Images of Peter: Finding Peter Godwin

Popshifter:: Because I wasn’t there. . . what was the period like when you started working with Sean Lyons and Duncan Browne on Metro’s debut album in the mid-1970s? This album, to me, is like the missing link between Roxy Music and David Bowie, with a generous helping of central European decadence. . . (I mean, David Bowie obviously covered “Criminal World”). Set the scene for me. . .

Cancello del Castello di Buda
Photo © centrostudilaruna

Peter Godwin: I remember there was a sense of wanting to create something authentic, something true to our experience at the time. We loved American music and culture—it’s in the very sound of an electric guitar after all—but bands like The Eagles sang their mythology, outlaws and prairies and musical roots in country and rock and roll. We wanted to celebrate our own experience and culture.

And although people didn’t sing about it much, my generation in England had discovered that we had a wonderful cultural diversity right on our doorstep in Europe. We all had started traveling there and we learnt the languages at school. In London we flirted with girls from all over Europe who had started to flock here in the ’60s, drawn by the music.

We got entranced by their many cultures, their cinema, their literature, their music, their cities, their landscapes. . . and just a few miles away over the English Channel was this diverse wonderland. I remember when I was just 19 I spent three months hitch-hiking alone all over Europe and the Middle East, soaking it all in.

We called the band “Metro,” because we lived in a city, London—that was our Metropolis—and a lot of our experiences of Europe were of the great historical cities: Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Berlin, Venice, Florence, Istanbul, Athens. . . and also the beach towns on the Mediterranean: Cannes, Saint Tropez, Barcelona. . . well, the list is endless of course, but there was an urban feeling to our experience, rather than the country life, back to nature. . . more cities and beaches. . . my life is still like that. . .

As a footnote, I took a holiday alone to Morocco in the middle of making the first Metro album, spending most of the time in Tangiers, so maybe there’s even some French-Arabian DNA in there,too! Also, I wrote “Flame” [from Metro’s debut album, 1976] about my French girlfriend of the time, in Paris on a Spanish guitar, Christmas Day!

I guess what I want to emphasize is that the “European,” travelled feeling wasn’t a pose. It was our real lives. Later a lot of people went “European” more as a concept: Ultravox famously admitting that when they wrote and recorded “Vienna” they’d never been there. Well, that’s OK, too; Bizet wrote Carmen and he never visited Spain!

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

Introduction:

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

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