Interview with Simon Godfrey

Béla Alabástrom: Hello Simon, it's lovely to talk to you. You are in Philadelphia at the moment.

Simon Godfrey: I am indeed, and it's just started snowing here actually, so I had to very quickly walk my dog before the snow really settled.

Ah, that is the lovely Manny, the greyhound.

Yes, our nickname for him is Ding Dong.

Why is that?

My wife has observed that our dog is smart and stupid in equal measures and as a result her nickname for him is Ding Dong.

That's a great nickname. I love it. So, Simon, for the sake of readers who might not know much about your long and very distinguished career, could you just talk us through your development as an artist? I think you started off as a drummer.

I did, yes. I went the Phil Collins route. I started playing drums in progressive rock bands back in the 80s and our heroes at the time were the neo-prog bands of the 80s like the Pendragons, the IQs, the Twelfth Nights, the Marillions of this world. Because we couldn't afford to get into all the big Genesis or Yes shows, so we were very, very much brought up on those 80s bands. Then in the 90s I switched to guitar, and I formed a band called Tiny Fish in the early 2000s which we got very lucky with, and we rode the next wave of British progressive rock bands during the mid-2000s. That lasted up till about 2012. I'd already met my wife at that time. She lived in New Jersey and I decided to up stakes and move from the UK to America. I've been working and playing in Philadelphia and the East Coast ever since.

Simon Godfrey on the drums, 1980s. (Photo courtesy of Simon Godfrey)

I think you started off in a band called Men Are Dead, which is a very intriguing name for a band.

Well the first band I was in was called Free Fall and that was myself and some of the guys that would go on to form Tiny Fish in the mid-2000s, but it was also where my brother Jem Godfrey, who is in a band called Frost*, first got his start. And then I formed this band. It was my very first band that I fronted in the 90s called Men Are Dead. It was a result of me misreading a sign. Basically, there was a poster for a play by Tom Stoppard called Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and directly beneath it was a toilet sign that said “Men” and I thought it said men are dead I just thought that was an intriguing title so that was the reason why I chose that as a sobriquet for my band.

At least it's nothing more sinister than that! Tim Eyles was the guitarist in Men Are Dead, and he recently joined you again for your very successful UK solo tour.

That's right. There's a gentleman called Tim Eyles who I've been working with on and off for many years, actually both as a session drummer when I was working for his band, which was called The Random. Then subsequently we went on and formed our own bands. We kept in touch ever since and when I was coming over to do the UK tour, I invited him to join us up on stage, and it was like no time had ever passed. I was very, very happy to return to that experience of standing on stage with Tim.

What was it like coming back to the UK for the tour?

It was a lot of fun. I'll be honest with you, it was as much a holiday for me and seeing old friends as it was playing some shows. I think the reason why I decided to play some shows was at the insistence of my wife Stacy. I had planned to be over there for about six weeks and I hadn't been back to the UK in quite a while — since before the pandemic. She said, “Why don't you play some shows while you're over there? It seems a shame not to do some gigs”. So I put a string of dates together, which both allowed me the opportunity to play some shows and also to see some friends which I hadn't been in contact with for a long time.

That's great! You said that you moved to the US in 2014 and that you hadn't been back to the UK for a while. Did you notice any major differences from when you were last actually living in the UK?

Well, I'm not entirely sure if it's a difference between what it was like prior to me going and after I had left, but the one thing I really did notice was the disparity in lifestyles between the south of the country and the north of the country. I played and rehearsed up in the north and the Midlands, and I was very disturbed by the fact that there didn't seem to be much in the way of money going around for infrastructure and just daily life, as opposed to in the southeast. It seemed like all the money was down in the southeast and nothing was being funnelled up north. That felt profoundly unfair. I'm a southerner, but I've got plenty of friends who live up in the north. It just didn't seem like it was a very fair and equitable split of the money, if you know what I mean, as a country.

Yes, indeed I have noticed that when I travel back to the UK that it seems a bit run down compared to what it used to be.

We had a very similar kind of effect here in Philadelphia. The centre of the Philadelphia is rather romantically titled “Centre City” and one of the things that I noticed was that there was a huge amount of shops and amenities which were just gone after the pandemic. That was a very similar kind of story back in the UK, where it was very obvious that there were shops and storefronts, which were abandoned shops and the like. The pandemic and the last ten years have left a significant scar, in my opinion, on the British psyche.

Simon Godfrey (promo photo, couresy of Simon Godfrey)

Definitely and I don't think that the B-word has helped.

No exactly, and to be really honest with you, I won't say that I was spared it because I had to go through the Trump years here. It is definitely a different country from when I left it in 2014.

Recently you wrote very eloquently about a musical epiphany that you had at the age of 14 listening to The Wall by Pink Floyd and how it changed your life.

I journal on a daily basis on my Facebook page and a little while ago I spoke about what was essentially a watershed moment for me as a fan of music, which was listening to The Wall. Up until that point, I'd been very much a young boy listening to the Top 30, not really much outside of that, and it was the very first time I'd ever heard an album that expanded, in a sort of literary sense, across four sides of music. It was a real epiphany for me and I suddenly realised that you could do a lot more with rock music than just three minutes of “she loves you yeah, yeah, yeah”. So that moment, even though it's not really my favourite Floyd album in hindsight after exploring the entire discography, was a pivotal moment for me as a music listener.

Those epiphany moments can end up being real turning points and I think it had a big impact on your creative output.

I agree. I think progressive rock is an incredibly broad church. You can go from anything from Renaissance to Dream Theater and every stop in between. For me personally, I think my big love is for story-led albums. I really love that long narrative. While not all of my output has been part of that, I think it's held that I've had a deep-seated love for that kind of stuff. As a result I'm drawn to things like The Wall, or Tommy by the Who, or even one of my favourite albums which, although the UK I know is very well aware of it, I think gets overlooked in the rest of the world, which is Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds.

That was one of my first loves!

Exactly, and it was one of the things that drew me to spoken word. One of the things that we had in Tinyfish in the mid-2000s is that we had a guy, in the form of a gentleman called Rob Ramsey, who would come out on stage while we were playing and deliver these spoken word sequences. I think that that was what really set us apart from the rest of the crowd. We were starting to gain a little bit of popularity because no one else was doing it.

Yes, that was amazing at Chepstow, and it certainly does make it very different and very striking.

I love that kind of narrative theatre. I think that's something which has always been very close to my heart and again, going back to Pink Floyd, I think that that was where it stemmed from. And certainly from Jeff Wayne's War Of The Worlds album.

Can you tell us a little bit about your solo album from this year, How I Was Defeated?

I used to record and release under the name of Simon Walsh. Walsh is my mother's maiden name and I very much identify with both sides of my family, the Godfreys and the Walshes. The Walshes are all from the Isle of Man. For a short period during the 90s and the early 2000s I released albums under the name of Simon Walsh. I really loved that period of my life. How I Was Defeated was a right return to that kind of aesthetic. The common thread was that all the songs were about self-sabotage and allowing us to grab defeat from the jaws of victory! I think we've all been there at some point in our life.

Definitely! You've been signed to a record label, and you've been independent: is one better than the other?

I don't know if one is better than the other; they are very different experiences. I was signed to a very successful label called Bad Elephant Music or BEM. It's a gentleman called David Elliot who set the label up around about 2013. I think they are two sides of the same coin and both have advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of being on a major label, or at least on a label that releases other tracks by other artists, is that you get a lot more support from them. You feel you are a part of a group of like-minded individuals, and you get a lot of cross collaboration as well. A lot of people that were on BEM, which was the label I was signed to, also played on my songs, as well as me playing on some of other people's tracks. It was a great time for cross-pollination of music.

The upside of being an independent artist is while you don't get the kind of coverage, you have a lot more ability to set your own agenda you can release a record whenever you like and promote it however you like. If you're part of a label you pretty much have to be working to their timeline, which is not a bad thing, but it can sometimes be a little bit frustrating. If you've got music which you want to release, but it's sat in the can for six months until all the other people on the label schedule are released — I would say that it's six of one, half a dozen of the other to be honest with you.

I know you're very busy at the moment because you're reissuing your entire back catalogue. You are about to reissue your first solo album. Can you tell us about that please?

My first solo album was only the third or fourth release on Bad Elephant Music, BEM, and it was called Motherland. It was my love note to the land of my birth. It was recorded between the UK and Philadelphia. My studio at that point had been broken down and ready for transit to the USA, which meant that all I had was a laptop, a microphone and a guitar, and I was literally using absolutely everything I could find. I was banging tabletops as well, as a way of providing percussion and basically trying to create an album which I think my earlier self was probably aiming for, which was like a very bare-bones songwriter album. I had a great time doing it, but it was my way of saying thank you to the country and the isles of my birth for raising me in and allowing me to remain alive and successful.

Is it because ten years have gone by that you've decided to reissue it?

A little bit of that, yes. Ten years since it was released and also this is the first time in my entire 30-odd year career that I've actually had control of my entire back catalogue. I'm trying to get all the music which I released through various different labels and projects in one place on Bandcamp. So I'm gradually working my way through my back catalogue and reissuing them. Sometimes I'm doing practically nothing to them but just maybe a little bit of a remaster and a bit of polishing, but in instances like this with the Motherland album, I wanted to make the album which I would have done had I had access to my studio. So I'm using those tracks, and I'm just adding a few little embellishments here and there in the same way that I would have done had I wanted to do an acoustic album at the time while having access to my full studio.

Is the studio attached to your house or is it in the garden?

It's attached to my house. I actually have a basement area here which I called Wetlands Conservation, which is my little island. I don't know why, but I've always been a big fan of ducks, and it's become a bit of a meme amongst myself and my fans. You can't see it here, but I have a sign on my wall with a duck on it and underneath it, it says “Wetlands Conservation”, so I thought well that's as good a name for a studio as anything else.

Absolutely, why not! I believe that you're also editing a book as well, called The Unreliable Heads And Tales.

Yes. This is something that was a bit unlooked-for. One of the things which I found when I first arrived here is it was a good way of documenting my life and my transition from the UK to America by basically walking my dog through the streets of Philadelphia. I used to journal about it and still do on occasion. My way of understanding American life was just by going out into the streets and the woodlands and just encountering America by walking my dog. These journals resonated with a lot of people on social media. They kept saying “You should write a book about this!” so I've decided that once I've finished at least remastering the Motherland album, I'm going to edit all the posts that I have together into one book and that will be The Unreliable Heads And Tales.

That sounds brilliant! I hope that we can get that via Bandcamp as well.

I'm not entirely sure how. I think, I'll probably actually just release that through Amazon as a self-published book so as soon as it happens, I'll let everybody know.

I'm sure that we all want to read that. I also read a very interesting post that you put on Facebook recently about expressing your authentic self and how you had said when you were 23 that if you were not a huge success in the music business by age 28 you would give it up.

Yes, it's a strange thing, that me making that promise to myself, or setting myself that deadline, forced me in some ways to confront who I was, because it was that moment where I reached 28 years and I still hadn't made it, and I knew I still wanted to do music. I still wanted to do it. It made me understand that I had a passion for this, it wasn't just a vapid career choice, a way of attracting people's attention and making a huge amount of money. I genuinely did love writing music. That was the moment where I came to terms with it, my authentic self really hit home for me. I realised that no matter what I did, no matter if I would be famous or rich or none of the above, what I wanted to do more than anything in my life was to write music.

Could you talk us through your creative process?

Sure! I mean my creative process — and this is one of the strange things that I've noticed about the world, especially when it comes to songwriting — everybody seems to do it slightly differently; everybody has their own personal take. For some people the words have to come first; for other people they could be humming a tune while they're out going to the shops and that will become the basis of a track. For me, it is all about the chords that I write. Everything has to hang on the harmonic content. It's not necessarily the melody that comes first, it's nearly always the chords and I actually have been very lucky in the fact that for many, many years I've had, certainly when it comes to the progressive rock music.

I've had a great co-writer called Robert Ramsey, and he is an amazing wordsmith. I love what he does and so as a result I will sit with a guitar and I will hum, and what I call “yoghurt” vocals. I just make up sounds and vowel sounds as I'm playing my guitar or putting together a demo. Then I will send him the demo and one of the things I love most about this process is that he writes the lyrics to what he thinks I'm singing. He hears a little vocal hook, and he pulls meaning out of the sounds that I do. That's basically how he writes the lyrics.

That's totally amazing and it's absolutely unique!

It's a fascinating process. I would never have thought that it was possible, but he's proven me wrong. He's come up with some amazing lyrics and some insightful lyrics just because he thought that that's what I was singing.

It reminds me of “The Clangers”, you can kind of understand what they're saying.

I'm not saying it's the most sensible way of working, but it seems to work and so as a result we're not knocking it.

Simon Godfrey in the studio (promo photo courtesy of Simon Godfrey)

No, you shouldn't, it's brilliant! I remember in Chepstow you told this anecdote about when you were performing in Nashville and somebody asked you about what kind of song you write. Could you tell us that, please?

Certainly! I was down in Nashville over the summer and one of the things that I wanted to do while I was down in Nashville was to see a proper singer-songwriter show. I managed to find my way out to the outskirts of Nashville and I went to a show. There was a very young songwriter there, who was just starting out her career. We got chatting and I asked her what her songs were about. She said “Well, my songs are mostly about the fragility of relationships and how love can fly apart on the merest whim”. She asked me “So what are your songs about?” I said “My songs are about machines which destroy the universe” and she didn't really want to talk to me after that.

I started out writing songs about love. You know, everybody does. But sooner or later you move on to different things because, personally, I had mined that pretty much for all of it was worth. So when I met Rob Ramsey, his lyrical style influenced my lyrical style we decided to write songs. I love how David Byrne of the Talking Heads says “I write songs about napkins”. He says “I write about the small stuff where everybody else is writing about the big stuff” and I thought to myself “Well, you can still write about napkins and still make it about the big stuff!” Hence, the reason for us writing an album like The Big Red Spark, which is an album entirely about a machine which destroys the universe.

That is so prog! I can't think of another genre where you would get a song like that really.

Exactly right, it's one of the things that we found was that once you had that concept you could drill down into it and find a bunch of different stories within that larger story. It something which we found fascinating. That's the reason we were able to write an entire album based around that one concept.

Another thing that I found quite fascinating is your Facebook post about how music is no longer counterculture but a refuge from the world. In one way, we live at a time when technology can help to empower musicians so you can have your own studio with all these powerful tools, and yet at the same time, paradoxically, musicians are disempowered by who you refer to as the big man.

I always remember there is a moment in a film called The Incredibles where the villain of the piece's idea is to make everybody a superhero, because when everybody's a superhero no one will be a superhero. I think what's happening to music. because everybody has access to all of this incredible technology, there's been a huge upwelling in what I would call grassroots music. But in a lot of ways, one of the things that the 70s labels acted as was like gatekeepers, only letting through the best of the best. Of course, all the people that could conceivably be the next generation are getting drowned out by the mediocrity and one of the things which I found is that because there is so much music available, people tend to go with what they know, and they don't want to try anything new. That's what I think is happening. No one really wants to be counterculture any longer, they just want to be heard. We just tend to run home to the music that we grew up with, it becomes a refuge. It's the thing that we use to shut out the huge influx of information and the speed of life that we have to endure each day. I don't know about you, but I'm certainly guilty of this: the one thing I want to do at the end of a day's work is I don't want to listen to new music, I want to listen to something I know that will relax me. However hard I sometimes try and fight against that, I do feel that pull to go to the familiar.

Do you think that the prog audience is a bit more open to listening to new music compared to say audiences of the kind of stuff that gets pumped out over the radio all day?

I don't know. My feeling about progressive rock audiences is that they are a paradox. One of the things I love about progressive rock audiences is that they will give a new band some time. I don't know if you were like this, but one of the things which I loved when we went to the Summer's End Festival was the opportunity to hear new bands. It was something which I think many, many people in that audience were looking forward to. It's always good to hear a band that you've heard before, but you also want to hear a new band. Maybe this will be the one that will really get your wheels churning or your heart pounding.

But on the other side of this, and I think this has a lot to do with genres or fans of genres and not just progressive rock, you kind of want their face to fit: it has to be the right kind of new music. If you have a band that's straying too far out of its lane, you get a lot of people conservative with a small “C” saying “I don't like it because it's not how I expect my music to be” rather than giving things a chance. So I think it's 50-50.

I love the fact that the prog community is willing to give new bands a chance. I mean, you get bands like Kyros who are an up-and-coming band. I say they're up-and-coming, but they've been around for years now and I remember we had a laugh at the Classic Rock Society when we went up there. We'd been going as Tinyfish at that time for about five years, and we were listed as one of the best up-and-coming bands, which made us titter because everybody's an overnight sensation, but it takes ten years to be an overnight sensation!

I think Kyros are a fantastic band. It's really refreshing to see the energy that they bring to the performance on stage.

I agree. There are always bands that have been going for a while which I've never heard before. I also love bands like Guy Manning who I think put in an absolutely brilliant set at the Summer's End festival this year. I really love him as a songwriter, but he's never really hit it big. He's what I consider to be the great undiscovered secret in progressive rock.

Live at acoustic solo gigs. (Photo courtesy of Simon Godfrey)

It's weird, isn't it? I totally agree with you about how brilliant he is and I hadn't heard of him, I have to confess, before Chepstow and I thought he was just amazing.

Yes, he's been bubbling under for years and years and years. He's got close to 15 albums under his belt now. He's reached that point in his life where he's starting to do what I'm doing, which is a little bit more of curation of his back catalogue rather than creation of new material, because like there's a lot of stuff out there which not many people know of.

Going back to the future of music question, do you think that AI is a threat? Do you think it might kill off human creativity by making human creativity even less economically viable?

That's a good question. I think it's a definite possibility. I'm not going to rule out that it's going to substantially change what we are as an art-appreciating and content-consuming society. There's a lot of issues and a lot of unlooked-for possibilities that come with this. One of the things which I do think are on the upside is that AI will allow access for people who might not necessarily be able to play an instrument, people who are handicapped or possibly don't have access to the kind of music creation tools which I've been very fortunate to have access. On the downside, yes you're absolutely right, it could conceivably just exacerbate what we're already suffering through which is a glut of mediocre material.

I find it really depressing sometimes if I switch on mainstream radio and what I hear is just so deadening, it's so repetitive, it's just mind-numbing and soul-numbing.

I heard a statement by Sting about song structure. He said that chords and playing have not really degenerated over the years, but arrangement has. It's become a lot simpler. He said “I missed the bridge of a song. There's no reprieve for me personally in modern music”. One of the things which he loved from an arrangement point of view is, as he said, there will be a song where you're talking about leaving a woman or a woman has left a man and the world is a bad place, and they're depressed. And then one of the great things about the bridge or the middle eight is that it provides an alternative, lyrically and musically. One of the things I hope about AI is it provides alternative ways of writing music rather than just the mediocrity of what we're hearing thus far.

But what can we do about it if that's what people want to listen to? It seems so sad that they don't get the opportunity to hear that there's a whole other world of music out there.

[Simon] I think as long as music is held in the hands of a handful of media conglomerates who are making money basically from eking out the little increases over increasingly large scale, that's how they make their money. They don't care. They don't really want to promote anything else. We don't live in the 70s. Maybe it will return again, maybe there'll be another way of expressing ourselves which the corporate entities will not have immediate access to, but I don't know. All I can tell you right now is that we have to choose the music we listen to in an active fashion. We can't just let it wash over us.

That's one of the things I love about prog and discovering new bands through festivals.

I have to say that I think in a lot of ways the festival format has saved prog from dissolving into the ether because it allows us all to come together and appreciate bands, admittedly over a short period of time. You have probably had this as well, where you used to be able to go see a band maybe once or twice a month or maybe two or three times a week depending on how you're interested you are. That just doesn't happen now with the kind of venue closures. That is happening both here in the US and in the UK and I dare say in Europe as well. The only way forward in my opinion has been the festival where everybody can come, everybody can see loads and loads of different bands and everybody can be amongst their people I suppose it's best to say.

Indeed. It is so valuable in spreading the word and helping people discover new music. Do you have any plans to return to the UK or to Europe to do some more gigs at any point in the not-too-distant future?

I do. I would love to come back! I really, really enjoyed the tour. I toyed with the idea of touring with a full band, but if I'm being really honest with you, money was the biggest issue. It cost me a considerable amount to travel across to the UK and not an insignificant amount to stay on the road as well. But I would, yes, in an ideal world I would love to come back on a yearly basis and do that and see a bunch of people. Really what it comes down to is money and if there's no money available, I can't do it.

Money makes the world go round, unfortunately!

Thanks capitalism!

Imagine that there's somebody that doesn't know your music at all — we'll stick to your solo career for the moment — is there one song that you think encapsulates best what you are trying to achieve as an artist? If there is what would it be and why would you recommend it?

Well, that's interesting because my outlook, and I think you'll probably find this is the same for many other musicians, is that I see my back catalogue very differently from the people out there. I've experienced it with a song which I absolutely love, and it never connects with the audience. I play a song which is just a throwaway thing, which I just put together, and that's the one that connects. So it just goes to show I'm not the arbiter of taste when it comes to my own music! I have my own personal favourites, but that might not necessarily be the best thing that I've ever written.

If I had one song which I was probably proudest of all of, and it's certainly the one that seems to have lasted the test of time, it's probably the song called Motorville. It is the first track from the first Tinyfish album and the reason why I said that is because it set the blueprint for me for the next 20 years of my musical life. It was recorded in a tiny little loft space in a room in Wandsworth in West London. I did it as a demo to try and entice other members of the band, and once they heard it they said “Yes, we'd love to be involved with this!” And so they came in, they fleshed it out. So there is one song that epitomises everything that I'd been aiming for as a musician, it's Motorville.

Tribe Of The Names, live in the USA. (Photo by Joel Barrios, courtesy of Simon Godfrey)

It's also interesting what you say about songs to which an artist feels a strong attachment, but the audience is not so keen on. I recently spoke to Peter Jones of Tiger Moth Tales fame, and he really loves The Isle Of Witches from his first album Cocoon, whereas it's probably the song that a lot of people skip. He loves it, and he was able to explain why it holds a special place in his heart. Unfortunately the fans are have not been quite so keen on it.

It's a conundrum for a musician and for a songwriter because you have a huge amount of emotional investment in some of this material and sometimes that just does not translate across to the people who are listening to it. It's a strange feeling and there's no rhyme or reason to it, Béla, it's just one of those things where you just have to shrug your shoulders as an artist and go, "Okay, well you guys didn't get that one, that's fine, on to the next song!" I mean that's one of the great things about being a songwriter there are always other songs.

I'm going to ask one final really silly question, but I know you can deal with it. Who is your favourite Doctor Who?

It's Tom Baker. It's always going to be Tom Baker for me. Funnily enough actually my co-writer Rob Ramsey is much more of a Jon Pertwee guy. That said, I am a big fan of Matt Smith. I loved Matt Smith, he's probably my favourite out of all the modern-era doctors.

I would pick Jon Pertwee as well because that's the doctor that I grew up with.

Exactly, he was suave, he was sophisticated, he always had an answer for any problem that was put in front of him.

Yes, you said it, and it was usually helped with a sonic screwdriver.

Yes, exactly. I think in a lot of ways actually the Pertwee era which was possibly the scariest era. That was the era where some of the monsters were absolutely terrifying.

Definitely behind the sofa territory! Simon, thank you so much for talking to DPRP, it's been wonderful!

Thank you very much Béla, I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.