Fourteen songs from a sad and delicate boy, now reissued for Disquaire Day, to the great delight of his past and future devotees.
The announcement, for Disquaire Day, of a first vinyl edition of Debris, an obscure record of depressed songs thirty years old, probably moved only about a hundred people worldwide. They form a tight caste: the devotees of Epic Soundtracks. A harmless sect in which each member savors the privilege of having been rocked forever by the insidious melancholy of a handful of intimate, finely crafted melodies: Fallen Down, Emily May… Songs that modestly aligned themselves with Big Star or Brian Wilson.
Kevin Paul Godfrey chose the pseudonym Epic Soundtracks at the age of fourteen, in 1973, when he and his older brother Adrian Nicholas Godfrey—better known as Nikki Sudden—formed the noisy, dadaist outfit Swell Maps, blending Can-like experimentation with the raw edge of early punk. Kevin served as the drummer, but he occasionally slipped in tiny piano fragments on the sly.
Crucial Encounters
When Swell Maps split in 1980, Epic Soundtracks becomes a bookseller at Rough Trade. In 1981, he releases an instrumental single, Popular Classical—a miniature piano piece in the vein of Robert Wyatt, with whom he sometimes played—and a maxi Rain Rain Rain, recorded with Jowe Head (ex-Swell Maps and Television Personalities). While his big brother pursued Jacobites, Kevin kept his distance and only plugged back in as a drummer when he met Rowland S. Howard, the ex-guitarist of The Birthday Party.
A guitarist of shocking, almost hallucinatory noise—perhaps the most inventive and unsettling of his generation—this Australian dandy who once showed Nick Cave how to dress was also a junkie, ravaged and compelling. With him, Epic contributed to two groups, Crime and the City Solution (where Epic appears in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire) and These Immortal Souls.
Epic could not escape the moment when his brother Nikki and Rowland decided to share everything: their love of powder and their penchant for crafting shattered songs. The result was two records as dark as they were beautiful: the album Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc, an elegant entry on Creation Records, and a faux country-folk project led by Jeremy Gluck, I Knew Buffalo Bill, in which the band was also joined by the legendary Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club.
Men of absolute honesty, they did not think they had the moral right to play the blues without knowing its torments
All of these people are gone today, and that 1987 record stands as the tombstone of a generation whose exposure is hard to gauge. People like Pierce or Howard were already ravaged by heroin at twenty-five. Men of absolute honesty, they would not presume the right to play the blues without tasting its afflictions. The late eighties left them behind, one by one.
In September 1992, Rough Trade released Rise Above, a solo album by Epic Soundtracks backed by the era’s crème de la crème: Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and a portion of the Bad Seeds. An album he wrote and arranged on the piano, carried by a softly sung voice. The British press picked up on it, and while in Paris, Epic delivered a deeply moving solo performance on France Inter, with Bernard Lenoir. It’s remembered that every song was transcribed into a small notebook. But the hype (modest as it was) faded quickly, and neither Sleeping Star nor Change My Life sold well.
Kevin went back to work at Rough Trade, sinking into a melancholy that bore little romance. Customs wouldn’t allow him into American territory, where he hoped to join his girlfriend of that era. Kevin Junior of the Chamber Strings, a worried friend, joined him in London, where they recorded demos and kicked off a mini-tour of German clubs to empty rooms. Worn down by this descent, Godfrey returned to London after a final show in Hamburg on October 22, 1997. He gave no sign of life to anyone.
Few worried about the silence—it was so solitary. But on November 18, his friends and his brother finally forced open his door and found his lifeless body. The autopsy would reveal he had been dead for twelve days. In his sleep, of unknown cause, at 38. Yet those who loved every record of this delicate, wounded boy know what medicine has never truly explained: that one can perish from sadness.
Debris by Epic Soundtracks (Return to Sender, 1995). Reissue for Disquaire Day on April 18 (Glass Modern, 2026).
