Sixteen was the minimum age for Wigan Casino’s midweek Northern Soul ‘Early Sessions’ – a kindergarten spin-off of the Weekend All Nighter that had made this old school ballroom a place of pilgrimage and, briefly, the most famous nightclub in the world. And so, armed with a fictitious birthdate, 14-year-old me would have to convince the formidable Mrs Woods on the door to let me pass. I don’t think either of us could have imagined that, a few decades later, in August 2023, I’d be standing on the stage of the Royal Albert Hall compering and curating a Northern Soul ‘Prom’, which would become the most watched prom concert on iPlayer.
In 1968, after a visit to Manchester’s Twisted Wheel club, Dave Godin, owner of London’s Soul City Records, told staff not to waste time playing current hits from the US soul charts to northern tourist / football fan customers; “Just play them what they like – Northern Soul’. The name stuck. ‘Northern Soul’ came to mean propulsive, vibrant music of black origin released on small independent US labels like Mirwood and Revilot in the second half of the 1960s which, magnificent though they were, had invariably flopped.
But in what we’d now term an act of ‘cratedigging’ or, more cerebrally, ‘curation’, collectors and DJs in the English Northwest and Midlands unearthed these obscurities which became the heart of a new cult in the UK, celebrated in clubs like Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca and the Golden Torch in Stoke.
When the idea of a Northern Soul ‘Prom’ – now the basis of a touring show with the BBC Concert Orchestra and singers – was first mooted, along with the excitement came niggling qualms. Were we trying to ‘catch lightning in a bottle’, to recreate the ephemeral magic of the original seven inches in an august but possibly neutering environment? And though the records themselves are clearly irresistible, there is, for the true devotee, an arcane fanaticism surrounding them that borders on the religious. Names of long-defunct clubs in Wolverhampton, Bolton or Cleethorpes are evoked as if they were the temples of Angkor Wat; rare singles on obsolete labels are venerated as artefacts of the sect.
Northern Soul’s relationship with mainstream culture has always been problematic. When the scene went briefly ‘overground’ in the mid to late 70s, the tracks that entered the pop chart, largely novelty cash-ins like Footsie by Wigan’s Chosen Few – ‘tailor mades’ as they were dismissively known – were reviled by the cognoscenti. Asking for one of these in Russ and Richard’s record shop in Hurst St, Wigan would invite instant scorn from both proprietors and clientele. Playing one at a real Northern Soul night would and still will clear a jeering dance floor.
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