‘The Night’: how Wigan Casino saved Frankie Valli’s music career
Frankie Valli is one of those names that command universal respect within the world of music and culture. As the frontman of The Four Seasons throughout the 1960s, Valli’s falsetto voice helped to define the popular music of that era. The singer certainly had no shortage of hit singles, commercial success and legions of adoring fans that surely put his name on the musical map indefinitely. However, the music industry is famously fickle, and by the time the early 1970s rolled around, Valli was at risk of becoming a forgotten relic of the past. His salvation came in the unlikely form of teenagers in Wigan.
For much of the 1960s, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons had been signed to Phillips Records, who put out a deluge of smash-hit singles by the band. As the 1960s came to an end, however, the band found their popularity waning and their position at Phillips teetering on the edge of commercial disaster. Eventually, Valli and company found a new home in Motown, but even the ‘hit factory’ could not revive the career of The Four Seasons. In fact, their first album on Motown, Chameleon, was such a failure that the label refused to release any further material by the group.
Even Valli’s solo material on Motown could not seem to make an impact on the changing landscape of pop music in the early 1970s. As a result, Valli was facing the very real possibility of never recording again due to being seen as commercial poison by major record labels. The only saving grace for Valli lay in the dancefloors of pubs, clubs and venues of Northern England, in which a bizarre music scene was rising in popularity.
The Northern Soul scene, which permeated Northern England during the early 1970s, was perhaps the strangest and most unexpected music subculture of all time. For reasons which, even now, seem pretty vague, legions of young people in places like Wigan, Blackpool and Manchester became obsessed with hugely obscure soul singles from the United States. Many of the tracks that defined the Northern Soul scene had been released the decade prior and subsequently written off as failures by record labels.
Unbeknownst to Frankie Valli, one track from the Motown album Chameleon, entitled ‘The Night’, had made its way over to Wigan Casino – the epicentre of the Northern Soul movement. The song had originally issued in Germany and The Netherlands on the Motown sub-label Rare Earth before being pressed on Mowest in the UK, which made it just obscure enough for soul junkies in Wigan to covet the record, and it became a regular track at the famous all-nighters at Wigan Casino.
Once the song’s popularity became evident to Valli and, more importantly, Motown, the label reissued ‘The Night’. After the 1975 reissue hit the shelves of record stores, the song provided Valli with a commercial renaissance, shooting to number seven in the UK singles charts. The track inspired a resurgence in the music of The Four Seasons, inspiring multiple other hit singles in 1975, which helped to reestablish Valli as a colossal figure within the world of pop and soul.
Even today, Valli’s career is treated with a level of respect and admiration that is not afforded to many vocalists. However, without the Northern Soul scene and the penchant for obscure records that defined the DJs of Wigan Casino, Frankie Valli might have been resigned to fading away into obscurity alongside all the other forgotten pop stars of the 1960s.
