“This is the best”: The northern soul track Johnny Marr classed among his favourite songs of all time
We are all products of our environment, and the music world is no different: The Velvet Underground needed New York, the acid-soaked skies of San Francisco were essential to Jefferson Airplane, and the music of the The Smiths was invariably tied to their roots in the industrial gloom of Manchester.
A far cry from the towering skyscrapers and overpriced coffee shops of modernity, the Manchester of the 1970s was marked by soot-stained decay and perpetually clouded skies. From those rather depressing foundations, though, came a truly revolutionary music scene. During the age of punk, Manchester spawned a wealth of now-iconic groups, ranging from the endearingly abrasive Buzzcocks to the subversive post-punk mastery of Joy Division.
Within the pages of musical history, that entire Manchester scene is often pinned on the Sex Pistols and their fateful 1976 visits to the city’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. Across those two gigs in the scorching summer, attendees included virtually every architect of Manchester’s musical heritage, from The Fall’s Mark E. Smith to John Cooper Clarke, Joy Division, Mick Hucknall, and Factory Records’ Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett. Somewhere in the crowd, though, stood a young Steven Patrick Morrissey.
It took Moz a few more years to land upon his slice of the musical revolution, forming The Smiths in 1982, built around his blossoming songwriting partnership with Johnny Marr. Throughout the band’s momentous rise to the upper echelon of indie heroism, and despite their singing to London-based Rough Trade records, Marr and Morrissey consistently paid homage to their Mancunian roots, both within their lyrics and their musical sensibilities.
After all, Manchester’s musical age didn’t start and end with the punk boom of the mid-1970s. Only a few years prior, the city had been the centre point of the northern soul phenomenon, the music of which always maintained an influence over Johnny Marr.
Beginning in the late 1960s, and reaching its arguable peak the following decade, legions of young people across the north became utterly infatuated with the obscure and forgotten sounds of American soul, recorded years prior and largely forgotten by the musical mainstream. Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club was the ground zero for the northern soul scene, and although it shut its doors when Johnny Marry was only eight years old, its impact on the music of Manchester has always remained.
Every self-respecting soulie has their one essential track, and for Marr it’s the northern soul stomper ‘Keep On Keeping On’, recorded by N F Porter was back in 1971 and adopted by the dancefloors of northern soul shortly thereafter.
“There weren’t many northern soul songs built on guitar riffs; usually, it was piano and brass and bass,” Marr once told Two Paddocks, citing it among his favourite tracks of all time. “This is the best,” the guitarist continued. “Totally unique and gets your attention brilliantly.”
Not only did the song capture the attention of those amphetamine-fueled soul obsessives back in the 1970s, but it certainly played a role in influencing Marr’s playing style during the peak of The Smiths’ output, too. In fact, if you listen closely to the guitarist’s output back in the mid-1980s, the influence of funk, soul, and disco was something of a constant presence, even if The Smiths first arose from the safety-pin revolution of punk.
