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London, Feb. 14: After being on the lam for nineteen years it was with their definitive style and interminable cynicism that the original line-up of The Godfathers took the stage of the Kentish Town Forum. Grey suited and in a black shirt, vocalist Peter Coyne fired handbills into the crowd as John Barry’s theme from The Persuaders filled the room, and when the last note faded, drummer George Mazur wasted no time in counting four fast clicks to instigate the the opening wail of I Want Everything. For a damn near two decades the song had been held hostage in those amplifiers across the stage and there was no one in the audience that wouldn’t have paid a thousand pound to have it back again. Grabbing the microphone, Peter Coyne finally made his long-awaited demands: ‘Instant coffee, instant sex,’ he snarled. ‘Instant failure, instant success,’ and though The Godfathers had been granted the last in 1985, for the fans, it would last all too brief a time.

     My own introduction to the band had come in the following spring of '86 upon the release of their second single, This Damn Nation. I had bought it unheard and on recommendation, but from the very first listen I thought it a masterpiece of rock and roll. As that twelve-inch spun round the turntable there came to my ears everything I loved about music and it was all tightly packed in the barrel of a cold, black Beretta. It was garage, it was punk, it was pop, and it was unbelievably huge, but above all, it was nothing less than three-minutes-forty-five seconds of raw desperation. After the build up of the first four bars, a dizzying descent of guitar slides and pull-offs continued to maniacally wave that pistol in my face, and to this day I don’t believe The Godfathers have earned the right to their name more so than from that record. Like a finely-tuned gang of thugs they work the listener over. Bassist Chris Coyne joins up with drummer George to pummel and kick their victim while guitarists Mike Gibson and Kris Dollimore take turns clapping him around the head. Peter, in the position of capo di tutti capi, grabs the throat and doesn't let go, doesn't stop shaking the lout till he makes it painfully aware to everyone, including himself, that there's no escape from this dismal frustration of life. But is there any relief to be had at all? Somewhere in the tumult, Mike finally feints with a fat John Barry riff but then George gets it into his head to start firing snare drum bullets. Every chorus can do nothing but explode with high back-up vocals that only lead to another round of unforgiving assault. It’s this record that would make me a fan for life, and even if The Godfathers had never written another song after This Damn Nation, I still would have booked a flight for their London reunion.

     Fortunately, for me, and all their fans, this line-up of The Godfathers did go on to write two more albums, those being Birth, School, Work, Death and More Songs About Love and Hate. The February fourteenth reunion concert (one of their legendary St. Valentine’s Day Massacres) was held to celebrate the re-release of their 1986 debut, a singles compilation titled Hit by Hit (which included This Damn Nation) but is now expanded to include material from all three albums. On stage, Peter rattled off more orders:

     Now listen all you peoples,
     To what I have to say.
     Every night’s a gas,
     If you want it that way.
     All you need is money,
     And a little bit of luck,
     I ain’t greedy baby,
     All I want is all you’ve got
    ’Cause I Said So

     ’Cause I Said So was the second song of the night, and that every night’s a gas line has become a sort of credo for me over the years. Go out. Live large. It’s what we do around here. The twin lead guitars of the college hit She Gives Me Love came next till Gibson and Dollimore got fed up with all that hand-holding to again let loose with what had become their collective signature sound. Like a pair of Punch and Judy lovers that have turned their quarreling into an art form, the two guitars collide, scratch, dodge, cry, threaten, sneer, forgive, and browbeat each other into submission, yet each knows when the buttons have been pushed too many times and so goes skulking off to another room to give the other space. Few guitar teams work together this well, and on the following Saturday I was given the opportunity to ask about the early days and how that sound came together.

     A hospitable South Londoner of Irish descent, Peter Coyne took me on a tour of the nearby Imperial War Museum where amongst biplanes, gunnery, and espionage gadgetry (such as an original Enigma unit used to crack the German code) we spent an afternoon talking about everything from the Battle of Britain to Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers to our equal fascination with Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner. Passing a Cold War exhibition, Coyne pointed out some promotional material for The Ipcress File. ‘Just like that film with Michael Caine,’ he noted, it being a line from their Top-40 hit Birth, School, Work, Death. When we got around to having coffee, we talked about the perfect line up.

     ‘As soon as those people started playing,’ he said, ‘you knew they were the right people for the job. I think Dolli was the first into the band, and then George was playing, I think, with Dolli at that same rehearsal, and he was good as well, and we thought, we’re nearly there now – this is not so bad. Then Mike turned up and we always wanted him because in Sid Presley (their previous band) it was only one guitar, and when you’re in the studio, of course you’re going to add effects and stuff like that, and we wanted to have that freedom to have another guitar that could do effects or the rhythm when there’s a solo going – just to make it more powerful, more dynamic.’

     ‘Did Kris and Mike get their sound down right away,’ I asked.

     ‘It took a fair bit of time to develop all that sort of thing,’ he said. ‘Of course it did. It’s natural. The Stones call it the ancient art of weaving. They weave in and out of each other, so you can’t really tell which guitar it comes from.’

     An absolutely true statement, for even watching the two men from a few feet away, it’s difficult to determine who’s playing what riff, and at the end of She Gives Me Love the two leads become that beautiful bickering couple again with Punch screaming at the top of his lungs and Judy crying through a wah-wah pedal. Next on the list was If I Only Had Time, which is probably the only song ever to have a lyric about Cary Grant on L.S.D. Peter talked about the creative process:

     ‘Every single line in that song is nicked from English newspaper headlines. A million mums are hooked on Valium. Headline. We’re living under a false economy. Headline. Today a new sun rises. That was a slogan for The Sun newspaper when they were re-launching it right about that time, and the other tabloid newspaper is The Daily Mirror. The second line is 'Look in the Mirror and there’s no surprises.' That’s why that’s the first two lines of that song. That’s another headline: Cary Grant’s on L.S.D. A generation raised on poverty. It’s all from English newspapers. I just collected them. I got that from John Lennon because I thought he was always getting ideas from songs. Four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire. He read that in The Daily Mail. So I used to read about other people and how they used to write songs, and I’ll start trying to do things like that, and that’s how you got that song. But that song was played to Lionel Bart, who wrote Oliver, because it’s got that recurring line, 'Things ain’t what they used to be.' It’s an old Lionel Bart musical, pre-Oliver sort of thing, and he used to write songs with John Barry. They wrote From Russia with Love together. So he was played If I Only Had Time when he was in hospital, and he said, ‘Sounds fucking great.’ So that to me is worth more to me than money in the bank. I’m telling you.’

     Back on stage, Peter goes on to tell the crowd, ‘Don’t take this personally, but I don’t believe in you.’ It's the title of a pop-groove number from More Songs About Love and Hate, and brother Chris Coyne, dressed in a black mandarin collar suit and looking very Dr. No, holds up the foundation with his bass as Dollimore and Gibson again build the attic. I spoke with Chris about The Godfather image after the show and it became apparent he’s the obsessive sartorialist of the group, talking about 60s bands he always thought extremely sharp and how he occasionally gets over to Bangkok to have suits made for seventy pounds each. Hell, we even talked about slub (those textured weaves common to 60s suits) and dupioni silk. Peter filled me in on the psychology of The Godfather look.

     ‘I think all of that sort of took developing as well,’ he said. ‘Look at the early, early pictures. Do we want to look a certain way and sound a certain way as well? We wanted to look clean, but we play dirty. Really dirty. So, it’s a nice contrast to have. Because people always go by what you look like, don’t they? And then…Bang, you hit them with this and it’s like, ‘Fuck me, I wasn’t expecting that.’ I always like the fuck-me factor in rock music or whatever. Where you go, ‘Fuck me, what’s that?’ When I heard Anarchy in the U.K. for the first time, I just didn’t know how to hear it. I thought it was rubbish. The second time I played it, I thought it was pretty good. And the third time I played it, I thought it was the best record I ever heard in me life. ‘

     Later in the show, when they came out for the encore, Peter would talk about that record that changed their lives. ‘We used to play this one back in the day,’ he announced. ‘It’s an old English folk song, but it’s not played on lutes or mandolins or nothing like that. It’s just drums and guitars,’ and then they busted into the Sex Pistols hit. For a moment, it really was the punk London of thirty years ago, for someone in the crowd twice assaulted Dollimore with a spray of beer. Having had enough, Dollimore finally threw down his guitar and had to be restrained from jumping off the stage to go fisticuffs.

     ‘Me and Chris used to go to all the punk clubs all the time,’ Peter recalled. ‘That’s when we was growing up. Nineteen-seventy-seven. I was like eighteen, so I was perfect for it. I remember going into The Roxy and throwing up, and Steve Jones and Paul Cook out of the Pistols walked in. They saw me vomiting on the floor and there’s a line of vomit near me. Steve Jones goes, ‘Look, he’s been eating cornflakes,’ and that was the biggest band of that time walking into a bog run. Because groups done that sort of thing. They were heroes, but they were like real people, as well.’

     I asked him if he knew back then that he wanted to be in bands.

      'No, I didn’t,’ he was quick to reply. ‘No. I was a fan of music, and I loved music, and I used to write about music. I used to write for a couple of music papers. One of them was Record Mirror. There’s four national music magazines. There was NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, and Record Mirror. I used to write for Record Mirror, and a few others. ZigZag was a quite famous magazine at the time as well. And the music scene at that time - this is nineteen-seventy-nine to about nineteen-eighty-one - was shit. Fucking shit. Plastic, synthesized, mullet-wearing shit. So after a while, I thought, hell, I could do better meself if I tried. And my brother Chris was always interested in being in a band, and I used to try and help him look for singers. I hung out with this guitarist, Del, who was later on the guitarist for the Sid Presley Experience, who was looking for a drummer and was looking for a singer for ages. I used to go, ‘What about him over there? Oh, he looks quite interesting.’’

     ‘So you just found people on the street that had a certain look?’

     ‘Yeah, or we’d go to a concert like The Cramps or The Ramones or something like that and just look. Till I looked in a mirror and thought, fuck it, I’ll just do it myself. So it started like that, really. I didn’t intend to be in a group; it just happened. Life’s a nice happy accident, though, isn’t it?’

     ‘Did you think you could sing at all?’

     ‘Nahhh. I still don’t think I can sing now. What I do like about what I do, though, there’s a bit of grit in there and at least I’m communicating to people, and people dug it all over the bleeding world, so I can’t complain about that. No one likes the sound of their own voice, anyway. John Lennon hated the sound of his own voice. That’s why every single one of his vocals are double-tracked. Because he just didn’t want to hear himself.’

     To converse with Peter is to converse with a music encyclopedia, and throughout the day one man's name kept coming up so often that his entry would have to take an entire volume in itself. About twenty minutes into the St. Valentine's set, Peter took up the tambourine and said, ‘This is the first of two instrumentals we’d love to play for you this evening. The first one’s called John Barry,’ and immediately Chris started hammering away at his bass to pay tribute to the legendary composer and progenitor of the spy-film soundtrack. Along with the rowdy Can’t Leave Her Alone, it is this thriller that made up the b-side of the original This Damn Nation twelve-inch, so there’s little wonder how such a... (To continue, click here.  Then click Page 2)

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stellar introduction to the group could have left me anything but slack-jawed. In fact, The Godfathers had so well assimilated the John Barry sound into their own work, injecting into it a fair amount of that grit Peter talked about, that I had always thought them to be a natural selection for one of the Bond title tracks. Peter outright laughed at the suggestion.

     ‘They’d never ask us to do something like that. No way. Alice Cooper had done a fantastic version of The Man with the Golden Gun and they just wouldn’t allow it because it was Alice Cooper…Alice Cooper,’ he noted. ‘Nineteen-seventy-four! With his best band, Billion Dollar Babies. They never liked any of those songs. When they played Cubby Broccoli Goldfinger, he said, ‘If I had the time to pull that song from the film…if it weren’t coming out in cinemas all across America in two and a half weeks time, I’d pull it,’ and that’s Goldfinger with Shirley Bassey singing. They got the money but they ain’t got no class.’

     Unfortunately, as had similarly happened to The Kinks in the sixties, the music industry never did seem to know what to make of The Godfathers. They had sold an incredible 50,000 copies of their self-released album Hit by Hit, yet, somehow, they still couldn’t get signed to a label in their native England. I asked Peter if timing was a factor.

     ‘See, we came out after punk,’ he said, ‘and before grunge and Britpop, so we was out there all on our own. Which is fantastic. We were like Marco Polo going around the world for the first time, because we weren’t aligned to any movement – we were The Godfathers, and that was it. We didn’t have a scene - there wasn’t a band like us – there couldn’t have been a band like us. We’re a British rock and roll band, and there was no rock and roll at that time. And that’s what I’m more proud of than anything else.’

     Despite the disinterest from the U.K. labels, the sheer volume of records they sold was enough to get the attention of Epic in America. I asked if the label demanded any changes in sound and image.

     ‘No, not at all,’ he said. ‘They were really good. Because we were turned down by a load of labels in Britain, and then we were signed up by Epic records in New York to a worldwide deal, including Britain, so Britain had to take us anyway. See, the rest of the world had to take us, because America was the dog, the head of the dog….’

     The Epic signing led to the release of 1988’s Birth, School, Work, Death, an album that would produce their hit of the same name.

     'It was a top forty single in the states,’ said Peter. ‘I didn’t believe this till George, the drummer, showed me Billboard from nineteen-eighty-whatever it was. We were so busy doing it, we didn’t even know how successful we were.’

     As a fan, I didn’t believe it either. Twisting the radio dial in my car one afternoon, I had suddenly come upon Peter’s sobering take on life and death, and my first thought was that the little orange indicator had malfunctioned because it was nowhere near the left end of the dial, the traditional realm of college radio in the states. ‘Really?’, I thought. ‘The Godfathers? On Top-40 radio?’ Realizing there was a chance my favorite band was about to go mainstream, I shuddered at the thought of having to see them in an arena. Reflectively, Peter made some assurances.

     ‘We were never going to go really mainstream, mainstream, mainstream. I told one magazine, ‘We just signed to Epic records.’ They said, ‘How do you expect you’re going to do?’ I said, ‘We’re going to sell more records than George Michael and Michael Jackson combined.’ I said it just for a laugh, but he took me so seriously. That phrase went round the fucking planet. Because you say something in jest, some guy with a tape recorder, like yourself, and then it gets turned into reality. Obviously we weren’t going to do that. We were never going to do that. We’re too gritty, too real, to be polished up.’

     During the show, the band played a fair amount of material from Birth, School, Work, Death. There’s Obsession, the song Peter calls a psychodrama, and on its heels came the psychedelic drone of When Am I Coming Down. Also in the set was the one song that, inexplicably, didn’t become their second hit from the album.

     Originally released on their own Corporate Image label a year earlier, Love is Dead is another pop masterpiece that exploded on my stereo. The original 1987 version kicks in with two snare beats and a guitar riff that’s larger and lonelier than a Montana sky. The portrait of desperation that’s rendered in this go-round is of the girl who’s just got out of bed and hasn’t had her breakfast yet. She’s being pushed around, Peter sings, and the boys come in with the Flo and Eddie call and response back-ups to corroborate. Peter then tell us of the poor thing who is always waiting for her chance to succeed, but, of course, in The Godfathers’ world, she never will, her destiny being that of another lonely character doomed to a life of falling through the cracks. For the version that appears on the album, the band decided to lose the big guitar riff and added a bit more jangle, but either way, the song has more hooks than a Clive Barker novel and I suppose it will still be a masterpiece should they ever decide to record it as a Gregorian chant.

     That big as a thunderball sound had always been key to The Godfathers’ success, and even before going to the studio, the group knew they had to capture it on vinyl. They also knew there was only one producer who could do it: a former engineer at London’s Pye Studios: Vic Maile.

     ‘It’s a very special relationship that came with that geezer. We picked him in the first place. We wanted our own record company. He was doing The Inmates, Motorhead, Screaming Blue Messiahs, Tom Robinson Band. He was a brilliant producer. Started off in the sixties as a tape op on people like Shel Talmy who produced all the The Who, The Kinks, and The Creation, and all that sort of stuff. When he [Vic] first started with Joe Meek - he’s like England’s Phil Spector - so Vic learned compression from Joe Meek. Joe Meek used to squash a record and then he’d make it sound big when it came out the radio. That’s compression basically in a nutshell. We heard all those other records, and we’d heard the b-side of Motorhead’s Ace of Spades called Dirty Love. That song was so clear and loud and powerful, we thought, that’s going to be great if we get that onto our records. So we started working with him and we worked with him right until he died. Three albums with the guy.’

     The loss of Vic Maile after More Songs was only one of two blows suffered by The Godfathers. The other was the untimely departure of guitarist Kris Dollimore, and though it can’t be said that one member makes or breaks a group, whether it’s a comedy troupe, television cast, or musical group, there are some units that work together so well that the departure of any member will leave a vacuum. For The Godfathers, that vacuum could have been created upon the exit of George, Mike, Peter, or Chris just as easily. I asked Peter about the day Kris announced his decision. ‘Did you feel like you lost something special?’

     ‘When he left? Yeah. It was like a girlfriend leaving or something like that…that you really loved. No shit?’ he intoned with a dumbstruck wonderment. ‘What we going to do now? So, really, we auditioned guitarists and we got a great guitarist, a guy called Chris Burrows. He did pretty good on Unreal World, which I still think is a brilliant album. Unreal World’s just different to the Vic Maile produced stuff – the three albums that came before it – but it’s still The Godfathers. Believe in Yourself is fantastic. This is War is great as well, but the…uh…the original’s still the greatest, you know? Now, looking at it with hindsight,’ he later said, ‘that line-up with that band was magic. Anybody can tell you that, apart from the people that was in the group at the time.’

     ‘You thought it was magic.’