‘Don’t Bother Me’: How a forgotten US soul song became a UK number one
Creating a hit single is an elusive art, where timing is everything.
In the fickle realm of the singles charts, labels have to act quickly when it comes to releasing tracks, lest they become lost in the weekly onslaught of new singles. Once a record’s time has passed, it very rarely comes around again, except in the case of northern soul.
A miraculous and totally unique music scene in which hit records are actively avoided, in favour of obscure, overlooked, and forgotten American soul singles, northern soul emerged in the industrial surroundings of northern England towards the tail end of the 1960s. During those early years, with legendary all-nighters held at venues like Manchester’s Twisted Wheel and, later, The Torch in Stoke-on-Trent, northern soul was expectedly niche.
After all, dancing all night to obscure American soul records while hopped up on amphetamines was hardly going to appeal to the youth clubs and Top of the Pops charts. However, as the scene expanded, and more people started queuing up outside the soon-legendary Wigan Casino towards the mid-1970s, northern soul became a colossal, nationwide phenomenon, demanding BBC documentaries and a fabled mention in the American Billboard magazine.
As with any music scene of that magnitude, its influence soon began bleeding over into the pop charts. Unlike other scenes, though, northern soul had no new releases. Instead, the tracks that found heavy rotation in Wigan, Blackpool, and Manchester began to get reissued by enterprising record labels, and the hordes of northern soul obsessives would buy those reissues, thus rocketing years-old singles into the charts for the very first time.
Throughout the mid-1970s, records by the likes of R Dean Taylor, Chuck Wood, Dean Parrish, and countless other soul stars, many of whom had since abandoned their music careers entirely, found themselves climbing up the UK singles chart. However, only one legendary track managed to reach the elusive number-one spot, five years after it had first been released.
Originally, Atlanta vocal group The Tams released their defining single ‘Hey Girl Don’t Bother Me’ in 1964, via ABC Records and, upon its initial release, it was a minor hit in their native US, peaking at 41 in the singles charts. In the years that followed, The Tams largely forgot about the song, without any knowledge of the fact that a copy had made its way onto the northern soul circuit across the Atlantic Ocean.
Within a few short years, the single was such a popular spin in northern soul clubs, with its beating mid-tempo rhythm and soulful vocals, that Probe – a subsidiary of ABC – caught wind and reissued the song in 1971. Much to the surprise of everybody involved, the single ended up topping the UK singles charts for three consecutive weeks in 1971, before eventually being knocked off the top spot by Rod Stewart, of all people.
During that unexpected chart-topping run, though, The Tams managed to visit their newly-established UK audiences, going as far as to perform the single on Top of the Pops on multiple occasions over the course of the year, including the infamous Christmas special.
Northern soul might have started out as a niche scene reserved for the movers and shakers of northern England’s fleeting mod subculture, but if the Tams showed anything with their number-one hit, it was that the scene had snowballed into a complete cultural phenomenon by the early 1970s – a phenomenon that is still ongoing to this day.
