The Guardian Obituary

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]

The Independent Obituary

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.

The Times Obituary