Sean Rothman gets food poisoning with Peter Godwin

It was with the release of 'Images of Heaven' that Peter Godwin first came to my attention but it was only when 'Let's Dance' by David Bowie was released that I began to take an interest in what Godwin had been doing since then. One of the tracks featured on the LP was 'Criminal World' and Peter Godwin was credited as cowriter with Metro's guitarist, Sean Lyons. It was with this in mind and the release of 'Correspondence', Godwins debut LP, that I arranged this interview. Over a Japanese meal I asked Godwin how he became involved with music.

"I've always been interested in it. I never studied it or any particular instrument. The first instrument I actually learnt to play was the piano accordion because my father played it and he taught it to me when I was about seven years old. Then I swapped that for an electric guitar. Like a lot of kids, I was always being given toy instruments and I used to bang out tunes on all sorts of things. I was never really interested in becoming a virtuoso on a particular instrument. I think it's a question of temperament. I was always interested in writing tunes. I think its something that came naturally in some funny way. I was always interested in lyrics 'cos I was always writing poetry and little stories and things.

"I went to college and studied mostly Literature and Languages. I resisted making my living out of pop music for a while though I did it in an amateur sort of way. Somehow I didn't find the people involved it all that exciting but I couldn t find something else that interested me more. People in the music business can be quite boring really because they're quite narrow minded. They're mainly interested in music and what they're doing and not a lot of other things. The traditional rock'n'roll attitude is very much obsessed with itself."

Big In Portugal

Why did Metro split?

"We got a reputation which is always a bit irritating, of being a band who has a hit in what are considered to be unimportant countries. We had a no. 2 in Italy, did quite well in Holland — we had a no. 1 in Portugal! We had our records released in a lot of places including America.

There are a lot of advantages to being a solo artist which I've realised since I became one. You have all the choice you want in terms of arrangements. If you have a line-up you have a sound by definition, you can't not have one of the musicians on the record. If you decide this track would be good without guitar you offend someone. The great thing when you start making records on your own is you've got as broad a canvas as you like. That's why on my first solo single I used all kinds of odd instruments just because I thought it would be fun. I suppose I was sort of celebrating the fact that I didn't have any limitations. On 'Torch Song For The Heroin' which I did with Midge Ure we used everything from acoustic instruments like zither as well as synthesizers, real bass, drums and drum machines. We just used anything we felt helped create the sort of atmosphere that suited the song. I've been looking around, trying out different things since I split Metro and it takes time to find out exactly what you want to do."

From Midge To Warren

'Images Of Heaven' was Godwins third single and for me anyway, remains his best song to date. Despite a lot of airplay from David Jensen, it failed to chart as have all Godwin's releases in this country. Ultravox's Warren Cann played drums on the single.

"Warrens quite a fan of my songs. He likes what I do and when he's not busy he likes to play with other people. It was a fairly spontaneous thing... we'd actually done a recording of the song and it was all drum machine and I thought it would be nice to have the feel of somebody playing drums on the track. The actual feel of someone hitting something even if its Simmons drums is different in a way."

'Images Of Heaven' almost I broke in the national charts in the States. If it had a little investment it would have done. It's like that in America. You're not even in the running unless you've got a competitive amount of money invested in the promotion of the record. Its all pretty corrupt really. 'Images of Heaven' got just outside the Billboard Top 100 all on its own legs without any of that. The last single ('Baby's In The Mountains') I had out there did particularly well in the dance charts which is quite an indication of American people because it's demographically sampled from about 400 clubs in the States who give reactions. The only thing that stopped it from reaching number one was Michael Jackson, Gloria Gaynor and Shannon with 'Let The Music Play'. There has been a real epidemic of English releases in America and in my opinion a lot of it is fairly mediocre and its one of those situations where its getting attention because its English and England is in vogue."

So how are you doing out there now?

"I've got quite a foothold. I've had a lot of exposure on MTV and that's with quite low-budget videos. It proves how worthwhile it is to do a video whatever your means. I did a couple of videos with a friends co-operation on Lo-band and one of them got shown all over the place including about 200 plays on MTV at the last count and that was 'Images Of Heaven'. There were two videos for it, one was a sort of provocative, slightly erotic one which was one interpretation and the other was quite different. Both of them were done with no money and yet they travelled and got a lot of exposure for the record."

So why haven't you cracked Britain. D'you get any airplay?

"Well... David Jensen and Peter Powell always give me a certain amount of exposure but they never really go over the top. As far as I can make out you have to get a certain amount of plays on Radio One to guarantee a hit and there aren't a lot of ways to do it unless you're going to go out and play intensively live and get your audience that way and even then there's no guarantee. Radio One has a monopoly on the situation and you've got to please those five people, the producers. They don't dictate entirely to their DJ's but let's say they are the main influences. "

Correspondence

What instruments did you use on the album?

"A lot of sounds on that were off the PPG 2.2. What I think is nice about the PPG is that the digital sounds have an acoustic quality yet you can take a sound and give it an analogue edge. Its got all the possibilities. We actually played around on the Waveterm as well but at the end of the day it wasn't that useful. I like the PPG but its very characteristic and like anything you have to get to know it very well to get the most originality out of it. Just recently I've been doing some demos with a JP8 which is the synth I know best. You can actually get a hell of a lot of things which are very similar to the PPG out of the JP8 if you persevere with it. I still think the Minimoog is one of the best things for bass. It's just got something — that particular oscillator sound. On the track 'Soul Of Love' that's Minimoog — it sounds like a fretless but its the Moog with glide (portamento). The synths that were used most were the PPG, the Jupiter 8, the Oberheim OBX and also an old ARP 2600.

"People in the music business can be quite boring really because they're quite narrow minded. They're mainly interested in music and what they're doing and not a lot of other things. The traditional rock'n'roll attitude is very much obsessed with itself."

"We played around with a Synergy. It has a few presets which are like real sounds but we didn't use it very much. We toyed with the idea of getting an Emulator but we didn't so there's quite a small range of instruments on the album. Most of the drums are Linn."

Writing Correspondence

Godwin was showing an active interest in my Aiwa HS-J02 and it turned out that he actually wrote most of the album on a Sony Walkman.

"I actually write acappella. If a song stands out completely naked then the arrangement will give it a whole new dimension. But that doesn't mean I don't write instrumental ideas down that way 'cos I do. For example if I get a bassline I will hum it down onto a Walkman just so I don't forget the nuance of something, just the rhythm of it or a note or two but I find its a nice spontaneous way to work. The problem with working from instruments is that you can become sidetracked with things which are more to do with arrangement then songwriting.

"A song has got to have a melody. There's a lot of possibilities in terms of the rhythms and that. It doesn't have to stem from just one rhythm. Obviously you can do that — some people do. They just work out a drum pattern and write a song to that. But I've always preferred to base it on a song."

Hullo Sailor

Tell me about George Kajanus.

"He's not really a producer, he's more of an artist. He was the singer and songwriter of a pop band called Sailor. They have a few hits, they had their heyday — 'Glass Of Champagne', 'Girls, Girls, Girls'.

"It was a coincidence that brought us together. Don (Godwin's manager) was doing some work for George at the time and we came together through that. There were some things that Sailor had done that I had always liked. They were one of the first bands to have a synthesizer bass — Pickertty Witch was another!

"I'm getting ready to do another album for Polydor. I've got lots of ideas for it. This time I'm probably going to do it with a different producer, with somebody who's actually more of a producer, somebody who does it for a job! Y'see George isn't really a producer as such... I don't know who its going to be yet but there's quite a few well-known names interested. One of the people I've been speaking to is quite well known in the electronic music field and that's Giorgio Moroder. He wants to hear the songs which he will do in the near future."

Criminal Cover

David Bowie covered 'Criminal World' on his last album and the writing of that track is credited to you and Metro's old guitarist Sean Lyons. How do you feel about that?

"The basic melody and lyric was something I was largely responsible for and Sean wrote a bit of guitar at the end which wasn't used very much. He also wrote a little guitar lick but that wasn't used much either! I don't resent it because being in a band and that he contributed to other songs and it was just the luck of the draw that that one got picked.

"It will mean a bit of money to me although a lot less than people will imagine even though it's the most successful album David Bowie's ever had. Hopefully people will take me more seriously by association. If some artist who is taken seriously takes me seriously enough to cover one of my songs then it should extend to me somehow. I've sensed that in the last year with people I've spoken to, whether it's interviews or whatever or whether it's just acquaintances.

Of all the people it could have been, Bowie is the most influential, at least in the English music scene. Everybody — well, not everybody but 90% of English recording artists — owe something to some stage of his career — on some level they've been influenced in someway even if it wasn't directly. So he is one of the most respected people in that sense. The irony is that I wrote the song as a response to the whole world of sexual ambiguity that he more or less provoked by his initial stance. 'Criminal World' was a sort of tongue-in-cheek song about that, so in a way the song wouldn't have existed probably if it wasn't for him. In a funny way it's not something to do with his current image which is a bit more masculine, almost family man. But it's quite a nice ironic twist that he should pick that particular song."

Well if David Bowie's endorsement of Godwin's songwriting talents is not enough for you, you can always listen to Godwin's album yourself. It is not Godwin's best work but it's still well worth hearing. The future? Well, Godwin and Moroder sounds a perfect combination and should knock the stuffing out of Giorgio's recent limp production work for Debbie Harry.