‘Sliced Tomatoes’: How Fatboy Slim brought northern soul to ’90s rave culture
Even if you have never set foot on a dancefloor dusted with talcum or have never spent hours digging through boxes of vinyl in search of that one holy grail soul single that nobody else has ever heard of, that doesn’t mean you are free from the influence of northern soul.
What first started out in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a niche scene of soul obsessives in the north of England, dancing all-night to the obscure and forgotten sounds of American soul artists quickly became a colossal cultural moment across the United Kingdom. From London to Lancashire, thousands of young people devoted their lives to amphetamine-fueled all-nighters, forging life-long relationships and changing the way they dressed all as a result of this new way of life known as northern soul.
Arguably, the northern soul scene reached its peak cultural relevance back in the mid-1970s, when the queues outside Wigan Casino stretched on for miles, and various reissued singles of northern floorfillers began to pepper the pop charts. Nevertheless, northern soul has persisted for decades. Today, there are still countless soul events and all-nighters across the country, with some of the greatest being hosted by those same faces who have been around since the old days.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising that northern soul is still around today, though, given just how essential the original scene was in influencing all future dance and club scenes in the UK, particularly the rave culture which dominated the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although the music of acid house doesn’t bear much striking resemblance to the timeless tones of Frank Wilson or Edwin Starr, the all-night dances, DJs, and drug culture which surrounded that movement were heavily inspired by the world of northern soul.
Particularly when the world of sampling and remixes began to dominate the rave scene during the 1990s, soul’s influence on the movement became much clearer, thanks to folks like Fatboy Slim. When Norman Cook arrived on the scene, fresh from the indie rock mastery of The Housemartins, he came with an extensive record collection of old and obscure soul records, including a plethora of northern soul anthems which formed the basis of his rave revolution.
Perhaps the most overt of these northern soul influences came on Cook’s masterpiece single ‘The Rockafeller Skank’, which became a top-ten hit back in 1998. An amalgamation of samples, including John Barry’s ‘Beat Girl’, the core of the song was made up of a sample taken from Just Brothers’ instrumental anthem ‘Sliced Tomatoes’ from back in 1972.
Released via Holland-Dozier-Holland’s Music Merchant label, the compelling rhythm and upbeat energy of Jimmy and Frank Bryant’s song made it a natural floorfiller for the northern soul scene of the 1970s, even if the tune never found mainstream success upon its initial release. For decades, the song was a pretty well-kept secret among soul circles, until Fatboy Slim managed to break those northern sounds firmly into the mainstream through sampling.
Although, for many northern soul fanatics, changing an iconic soul masterpiece into a rave-centric banger is akin to sacrilege, Fatboy Slim’s unification of those two very disparate worlds was an absolute masterstroke by the DJ; harking back to the roots of rave culture while establishing an incredible new sound for the 1990s.
