I bought this less for the music itself and more for Dave Godin. I knew of Dave for many years before I knew that he'd played such a pivotal role in bringing soul music and Motown to the UK in the '60s. I knew him as the director of the Anvil, Sheffield's civic arts cinema, which he ran up to its closure in 1990.
Dave presided over the annual audience meetings where he would bemoan the state of the City Council funding, listen to a few comments, and then show an uncertificated film like Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom. He explained that this was exploiting a loophole in the certification system, which enabled him to show such films as long as no charge was made (the audience meetings were free, of course). I wrote to him a couple of times to thank him for showing films that I hadn't requested (like Greenaway's The Falls) and those that I had (Alan Rudolph's Made in Heaven). I didn't expect a reply, but I got two pages of dense typescript, which started with Dave saying that he'd made a point of watching Made in Heaven himself, and enjoyed it, so he was grateful for the suggestion (it didn't sell him many tickets). He then went into a diatribe about the City Council again: "They think I just want to show the most obscure films and charge nothing to see them," he explained. "And it's true, I do."
At the Sheffield Literature Festival Dave was interviewed about his Desert Island books, and was both a charming and barbed guest. That would have been when I began to realise his history.
From the point where the Anvil's closure was decided, Dave became an outspoken critic of the Cultural Industries Quarter and the Anvil's replacement, the Showroom (I never had any success in persuading the Showroom to show more Alan Rudolph films, even though I spent three years on the board of directors). He suggested that the Council and the police should relocate Sheffield's red light district to the CIQ: his reasons for this made some sense, and Spearmint Rhino opened there five years ago. When the National Centre for Popular Music failed, Dave reminded anyone who would listen — via bitter letters to the local papers — that he had always been against and had predicted its failure. As Tim commented, if you predict that everything's going to fail, you're bound to be right once or twice.
So that's what I knew about Dave. He compiled this album, and I bought it in Polar Bear on Ecclesall Road in 2001. He died three years later — not that there's a connection. (Here's a great obituary, which explains inter alia how Dave coined the terms "deep soul" and "northern soul" and turned Mick Jagger onto black American music, before coming to revile the Rolling Stones as they sold the music back to America).
The music on this collection is not home territory for me, though I'd definitely listen to it if it came on the radio, especially if there was someone apparently knowledgeable like Mark Lamarr filling in the stories. Good to hear Baby Washington's version of Breakfast in Bed a few days after Dusty Springfield's.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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