black America itself was becoming upwardly mobile, and indeed why not? If some people can have champagne then why not everyone? So Henry Giles did the artwork , and this was gong to be on a par with the classiest classical record label that there is. And for my pains, one of my dearest enemies in the industry described it as looking like the headed notepaper of a plantation owner… that was Charley Gillett, and I’ve never spoken to him from that day to this. It was the most wicked and evil thing that anyone could ever say about me.
When did the term Northern Soul come about?
That was born in Soul City, it was just short-hand for customer awareness. In those days, the range of records we had in stock, only a very small proportion of them would get any airplay. If the record was never issued over here, it wouldn’t get any at all. Consequently, there was this change going on in the American charts, that was reflected, to a degree, over here. What happened was London and the home counties fans, wishing to be seen as all things hip and up to the minute, would tend to follow whatever was going down in the American charts. Now at weekends particularly, Soul City was a target for soul music fans from the north, who would often travel down to follow their football teams, there’s a definite link between football and soul music, one that I don’t share, but my god… also we should mention that the following is probably ninety percent male to ten percent female. And the northern fans didn’t appear to like this new direction that black American music was taking in America, which was towards what we subsequently called funk. James Brown’s influence was always enormous, and at that time I think his influence was out of all proportion. when we got records in and I’d heard them, because they weren’t getting airplay, Soul City became in effect a kind of listening parlour, the shop would be full of people and we would put records on one after the other, and arms would shoot up, and people would say, I’ll have that one, I’ll have that one. So one spin, you could sell twenty odd copies. How northern soul came about was, it was my term for a record that wasn’t a part of the emerging trend, and it was, audition this for anyone who was from the north, but don’t bother to audition it for anyone from the south. This proved remarkably sound.
Can you give me an example of the type of record that would have been.
Er, Mr Bang Bang Man, the Plank, Chubby Checker’s At the Discoteque, the Velvelettes, These Things Will Keep Me Loving You. The beat was on the fours, it was in a sense almost the same type of thing as what we know as strict ballroom dancing. Funk is much looser, drawing influences from film music too, it’s interesting that people like Booker T. did film soundtracks. Uptight. I reviewed that when it first came out, I think it might have been the first film review that Blues and Soul ever carried. basically that was it. Because I was writing as well at the time, I’d just say this record will particularly please northern soul fans, or fans of northern soul. And it became in effect a generic term, which is how I always used it. It was easier to say that than to say that this was like old style soul music.
When did Soul City finish?
About 1971. It was three or four year. It went bust, ran out of money.
And when did you move up north?
I carried on writing, and I moved up north when the first property boom started in London. I wanted to buy a house, I wanted to buy a house at three thousand pounds and ended up going to eight or nine. I felt, my god, I’m never going to be able to get on the property ladder. I thought, I’m working as a freelance journalist, do I really need to live in London? In fact, my life might be calmer and more collected not being in London. It might be easier, which in effect it was. I managed to buy a house in Lincoln, and I worked from there, doing the column, and various freelance bits in the business, and I suddenly reached one of those stages, a life crisis. I started to feel, you know, I’m not a teenager anymore. Is there anything else I wanted to do with my life? One of the things I’d bitterly resented was that my education was abruptly stopped. Simply because of financial considerations, and I thought I’m a mature student now, and in those days as a mature student you could get a grant automatically if you were accepted on a place. So I thought, this is fine, I can have it as a right, I don’t have to go cap in hand. I was seeing so many jobs advertised which I could have done on my head, but which required this piece of paper, in order to get to the interview stage. so I enrolled at Sheffield Polytechnic. One of my other passions in life has always been film. Somebody saw an advert, and told me, you can do a degree in film history. I couldn’t believe it, but all these dippy degrees were starting to come out then. I called up and they were very hostile when I explained that I didn’t have any A Levels, and I was so angry I wrote to the principal, and I got a reply, very apologetic, asking me to come for an interview. and they gave me a place, starting September. I thought what? I thought they’d called me in just to explain their position! But they actually offered me a place. I told them I couldn’t start in September because it would take me a year to get out of all I was committed to, so I started the September after. I did two years, a year on the Student Union as site president, and then I did another year finished. After that Sheffield announced that it was setting up a regional film theatre, and they wanted a senior film officer, and I applied for that, and got it.
How long were you there for?
I was there for seven or eight years.
When Northern Soul became a big thing, were you aware of its development as a subculture?
Oh yes. I don’t think its really for me to say, but if you talk to fans of the music, they would say I was probably the most influential person. One of the reasons was I was the only guy who was giving decent reviews to these records. Other people either weren’t reviewing them, or were scorning them as being lacking in authenticity, or whatever…
You went to some of the Northern Soul events?
Oh yes, it was a big event, for Dave Godin to cover the night, and it still is, to a degree. I really admired the northern soul scene because it was something that had grown organically, from the bottom up. There was a lot of bad feeling from the London record companies when they saw this, they wanted to exploit it fully, which the kids understandably deeply resented. some journalists who had been unkind about northern soul were actually refused admission, and were not given red carpet treatment. The crowd was actually hostile towards them One journalist went up there and to revenge himself, pointed out that it wasn’t a soul music scene, it was a drug scene. But certainly no more than anywhere now. Drugs have always been a part of dance culture.
Were they in the sixties?
Oh yes. New things began to emerge. We’ve mentioned before that certain genres of music have their own favoured drug. Northern scene was almost totally speed. That ties in with the all-nighter thing. The only time in my life I ever took speed was actually years before, when it was legally sold in transport cafes. There was a whole gang of us who used to hang out and if anyone’s house was empty we would all move in there and have a soul party. One of the lads there was a long distance lorry driver, and one of the things you could buy in these transport cafes, hanging on cardboard sheets like peanuts are now, was a product called Night Owl. It said, Don’t fall asleep at the wheel, take Night Owl, it’ll keep you awake and alert. Of course this was pure amphetamine. Anyway he came to a party and he had some Night Owl with him. They were in an ordinary package with this Walt Disney design, there was two car headlights shining.. there was no question of it being illicit. It was just like pro-plus, you know, and that was the most delirious wonderful party we ever had. Subsequently, he didn’t come to the parties, and we were always bemoaning the fact that none of our subsequent parties reached the level of magic and wonderment that the first one did. A few years later the whole amphetamine thing hit the papers, ;you know. And those slimming tablets, I’ve forgotten what they were called now, and I thought, no wonder it was a wonderful party we were all stoned out of our heads without realising it. By default I do know what the effect is, and it was pretty glorious, I must say. everyone felt so loving. Again, don’t put this in the interview, but I met someone recently whose life has been transformed by Ecstasy…
Okay what interests me first of all about these records is how lush and expensive they are. String sections, brass sections, and very almost baroque sounding, and its completely against the image we have of black music.
— which ties in, I’d anticipated this in a way, with the Deep Soul label. All of that applies to the Deep Soul label.
How do you feel about the way that black music has been fetishized? You were involved with it on the ground level, and now music appreciation is so exclusive, and what I like is that you include people and make it applicable to everybody, rather than being trainspottery and saying, I know this and you don’t… that’s a huge problem with black music that you have all these do’s and don’ts…
This reflects an aspect of my character, that if I have got a lot of pleasure form something, I don’t want to keep it to myself. I want to share it. Maybe its insecurity on my part, but I think you’ve got a duty, actually, as a critic, to be ahead of public taste, and what people are paying you for, is to be an advance guard, saying, hey, we’re coming up to something good here it is. I can honestly say I have performed that role. The number of people who have said at a certain stage in their life, they would go out and buy, blind, ever record that I raved over, and would never be disappointed. One of the reasons I wasn’t that liked in the record industry when I was at the height of my critical powers is that they knew I was an untouchable. I always felt that my loyalty was to the public when I was writing. Even when there was an artist who I loved dearly, there would be no point if they had made a disappointing record, in saying otherwise. You would lose the confidence that people have. I’m quite pleased that when I go around, people always say that same thing.
A lot of these records were made before events took place in America which in a sense pushed black people back… it got a couple of steps over. I think the assassination of Martin Luther King was a key thing. I also think the infiltration of drug culture into black American life was a big thing. I still get very angry, as an anarchist, because I really don’t give a fuck what people do with their bodies, because your body is the one thing you’ve got sovereignty over, as long as they know what they’re doing, which they don’t. What really annoys me in present day culture is this ambivalent attitude towards drugs. They’re always going as far as they dare to say it’s smart and cool. I’ve seen the effect of drugs, and there’s nothing smart or cool about it. I will sign a petition saying that in my view all drugs should be legal, but these people who make it look cool, and use the language of drugs, the language of the streets in their writing, I loathe that. I really loathe it. This is what glamorises it. The only glamour is in the fact that they’re forbidden. There’s nothing glamorous about smoking a cigarette anymore, or drinking a double scotch. It isn’t glamorous, it’s just an experience. I see drugs as a form of social control, whether or not it’s sat down and thought out, or whether it’s all by default, because in a way powerful people are very opportunistic. They see the use of these things… it represents a door slammed. At a point, black music appeared to become free. I did a radio interview, and she asked, how can you say that black American music is marginalised when we have Aretha Franklin? The creative control may be in their hands, but you will have to go to the man, you will have to go to the major record companies. this reflects the nature of capitalism. Let’s not mince words here, which is to eat up small things. Small companies start up, they become successful and they get taken over by big companies. And now we’ve got to the stage where in effect, how many companies over the whole record business? You’ve got the little indies, but that serves the interests of these big corporations too. If you’re any good, we’ll just come along with our cheque book and take the whole fucking shooting match over.
A lot of the singers in the records on Deep Soul are presenting themselves in an extreme situation. There’s gonna be a showdown. We’ve reached a turning point.
Yes. Perhaps it reflects something within black American culture that perhaps we don’t experience as much. We do tend to forget that in Britain we do lead rather sheltered lives. Maybe within the black American experience, the extremis situation exists more frequently. Also something I’ve noticed is that if you marginalize a culture, what is left that is your own? I think this is also an element in white racism. Back American culture clung to things that they could c control, for example the completely diverse development of the Christian religion in black American culture, which is startlingly noticeable. to the extent that a visitor from another planet would never recognise a service in Canterbury cathedral and one in Alabama as the same religion. I think because of this, human relationships have an intensity, a value put upon them, which we perhaps don’t. The whole concept of being cool, laid back, indifferent to emotion, really comes down to Reich’s concept of the emotional plane. In a repressive, sex-negative society, passions, if repressed, will become morbid. In effect I don’t think this happened in black American culture because the dominant white ideology couldn’t give a toss what they were up to. As we know, racism, particularly with regard to black people, often has an element of sexuality within it. I don’t thin this is accidental. It reflects the repression that white society puts upon its adherents, as a virtue of course, dresses it up as a virtue, then you get a parallel society which has been marginalised, which doesn’t subscribe to that thing, and it produces bitterness and resentment. I think Reich was dead right, if you repress healthy sexual instincts, they will become morbid, and I think the price that the west is going to have to pay, and I see this daily, we are gradually falling into a state of decadence. and when you do that, not many voices are going to stand up and say, hey, we’re falling into decadence. What people are actually saying is that this is interesting. there’s a man at the Vienna Bienalle showing videos of himself fucking animals. You know, rabbits. I mean, come on.
So in this emotional plague, you see black American music as healing, as a life force?
Oh yes, most definitely. I think black America, because it was marginalised, because it existed in its own vacuum, because white folks didn’t care what black people got up to, as long as they didn’t start demanding better wages or unions or anything like that. They could have their hooch, their dance halls, all that. Anything that was non-threatening. And black American culture, and this applies to other marginal groups too, they will develop their own norms. It’s true of gays and of the British working class, who have certain mores which other classes don’t understand. You see it when middle class people go out, their passions have become so morbid they fancy a bit of rough. Their concept of working class sex is that it is brutish… they’ve got it wrong, it may appear that way because its direct, it’s no nonsense, and as Reich would argue, it is healthier because it has a better perspective of what it’s all about. I think this happened with black American culture. It’s difficult to talk in terms of admiration and praise, because racist bigotry often has this element of, you know, they breed like rabbits, they live to fuck… maybe if a few of these people lived to fuck, they wouldn’t become fascists. Basically that was what Reich was saying.
Another element is that you see a divergent culture which values other, abstract things like tenderness, generosity of spirit, of love, and why these records have found an echo in so many hearts – and I should also mention that it is mainly male hearts – is that men are brought up in our society to despise the feelings that these records represent. They may be brought up to despise them, but that doesn’t eradicate them. And there’s a recognition, like 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.
It seems to me that also what you have in deep soul is the result of a period of overproduction, a great deal of money being poured into black music, presumably because of the success of Motown, and its taken people thirty years to really encompass what actually went on.
It was the golden age of black American music. It was the combination of social history, political history, and for the first time ever, the historic background, with the civil rights movement, and as deeply reactionary as he was in other ways, Lyndon Johnson signed more pro-black legislation than Kennedy did in his whole lifetime. Admittedly it was all in the pipeline, but he actually did it. All the creativity that black people had through the denial of opportunity, it may be that we’ll find this, I hope so, in Britain. when all these poor unemployed people who can’t get a break, the creativity might be building up here, and eventually the floodgates will open. This was such an outpouring…
And stuff got lost…
It got lost and it got appropriated, and things changed. This reflects the ambivalence of the black American experience. Human nature being what it is, when the American dream is actually offered, you see it all somewhat differently. And indeed why not. If you can get regular income singing ballads in Las Vegas, you know, who wants to sing at a local dive for peanuts? I went to a place in Brooklyn where people just sang for pleasure and to entertain themselves and everybody else. And the talent there was just incredible. When I remarked on this once to Berry Gordy, he said something I thought was very significant. He said talent is nothing. You can go to any black American church and find talent.
When did you first meet black Americans? when you went on your first trip in 1957?
I met black Americans in order to get to know American people. when our van finally conked out, we decided to travel on by Greyhound bus, and me and my mate deliberately didn’t sit together, because we’d just be talking to each other. by sitting separately we would invariably get an American sitting next to us, and the Greyhound buses had just been ordered to integrate so people could sit wherever they wanted, and I made a lot of contacts. It really was a culture shock for me. I was talking to a black American serviceman for a long part of the journey, and we came to a coach stop and I said, let’s have a coffee together, and he said, not here you can’t. I couldn’t believe it. We were in the south and there was a white cafe and a black cafe, and we just couldn’t sit and have a coffee together. That was traumatic.