What was the biggest-selling northern soul song?
Chart-topping hits are the bread and butter of every major artist, record label, and music scene in history, apart from northern soul. From the moment that the scene first emerged towards the tail-end of the 1960s, soulies have made a point of seeking out tracks for the very fact that they didn’t ever trouble the singles chart.
Taking inspiration from the mod subculture which preceded them, northern soul DJs were in a seemingly constant competition over who could seek out, uncover, and reintroduce the most obscure, forgotten soul singles from across the Atlantic, bringing them to the sweaty, amphetamine-fueled masses of Manchester, Wigan, and Stoke. Sure, the odd Marvin Gaye or Dusty Springfield track slipped into sets here and there, but true soulies are only concerned with the records that nobody else has ever heard before.
Inevitably, then, if a track ever received any degree of mainstream success upon its initial release, that often acted as a mark against it within the northern soul scene. Take Al Wilson’s ‘The Snake’ for instance; despite being a regular feature of northern soul nights up and down the nation to this very day, there is a not insignificant part of the soul scene which turns its nose up at the track, both for the fact that it is massively overplayed but also because it reached 27 in the US singles charts upon its first release in 1968.
If northern soul was only interested in the obscure, though, by the mid-1970s, the scene found itself in a paradoxical state. After a few years of bubbling way under the surface, in the industrial towns and cities of northern England, the wider world started paying attention to the queues forming outside Wigan Casino, so much so that the record labels that originally issued that multitude of miss-hits and obscurities began to reissue them to meet the mounting demand.
Ultimately, this had the bizarre effect of sending a selection of northern soul tracks into the UK singles chart, nearly a decade after most of them were first released. From classic floorfillers like Chuck Wood’s ‘Seven Days Too Long’ to R Dean Taylor’s spooky stomper ‘There’s A Ghost In My House’ – which peaked at number three in 1974, six years after Motown first released it, a litany of northern soul favourites became mainstream hits overnight.
While, for some of the more stringent northern soul purists, these newfound hits acted against the original spirit of the movement, the chart success of those reissues only served to highlight just how big a phenomenon northern soul had become during the mid-1970s, in between the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and the abrasive punk which would arrive a few years later.
So, what was the biggest-selling northern soul single?
Even among those various chart successes, it is difficult to accurately measure which northern soul song has been the ‘best-selling’ over the decades. Certainly, tracks like Frank Wilson’s holy grail track ‘Do I Love You (Indeed I Do)’ are among the most recognisable, sought-after, and heavily bootlegged northern soul tracks. If you are looking solely at numbers and hard evidence, though, The Tams’ ‘Hey Girl Don’t Bother Me’ takes the crown.
Originally released back in 1964, on the ABC-Paramount label – or His Master’s Voice here in the UK – the single was a flop until it received some spins on the blossoming northern soul circuit, prompting Probe Records to reissue it in 1971. With that reissue, the single went on to top the singles charts for three consecutive weeks, knocking Diana Ross from the top spot and helping to keep Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’ from reaching number one.
Whether the intensity of its chart success prevents The Tams’ single from being considered a bona fide northern soul classic in the eyes of the rare soul hunters, its chart-topping run cannot be ignored, awarding it the paradoxical title of being the best-selling northern soul single of all time.
