Godley & Creme — Is there anything these men haven’t done?
“Why aren’t I a millionaire? I haven’t the faintest idea,” laughs Kevin Godley. “I’ve worked hard enough!”
In fact this year Kevin (39) and his partner Lol Creme (37), currently back in the charts with “Cry”, are celebrating their twenty-fifth year working together. In that time they’ve been in incredibly unsuccessful bands, written a series of children’s books which converted into toys, been in incredibly successful ‘70s pop band 10cc, invented The Gizmo (a guitar attachment which makes it sound like a synthesizer), been an unsuccessful duo who wrote complicated concept albums like the boxed set “Consequences”, written a humorous book about rock’n’roll, composed music for award-winning commercials, been a successful duo with hits like “Under My Thumb” and “Wedding Bells”, and set themselves up as one of the country’s most respected video production teams (amongst many others they’re responsible for Herbie Hancock’s “Rock it”, Frankie’s “Two Tribes” and “The Power Of Love” and Go West’s “We Close Our Eyes”).
Yet nowadays they seem to be working even harder than ever, as Kevin explains:
“We’ve started a video label like a record label. We want to move away from videos just being things which are made to promote other people’s records. In fact we’ll be releasing music which won’t even be available on record.”
Which would be enough to keep most people busy —
“We met him in a hotel last year. He rekindled our interest in music. For the album we used a Fairlight and sampled lots of the music we’ve made over the last 25 years and set the whole thing to a dance rhythm. It’s nostalgia music for the feet.”
Almost as an aside, Kevin also mentions that plans are afoot for them to make a feature film though, he says, “I don’t really want to talk about it yet in case it doesn’t come off.” How on earth, Bitz wondered, do the two of them carry on being successful at so many things?
“Follow your instincts,” he answers. “Do it your own way all the time. And keep an open mind.”