Mike Gibson, guitarist for the British band the Godfathers, is discussing, by phone from London, the material on his band's new album, "Birth School Work Death." At least he had been discussing it. At the moment he is telling another resident of the rooming house where he lives that he will be on the phone for a while. The house has a single communal phone, Gibson explains upon resuming his long-distance conversation, and a couple neighbors apparently have been anxious to do a little dialing.

A band making its major-label debut with "Birth School Work Death," the Godfathers recently saw their album turn up on the Billboard album chart tagged with a bullet. The band has lined up a two-month tour of America (which brings them to Cabaret Metro Saturday) and has been getting a good deal of airplay recently on American radio stations that have an album-oriented format. All in all, things appear be going well right now for the Godfathers, so an outsider naturally might assume that they are leading fairly comfortable lives.

"Oh, I wish you could see me right now," says Gibson, with a grim laugh. "I'm in a one-room bedsit in East London, with the contents of my suitcase strewn on the floor around me. There's a bottled-gas heater. Gaps around the window.

"I mean, I've been earning enough money for the past few months to move to a better flat and pay more rent. But I'm not here much anyway, and before I change any circumstances, I want to make sure I've got enough to keep them changed. Not have a sudden burst of spending, go up in the world for a little while, then go back down again.

"It doesn't bother me that much. I live on my own. I don't have a girlfriend I have to keep comfortable while I'm away."

Not that Gibson would mind if the Godfathers achieved major success and began to enjoy some of its material rewards.

"Success tends to be rather frowned upon in England," he says. "If somebody is successful, makes money, they almost immediately start losing credibility points. But I don't think there's anything wrong with success. I want success. It depends how you handle it, really. It's early days for us, and I might handle it all wrong, but I don't think so. And I'm willing to try."

A five-man band that got its start some two years ago, the Godfathers employ two lead guitars in a straight-ahead style that has strong elements of classic rock brashness and spunkiness. Their playing often reminds you of earlier days in pop history when rock and a rebellious attitude were more closely linked.

"Not necessarily just rebellion," says Gibson. "Rock 'n' roll and excitement, which rebellion can often be a part of. It's about excitement, really.

"You don't like to think of yourself as arrogant or anything, but, yeah, I think we have an attitude, a sort of no-nonsense attitude. I like things that are really straight ahead and come at you. But I think, on the whole, we're pretty easy blokes to get on with. We have longstanding friends who would testify to it."

While the title song of the Godfathers LP, "Birth School Work Death," is certainly one of the more succinct descriptions of life, it's also a description that seems to contain more than a little cynicism-an impression that isn't dispelled by song lyrics such as "I don't need your sympathy/ There's nothing in this world for me." Gibson, however, says the song was born from a feeling closer to resignation-resignation to the probability that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who is not one of the band's favorite politicians, would be in office a while longer.

"There's a mood of depression in that song," says Gibson, "because it was written at a time when there was something in the air, and it wasn't too good. At the time the song was written, it was just before elections in England, and we were feeling pretty low. There seemed to be a sense of the inevitability of Mrs. Thatcher getting another go at it. This involves English politics, which is probably meaningless to an American audience, but that sort of climate, that feeling in the air. . . .

"But I don't think the song is limited to that. All right, those are the four stages of life everybody will go through. But, you know, there's ways and means of going through them."

At the moment, says Gibson, he can think of no other band that consistently is playing the sort of no-nonsense rock the Godfathers favor.

"There are bands around that have done things I enjoy," he says, "but I wouldn't say there's anyone who is doing it consistently. I suppose it's the way of the world. A band keeps producing albums, and one fan's going to like one album, another will like another.

"I think the scene here in England is in a very bad way. I think it's so bad, it can only get better. Particularly with the way we're so dominated over here by (the BBC's) Radio 1, and Radio 1 has become dominated by this wave of real pap. Basically, the whole thing's got itself stuck in a little corner. It's getting so bad at the moment that something has to change.

"Our American A&R man came over to see us in London, spent a few days here, looking up bands, checking things out. Before he left, we had a meal, and he proposed a toast: 'To the only rock 'n' roll band in London.' He couldn't find any others."

The Godfathers' current tour is their third visit to America, although some of the band members were here a few years ago as part of the Sid Presley Experience, a band that broke up shortly before the Godfathers came into existence. At many dates, the band members probably will be wearing the spiffy suits and ties they don for psychological as well as sartorial effect.

"I'll be bringing some suits with me," says Gibson. "Some nights I wear 'em, and sometimes I don't. It's strange: I've noticed, particularly in America, that people think they're just stage costumes. Well, I don't walk around wearing a suit all day-I'm wearing jeans and boots now-but I do like to get dressed up, spruced up for a special night out. And I think it's nice to approach every gig as a special night. It's really bad if a band just ambles onstage without making any effort toward their appearance. What you do when you really prepare for a gig is heighten the sense of occasion, increase the tension, make it more of an event."

Onstage, the band will be performing material from "Birth School Work Death," as well as songs from "Hit by Hit," a 1986 independent-label LP that was a compilation of the band's British singles. That earlier album was in much the same vein as "Birth School Work Death," but it did contain one seemingly odd selection-a cover of "Sun Arise," a vaguely "tribal" song originally recorded by Australian Rolf Harris, whom Americans might better remember for his 1963 song "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport."

"What happened with 'Sun Arise,' " says Gibson, "was this: They have these radio sessions over here in England where you record four songs and mix them in eight hours, and they get broadcast on radio shows. They're called 'live sessions,' the idea being you have a very limited time to sort them out.

"What people tend to do-and this was certainly our approach-is do some of their own numbers and then do something unusual, something unexpected. So we tried 'Sun Arise.' Then we told Vic Maile, our producer, about it, and he said he'd always wanted to record a version of it. So we said: 'Yeah, why not? Why do something people expect you to do?' I hope we get to do something unexpected in the future. I'd hate to think we'll become predictable and boring.

"I think we'll always be a hard-rocking band. That's our main inspiration: exciting rock 'n' roll music. Always has been, probably always will be. But we are diverse in our tastes, and I'd like to think we can be diverse in our application of what talent we have. We don't want to get in a situation where we have to work to a formula. If we fancy having a go at something, we want to be able to have a go at it."