A Northern Soul
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DAVE GODIN, NEWLY APPRECIATED
Temperatures were sizzling in the eighties in Detroit on the summer’s day that Dave Godin arrived at the city’s Metro airport, after a long, arduous flight from London via Boston. Metaphorically, temperatures were even higher in the Motown offices on West Grand Boulevard, due to the excitement generated by one of the hottest hits on that very week’s Billboard Hot 100: “Where Did Our Love Go” by the Supremes, rocketing from 77-38 with a bullet.
It was July 15, 1964, and the idiosyncratic founder of Britain’s Tamla Motown Appreciation Society was beginning what he would later describe as “the happiest five days of my life.” Godin was Berry Gordy’s invited guest on an all-expenses-paid visit to Detroit (and New York), as the company recognised and valued what he and the fan club’s members were doing to support its artists and music across the Atlantic. Just one month earlier, the company had experienced its first-ever British Top 10 entry with Mary Wells’ “My Guy.” So spirits were high at Hitsville, and Godin was made as welcome as anyone could be.
Author Stephen Stevlor sets the scene in even finer detail in Dave Godin: A Northern Soul, a forthcoming biography about one of Motown’s first foreign evangelists. Here’s an excerpt:
The original itinerary for Dave’s visit had been altered at the last moment, and instead of going first to New York as planned, it was decided that Detroit would now be the first port of call, spending two days in the city before flying to NYC to see the two parts of The Motown Revue. Dressed sharply in an off-white, four-buttoned linen suit that Godin had had specially tailored to his own design, shirt and tie fastened tightly at the neck, the Soul man combatted the extremely hot U.S. weather with a glass of cold milk in the airport café. “That suit! He had a lot of trouble getting it made ’cos it had four buttons,” remembers Graham Moss. “It was difficult to get a four buttoned suit so he designed it himself with short lapels so it buttoned very high. He always made a point of buttoning all four right the way up and that was his sartorial look, and he always wore a buttonhole because he knew how to make them.”
Moss, quoted above, was an original member of the Mary Wells Fan Club and Tamla/Motown Appreciation Society, which Godin had formed towards the end of 1963. Moss told Stevlor: “Me and a school friend were in a record shop on Bexleyheath High Street, listening to a record by some English group doing Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Goin’ Down Slow.’ It was one of those record shops with headphones like two lollipop sticks that you held to your ears, but if there was no one else in the shop they’d play the record you wanted to hear over the loudspeakers. We were in after school about 4.30pm and this fellah [Godin] wandered into the shop while were listening to this record and he came over and said, “Do you want to hear the original version of that? ’Cos that's just a copy.”
A few weeks later, Graham [Moss] took Dave up on his offer... “...he had an LP with Howlin’ Wolf's ‘Goin' Down Slow’ on, but he also showed me the English pressing on Pye International, yellow and red label, and they’d re-titled it and it read ‘Goin' Down South’ instead of ‘Goin’ Down Slow.’
AN ECONOMICS LESSON IN BEXLEYHEATH
“What Dave used to do with good black music when it was issued was go into the three local record shops on Bexleyheath High Street, and he would order these singles in each of the shops and then not go and pick them up, so in three months’ time they’d be at a reduced price for someone else to buy. And that was his plan to do with publicising and making these records available to people who might not otherwise be able to see or hear them.
Dave Godin (left) with Norman Jopling of Record Mirror and Berry Gordy, 1965
Dave’s theory was, if they were in the record bin at a reduced price, people were more likely to listen to them, and if they liked it, they’d buy it because it was cheaper. He was very good at understanding how economics worked, and that people liked a bargain. At the same time, he’s writing to record labels telling them they’ve got the rights to release certain American tracks and they ought to release this and that ’cos it was a good track and it would sell well. He knew the language to put into these letters to try and persuade the likes of [Decca Records’ subsidiary label] London American to issue black music that otherwise wouldn’t get issued....”
Fast forward to Detroit on that July ’64 day, and Godin was whisked from the airport to Hitsville, to be given a tour of the Motown offices in the company of Margaret Phelps and Fern Bledsoe. Stephen Stevlor picks up the story:
More departments were visited, even more photographs taken until finally Dave found himself back once again in the office of Margaret Phelps, and the opportunity to sit in conversation with the legendary Marvin Gaye. “It would be difficult to imagine anyone less ‘Big-Time’ than Marvin Gaye,” Dave decided. “And he must be the most modest teen-idol in the business. He knew I was a ‘blues-man’ and had not given a very enthusiastic review of one of his recent flip-sides which featured strings. We did, in fact, have a good laugh over it, and he told me, that he himself really felt happier when singing Soul music!” Gaye would, like Harvey Fuqua and many other Kings and Queens of Motown, remain close friends for many years to come.
MUSIC TO MARTHA’S EARS
One of these Motown Queens, a young Detroit Miss whom Dave would spend a substantial amount of time with on this visit, was busy recording in Studio A at the time his arrival at Hitsville was announced. She remembers the Englishman's visit vividly. “We were honoured and delighted to meet Dave Godin, the president of the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society,” says Martha Reeves, though admits on first impressions that she thought Dave looked a bit “Nerdish,” and blamed his heavy rimmed glasses for hiding his “warm, expressive eyes,” but confessed his proper English was like music to her ears.
“He was sophisticated and brought new and good ideas to convince Berry Gordy to take Motown's United States to our Mother country, the United Kingdom. The more he spoke, the more he convinced us that our music was the connection we needed to unite our countries even more. Berry Gordy was very impressed by the size of this new society formed by Dave and welcomed him and made him part of the family. Dave saw everything that was going on in every department, and though excited, remained poised, receptive and delightful and seemed pleased to be with us. There was a session going on and he witnessed the Funk Brothers recording live.”
A Northern Soul DJ and radio show presenter, Stephen Stevlor first became acquainted with Godin in the early 1990s in Sheffield, where the music aficionado had moved some years before to study Film & Art History as a mature student at the city’s Polytechnic. Stevlor was editing Sheffield’s Alternative Magazine (SAM) and asked Godin to contribute regularly. “I was overjoyed when he came on board, and couldn’t wait for a column full of music anecdotes, soul stories and, hopefully, the circumstances of how he’d once shook the hand of Hollywood movie starlet Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately, in all the four years he wrote for us, he only mentioned music about three times, always very briefly, and usually involving a vicious remark directed at Mick Jagger and his bandmates, the Rolling Stones.” (Godin had met Jagger at Dartford Grammar School, which is recalled in the book.)
Stevlor says that he decided to write the biography circa 2013 – nine years after Godin’s death – “when it felt like he was being a little forgotten and ignored by the Northern Soul scene, a scene he’d named and given a specific identity to.” He adds, “I thought it would take me six months until I realised how many ‘lives’ this man had in him. Six years-plus later, here we finally are.”
In addition to its account of Godin’s Motown adventures and his intense advocacy for American black music, the book relates his business experiences with the Soul City retail outlet and record label during the 1960s; his time as a popular columnist for Blues & Soul, when he coined the “Northern Soul” description; his tenure as manager of Britain’s first civic cinema, The Sheffield Anvil; and his final days fighting cancer in the care of friends in Yorkshire. Dave Godin: A Northern Soul will be published on October 15 in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. More details from stevlor@hotmail.co.uk.
With luck, Stevlor’s work will be an engaging companion to an earlier, essential volume about the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society: Hitsville! The Birth of Tamla Motown, written by Keith Rylatt and published in 2016. This, too, chronicled the origins and exploits of the fan club, with reproductions of much of the content of its magazine and – more dramatically – photographs and memorabilia kept by the late Clive Stone, a Godin ally and fellow R&B enthusiast.
Stone made his own trip to Detroit in December 1964, detailed soon afterwards in the first issue of the Appreciation Society’s revamped newsletter, Hitsville U.S.A. Like Godin, Stone was a bohemian character – but daring to be different helped to fuel his passion for Motown, as it did for other young Britons at the time. And to his credit, Berry Gordy has often acknowledged how that passion encouraged his company to look beyond America’s borders, to understand how much the music was (in Smokey Robinson’s words) “loved by people living so far away.”
Dave Godin was one such soul.
Memory notes: Dave Godin wrote so much about music (among other topics) during his lifetime that biographers have plenty to draw upon, but one Motown anecdote from an extensive interview with Jon Savage in 1995 bears re-examination. Godin remembered that during his 1964 visit to Motown, “a huge reception” was held for him, attended by the company elite. The Supremes were considered so second-level at the time, he said, “that they were not even invited to this reception.” In fact, there was a different reason: the group was on Dick Clark’s “Caravan of Stars” national tour, appearing in towns and cities in West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana during the exact period of Godin’s stay.
Music notes: For a 2003 edition of Manifesto magazine, Dave Godin picked his all-time favourite Motown tracks, and they make up the latest WGB playlist here. Also, for Ace Records, Godin compiled a series of albums entitled Deep Soul Treasures, starting in 1997. These epitomised his informed, eclectic taste, and included tracks by the likes of Maxine Brown, Irma Thomas, Otis Redding, Bessie Banks, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Jean Wells, James Brown and many more.