This autumn marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of Wigan Casino, the legendary Northern Soul club – the most famous of a number spread mainly across the North and Midlands of England, where a generation of British people dug deep into the music of black America. And vice versa.
I was only nine when the venue held its first Northern Soul all-nighter in September 1973, so more concerned with Subbuteo and The Goodies than the neglected output of Detroit hopefuls. I lived just 15 miles away, though, and became distantly aware of it in my teens, seeing older lads from the village at the bus-stop with their holdalls covered in patches, waiting more excitedly than most for the 113 to Wigan.
By the time it closed in 1981 I was holding out for a baggy overcoat and gathering courage to sneak into the post-punk band nights at the Warehouse in Preston, which had evolved from before-my-time “Roxy-Bowie Nights”: basically somewhere for the wierdos to go. (Full disclosure: I was wierdo-adjacent at best.) The early-mid eighties ‘alternative disco’ would introduce some soul to the mix, influenced by covers by Soft Cell and others. (What, Mark? Yes, that was one of them. B’dum tish.) The connections went deep: Johnny Marr described his early Smiths style as coming from trying to sound like all the parts on a Supremes record with just one guitar…
Here ends the reminiscence. I sadly have no tales of amphetamine-driven all nighters, and have never really got into ‘the scene’ as I’ve aged. Nor can I access the images I made of imagined rare record labels for New Writing North’s then cutting edge cd-rom project BON (Book of the North), on my own BONtempo records. (Biggest group: The Five Welders.)
What I do have is a massive love of the music, and a similarly massive pile of northern soul and related compilation cds, and an imaginative home. (And some North End Soul t-shirts as seen above which are the sweetest of sweet spots for me.) I think I could have paid for a house for someone at Ace or Kent Records and I’m very happy about it. The work of compilers such as Ady Croasdell and others has enriched my life, and the cd has been the perfect medium for this – breadth, inexpensive and purist-irking.
I wanted to have a think about why the music has meant so much, and what I take from it into my creative practice. To avoid a trip down False Memory Lane I am going to capture five things that Northern Soul has taught me, so far, in list form. These do seem some of my fundamentals, for good and/or ill.
1. Failure is a matter of perspective. And time.
None of the real northern soul classics were hits at the time: the compilations are full of brilliant failures in the market place. The market place is not efficient. Thanks be to the crate diggers for finding needles in haystacks.
2. Originality is over-rated.
In some ways Northern Soul is the spillover effect of Tamla Motown and its industrial model: a surfeit of studios, producers, and labels soaking up the aspirations and talents of black writers and performers, a fools’ gold rush leaving an amazing deposit of rapidly-generated folk music. Seemingly-simple on one hand (the beat, many of the lyrics), incredibly sophisticated on the other – the arrangements, the vocal ornamentations. Like Merseybeat, punk, or even the landfill indie of the noughties, there’s something liberating in the widespread use of templates alongside wit and ingenuity, helping otherwise ordinary people to make one or two extraordinary things.
3. Purism is a disease.
There are people who think Motown watered down black music for white consumption. These people have no souls. Some people think the sale price of a seven inch piece of vinyl is a marker of cultural value. Some people think obscurity is a virtue and that the collecting bug never leads to infection. These people have no souls either. Northern Soul is a great example of how people make culture from lots of bits and pieces, impure and sweaty as could be.
4. Anonymity and fame are twins separated at birth.
One of the things I like most about Northern Soul is – and here I’m sure I differ from some – is it doesn’t matter much who the record is by. You can refuse to be a nerd about this music. Yes, it’s been a pleasure finding out over the years how many great records people like Jimmy Radcliffe made. But fundamentally, for me, this is lost music rescued from warehouses by instinct, brands and egos detached. It’s a well unconfined by history. Only by reading the booklets and the websites can you rescue the makers from being Anon. But I often don’t worry about that (so long as the survivors get paid). Why should I want to do that when the ideal of Anon. represents, for me, the possibility of a culture we make together despite Capitalism? But Anon. can also be a kind of fame.
5. Resilience matters.
What Northern Soul says about love it also says about work, life and art: keep the faith. Keep on keeping on. Keep hitting that beat. Stay on the right track. Through what might seem cliché comes a form of resistance for working people everywhere. Oh, and dance to keep from crying, when resilience hurts.
One More Thing…
If this has inspired you to read just one book about Northern Soul I would recommend Stuart Cosgrove’s “Young Soul Rebels”, which is a personal history of his involvement in the movement. Cosgrove has the memory to tell the story, the collector’s mania for detail, but also, crucially, the wide-ranging cultural curiosity to draw the dots between obscure 45s and social movements. He does this in greater depth and arguably even more success in his series of books covering the late sixties in the US – “Detroit 67”, “Memphis 68” and “Harlem 69”. Imagine Greil Marcus had come from Scotland and been obsessed with soul music and football not Bob Dylan…
Tactics Tomato
You know the score. Work for 25 minutes and 16 seconds. Then relax for five minutes. Or this week why not dance for 25 minutes and 16 seconds and then work for five minutes? The choice is yours.
It was strange to sit here in Japan and read about the bus route I used to walk past. It's amazing what little parts of culture you take as normal until they're not they're anymore. This kind of mixing of cultures is also strange to explain. Part of my job here is to explain British culture to the locals, and they'll ask for British music, British-style music, and it's hard to get across that where I'm from we played soul, and punk, and new wave. I think it's because they expect 'the culture' and all I can offer is the counter-culture? Anyway, thank you for this article. This is something I can send to my coworker who's interested in the music we play.