What makes Northern Soul ‘northern’?
For the uninitiated, those who have never felt the bass of ‘The Right Track’ pounding in their chest, or a sprung dancefloor underneath their feet, the realm of northern soul brings with it a multitude of unanswered questions: Who on Earth is Frank Wilson? How did these impossibly rare American soul records find their way onto British shores? And, crucially, what makes northern soul ‘northern’ in the first place.
As far as the northern soul title itself, the endlessly retold origin story of the term centres around Dave Godin, proprietor of Soul City record shop in circa-late-1960s London. While his local clientele were invariably searching for the freshest, hottest funk and soul emanating from the American airwaves, Godin noticed that, week after week, young people with northern accents were coming into his shop searching for obscure soul titles released years prior, many of which had since disappeared into the depths of obscurity.
Thus, Godin gave those customers their own particular section, titled ‘northern soul’.
That certainly explains the title of the enduring musical movement and subculture, but it doesn’t really explain why those northerners were searching for those records, or how they had heard them in the first place. For that, we must delve much further into the social history of this sceptred isle, and turn the clock back to the days in which the north of England was the industrial heartland of an entire empire.
Whereas, down in London, the cultural landscape was constantly changing and shifting as new trends were introduced – seeing the youth culture of the city change from the mods and rockers of the mid-1960s to the hippies of the counterculture age in the matter of just a few years – things didn’t move quite so quickly further up the recently-extended M1.
In a general sense, too, the hippies who carved out the swinging sixties scene in the capital came predisposed to privilege; they had the economic freedom to turn on, tune in, and drop out while studying at university or living off pre-existing wealth. Meanwhile, for working-class communities in the north, kids tended to leave school and go straight into work. By and large, that work wasn’t overly fulfilling, either.
If you were a young, working-class person in the north back in the 1960s and 1970s, your prospects were often limited to being funnelled into steel works, textile mills, coal mines, and other industrial occupations as physically demanding as they were creatively unfulfilling. Inevitably, then, when the weekend finally rolled around, it was down to you to make the absolute most of it.
They didn’t want to trip out on LSD and watch the flowers emerge from their peripherals; they wanted to dance to fast-paced music and stay out all night – northern soul certainly enabled those desires. After all, the bulk of that American soul was being created in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago, with industrial landscapes that mirrored the north of England to an extent.
In essence, then, northern soul blossomed both from that desire to make the most of the weekend and from the fact that much of the north had yet to move on from the subculture heyday of the soul-obsessed mod generation.
To top it all off, the north of England boasted a plethora of dancehalls and venues built to appease the factory workers of the early 20th century, many of which had since fallen into relative disrepair and were therefore able to be rented out for fairly cheap rates.
Wigan Casino – the heart of the northern soul scene from its first all-nighter in 1973 – was hardly a state-of-the-art location, but it gave the likes of Russ Winstanley a certain freedom to experiment with putting soul nights on there. Whereas, in London, clubs were not only more expensive, but they also tended to focus on whatever the current happening sounds were, in an effort to drag in a trendier crowd.
There are, of course, exceptions to these rules, and today northern soul is a nationwide – even international – scene, with some of its most prominent events occurring in London, where The 100 Club has been hosting nights since way back in 1979. Due to its industrial spirit, tethering the region to the epicentre of American soul, and the pounding, weekend-defining rhythms of the scene, though, northern soul will always remain rooted in the north.
