In Search of Godevil: The Devil Rides In with All God’s Children
CHERRY RED RECORDS, notably their subsidiaries Grapefruit and Strawberry, have a run of interestingly themed box sets comprising deep cuts of the 1960s and ’70s. The label’s earlier compilations, among them Deep In The Woods, Dust On The Nettles and Sumer Is Icumen In, feature songs with a pagan folklore vibe. With each comes a well-researched booklet, delivering a clamshell package of fascinating pop culture archaeology as well as some good tunes.
The Devil Rides In: Spellbinding Satanic Magick & The Rockult 1967–1974 and All God’s Children: Songs From The British Jesus Rock Revolution 1967–1974, are two of their recent releases. As the titles suggest, these compile songs with, respectively, a satanic tint and Christian good cheer, making god-devilish appropriate bookends to any half-decent record collection.
But let’s begin with a quest for a song heard performed on a British TV show long ago. This was the latter half of the 1990s, so I was watching an incarnation of one of the chart or CD music shows of that time, which sometimes featured promos by rock and indie bands. I didn’t catch the name of the band or many details beyond the track title, other than the band was British and the song a crossover of styles, called Godevil.
Off I go on a search through fog, a fairly common activity, be it a search for an elusive film or film director, artist, book, zine or record. This particular quest took me to the now-closed Decoy record shop on Manchester’s Deansgate (located inconveniently on what might have been a bridge), where the knowledgeable staff often helped in such situations — albeit not in this instance. It was several years after first having heard the track, reduced with the passage of time to title alone, that I stumbled on Godevil in the used CD section of Vinyl Exchange in the city centre. Godevil appears on Erotic Terrorism, a 1998 album by Fun-Da-Mental,[1] “the Asian Public Enemy” according to a source quoted on Wikipedia.
It’s Getting Near Dawn
The wordplay of the title is the sort of juxtaposition that often draws me to a song — Godevil in this instance being a fitting diversion in this assessment of the compilations The Devil Rides In and All God’s Children, good and evil. There is no greater connection to the collective tracks than that. A profound meaning in the lyrics of 1960s garage rock holds a similar fascination, lyrics with a sentiment plain and true and yet inspire a deeper reading. Or are simply odd or funny.
”Remember, it’s a commandment not a suggestion” — What Part Of ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ Don’t You Understand? by Knights of the New Crusade[2]
Moving on. Godevil doesn’t move me the way that a song by, say, Cream does, like Sunshine Of Your Love, performed at Cream’s farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1968. Documentary footage shows the rock trio performing in a state of trance; watching them is like watching persons absurdly driven by spirits to create a thing of beauty everlasting. None of the band — Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker — looks a well man. Also, the sound is sometimes a step out of sync with the visuals in Tony Palmer’s film of the event, which only compounds the dreamlike quality.
Witchcraft magazine appears in the booklet for The Devil Rides In.
Heron ‘insisted on recording both of their albums in fields’. All God’s Children.
We like the disco, we like the disco sound
Take another one: Black Is Black by La Belle Epoque. This disco cover of a moderately catchy 1960s hit is, for me, forever tied to The Idiot, the Iggy Pop album produced by David Bowie. The two of them — Iggy Pop and La Belle Epoque — are ubiquitous because of my final year at secondary school: students in the final year had certain privileges the other years did not, one of which was access to the newly erected ROSLA building, named after the Raising of the School Leaving Age, an incentive in England and Wales that saw the age of school leavers rise from fourteen to sixteen. The ROSLA was a dedicated leisure area for us older kids. No longer did we have to hang about outside during break with the other kids. Here we had our own record player and canteen, evidently key attributes in preparation for the life choices waiting around the corner. Many students brought their favourite records to the ROSLA, a mixed bag in 1977, the year that punk broke: along with punk we had disco and doo-wop revivalism in the form of Darts, the debut album by the band of the same name that a lad with a quiff called Eddie was proud to have seen perform no fewer than three times. Samantha, who had a straight back and was never a comfortable fit for a secondary school, enjoyed Bat Out Of Hell and sang along with Meat Loaf like a night at the opera. Boomer, tall and thin, brought along Iggy Pop’s The Idiot and believed that Blitzkrieg would make a cool name for the band he intended to form, having recently discovered the meaning of the word in the queue for lunch. As well as The Idiot, Boomer brought along La Belle Epoque, because he liked that too, and so would I soon enough.
This dichotomy, the credible Iggy Pop with a disco band I would not ordinarily care for, became, in the ROSLA, entwined. Now I don’t hear tracks by Iggy Pop without also hearing Black Is Black. The laconic drawl of punk’s grandmaster and a disco song by an otherwise forgettable female vocal trio, disparate records released only weeks apart, is a divergent unity shaped by the upheaval that had come to us all, the pending transition from school to adulthood. We were dropping away, one by one, barely saying our goodbyes when another was gone from the ROSLA, our very own halfway house, off to pastures new. Some couldn’t wait and counted down the days. Others, like me, were nervous. And all the while the records continued to play.
Godevil, Sunshine Of Your Love, and the other detours on this musical memory lane, are a Nietzschean conflagration — good and evil, god and devil, black and white, black is black. Nietzsche, incidentally, that rare breed: a philosopher who liked to dance.
Godevil
There is a crossover with All God’s Children and The Devil Rides In, in that the songs contained share the same time frame through the late 1960s and early 1970s, and some bands appear on both (Jethro Tull, Strawbs and Manfred Mann among them — godevils for sure). One set is a product of the so-called ‘Jesus revival’, the ‘wholly unexpected consequence of the hippie counterculture’[3]; the other the result of a more diverse upbringing, inspired by the harder post-Beat sounds of psych and prog, and shaped by pulp literature and horror movies. The content of each box has its own core musical style, the former, with tambourines present, being lighter, more upbeat, and arguably more of its time than The Devil Rides In, which is rock-orientated. The Devil Rides In is also more subjective: musically, The Open Mind’s freakbeat classic Magic Potion, stands its own, but as a drug song is a hard push next to the likes of Atomic Rooster’s satanic magick Death Walks Behind You, The Gun’s Race With Devil (which, incidentally, is a fine Sabbath boogie, if Sabbath was fronted by Arthur Brown), or Titanic’s Heia Valenga (not unlike a late era Bonzos singalong). The penultimate track on the box, Cozy Powell’s Dance With The Devil, might be the only drum instrumental to make number three on the UK charts.
All God’s Children is the bigger surprise. Woodstock brought a positive note from the underground, the quintessence of the ideals of freedom and love, and was followed by a variety of successful Bible themed, long-haired rock musicals, including Godspell, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and Jesus Christ Superstar, and the ossasional Biblical concept album. The artists on this box range from big names such as Lindisfarne, The Moody Blues, and Richard Thompson, whose repertoire was not devoted to the Scriptures but encompassed many themes, and some lesser-known names emerging from the British gospel scene (Out of Darkness, Whispers of Truth, The Pilgrims) who today, are not so well known but a delight to hear.
The illustrated booklets that accompany each box are penned by David Wells (All God’s Children) and Martin ‘Cally’ Callomon (The Devil Rides In). Cally’s is more an essay and looser in style, an overview of the magickal pop culture of which the bands were part, replete with devil themed book and magazine covers, whereas the track-by-track details of Wells is an approach I prefer for this sort of musical edification.
Both boxes contain at least one novelty item. It’s unlikely that I will revisit Nigel Goodwin’s First Time I Went To Church or Jacula’s Long Black Magic Night any time soon. One is a prose piece about the revelatory experience of walking into a church a hip if disillusioned young man and being spiritually transformed, delivered as a cockney morality play by the RADA-trained Goodwin. The other, another spoken word effort, is by the experimental Italian outfit Jacula (featuring ‘a couple of Brits’ if I understand Cally correctly). This long tale of high weirdness is made longer by a female lead for whom the English language is a valiant struggle.
But these are minor quibbles for two sterling collections. The Devil Rides In even points you to a Spotify playlist of the many tracks that didn’t make the cut. Which reminds me, if you do see your mother this weekend, be sure to tell her: “Jesus Is Just Alright!”
Notes
[1] It was also released as a 1996 single under the title GodDevil.
[2] Knights of the New Crusade are an American garage punk band whose repertoire consists of pro-Christian songs. Two of their three albums to date have been released on Alternative Tentacles.
[3] David Wells, ‘Suddenly, Jesus Christ is more popular than the Beatles,’ booklet accompanying All God’s Children: Songs from the British Jesus Rock Revolution 1967–1974, p.2
- Music
- All God’s Children, Arthur Brown, Atomic Rooster, Bat Out of Hell, Black Is Black, Black Sabbath, Cherry Red, Christian music, Cozy Powell, Cream, David Bowie, David Kerekes, David Wells, Decoy Records, Deep in the Woods, Dust on the Nettles, Eric Clapton, Erotic Terrorism, Fun-Da-Mental, Gathering of the Tribe, Ginger Baker, Godevil, Godspell, Iggy Pop, Jack Bruce, Jacula, Jesus Christ Superstar, Jethro Tull, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Knights of the New Crusade, La Belle Epoque, Manfred Mann, Martin ‘Cally’ Callomon, Meat Loaf, Nigel Goodwin, Out of Darkness, Raising of the School Leaving Age (ROSLA), Strawbs, Sumer Is Icumen In, Sunshine Of Your Love, The Devil Rides In, The Idiot, The Open Mind, The Pilgrims, Tony Palmer, Vinyl Exchange, Whispers of Truth, Woodstock
David Kerekes
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