Keeping the faith

A history of northern soul

Keith Gildart, Stephen Catterall

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781526150967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In the 1970s, Northern Soul held a pivotal position in British youth culture. Originating in the English North and Midlands in the late-1960s, by the mid-1970s it was attracting thousands of enthusiasts across the country. This book is a social history of Northern Soul, examining the origins and development of this music scene, its clubs, publications and practices. Northern Soul emerged in a period when working class communities were beginning to be transformed by deindustrialisation and the rise of new political movements around the politics of race, gender and locality. Locating Northern Soul in these shifting economic and social contexts of the English North and Midlands in the 1970s, the authors argue that people kept the faith not just with music, but with a culture that was connected to wider aspects of work, home, relationships and social identities. Drawing on an expansive range of sources, including oral histories, magazines and fanzines, diaries and letters, this book offers a detailed and empathetic reading of a working class culture that was created and consumed by thousands of young people in the 1970s. The authors highlight the complex ways in which class, race and gender identities acted as forces for both unity and fragmentation on the dancefloors of iconic clubs such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Blackpool Mecca, the Torch in Stoke-on-Trent, the Catacombs in Wolverhampton and the Casino in Wigan. Marking a significant contribution to the historiography of youth culture, this book is essential reading for those interested in popular music and everyday life in in postwar Britain.

1

Mods, Motown and ‘rare soul’ in northern England

This chapter explores the origins, reception and experience of soul music in the industrial north in the 1960s, and how it led to the creation of the ‘rare’ and ‘northern’ scene in the early 1970s. It charts the importance of the Motown record label and the impact that its recordings and the performances of its artists had on youth clubs, coffee bars, dance halls, bedrooms and personal identities. Brian Ward and Suzanne E. Smith have provided extensive analyses of the growth and impact of black music on the cultural politics of the United States.¹ More recently, scholars such as Joe Street and those connected with the Subcultures Network have noted the transatlantic connections between American soul music and its audience in Britain.² This music contributed to aspects of a northern youth culture that had its origins in the late 1950s, yet retained some features of a working-class culture that had been created by communities forged in the coal mines, cotton mills and factories of the industrial revolution.³ The symbolic, yet at the time largely unsuccessful, Motown Revue Tour that traversed Britain during 1965, and the ‘rare soul’ club scene that emerged in its wake, became firmly rooted in the legend, mythology and iconography of what later became known as northern soul.⁴ The popularity of soul music developed in the context of a changing and in some ways unchanging Britain and a youth culture that was responding to the attractions of aspects of American popular music, fashion, film and patterns of consumption. Yet such processes were often mediated by class, gender, region and locality, most notably in the economic structures and shifting soundscapes of northern industrial cities and towns. In the clubs of Manchester and the centres of youth culture in its satellite locales, soul music provided a soundtrack of affirmation, transgression and temporary escape.⁵

Soul time: mods and the emergence of the ‘all-nighter’ rare soul scene⁶

The mod subculture is indelibly linked with images of the 1960s.⁷ For historians, sociologists and a generation of memoirists, journalists and television documentary film-makers it has provided a template for mapping post-war British youth culture.⁸ It is also seen as a tributary that fed into the creation of northern soul, with many of the participants, historians and curators of the scene noting its connection to the mod culture of the mid-1960s.⁹ Yet the philosophy of mod that linked both fashion and music to evolution, progress and breaks with the past sits uneasily with what became northern soul’s commitment to preservation, commemoration, nostalgia and vinyl archaeology. The elements of mod that it did express were based on shared notions of authenticity and exclusivity. However, reading northern soul through mod masks some of the local peculiarities of the scene and the continued resonance of class; more importantly it marginalises the experience of women and others who were not involved in its more notable affiliations, codes and manifestations. Some young men might have found their way to northern soul via mod, but most women did not. This is not to say that mod and its attendant culture was not central to the origins of the scene, but it is clear that many people engaging with northern soul in its peak years in the mid-1970s had little or no relation to the mod culture of the mid-1960s. The bedroom, the parlour and the youth club were just a few of many places that provided a soundtrack of soul that operated beyond the parameters of mod in the industrial north.¹⁰

The key innovators in terms of soul music were the black American musicians Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and James Brown. The sound found a welcoming British audience from around 1962, and for the rest of the decade it formed a core component of British youth culture via record labels such as Atlantic, Motown and Stax. Soul music was promoted by innovative British musicians, the more discerning DJs and young music fans who were seeking sounds beyond the standard pop fare that was a feature of mainstream radio stations. Anthony Marks has outlined three reasons for the attractions of soul music at this time: ‘it was a minority taste … its appearance coincided with the growth of the discotheque … soul music was exotic … and knowledge of it was seen as a status symbol and privilege’.¹¹ Such features would personify the developing rare soul scene from 1966 and its later labelling as northern soul around five years later. In this process, particular DJs played a crucial role. Guy Stevens (1943–81) became resident DJ at the Scene club in 1963, where his esoteric mix of American rhythm and blues and English beat music attracted mods from across London and the rest of England.¹² His enthusiasm was picked up by Roger Eagle, who had visited the club and went on to establish his own credentials as a promoter and enthusiast of soul music in Manchester.¹³ Eagle was to play a key role in the origins of the rare soul scene through his position as a DJ at Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club (1963–71). The Twisted Wheel would later gain iconic status as the ground zero of the northern soul scene.

DJs were significant in creating informal networks of soul enthusiasts crossing paths in the northern clubs, and their reputations and sounds reached beyond the confines of the dance floor and into the parlours, lounges, kitchens and bedrooms of thousands of British homes. They created their own forms of dissemination in local fanzines and through record trading and exchange schemes that defined tastes, created scenes, and codified soul, and particularly rare soul, as a specific musical genre. In Manchester in 1964 soul fans could keep up with the latest releases by reading R’n’B Scene, edited by Eagle from his office in the Twisted Wheel.¹⁴ Yet ‘soul time’ in the north emerged from a variety of tributaries and the sounds emanated from a wide range of public and private spaces. Young women were sharing the sounds of black American soul music in bedrooms, youth clubs, and through the collective steps and styles being forged on hundreds of formal and informal dance floors. Shoes would be kicked off and living room carpets and rugs became sites for the consumption of soul music and the expression of its impact on the emotions.¹⁵ The foundation myths of the northern soul scene were largely created through a masculine lens, yet although there were few female DJs, women’s role in promoting, sharing and expressing their love of soul music was significant.

The bridge that mod culture formed with the later northern soul scene took its most iconic and mythical form with the ‘all-night’ rhythm and blues scene at London’s Flamingo club. The Lancashire musician Georgie Fame was the key individual in epitomising the ‘northern’ connection with the growth and popularity of soul music in the mod subculture, the industrial towns of north-west England and the city of Manchester. Fame was born in the coal and cotton town of Leigh, located between Manchester and Wigan. From early exposure to rhythm and blues in the late 1950s he moved from employment in a cotton mill to performing in working-men’s clubs, theatres, dance halls and holiday camps. Fame never became a northern soul artist, but his career trajectory and canonical role in mod culture secured his place in the pantheon of key figures who formed the foundation myths of the scene.¹⁶ Through Fame and associated performers who played the Flamingo, the soundscape was one that swirled to the beats and harmonies of what would later become the sonic core of the northern soul scene. With the creation of the ‘all-nighter’, the Flamingo created the template for the later soul clubs: music, dance, amphetamine consumption, entrepreneurship, exclusivity and authenticity.¹⁷ The all-nighters at the Flamingo were attended by increasing numbers of young, working-class mods between 1962 and 1963. By 1964 mods across Britain were creating their own scenes, adopting variations of fashion trends and dancing to the increased output of American record companies that were finding success in marketing black performers and sounds.¹⁸ Club owners could see the financial opportunities that were opening up through youth culture. A similar kind of individualism and micro-capitalism would later appear on the northern soul scene in the form of penny capitalists who would buy and sell rare records, and create their own businesses, record labels and magazines/fanzines.¹⁹

Provincial versions of the Flamingo proliferated across the country in the 1960s, and in Lancashire they formed the nucleus of what would become the northern soul scene. In the towns of industrial Lancashire (Wigan, Leigh, Bolton, Bury, Burnley, Warrington) the original soul sounds of the period 1962–66 retained a particular resonance, notably working from the template created by Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club. These clubs attracted school-age teenagers, miners, factory workers and shop assistants, who viewed the spaces and sounds as successors to the hedonistic weekends that had been a feature of the working-class lives of their parents. Traditional blues and jazz held little appeal for the northern working class, whose hard lives and occupations attuned them to the exciting ‘three-minute’ melodies and dance floor fillers that from 1962 onwards were being pumped out of a multiplicity of recording studios in major US cities at a much faster pace. Detroit might have been the spiritual home of what was to become northern soul, but the scene also drew artists, sounds and styles from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mods, Motown and ‘rare soul’ in northern England
• 2 In the days before Wigan
• 3 The beating heart of soul: Wigan Casino
• 4 Soul explosion, fragmentation and decline
• 5 The chosen few: the experience and practice of northern soul
• 6 Locating northern soul: place, class and identity
• 7 Race, gender, sexuality and the politics of northern soul
• 8 Going back and checking it out: myth, legacy, history and nostalgia
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index