Godfrey Winn - I Pass/ Love Shades

Actor and newspaper columnist makes bid for pop stardom

Label: Decca

Year of Release: 1967

There really aren't a lot of pop records out there about fairness and common sense and gentlemanly values. To state the perfectly bleeding obvious, ever since rock decided to do its own brand of particular stuff around the clock, popular music has been primarily about romance or rebellion. Even if a performer or group are miffed off with the current state of society, this will normally be expressed as a call to arms rather than a series of gentle complaints sent to music. 

Godfrey Winn chose 1967 of all years to step forward and buck this dominant trend. He was a regular actor, who by this point had starred in "Billy Liar" (as a DJ) and "The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery", but he also earned a more regular living from being a newspaper columnist for the Daily Express. "I Pass" is essentially a middle-of-the-road column set to music wherein Winn waxes lyrically about good old-fashioned British values. While he does so, backing vocalists trill, coo and b'dum around him. "The fair way is called the square way!", "The gentle are called sentimental!" he complains in plummy tones. "The age of science sees no alliance between mind and soul!" It sounds like he's singing from his notebook of possible future column ideas.

It's a truly odd record which, if nothing else, goes to prove that most newspaper columnists have always been a sanctimonious and overly nostalgic bunch, and have never veered enormously from their handful of pet topics over the decades ("So what's the point of them?" you may well ask, and I'd be inclined to agree). The contents of this disc aren't particularly controversial, but could have been written by any greying hack at any point between hip and swinging 1967 and today. It doesn't matter whether you agree with what Winn is saying or not, it's still questionable whether the record needs to exist. It's like listening to some telephone hold music while your aged Auntie complains in the background about how rude people are in supermarkets nowadays.

Interestingly though, Winn seems not to have written this himself, though he surely could have done, the idle tyke, as he clearly had a way with words and the end results here are barely worthy of him. Jobbing songwriters Cowen and Kerr seem to have landed the job and given him the words to chew on.

Whoever was responsible, the single sold poorly despite having quite a bit of national press hype, and was swiftly forgotten about not long afterwards. Winn never recorded another record and stuck mostly to his typewriter afterwards, and this piece of work became a forgotten curio.  In the end, you could argue that the public did indeed choose to pass on the idea of Winn as an unlikely pop star, and that can hardly be considered surprising.