Kevin Godley and Lol Creme
Leonardo & Da Vinci
Renaissance Men In The 20th Century

THE WEIRD AND WONDERFUL WORLD OF
GODLEY & CREME
(OR HOW TWO OLD FRIENDS TOOK TO MULTI-MEDIA WIZARDRY LIKE DUCKS TO WATER)

PULSE! fifth anniversary issue april 1988 pp. 66-72
by Iain Blair

Hollywood

Question: What do a critic's poll-topping band from the 1970's, the video for "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, a guitar attachment called The Gizmo, a Nissan Hardbody truck commercial, an illustrated memoir titled "The Fun Starts Here," a new video label and an upcoming feature film called "Howling At The Moon" have in common?

Give yourself a gold star if you answered Godley and Creme. In a world increasingly dominated by specialists, Kevin Godley and Lol Creme are multi-media renaissance men, a modern, double-sided version of Leonardo da Vinci, if you will. These two men have - over the course of a 27-year partnership - accumulated a substantial resume: as composers, musicians, video directors, illustrators, wordsmiths, and - soon - as film directors. And, though they appear to be jacks-of-all-trades, they're masters at every one, and somehow manage to do them all at once.

Listening to them talk is like seeing a well-oiled comedy duo in action, off-the-cuff, one finishing a sentence the other has started, then starting a sentence which will be completed by the first. But you don't assemble a body of work like theirs in Derek and Clive mode. They've got an enviable mastery of the tools, a seemingly endless palette of ideas and a rare gift for putting - and keeping - it all together.

They are funny, articulate and remarkably calm considering the demands surrounding their new album - titled Goodbye Blue Sky - and the mounting pressure of an imminent shooting deadline for their debut feature film.

Have they bitten off more than they can chew? "Well, it does keep us off the streets," admits Creme. "But not out of trouble," adds Godley. A TV is playing in the background with the sound off and, as if right on cue, up comes a series of Godley and Creme videos. In one scene, nearly naked girls fight each other with pillows astride a symbolic pole. In another, demented prisoners hurl hammers at the camera. In another, a group of suspended and stockinged robot legs performs a crazy dance.

This is the British duo that brought to the screen such delights as Duran Duran's "Girls on Film"; "Every Breath You Take" and "Wrapped Around Your Finger" for The Police; "Rockit" and "Autodrive" for Herbie Hancock; "Victims" for Boy George and Culture Club; "Two Tribes" and "The Power of Love" for Frankie Goes to Hollywood; and "Don't Give Up" for Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush.

But music video is but the most recent medium they've mastered. As half of the British pop quartet 10cc, they had a six-year string of hits, and they're about to release their seventh LP as a duo, Goodbye Blue Sky, their first since The History Mix, Vol. 1, in 1985. In the meantime, they've written and/or illustrated a variety of books; created and produced television advertising (Wrangler Jeans, Lincoln-Mercury, New York and Boston Yellow Pages); invented, manufactured and marketed guitar electronics (the Gizmo); as well as directed an eye-opening array of creative endeavors which never quite made it to market .

All this on top of 40-plus music videos for an eclectic group of artists.

"Our first hit, 'Neanderthal Man,' we wrote in the back of a taxi on the way to a session, and it went to number one! No one was more surprised then we were." - Lol Creme

Right now, though, they're reclining poolside at an expensive Hollywood hotel, where they're doing some movie business. Just how do a couple of Manchester blokes take 27 years to get here from there?

Lol Creme says he was born on September 17, 1947, just 'round the corner from the home of Kevin Godley, who appeared two years earlier, on October 7, 1945. "We basically grew up together and just became best friends. We were always working together on ideas and projects. We had this group at school called The Sabres - Kev played drums and I was the guitarist. At the same time, we wrote shows together and got into painting, and eventually we both landed up in art school, where we started getting into designing books. We actually invented this huge book complete with 3-D models of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade."'

Godley says he was 13 when they met "I was shooting an 8mm version of dracula, he explains, "on a film set at my house. I desperately needed a hunchback, so I auditioned Lol in the living room. He was perfect."

"It was my first brush with showbiz," adds Creme. "Later, we both began playing around in various groups, doing session work and demos, and writing songs. Later, we met Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart, the other half of 10cc. Eric had set up his own studio, called Strawberry Studios, and that's where we recorded our first hit, 'Neanderthal Man.' We wrote it in the back of a taxi on the way to a session, and it went to number one. No one was more surprised than we were."

To promote the single, they quickly formed a band called Hotlegs, made an album and toured. "But we failed to come up with another hit," says Godley, "so we started getting more into production." Armed with the first Moog synthesizer in Britain, they did sessions for Paul McCartney, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Freddie and the Dreamers and others between their own projects.

In 1972, they emerged with Stewart and Gouldman as 10cc, one of the '70's most successful British bands. Those stories, by the way, about the origins of the band's name are true: "We were racking our brains for a suitable name," Creme says, "one that really captured our style and image, and Jonathan King, who'd signed us to his U.K. label, said, '10cc - because it's the average amount of semen ejaculated by a healthy male!' Well, naturally, we thought it was perfect."

Their first single off 10cc, "Donna" - a clever doo-wop parody - reached number two in the U.K., and the second, "Rubber Bullets," hit number one in July '73. "The Dean and I," the debut's third single, also went top ten. In America, Cashbox magazine voted them "The Best New Group of 1973."

The next few years saw a succession of hit singles and albums. In June '74, "Wall Street Shuffle" went top ten, and their second LP, Sheet Music, was released to rave reviews. In '75, they nearly had a worldwide number one smash (it was number two in the U.S. for three weeks), "I'm Not in Love" from The Original Soundtrack album. Their fourth album, How Dare You, followed in January '76, spawning British hits like "Art for Art's Sake" and 'I'm Mandy, Fly Me."

Although 10cc had a Top 5 gold single in the U.S. with "The Things We Do for Love" in 1977, its lineup didn't include Godley and Creme, who suddenly announced in '76 they were leaving the band, surprising both fans and Gouldman and Stewart. "It may have seemed sudden to everyone else," explains Creme, "but we'd been planning it for some time. When 10cc first happened, we decided to give it four or five years, because we were already interested in a lot of other areas, and always planned to move on at some point."

The first of those other areas was an invention called The Gizmo, a device which, when fitted onto a guitar bridge, gave it an orchestral-type sustain, making it a relatively inexpensive alternative to the newly arrived synthesizer. Though hailed as a breakthrough, it was a total commercial flop, as was Consequences, their debut album box, which showcased the Gizmo.

"We got a deal to manufacture it, and after leaving 10cc, we spent over 14 months - and a fortune - demonstrating the Gizmo and its potential on our Consequences album," recalls Godley. "But we ran into a whole lot of problems. For a start, it came out as the recession hit, and then the album didn't do too well. It almost sold about three copies."

"Yeah, it went silver, or was it bronze?" jokes Creme. "The timing was terrible too, because overnight, the whole punk scene took off in Britain. No one wanted self-indulgent statements or 'artistic adventures in sound' like Consequences."

The pair still has a soft spot for the now-deleted set, "or at least some of the ideas," says Godley. But neither has any interest in the ill-fated Gizmo. "The company went bust, and we just got very fed up with it and decided to shelve the whole bloody thing," he adds.

Such disappointments were compounded by their split from 10cc, which had been far from amicable "It was like a divorce I guess," says Creme. "It was extremely difficult and in a way it was made even worse because we decided to leave when the band was so huge worldwide. People understand more if things are going badly, but we had to follow our instincts and leave."

"After leaving 10cc, we spent over 14 months - and a fortune - demonstrating the Gizmo and its potential on our Consequences album." - Kevin Godley
The Gizmo prototype manufactured in 1975-76

"In certain bands, like Talking Heads, the situation is loose enough for members to do their own projects every so often, and then re-group. But the pressure in 10cc to keep coming up with hits, the touring and recording just made it impossible for us," explains Godley. "In order to grow, we had to leave, painful as it was."

Undaunted by the failure of the Gizmo and their first solo album, the pair released a second, more commercial album simply titled L in 1978, followed in the U.S. a year later with Freeze Frame (in the U.K., Music From Consequences was next). It was the single taken from this album, "An Englishman in New York," that finally provided an opportunity to return to film via a music video.

"The years after 10cc felt a bit like being in the wilderness, but we were spending more and more time thinking visually," recalls Godley. "That's when we wrote and illustrated our rock 'n' roll memoirs, 'The Fun Starts Here' (Arrow Books), and when the chance came up to direct our own video, naturally we jumped at it."

"We drew this storyboard, hired a technical director to tell us how to work all the fancy equipment, and then just started shooting," says Creme. "It taught us a hell of a lot, and by some miracle it actually worked."

It helped get them an international hit and was proof that the new-fangled video promo could also help sell a song. They were soon besieged with offers to do the same for other artists.

"Steve Strange, who'd just formed Visage, loved it, and asked us to direct 'Fade To Grey' for him, and that was our first gig as official directors," Godley says. "That was a hit too, and that's roughly how it all started. The great thing was that we took to it like ducks to water."

The pair have since directed over forty videos, including award-winners like Duran Duran's "Girls on Film" (Grammy for Best Video Short 1983); Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" (1984 MTV awards for Best Video, Best Special Effects, Best Art Direction and Most Experimental Video) and "Every Breath You Take" for the Police (1984 MTV award for Best Cinematography).

Duran Duran's "Girls on Film"

Kevin Godley with one of the robot figures from Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" video.

Sting and the Police in "Every Breath You Take" at the Charlie Chaplin Soundstage in Hollywood in June 1983

"The Fun Starts Here," a wickedly satirical book that looks at the world of rock'n'roll, is illustrated by Godley and Creme. The images are as vividly surreal as anything Ralph Steadman has ever done.

Video work kept the pair out of the recording studio through mid 1981, but by August their IsmIsm album was ready. Released in the U.S. as Snack Attack (on Mirage/Atco), IsmIsm produced two U.K. hit singles, "Under Your Thumb" and "Wedding Bells," which also received the Godley & Creme video treatment.

The video director's chair comes with risks, as their own "Save Me a Mountain" clip was to prove. Shot at a prison set in L.A. in '83, it almost ended their careers - or at least Godley's.

'We were shooting this riot scene where Kevin tries to calm down the prisoners," recalls Creme. "But they ignore him and start throwing these hammers past him at the guards. Suddenly he collapsed, and an impressive trickle of blood spread across the floor. Well, naturally I thought it was an Oscar-winning performance, if a little over the top. But when I yelled 'Cut!' and he didn't move, we suddenly realized he'd been hit for real. It was pretty scary."

The hammers were fakes, but Godley nevertheless received a bad gash in the forehead.

The same year, they were asked to shoot an hour special of the Police called "The Synchronicity Concert," for Showtime. "The first thing we did with them, the video for 'Every Breath You Take,' turned out great. We were all thinking along the same lines of a '40's jazz jam session look," says Godley. "We shot it at the Charlie Chaplin Soundstage at A&M in Hollywood in black and white, keeping it very 'hard' - so there were no grays. We enhanced that contrast look in the edit as well, and it was eventually released in four versions - B&W, red, blue and yellow."

The Police were so pleased with the results - Sting said it was the first Police video he was really happy with - that they retained Godley and Creme for follow-up singles. "For 'Wrapped Around Your Finger,' we used a very stark set filled with thousands of candles in spirals and rows," explains Creme. "That gave it a very mysterious, 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' type of feeling. We also filmed it at double-speed, so that when we edited it at normal speed, the band were all moving in slow motion, but their mouths were in sync to the track. It worked really well, but of course during the actual shoot itself, all you could hear was this Mickey Mouse-type vocal."

The next video, the full-length "Synchronicity II," was shot in London and on location at Loch Ness in Scotland. "It was very eerie up there, but we didn't see the monster," laughs Creme. "Back at the studio, we used a sort of post-nuclear set featuring three mountains of the band's equipment each about 25 feet high, so that they looked like piles of garbage made out of guitars, drums and mikes, etc. But no sooner had we started shooting than one pile caught fire, which was very exciting."

Fresh from that long-form success, they went on to shoot the pilot and several episodes for "Rebellious Jukebox," a music/comedy series for Showtime in the States and Channel 4 in Britain.

"During this period of heavy videomaking, we also tried to keep up on all our other interests and projects," points out Creme, "although there simply wasn't enough time to do everything we wanted." Despite that, they managed to conceive, score and direct several acclaimed commercials, including the award-winning Wrangler jeans "Frozen Images" campaign in 1982, as well as publish "The Fun Starts Here," a wickedly satirical look at the world of rock 'n' roll, illustrated by Godley and Creme themselves. The images are as vivid and surreal as anything Ralph Steadman has ever done.

The pair's wit was put to more political purposes for the controversial "Two Tribes" video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood in 1984. Opening with old newsreel footage of Nixon, Stalin and Kennedy, it showed a provocative, entertaining 'cockfight' between Reagan and Chernenko look-alikes that drew angry protests from Russians and Americans alike.

The video for the follow-up single, single "Power of Love" was shot entirely video on location in Israel. "We hired all these guys to ride camels who said 'Oh, I've been riding them since I was three,' only to find half of them couldn't even get up on them," laughs Godley. "Then, Top of the Pops wouldn't air it because the band wasn't in it, so we had to re-shoot another version."

1985's batch of clips went smoother, say the directors. "We did 'Forever Man' for Eric Clapton, and it was more a matter of getting the right vibe than anything else. It's no good getting a classic rock figure like Clapton all dressed up and sticking him in a situation where he feels uncomfortable - it just wouldn't work," Creme said. "So we just let him be himself, carefully choreographing the camera moves around him, letting him retain his natural dignity. We ended up using over ten cameras - no other videos were shot that week in Britain as we had all the equipment!"

"A View to a Kill" used another complex shooting script. "The film's producer, Cubby Broccoli, allowed us a pretty free hand as long as we included some of the movie footage," explains Godley. "So we saw it as an ideal opportunity to build lots of gadgets in the Bond style, and film the video on the Eiffel Tower. So we had a van built with a false cake on top, and a bomb detonator disguised as a Sony Walkman, and the telescope that turns into a gun, etc. But then we found that there were very restricted hours for filming on the Eiffel Tower - from 6:30 a.m. till 9:30 a.m. only - and it turned into a four-day shoot."

"On top of that, we weren't allowed to kill Nick Rhodes," adds an obviously disappointed Creme. "The record company didn't want tons of complaints from the fans. It also took a marathon edit session of six days to finish the clip. It was a very tricky cut."

Even more complex was the shoot for Sting's "If You Love Somebody Set Them Free." "He was working in Paris with his new band, and he wanted them in the video. So we went back there to film it," explains Godley, "but we couldn't do just a live shoot because of Michael Apted's forthcoming documentary/film of the tour. So we came up with the idea of making it look like a normal rehearsal, except that each player's image is treated totally differently from the others. For instance, the sax player is transparent, and only becomes solid when he plays, while Sting has this aura, etc."

"We saw it as an ideal opportunity to build lots of gadgets in the Bond style, and film the video on the Eiffel Tower. So we had a van built with the false cake on top, a bomb detonator disguised as a Sony Walkman and the telescope that turns into a gun." - Kevin Godley

"On top of that, we weren't allowed to kill Nick Rhodes." - Lol Creme

Duran Duran's "View To A Kill" filmed at the Eiffel Tower in Paris April 1985

"We only used four cameras, and locked each one off in combination with lots of bluescreen matting," adds Creme. "So all the images were very carefully worked out in advance, and then it was a question of editing it alI together in another long, four-day session."

Godley and Creme's video for their own hit single "Cry" is typically elegant yet effective. "Originally, we were going to film the British Olympic skaters Torvill and Dean, skating to it," reports Creme. "But they were unavailable, so we came up with simply cross-fading all these different faces into each other as they sing the song. Interestingly, the results also produce a series of interim, 'half faces' that don't even exist. We actually auditioned faces, and even used a few friends, like producer Trevor Horn," Creme adds.

Faces from Godley & Creme's "Cry" filmed in 1985, which featured an appearance by producer Trevor Horn (3rd from right)

"Cry" was a big hit in Britain for Godley and Creme. It was taken from '85's The History Mix; Volume 1, an unusual compilation of earlier work. "After working together in the music business for a quarter of a century, we thought we'd celebrate by putting out a compilation album," says Creme. "But not our 'Greatest Hits' LP," adds Godley. "That'd be too obvious. So we both decided that a 'Greatest Bits' album would be far more interesting and fun to do."

"So we started going through all our old tapes and demos, and just generally dug around. It's really vinyl archaeology or re-cycled music," comments Godley. "And people sent us stuff we'd totally forgotten we'd ever done. We got one old demo from Graham Gouldman with a note saying 'Don't give up your day jobs yet!' At the same time, we didn't want to spend months and months on the project, so once we'd collected all the basic material, we gave ourselves a time limit of just three weeks to pull the whole thing together, including mixing it."

"It was a bit like blending a huge cocktail with a thousand different ingredients," says Creme. "We just took the whole lot and fed bits and pieces into the Fairlight system and sampled them. And we chose all the idiosyncratic bits that best represented us, so it was very enjoyable. A lot of the credit for the album must go to our engineer, Nigel Grey, at Surrey Sound Studios, who did a lot of the early Police sessions," stresses Creme. "A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the album was produced by Trevor Horn, but that's not the case. Trevor co-produced the single, "Cry," with us - not the History Mix LP."

The album also featured their own artwork on the sleeve. "There's my drawing of Kev, and his drawing of me," Creme explains. The record company thought it was cheap and nasty - but naturally we insisted."

"The U.S. album is also slightly different from the U.K. version," adds Godley. "There were several tracks never released over here which are now available for the first time. The whole idea behind the album was to have some fun and experiment a bit with 20 years' worth of music - it wasn't so much a big effort to make a hit album as it was to bake an anniversary cake with all these different slices."

"Looking back on even the last few years is kind of interesting, because of the sheer variety of stuff we've done," comments Creme. "Or possibly fucked up," says Godley.

Prior to the History Mix release, there was the April 1983 U.K. release, Birds of Prey, with its "Samson" single, followed a year later by the "Golden Boy" single and video. Around the same period, along with manager John Gaydon, the pair made their first moves toward setting up their own video label, and finally getting "Howling at the Moon," a feature film about the last night of outlaw John Wesley Harding, off the ground.

During 1986, they continued to make videos for artists like Huey Lewis and The News ("Hip to Be Square"), Lou Reed ("No Money Down") and Ultravox ("All Fall Down"). They also recorded soundtracks for a series of Lincoln/Mercury commercials and last year directed 12 television commercials for the New York and Boston Yellow Pages. "Hey, we'll do anything as long as we're inspired," comments Creme.

"There's my drawing of Kev and his drawing of me. The record company thought it was cheap and nasty, but naturally we insisted." - Lol Creme

"Which kind of explains - or perhaps it doesn't - how our latest album, Goodbye Blue Sky, came about," says Godley. "We were both getting really bored with what we call today's 'perfect mediocrity' - all that high-tech perfection that has absolutely no soul."

"Hey, we'll do anything as long as we're inspired." - Lol Creme
Boston Bell Telephone ad, July 1987

"Anyway," says Creme, "we were thinking along the lines of this film we're going to be doing which is basically a Western drama, and then thinking about music and sounds, and that sort of sparked off the idea of using harmonicas."

"We also decided to use other musicians on the album for the first time ever, to get back to a real live band feel, and that's when we started auditioning harp players," adds Godley. "And to our surprise, we found that there's a huge range - everything from bass to treble - but that traditionally harmonicas are always played as solo instruments. They're never played in groups."

"So naturally we thought, 'Why not use a harmonica section?"' Creme continues. "And after auditioning a bunch of players, none of whom had ever played with another harp player, we finally selected two guys - Mark Felton and Mitt Gamon -and began laying down rhythm tracks at my home studio.

"Next, we brought in three black backup singers - George Chandler, Jimmy Helms and Jimmy Chambers - whom we'd met on the Paul Young video, and started building up the tracks. The interesting thing is that the more we got into the sounds, the more we began re-writing the songs to suit the singers or the harp players.

To be honest, I was dreading the whole album writing process again," admits Creme. "But this time we kept such a clear focus on simplicity and soulfulness that it all flowed together very quickly," adds Godley.

"We cut two tracks a day, and worked very civilized hours - 10 a.m. till 6 p.m. - and had more fun doing this project that we ever expected," he continues. "Normally I hate an album I've just finished, but of all our solo LPs, this is my favorite."

With inspired tracks like the a cappella - "H.E.A.V.E.N." and the surreally titled "Don't Set Fire (To The One I Love)," Goodbye Blue Sky is vintage Godley & Creme. Who else would build an entire LP around the lowly harmonica in the microchip-heavy '80s?

"People have been suggesting it's full of sampled sounds, but it's all real and live. There's not a fucking synthesizer anywhere on it," sneers Godley.

"Ironically, we tried that whole synthesizer/synclavier route a couple of years ago, and in theory it should work just like a video edit," says Creme. "But strangely, in practice, we found the whole process to be incredibly boring. There was no spontaneity, no personality. We hated it."

In keeping with the album's emphasis on simplicity, the video for the first single, "A Little Piece of Heaven" is striking and straightforward. Godley and Creme stand in the foreground singing, while in the background the backup singers and harp players accompany them, occasionally gliding forwards (and, apparently, through the figures of Godley and Creme), and then back again.

"That's the effect we wanted," comments Godley. "Something that looks very simple, but that in fact is complex and difficult to achieve. We'd originally planned to shoot videos for the whole album, and film them around the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately that didn't work out because the budget was enormous.

"So we re-thought everything, and ended up in a studio in London where the actual shoot itself was dead simple," he continues. "We experimented with using just a zoom for each performer, and then keyed in backgrounds, with people moving backwards and forwards."

"So it was the edit that was unbelievably complex," adds Creme. "It was all done digitally on the Abacus, but even then it took six days to complete and nearly killed our editor."

By contrast, their latest video for "When We Was Fab," George Harrison's second hit from his Cloud Nine comeback, presented its problems during the actual shooting.

"George called us up and asked if we'd do the video, so we went over to his house - which is the ideal rock star's mansion, incidentally - to discuss our ideas," recalls Creme. "We wanted to do something that again looked very simple, but which was quite subtle and complex, and that was to position George against this wall, and have all the action take place around him."

The pair report that Harrison became so enthusiastic about the concept that he decided to use the occasion for a bona fide Beatles reunion which, given the continuing legal battles over Apple, was by no means a sure thing. Everyone agreed at first, including Paul McCartney. "He was going to wear the Walrus suit and play bass," Godley said. "But unfortunately, he pulled out at the last minute, and that's when we got Elton John to come down. Elton walks past George and the band carrying a picture of John Lennon. So symbolically, at least, all The Beatles are there."

But if Paul didn't show up, then who is the mystery bass player wearing the Walrus suit? Godley and Creme aren't telling.

"We will, however, reveal a few of our tricks, like how we managed to make George grow four arms and float," adds Creme. "The truth is, that's not even really George standing against the wall. It's a fiberglass and metal dummy which we then attached to the wall. Then we had five people manipulating the hand movements through a hole in the wall and the cast."

"Once we'd shot all that footage, we simply superimposed George's head on top in the edit," explains Godley. "Of course it wasn't quite that simple," Creme says, "because every time a person walked past him, we had to rotoscope their heads in later."

"But it real really is George's legs crossing at the end," laughs Godley. "He simply lay on his back behind the wall, stuck his legs through the hole beneath the body cast and then crossed them.

"It was a lot of fun to do, and George and Ringo were both great to work with," he adds. "In fact George enjoyed himself so much that he told us we'd have to direct all his Handmade Films from now on."

"The truth is, that's not even really George standing against the wall. It's a fiberglass and metal dummy which we then attached to the wall." - Lol Creme
A clip from George Harrison's "When We Was Fab"

Which might suit the pair perfectly. It's no secret that their main interest now lies in the silver screen and their long-awaited feature film debut. After several years of frustrating on-again, off-again negotiations with a variety of Hollywood studios, Godley and Creme have finally signed a deal with Film Dallas, the company that scored with "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and "Trip to Bountiful."

"We start shooting on June 15th at Los Colinas Studios in Dallas," says Creme happily, "but it's been a real bitch to pull this together. The main problem was that the script, "Howling at the Moon," is essentially a dramatic western, about the last night in the life of the legendary John Wesley Harding (who will be played by Gary Busey). And no one in Hollywood wanted to touch a western. They all told us it's box-office poison."

photo: Ebet Roberts GODLEY & CREME VIDEOGRAPHY
Year	Title	Artist
1980	An Englishman in New York Wide Boy	Godley & Creme Godley & Creme
1981	The Cooler Fade to Grey Mind of a Toy Girls on Film Something 'Bout You Baby I Like	Ringo Starr Visage Visage Duran Duran Status Quo
1982	Temporary Beauty Wedding Bells Only Time Will Tell In The Heat of the Moment Thunder in the Mountains I Want to be Free The Weakness in Me When I Get It Right	Graham Parker Godley & Creme Asia Asia Toyah Toyah Joan Armatrading Joan Armatrading
1983	Leave It Feel The Love Victims Kiss the Bride Forbidden Colours Synchronicity (short version) Synchronicity (full length live version) Wrapped Around Your Finger Every Breath You Take Rockit Autodrive Save Me A Mountain	Yes 10cc Culture Club Elton John David Sylvian Police Police Police Police Herbie Hancock Herbie Hancock Godley & Creme
1984	Power of Love Two Tribes Golden Boy	Frankie Goes to Hollywood Frankie Goes to Hollywood Godley & Creme
1985	Forever Man We Close Our Eyes Cry A View to a Kill Set Them Free Doctor Dream Everything Must Change History Mix (long format) Mondo Video (long format)	Eric Clapton Go West Godley & Creme Duran Duran Sting Thompson Twins Paul Young Godley & Creme Godley & Creme
1986	No Money Down Boystown Don't You Hear Me Screaming Oh People Don't Stand So Close To Me Everybody Have Fun Tonight Don't Give Up All Fall Down Hip To Be Square	Lou Reed Rob Jungklas Jana Pope Patti LaBelle Police Wang Chung Peter Gabriel Ultravox Huey Lewis & The News
1987	I Want to Hear it From You Biko When We Was Fab	Go West Peter Gabriel George Harrison
1988	A Little Piece of Heaven	Godley & Creme

"Howling at the Moon" storyboards. "It took us a month to do,but it'll save a lot of time and money in the end, 'cause now we know exactly what we're doing." - Kevin Godley

"Except for one financier who thought it was a musical," laughs Godley. "She said, 'And when's John Wesley Harding gonna sing his big number?' Can you believe that?!"

"Hey, I'll believe anything about Hollywood," says Creme. "We really got fucked around and became very pissed off and disenchanted with the whole business at one point. But we were determined to do this project, and it's actually all come together really well. Robbie Robertson is going to do the soundtrack, and Trevor Horn will produce it, so at least it'll sound good!"

The film also promises to look extraordinary, if their storyboards are any indication. Typically they have actually handdrawn every single shot, including camera moves and the final edit as they see it. "It took us a month to do," explains Godley as he leafs through a fat volume of drawings and instructions. "But if it'll save a lot of time and money in the end, 'cause now we know exactly what we're doing."

"Well, not exactly," deadpans Creme, "but for Christ's sake don't quote me. It'll make the studio nervous and then we'll be out of work again."

But that's unlikely. On top of their prolific output of music videos and commercials (they recently completed a series of spots for Nissan Hardbody Trucks), they've just unveiled their new video label and signed a deal with Virgin who will distribute."

"They're not promos, but what we call 'Videolas,"' explains Creme. "Each one is about 20 minutes long, and will marry a musician like Sting with a Ken Russell, or a Peter Gabriel with a visual artist."

"And they'll be collectibles not just exclusively aimed at rock 'n' roll," adds Godley. "Video is such a great medium, but it really hasn't been used much outside that pop/rock format. We definitely plan to cut down on music promos and commercials but this is an area we'll keep contributing to."

They also admit there's another book in the works. "It's an improvised novel called 'Bullshit,' and we're right in the middle of it," says Godley with a perfectly straight face.

"Yeah, we started with the last line, went back to the beginning and now we're working our way through to the end," says Creme. "I know it's not your usual literary practice, but doing it like this appealed to our warped perspective on life. Besides, we know that the ending's great."

Click to subscribe

© 2008 by Minestrone. All rights reserved.