FOR ‘CRY’-ING OUT LOUD, GODLEY, CREME ARE BACK

Kevin Godley looked aghast, as if someone had invited him into a snake pit. Lol Creme, his partner in directing videos and making records, clutched his stomach and writhed in mock wretching.

This was the reaction of these caustic cutups to a simple question: Would they go on tour if their new single, “Cry,” was a hit?

“We haven’t done a show for 9 or 10 years,” said Creme, recalling their tours as members of 10cc. “We got sick of it after all those years. Go on tour? I’d rather face a firing squad.”

“Cry,” a loping romantic ballad from the new Godley & Creme PolyGram album, “The History Mix Volume I,” is very commercial and could easily be a hit. That would complicate the lives of this English duo, who have concentrated on directing pop music videos in the last five years. Their list of credits includes Duran Duran’s racy “Girls on Film,” Herbie Hancock’s award-winning “Rockit,” “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and Sting’s current “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free.”

A hit record could turn them into pop stars again and divert them from a long-range film project and plans for a unique venture, a video label that would commission and market videos much like a record company does with records.

Godley, 39, and Creme, 37, have no illusions about being pop stars. “Can you image some teen-aged girl screaming her bloody head off because I turn her on?” Creme asked. “Look at me. I’m no sex symbol. I don’t look like anybody in Duran Duran. The thought of me being a pop star is insane.”

“We might appeal to some older pop fans,” Godley quipped. “The demented ones, of course.”

During this visit from England, Godley and Creme, who were residing in a West Hollywood hotel, have spent a lot of time watching MTV.

“There’s no cable in England,” Creme explained. “So there aren’t any video shows. This is the only time we get to see how our work ends up. It ends up here being spewed out dozens a times a day with all this other junk on either side of it. But still, our stuff plays great.”

Both seemed amazed by the hypnotic appeal of MTV. “There’s so much garbage on MTV,” Creme insisted. “But you can’t stop watching these terrible videos. You watch and watch and watch this rubbish. You get hooked. You can feel your brain cells turning to dust but you watch anyway.”

There’s a bright spot, Godley observed drolly, to MTV presenting what this pair considers junk: “It means when our stuff is played, it looks great by comparison. I hope they keep up the bad work.”

Music is really sort of a hobby for Godley and Creme. Their hearts are really in video. “We love it,” Creme gushed. “We can have fun and be challenged and make money all at the same time.”

“What we do really is simple,” Godley explained. “We just try to present the most imaginative visual interpretation of a song. We take a clue from the key elements, like the lyrics, the music or how the artists look. We get an idea for a concept from some of these elements and go with it.”

Creme added: “There’s no formula to it--it’s creative chaos. You can go in any direction. It’s hard to explain to anybody what we do. The concept of the video is very important, but where does it come from? Out of thin air. You never really know if it’s right.”

Their latest are their own “Cry” and Duran Duran’s “A View to a Kill.” The “Cry” video cleverly and simply illustrates the song, a montage of forlorn faces, one dissolving into the next. “A View to a Kill” is anything but simple. Filmed in the Eiffel Tower in Paris, it’s a lavish ad for the current James Bond film.

“It was a challenge,” Creme pointed out. “We did it because we thought it would be fun to work on a piece for a Bond film. The trick was to get across the ideas for the song and do a promo for the movie at the same time. We saw the film early and decided the Eiffel Tower chase would be a good focus for the video.”

They had one problem with accepting the assignment. “We didn’t like the song at first,” Creme admitted. “It seemed silly. After we worked on the video, it didn’t seem as silly after a while.”

Godley and Creme spend nearly as much time rejecting the flood of offers as they do directing. “We turn down 98%,” Godley said. “Most of them seem wrong in some way. We don’t like the people or music or we just can’t get inspired by anything about the project. It has to be fun for us too--that’s a crucial factor. If it looks like it’s going to be a pain, we just say no.”

Friends since childhood in Manchester, England, Godley and Creme--both art college graduates--have been working together steadily for 25 years, beginning with a group called the Sabres. In the early ‘70s, they formed 10cc with Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart, which they tired of after a few years.

After escaping the band, they recorded three duo albums. While irreverent and experimental, their pop-rock songs weren’t very commercial. Making a video for “An Englishman in New York,” a single from their 1979 “Freeze Frame” album, was the beginning of their video career. Music has been secondary to them ever since.

“When we recorded ‘Golden Boy’ (a single not released in America) last year, we hadn’t done a record for three or four years,” Creme recalled. “Recordings weren’t important to us. Our minds weren’t into it.”

A drunken night with noted record producer Trevor Horn, who wound up co-producing “Cry,” helped rekindle their interest in recording.

“When we met Trevor in New York, we were filming the Police’s “Synchronicity’ concert,” Creme recalled. “We had been doing video solidly for years. Trevor was working with Foreigner. We were staying at the same hotel. We met there at midnight and got wrecked at the bar. We all went back to the studio to fool around and had great fun. It was such a shot in the arm to do music for a few hours. We had forgotten what fun it was.

“We left at 7 a.m., but we made arrangements to meet six months later and have some more fun in the studio. We all turned up on that day. That’s when we started the session for ‘Cry.’ ”

You can’t really say Godley and Creme are enthusiastically back into writing and singing music. An entire album of new material would be an indication of thoroughly renewed interest. But that’s not what “History Mix Vol. I” is. It’s really a bizarre compilation of oldies. Little of it is new. Even “Cry” isn’t really new.

“The first verse of ‘Cry’ was written 15 years ago when we first started writing together,” Creme explained. “We were never able to finish it. In every group we were in, we tried to finish it. It really took us 16 years to write it.”

One side of “History Mix” features old songs that were unreleased in the United States. Most of the other side is devoted to a long piece that’s a fusion of remixed parts of ancient 10cc hits like “Rubber Bullets, “Life Is a Minestrone” and “I’m Not in Love.”

How committed are they to music now? “It’s hard to say,” Creme replied. “Our film and video projects still come first.”

Godley noted: “Who knows?--it’s possible that we might still be totally wrapped up in video if we hadn’t gone to the studio that night with Trevor.”

“That Trevor,” Creme said sarcastically. “I don’t know whether to thank him or curse him.”