Images Of Peter: Finding Peter Godwin, Part Two

Peter Godwin: To give a little back-story, Johnson and I met by chance at a gig and when we were introduced it turned out that he was familiar with my career and had a particular connection with the Correspondence album, as I mentioned before.

We really decided on the future that night, as Johnson so wonderfully put it in a text to me: “The beauty of the unknown. Let’s make history.”

And in more than one way, that has happened. That’s not just a vanity, let me explain.

On one level, yes, we started making tracks together and it grew into this band Nuevo and into this album Sunset Rise that we both see as a “piece of art,” in the sense that it just evolved into something we didn’t plan or theorize, with no particular genre or demographic in mind. And we both really love the result, and we did as soon as it was finished, which, believe me, is not always the case!

We both have no particular affection for that tastemaker musical fascism that dictates at any particular time how your music should conform. How many minutes a track should last. How many choruses and repeat refrains it should have. What soundscape and instrumentation you should limit yourself to, to fit a particular genre, style, or radio format. What complexity or simplicity of lyric is appropriate to what genre of music. I could go on. You see what I’m driving at. These are either tribal or genre-related, or more often, just simplistic, copyist, backward-looking, marketing ideas: the simple sell.

To me that’s fine if it’s what you like, and sometimes it’s what I like. But I don’t want the artistic suffocation of that being the only way to make music.

I’ve always had this view. My first single—with Metro, “Criminal World”—was just under five-and-a-half minutes long, not the regulation three minutes for a single. It changed time signature at the end and went from 4/4 to 3/4 time. It had a choir in the middle section with baroque harmonies with moving vocal lines and a Les Paul lead guitar solo over that. There was also a 12-string acoustic guitar at the heart of the sound. And it had a vocal that was dark and full of innuendo in its poetics and half whispered, barely sung.

So let’s say, it wasn’t your typical jolly three-minute pop single of the day.

But amazingly, quite a lot of people seemed to like it. It got to number two in the Italian hit parade just from radio play, no concerts or television appearances. Top Ten in Norway, same deal.

The legendary Seymour Stein—who signed Madonna, Talking Heads, so many interesting acts—liked it enough to release it and the album on his record label Sire in the USA. And of course Bowie actually bought the album—well, I have a Kid Jensen Radio 1 interview where he says this—and liked that song enough to cover it on Let’s Dance. And that turned out to be Bowie’s fastest selling and biggest album at the time.

I’m not saying because of “Criminal World”!

All I’m saying is that you can make music you love, in a spirit of trying at least to do something original—break all the rules—and still find an audience for your work. The main risk is that you’re “ahead of” (or let’s say “out of”) your time. Many people have said that, with hindsight, about a lot of my work.

Well, I just hope my timing with Nuevo is on this time around! Because I really want to find an audience for this album and this band, because I’m very pleased with it, but that’s up to people out there in cyberspace reading this. . .

In a way, it’s out of my hands. And we live in an age where someone will pay three times for a coffee what they WON’T pay for a download.

It’s strange: in the YouTube Era everyone streams or steals music—but they really object to paying for it, as if it obeyed some different law of economics from everything else on the planet. As if music cost nothing to make and put out there and, unlike other species, musicians somehow didn’t need money to pay for their roof and their food.

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

Music Video Influences
Maturing inspirations
Poetry and Collaboration
Artistic suffocation
Chemistry and Alchemy
Old souls
Catharsis
Changes
Transcending technology
Everything Is Possible

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