The Mary Wells Fan Club and the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society were founded in 1963 by Dave Godin, two years before the launch of the label. Godin was a young English fan of American R&B music, inspired in 1953 by hearing Ruth Brown’s “Mama (He Treats Your Daughter Mean)” to explore Black music from the USA. He was an idealist and an activist, the son of a milkman, born in Peckham, South London, before moving to Bexleyheath in Kent, as a result of war-time bombing. Despite living in a suburb to the south-east of London, Godin could see behind the music and understand the culture that produced it. He wrote regular newsletters for members of the two fan clubs and made contacts in America, in order to ensure that he was alerted to all the important developments in R&B music there. It was Godin who introduced Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to the music he loved (Godin and Jagger were both pupils at Dartford Grammar School).
Berry Gordy became aware of Godin’s work in 1964 and was impressed by his knowledge of the music and his passion for fighting racial inequality. He invited Godin to Detroit and hired him to act as a consultant for Motown in the UK.
In 1965, it was Godin who persuaded EMI to create a new label for all Motown’s releases in the UK and suggested the name Tamla Motown, which, of course, Godin had chosen for his Appreciation Society. It was also Godin and members of his society who had greeted the Motown stars at London Airport, holding banners that they had made.
The newsletters ensured that all the members knew where the performances were going to take place. The audiences may have been small but they were largely made up of really committed fans, and that was apparent to the Motown stars. Mary Wilson has written about the reception they all received: “To go to a country where people just adored us… Well that was new. We were treated like royalty. We were not treated like that in the States, even though we’d started to have hit records.”
The absence of segregation and the respect they were accorded left a lasting impression on the visitors. Berry Gordy still remembers seeing the fans with their banners at the airport: “That was so important for our self-esteem. It changed our whole perspective.”
In 1966, Godin set up a specialist record shop in Deptford, South London, along with his partners Robert Blackmore and David Nathan. The shop, called Soul City, sold R&B records that were in the charts but also stocked older material and imports that had not been released in the UK. The shop quickly built a following amongst fans of Motown and American R&B. To raise money to start the shop, the partners had drawn up a list of good R&B singles that were only available in the USA and advertised them as imports. Customers sent in orders with a postal order and the records were ordered and then posted to them. The idea took off and grew into the record shop.
In 1967, the shop relocated to Monmouth Street in central London, where its customer base grew much larger. Some of the new customers were football fans, who came to London on match days to support their teams and dropped in to Soul City in search of the latest Soul recordings from America. Dave Godin noticed that Soul fans from the North of England tended to buy a particular style of R&B that he called Northern Soul. The staff were alerted and the term spread. The shop’s fame even attracted the occasional visitor from the USA, including Nina Simone in 1968, and a few well-known UK artists, such as Reg Dwight (who later went by the name Elton John).
The shop also gave rise to its own record label, which released such gems as “Go Now” by Bessie Banks in 1964, which was covered by the Moody Blues. A total of nineteen singles were issued in the UK by Dave Godin’s label, the majority leased from EMI or CBS. It is only a small number, but the idea of licencing and releasing singles from the USA was typical of Godin. He wanted to make the songs he liked available to British fans.
The story of Dave Godin’s efforts to champion the music of Motown and of the 1965 tour is told in a BBC documentary “When Motown Came to Britain”, first broadcast on January 1st 2023. It underlines the importance of the UK to Motown’s wider development and of Dave Godin to achieving Berry Gordy’s dream of being a major international force in the popular music industry.
Dave Godin’s dedication to Motown’s cause had a big impact on Berry Gordy and the Motown artists, convincing them that overseas markets were well worth developing. Indeed, several well-known Motown singers, such as Edwin Starr and Jimmy Ruffin, became more successful in the UK than they were in the USA. Moreover, dance halls in the UK were later to develop the Northern Soul movement, which prolonged the success of Motown, attracting Motown artists to the UK, when their popularity in the USA was on the wane.
