Images of Peter: Finding Peter Godwin

Discovering Peter Godwin

Many years later, I rediscovered this video again through the Internet gift called YouTube. I also discovered a much more risqué version of this video, featuring half-naked women in various crucifixion poses. The imagery in Peter Godwin’s videos was very Scavullo- and Helmut Newton-inspired:colorful, quite European-flavored, and unabashedly sexually suggestive. There were even more videos from Peter Godwin which popped up from the ether: one called “Emotional Disguise,” “Baby’s in the Mountains,” and my favorite, “America in my Head”. “America in My Head” was a very sexy song, discussing a possible romance with an American girl (“I’ve got America in my bed/She set alight to all my dreams”) while sounding like a much better version of The Police.

On a visit to a local CD store, my brother-in-law (also a hugely dedicated audiophile) discovered an import CD from Germany by a band called Metro. It was then that the plot thickened—the man called Peter Godwin was on the album cover, dressed up like something from a Dior pour Homme advertisement, sitting in a wicker chair next to another strikingly well-dressed guy named Duncan Browne. They looked like twin Robert Palmers: one very slight, slicked-back looking gentleman on the left in a black suit with a red flower on the lapel (Browne), and one taller, more menacing, intense looking gentleman in a white suit with a black flower on the lapel (Godwin). An exclamation point went off in my head.

The old adage may say that one should never judge an album’s music by its cover—but this time my judgment was spot on. (In a story for another time, I also became enamored by the solo work of Browne—but I have already discussed this in previous writings.)

I stole the Metro CD several times from my brother-in-law before securing my own copy. I became obsessed with two songs in particular on it, namely “Criminal World” (later covered by none other than David Bowie—although Metro’s version remains superior) and “Black Lace Shoulder.” It made 1976 sound like the most sophisticated time ever, surrounded by central European adventures soaked in wine, wayward women, Vogue magazines on hotel floors, and expensive cigarettes, Duncan Browne having clutched what looked like a French cigarette—posed almost iconically—on the album’s cover.

One fan on the Internet described the album defining Metro as “. . . indeed the softest glam band, in fact they sound delicate even in the most [danceable] parts, it’s like they played their songs dressed in suits and didn’t want to sweat too much.” Having missed that part of the decade myself, I thought it was an underrated yet eminently important document of the progressive-glam rock era.

The advent of punk, however, guaranteed that this album would be consigned to merely cult status; music writer Dave Thompson wrote later, “. . . [b]ut timing also came into it, and if you want to talk about missing the boat, Metro never even found the harbor. Metro was released in early 1977, but it belonged to late 1974.”

Eventually, Peter’s collaboration with Duncan Browne came to an end, but he made a few more albums with the remainder of Metro. Much later, in 1993, Browne’s life would be cut savagely short by cancer.

Introduction:

Cherchez la femme: “Images of Heaven”
Discovering Peter Godwin
Rediscovering Peter Godwin

Click here to read more from Peter Godwin on. . .

Setting The Scene
Influences
Cult Following and Italo-Disco
Benitez, Bowie, and Electronic Music
French and Spanish Inspirations
Producing and Writing
The English and European Aesthetic
Working with Steve Winwood
Off The Map
Working with Others
Forays Into Acting
More On Acting

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