Dave Godin
Esperanto-speaking vegan who became an apostle of soul
By Phil Johnson
Wednesday October 20, 2004
The Independent
David Godin, music journalist and CD
compiler: born London 21 June 1936; died Rotherham, South Yorkshire
15 October 2004.
Dave Godin was one of the world's
leading authorities on soul music, who as a journalist, compiler of
records and CDs, and general ideologue for what he saw as the cause
of black American music, helped to transform popular culture in
Britain.
In a long career in which he was also
engaged in a whole range of political and ethical activities
involving anarchism, Esperanto, vegetarianism and later veganism,
animal liberation and film censorship (on which he was also a world
authority), Godin was, among other things, responsible for the
creation of a dedicated Tamla-Motown label in the UK, the co-owner
of the first specialist black music record shop in Europe (Soul
City, in Deptford and later Covent Garden), and the first person to
give a name to the phenomenon of "Northern Soul".
His series of compilation albums for
the Kent label, Dave Godin's Deep Soul Treasures, the fourth volume
of which appeared only a month before his death from lung cancer
last week, is one of the great achievements of popular music
scholarship, raising his beloved rhythm and blues and soul to the
status of grand opera, the only art-form he thought capable of
achieving the same level of emotional intensity. Until his
retirement through ill-health, Godin also ran the Anvil Film Theatre
in Sheffield, a civic cinema that he, as Senior Film Officer, had
helped to create. Here, his rigorous approach to programming
("Dictatorship in the arts, democracy in everything else" was his
credo) enriched the arts scene of his adoptive South Yorkshire,
where he was a well-known figure, often appearing on local radio.
Godin's personal discovery of black
American music occurred in an emblematically English moment of
epiphany, in an ice-cream parlour in Bexleyheath in 1953. Some
builders were playing records on a brand new American jukebox, and,
struck by the shockingly new sound, the 16-year-old Godin tried to
swivel his eyes along with the spinning record in order to read the
label and see what it was:
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: Ruth Brown, "Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean". I'd
never heard a record like that before.
It was so earthy, so real, and the
words were so adult. This young man - I wish I could go back and
thank him because it changed my life - gave me about five sixpences
and said, if you like this, you'll probably also like this, and this
and this. It's called rhythm and blues, black American music.
Dave Godin, whose father worked as a
milkman, was born in Lambeth, south London, in 1936. He spent his
early childhood in Peckham before bombing forced the family to move
to suburban Bexleyheath, in Kent, where he won a scholarship to
Dartford Grammar School. "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," Godin told the writer Jon Savage in a 1997
interview. "It's ironic that as a result of meeting me he's where he
is today."
Godin encouraged the younger Jagger
in his interests in American R&B, and played a minor role in the
early jam sessions out of which the group who later became the
Rolling Stones emerged. He later took a Pyrrhic revenge on Jagger,
whom he resented for what he saw as the Rolling Stones' exploitation
of black music. At a recording of Ready Steady Go! in 1964, the
already famous Jagger asked Godin to introduce him to the Tamla-Motown
singer Marvin Gaye, whom Godin, by now Tamla's representative in the
UK, was with. "I told him to fuck off and introduce himself," Godin
recalled.
Following the encounter with Ruth
Brown in the ice-cream parlour, Godin became an enthusiastic
collector of American R&B, which in the UK at that time was a kind
of underground, samizdat pursuit, as records weren't normally
released here or played by the BBC. At around the same time, he also
became a vegetarian, discovering an equivalent sense of solidarity
when meeting fellow enthusiasts for either activity.
After leaving Dartford Grammar, Godin
worked briefly in an advertising agency and travelled around the
United States with a schoolfriend (where he experienced R&B concerts
at first hand) before claiming Conscientious Objector status for his
National Service. At the tribunal, at which he registered his
objection not, as was usual, on religious grounds but because, as he
said, "I didn't want to learn how to murder people", the committee
congratulated him on the rigour with which he had presented his
case, and he spent his two service years working as a hospital
porter.
The most extraordinary episode in
Godin's career is probably his role in the story of Tamla-Motown in
the UK. In 1963, after setting up the Tamla- Motown Appreciation
Society, and experiencing a lack of interest from Oriole, the
various Tamla labels' parent label in the UK, Godin wrote directly
to Motown in Detroit. He was shocked to receive a five-page telegram
in reply from the founder Berry Gordy, inviting him to visit the
company's headquarters forthwith. A plane ticket followed and Godin
arrived in Detroit to be met by various Motown stars and taken to a
banquet in his honour at which he couldn't eat any of the food
because he was vegetarian.
On his visit, Gordy would casually
ask his opinion on which new Supremes or Martha and the Vandellas
single he should release next in the UK, and by the time he returned
home Godin - whose bearded anarchist's countenance made him an
unusual presence in the Motown milieu - had become a paid
promotional consultant for the company. As such, he helped secure
airplay on the new pirate radio stations, and encouraged EMI (who
had taken over the Tamla labels' distribution from Oriole) to create
a proprietary Tamla-Motown label, which Godin wished to promote on
the basis of the overall Motown sound, rather than individual
artists. The result was the greatest success story in the history of
black music in the UK.
After later losing some of his credit
with Berry Gordy by advising against going ahead with a Motown
package tour of the UK, which ended up playing to half-empty houses,
Godin set up the Soul City record shop in Deptford in 1967 (later
moving to 17 Monmouth Street in Covent Garden), and began writing an
influential column in the magazine Blues & Soul, also established in
1967. It was in a Blues & Soul column, in June 1970, that Godin made
another significant cultural intervention, when he gave the name
"Northern Soul" to the new soul scene emerging in clubs in
Blackpool, Stoke and Manchester, whose fans would come into the Soul
City shop at weekends looking for fast-tempo dance records notably
different from those favoured in the south.
As a writer, Godin could be
idiosyncratic - he took it as a compliment when a critic said he
wrote as if translating from the German - and also combative, but
his taste in soul music was unimpeachable. Shortly after the Soul
City shop, and its associated record labels, Soul City and Deep
Soul, went bust in 1971, Godin moved out of London in search of
cheaper housing, first to Lincolnshire and then, in 1978, to
Sheffield. At Sheffield Polytechnic, he enrolled on a new degree
course in the History of Art, Design and Film, which led in turn to
his appointment as a Film Officer and the creation of the Anvil Film
Theatre.
Godin became an indefatigable
campaigner against cruelty to animals in film-making, whose efforts
succeeded in stamping out many abuses, as well as campaigning
against all forms of film censorship. Although a lifelong atheist,
in his later years Godin also became a proponent of the Jain
religion.
In a life full of passionately held
beliefs about all sorts of things, Dave Godin's identification of
the concept of deep soul, and the four magnificent albums devoted to
it that he compiled between 1997 and 2004, will stand as a permanent
achievement. By bringing together obscure and neglected records
whose unapologetic emotionalism did not suit all tastes in the soul
spectrum, he created one of the towering monuments in the history of
black music.
That it took an Esperanto-speaking
vegan from Bexleyheath to do it is all the more poignant. |