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WHAT IS NORTHERN SOUL?
There are some great sites out there on northern soul, and I encourage you to check them out:
Northern Soul Radio : Paddy Grady's fabulous online northern radio show.
The term "northern soul" was first coined by UK journalist Dave Godin in 1971 in Blues & Soul Magazine.
While a widely understood term in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, northern soul as a genre is only
conceived of by a small segment in the US. Which is odd, because the true heart of northern
is quintessentially American: obscure R&B and soul music by black American artists, produced largely in the 1960s.
Rooted in the mod scene, northern had its heyday in the early-mid 70s in the UK, but is recently witnessing
a huge rebirth in Europe and even in the US.
In the late 60s and early 70s in the UK, a certain segment of clubgoers was becoming dissillusioned with
the sounds being offered by DJs and radio. They sought a more straightforward, danceable sound, and from
this general malaise the fad for northern was born. Soul dance clubs, like Wigan Casino (considered by many
to be the granddaddy of all northern dance clubs), Manchester's Twisted Wheel, Stoke's Golden Torch, and Blackpool
Mecca, began operating all over the north of England. The scene was unlike any other at the time; dances were
part athletic endurance test, part rare record swap, with thousands of dancers showing up every weekend with
clutches of rare 45s to sell and trade and a change of clothes to greet the morning. Clubs typically ran
"all-nighters", all night dance marathons which began after midnight and ran til 8am. Most accounts will
tell you that boozing and romance made up very little of the scene, as dancers focused more on individual
acrobatics and frantic movement til dawn; there's less agreement on what role speed and amphetamines played
in the culture, but certainly no disagreement that nothing was more important than the music, the dancing,
and hunting down that next obscure acetate that held pure R&B gold.
The near fetishism of obscurity that has come to define northern soul, particularly in recent years (thanks
hugely to eBay and the rebirth of the vinyl buying market), is something that I find personally important to
the music itself. Some have said that the worship of the obscure track has made northern less about the quality
of the music and more about the monetary value of the records, or the blind worship of a certain 4/4 beat,
but I have to disagree on both counts. As an American, I've observed for years the reductive packaging of various genres
of music into neat little bundles on US radio; as a good friend once said to me, the Rolling Stones are now down to 5 songs,
Jimi Hendrix is down to 3, and soul music means 10 Motown tracks by about 4 artists--if you're lucky. American
soul music is an important piece of the history of this country, and yet the width and breadth of it has been dead
and buried almost since birth, and so it would've remained if not for a handful of DJs who realized its worth. Many of
the now-quintessential northern tracks which define the genre were originally commercial flops, regional releases,
or not even released at all. The northern DJs quite literally saved these pieces of American history, and
thankfully so--for every badly sung comp-filler unleashed on the buying public, there are many more true classics
which, without this obsession with the next rarest 45, would've been lost forever. This is the best lesson possible
in the idea that commercial quality and artistic quality are two very different things.
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