Dave Godin - Rest In Peace

[Greg Wilson]

Sad news for the British black music community.

Rest In Peace.

The announcement below was sent via Daddy Bones at GrandSlam. It's from Ady Croasdell:

Soul News Announcement

Dave Godin died peacefully in his sleep on the morning of Friday October 15th. He had been ill for some time and was fully accepting of his fate, though true to himself he put up a brave fight.

Dave was a pioneer of Blackamerican music and soul music in particular throughout his life. The highlights of his endless championing of the cause were his working with Berry Gordy in establishing Tamla Motown as an entity in this country; his passion for, and the coining of, the genres Northern Soul and Deep Soul and his series of four CDs of "Dave Godin’s Deep Soul Treasures" which he claimed were the proudest achievements of his life. He was the world’s foremost soul music journalist for many years and wrote intelligently and illuminatingly on the subject, particularly in his Blues and Soul magazine column in the 60s and 70s. His grasp and understanding of Blackamerican social and political life gave him an insightful perspective on the music that made his writing so vital.

He was also a renowned expert on films and a passionate Animal Rights activist as well as being a committed anarchist, vegan, pro-life, Esperanto speaker and supporter of the Jain religion.

Details of his funeral will be posted as soon as we have them. It is hoped that there will be a celebratory soul dance on the evening of the funeral.

Cards can be sent to

Dave Godin in memorium

27 Clifton Crescent South

Rotherham

S Yorks

S65 2AR

Dave wished any donations to be sent to:


Dr Elizabeth Svendsen

The Donkey Sanctuary

Sidmouth

Devon

EX10 0NU

UK

Cheques payable to the Donkey Sanctuary



We have set up a message board for any thoughts or reminiscences on Dave’s life at the 6TS website www.6ts.info The direct link is http://pub18.bravenet.com/guestbook/1467978738



A fuller obituary will be released after the weekend.

[Forrrce]

I know very little about Dave Godin, but I once read that he was responsible (and took a lot of flack) for acknowledging and playing modern records, giving rise to the 'modern soul' scene. I'm sure there's a lot more to it than that, but a very important figure nonetheless.

[zeca azevedo]

Dave Godin's Deep Soul CD collection is a heaven sent gift for all serious soul fans of the world. He will be missed by soul fans everywhere.

R.I.P., Dave

zeca azevedo

[DISCODISK]

id like to say a little about dave i did type something here on saturday but lost it all and am a bit upset about this and couldnt re do it.
dave goes right back to the 60s,first i know about him a passionate lover of soul music and one of daves all time records 'go now' by bessie banks was spinning in his head in 1964 and he thought the whole world should hear it, he pushed and pushed to get it released in the u.k it sold just 81 copies :o got covered by the moody blues and went #1 pop :o but he wasnt about to give up.
working for e.m.i in the mid 60s and sick of seing motown records flop here on various labels like oriole/fontana /stateside he decided something had to be done so he was off to detroit to meet berry get the nod and the tamla motown label was born here in the spring of 65, this label design outside of the u.s was used mostly all over the world even canada.this time he also formed the motown appreciation society sending out newsletters to fans[remember no black music press then],MARKY once mentioned the funk brothers arriving and getting mobbed at the airport whilst really unheard of at home this was all down to dave.
late 60s formed soul city & deep soul record labels and soul city shop london, started to write for the newish blues &soul mag with his unique writing style just really turning people on to music[why use 10 words to describe a record when you could use 100] early trips to manchesters twisted wheel gave him a lot to say, but it was his ravings after his first visit to blackpool mecca in the early 70s when he spoke of the atmosphere the kids the dancing,the records 'the term 'northern soul' was born.this article had me going as a 15 year old i read it and read it and within a year i was standing on tip toes in line praying the doorman would let me pass.he left blues & soul for a year or two and came back mid 70s to write for black music and blues and soul,by now he was the god of soul boys nationwide,urging people to listen to and buy this record and that record and if sales wernt good hed remind you next month im always going through old mags reading his stuff the last one i read he was going for the notations 'think before you stop' jeff perry 'love dont come no stronger',dianne jenkins 'tow away zone', rodger hatcher 'were gonna make it' and 'i dont want to leave you' debbie taylor ALL highly collectable today!
mid 70s he formed right on records quite short lived but releasing nice things like the early disco obscurity 'come back'the fantastic puzzles i mean what other u.k label was gonna release that!
looking back perhaps dave was not good at being a record label boss because he just released pure class,fatal!
dave godin was just a gentle lovely funny [verging on hysterical] passionate man loved and highly respected by many,this is a big shock people are just devistated and lets not forget dave did as much for his love of films as he did for music
R.I.P DAVE GODIN SADLY MISSED
and as ZECCA said hes left us those fantastic c.d volumes of 'dave godins deep soul treasures' drenched in soul with gorgeous sleeve notes

[Greg Wilson]

Here's the piece Dave Godin wrote last year for GrandSlam about how he first came across what he refers to as the music of Blackamerica. Illuminating stuff!

Thanks to Daddy Bones for sending me the Word Document of this and giving me the go-ahead to post:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HALF A CENTURY AGO...!

It all began for me in 1953. Prior to then I had no interest whatsoever in what passed in those days as "popular" music. To me, it was shallow, safe, superficial and effete, so as I grew up, my only musical interests up until then were "classical", although I did like some extremely avant-garde jazz, and had begun to explore (through the very few recordings that were then available), what is now known as "World Music". Remember in 1953, the airwaves were dominated by the BBC who had a monopoly on UK broadcasting; there was only ONE recording in catalogue of Stravinsky’s "Rite of Spring", (it not having yet been rehabilitated into social acceptability, and that recording was ominously listed in the catalogue as "Available only to special order". No doubt MI6 annotated all of us freaks and potential subversives who bought copies!), and there was not a single recording of ANY symphony by Gustav Mahler available on disc.

I mention all this because in recording social and cultural history, it is so often the detail that gets lost, and, as true history has shown, (as opposed to the history as recorded by fantasists and those who weren’t there), truth always is to be found in the detail. Day-Glo socks when they became a craze, were only ever available in pink or lime green, and Y-fronts were, by and large, considered effeminate and only likely to appeal to "queers" (the word "gay" having not yet been transmogrified), and in any case, queers were locked up in prison if they were caught making out with another guy.

Records were deemed in the financially straightened times of post war Britain to be luxury items. We had mortgaged ourselves to the point of bankruptcy in order to defeat the Axis powers, but unlike those defeated, who no longer were allowed to waste money on armies, bombs and weapons of mass destruction, and must have been very grateful for this boost to their post-war economic recovery, we had to then continue paying the high cost of maintaining the cavalry and all the other vanities that go with being a "major power".

Consequently, every time you bought a record, one third of its purchase price was tax, and, when you consider that the average miner was paid a weekly wage of £7, (which was then taxed), four shillings and sevenpence halfpenny (old money, equating to 25p approximately today, but in real terms closer to £14), was indeed a heck of a price to pay! 45rpm singles had just been introduced by a few companies, but this format was charged at six pence extra, so it was small wonder that in times when working people had to count every penny and try to make every shilling do the work of a pound, it too eight long years, and an eventual parity in pricing before sales of 45s overtook 78s. There was also a psychological impediment too - it seemed you paid more and came away with "less" (seven flimsy inches instead of ten of heavy, substantial shellac). The main advantage 45s had over 78s though, and which probably won the day, was if you dropped them, they didn’t break.

Long Playing records cost a fortune - almost a quarter of one’s take-home pay for a 10" album which was the format used for "popular" music, with the 12" (and proportionally even more expensive) format being reserved for classical repertoire. Elvis Presley’s first LP was a 10" LP, but soon the record companies twigged that if they re-issued these same records in the 12" format, they could increase their profits with no need to provide any extra material.

So, this was the background from which I came to the glorious, magnificent and ever stunning music of Blackamerica. And, as I was embarking into a new collecting territory, I decided that I’d collect these special records on the 45rpm format. Not that you could go into any shop and just buy it off their shelf! Oh no, life was never that simple, 45s had to be specially ordered. But, what the heck - a seven inch cock might be impressive, but a seven inch single is dinky! All life is relative.

[On another cultural plane that played a large part in working-class culture, the "X" certificate, which was expected to herald a more liberal and "adult" form of cinema entertainment, was just two years old in 1953, but had turned out generally to be box-office poison. Nevertheless, the British Board of Film Censors still prohibited the public exhibition of such lost pot-boilers as VIOLATED; PROBLEM GIRLS; WICKED WOMAN; MAN, BEAST & VIRTUE; MAN CRAZY; and such mystery films as MARY; THE HITCH-HIKER; INVASION USA; THREE WOMEN; and a Yugoslav film called BAKONA FRA BRNE! And of 17 films passed in the adult "X" category, these were still nevertheless subjected to censorship cuts. Such was the threat that film was seen to present to social tranquillity amongst the lower classes!]

It all began for me when a friend and I wandered into the Silver Lounge Ice Cream Parlour. It was run by Italian pre-war émigrés who, poor souls, were forever mentioning how much they hated Mussolini, since people tend now to forget that Italy was Britain’s "enemy" in World War 2, but all we wanted was one of their marvellous Knickerbocker Glories. In a drab world where everyone wore a raincoat and men looked bizarre if their hair was even visible over their collar, this confection was the nearest to Technicolor Paradise we could get outside of the cinema. And, on that fateful day, they had installed a JUKE BOX!!!!

Now you have to understand that Juke Box culture, precisely because of WW2, never played as vital a part in promoting recorded music as it had done in the States. Over there, juke boxes were big business, often Mafia controlled in the big cities, so that when they saw how much money there was to be made from providing people with the means of playing records, some of them eventually decided it might be even more profitable to get into the business of making the records that went inside them too. But, it never happened that way over here. The War stopped widespread distribution and post war economics ensured their encroachment into our lives would be slow and fitful.

But, they’d somehow got one, and looking back on it now, since it was full of American 45s, they had probably bought it from an American service base. Since the Americans had been our allies in the War, thousands stayed on here helping defend us and probably acting as a long term safeguard against the British people doing anything as silly as electing a Communist government. It was also a lucrative market for British record companies who were licensing American records, and the majority of records of Blackamerican origin that were put out primarily on the LONDON label, were almost certainly for this market, rather than for the likes of us.

A group of young men were seated by this marvellous novelty, and constantly putting money in to keep the records spinning, and I had NEVER heard music like it before! This wasn’t the crapola slush of popular music as expounded by White folks - this was real men and real women (as opposed to boys and girls), talking about real passions and hard emotions! This was no-**** reality to me, and I was hooked.

I went over to the machine to see what was playing, and determined I had to get my own copy. The chaps who had more or less taken charge of it noticed my interest and one of them asked me if I liked that music.

I should supply a bit more of historic detail here, and explain that although these guys were probably no more than six or seven years older than me, in those days, teenagers had not yet been invented. You were either a boy, or a man, and of course, as a boy you longed to age and pass into the realm of fully-fledged men, even if you only vaguely knew it meant something more than wearing long-trousers. Boys wanked, men never did. (Or so the bare-faced lie went in those days!)
I told him I had never heard music like this before. What was it? He explained is was "Rhythm & Blues", music made by "coloured Americans" (to have used the word "black" in 1953 would have been unthinkably evil - only out and out racists ever used that word), and he went on to point out several other titles I might like to hear. Since I didn’t have any more cash with me, this wonderful person, who, without knowing or realising it, was to have an effect on me that would last for the rest of my life, shovelled a handful of sixpences into my hand and showed me how to operate the machine and which titles to play that I might like.

What heaven! What magic! And how I wish I could somehow thank that chap for his generosity and guidance.

And, so, you are no doubt thirsting to know, what was the first record I bought as a result of this encounter? Ruth Brown’s "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean", and, after that, the incomparable Johnny Ace, Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis, Earl Bostic, Joe Turner (an immaculate stylist with a phrasing that was perfection), gutsy Faye Adams.... and on the horizon were Bobby Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Clyde McPhatter, Laverne Baker, and the hypnotic, irresistible spell of Jimmy Reed.... All of them pioneers in bringing their wonderful musical creativity to the world, and, in my young, and comparatively innocent mind, it was surely only a matter of time before they became household names held in as much respect and admiration as I had for them.

How naive I was to the ways of this wicked world when it comes to the worship of Mammon. But then, I was only a kid. And I was only interested in good artistry. But how wrong I was!

DAVE GODIN
GRANDSLAM MAGAZINE VOLUME 1 ISSUE 1 SPRING 2003

[Greg Wilson]

Just come across these Obituarys from The Guardian and The Independant, posted by Andy Simpson at DHP:
__________________________________________________ __________

Dave Godin
Champion of black music who coined the term 'northern soul'
By Richard Williams
Wednesday October 20, 2004
The Guardian

When the musicians and singers of the first Motown Revue - the Miracles, the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, "Little" Stevie Wonder and Earl Van Dyke and the Soul Brothers - disembarked at London airport for their first British tour in the spring of 1965, the hand stretching out to greet them was that of Dave Godin, the leading light of the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society, founded the previous year. Godin, who has died at the age of 68, was then, as he remained for the rest of his life, Britain's most effective propagandist on behalf of soul music.

Godin did not coin that term, but he did come up with the epithets that adhered to two of its most distinctive variants: deep soul, which describes the idiom at its most emotionally intense, and northern soul, encapsulating the fast, urgent style beloved by dancers at clubs such as Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca and other venues north of the Trent. His knowledge and enthusiasm made him into something of an arbiter when it came to disputes over artistic authenticity within a field abounding in purists of all persuasions.

As a journalist, record company adviser, record shop owner and even, briefly, owner of his own labels devoted to the African-American music he considered a pinnacle of 20th-century culture, his influence was out of all proportion both to his limited fame and to the rewards he received. In recent years, however, four volumes of a series called Dave Godin's Deep Soul Treasures created renewed interest in the music he loved with such a profound and enduring passion. Selling in unexpectedly healthy quantities, they helped create a new and younger audience for such gifted but long-neglected artists as Doris Duke, Bessie Banks, Irma Thomas, the Knight Brothers and the Soul Children.

There was more to Godin than a love of music, however. A militant atheist, a conscientious objector who argued his way out of national service, a vegetarian from the age of 14, a campaigner against cruelty to animals and cinema censorship, he abhorred violence and believed in fairness in all areas of human conduct. His support for America's civil rights movement underpinned his belief that blues and soul music gained their special force from the social and historical context in which they were created.

To him, the fact that he introduced Mick Jagger to black music was probably the least interesting thing he did in his life. Idolising the original performers, he was aghast when Jagger, a school acquaintance, and a group of friends appropriated the music and sold it back to American audiences. To Godin, this represented the ultimate betrayal of the music and the people who had invented it. "We were working on behalf of black America," he told the writer Jon Savage many years later, "and it seemed that they were working on behalf of themselves."

Born in Peckham three years before the outbreak of the second world war and raised in Lambeth, he moved with his family to Bexleyheath when the activities of the Luftwaffe made their south London street uninhabitable. A milkman's son, he won a scholarship to Dartford Grammar School, where he met the young Jagger and witnessed the birth of the Rolling Stones.

Ruth Brown's Mama He Treats Your Daughter Mean, heard on a juke box in an ice-cream parlour in the straitlaced world of 1950s Britain, was his own introduction to the emotional directness of black music. Reading Norman Jopling's erudite reviews in the Record Mirror and listening to Salut Les Copains on Europe 1 provided further evidence of the existence of music that made contemporary white pop music sound anaemic and trivial.

After starting his working life as a junior in an advertising agency, he spent two years working in a hospital in lieu of national service. But music was assuming an increasing importance, and he knew he was not alone when his letter to Record Mirror, complaining about their failure to review a Bo Diddley LP, attracted correspondence from other R&B fans. "I suppose it's like being gay," he said. "Everybody thinks they're the only gay person in the world until they realise there's more out there."

A column in a new magazine, Home Of The Blues, gave him an audience, but the seal of approval arrived in 1964, when Berry Gordy Jr, the founder of the fledgling Motown empire, flew him to Detroit, threw a star-studded party to welcome him, and offered him a job as the company's consultant in Britain. It was Godin who pressed Gordy and EMI, their British licensee, to raise the label's profile by creating a Tamla Motown label, on which releases by the Supremes, Four Tops, Temptations and others gradually became a presence in the British charts.

In 1968, he founded Soul City, a record shop which began in Deptford High Street and later moved to Monmouth Street in the west end of London. Soul City was also the name of the first of his two independent record labels, on which he released such classics as Go Now by Bessie Banks, the original (and vastly superior) version of a song that gave the Moody Blues their first British hit.

When Home Of The Blues mutated into Blues And Soul, Godin's column became even more influential. Whether unearthing obscure waxings, exposing frauds or simply namechecking ordinary fans, he imbued his prose with the flavour of true obsession. "The recent death of 'Flash' Atkinson," he once wrote, "will be felt by many for a long time. One of the real, true characters on the soul scene, he will not have died in vain if it saves one life by remembering never to take a record player into the bathroom with you." Each column ended with the rallying cry: "Keep the faith - right on now!"

In the 1970s he moved north, taking a degree at Sheffield University and later becoming the first director of the Anvil arts cinema. Generous in his enthusiasms but unsparing in his judgements, he once said of David Blunkett, a Sheffield acquaintance, "That man always had a whiff of Stalin about him."

Along with Guy Stevens, DJ at London's Scene club, Vicki Wickham, the producer of Ready Steady Go, and the pirate radio DJ Mike Raven, Dave Godin helped create the wave of enthusiasm that made soul music a vital part of British youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The 100 tracks contained within the four volumes of Deep Soul Treasures remain as a permanent memorial to the success of his self-appointed mission, for which many have cause to be grateful.

[Dave Godin, journalist, activist, arts cinema director; born June 31 1936; died October 15 2004]

__________________________________________________ __________


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 **** 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.