Wigan’s Chosen Few: the bizarre 1975 pop song that capitalised on northern soul
If you were a budding young music fan back in the 1970s, the typical process of finding new music involved tuning into Top of the Pops, reading the music papers, or browsing the new arrivals in your local record shop. Northern soul was an entirely different kettle of fish when it blossomed towards the tail-end of the 1960s, namely because it wasn’t exactly ‘new’.
Whereas virtually every music scene at the time focused on new, cutting-edge, and emerging sounds, northern soul largely rejected modernity. Instead, DJs and dedicated soulies delved into the forgotten record crates and label archives of the previous decade, looking for undiscovered gems that had flopped on their initial release, but were sure to get dancefloors moving in places like Wigan, Manchester, Blackpool, or Stoke. For certain northern soul DJs, in fact, anything released post-1970 is viewed with some suspicion.
Nevertheless, by the time that word of the northern soul scene started to spread beyond the M62 corridor, those old, obscure American soul songs that were dominating the dancefloors at Wigan Casino began to break into the mainstream pop charts. All of a sudden, the weekly chart run-down on Top of the Pops boasted the likes of R Dean Taylor, Chuck Wood, and Dean Parrish alongside the prevailing pop stars of the mid-1970s.
With that influx of unexpected hits, there came the inevitable wave of opportunists keen to capitalise on the trend, which is where Wigan’s Chosen Few enter the picture. An invention of Pye Records, Wigan’s Chosen Few and their hit 1974 single ‘Footsee’ were a rather cringeworthy attempt by the label to make a few quid off the back of the ever-expanding northern soul scene and its popularity.
Other labels had already got in on the trend, with Motown reissuing a plethora of its previously obscure northern soul material to great effect during the early 1970s. When it came to pre-existing material that could serve the needs of the scene, though, Pye fell a little short. So, Pye’s Dave McAleer delved into the depths of the archives and plucked out ‘Footsee’, a 1968 track recorded by the Canadian outfit The Chosen Few.
Unsurprisingly, the song wasn’t a hit upon its release on the Roulette label, so it was ripe for McAleer and Pye to rework it into a far more uptempo, dance-focused single, clearly marketed towards the hordes of new northern soul obsessives. By and large, though, the soulies who actually frequented Wigan Casino on a regular basis quickly developed an intense and unwavering hatred for ‘Footsee’, not least when it appeared as a hit on Top of the Pops, complete with a northern soul dance demonstration on primetime television.
In almost every aspect of their existence, after all, Wigan’s Chosen Few and ‘Footsee’ was directly opposed to everything that made northern soul so special: it wasn’t a lost gem of American soul that had been rediscovered, it wasn’t introduced to the world through the DJ decks of Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca, or any other northern soul venue for that matter, and, crucially, it was invented with the express intent of making money from an otherwise organic, underground music scene.
Despite ‘Footsee’ peaking at a bizarre number nine in the UK singles charts, perhaps owed in part to being backed with Chuck Wood’s bona fide northern soul classic ‘Seven Days Too Long’, it was immediately disowned by true northern soul fans, either as an insult to the scene or a poor novelty cash-grab – both of which are hard claims to dispute.
If nothing else, though, the success of ‘Footsee’ did lay bare just how culture-defining the northern soul scene had become by the mid-1970s, far from its roots in underground nightclubs during the previous decade.
