Northern Soul 1

I have near-perfect recall for the morning Wigan Casino opened its doors for the first of many Northern Soul all-nighters, on the 23rd September 1973.
I’d pre-arranged a ride in one of the fleet of cars heading on to Wigan from Blackpool Mecca’s Highland Room. But I ended up under the spell of a pretty brunette from Burton on Trent, who asked if I wanted to share her (and her friend’s) guest house room on Blackpool’s South Shore?
‘Indeed I do!’
I forsook my lift to Wigan Casino’s opening night and spent whatever cash I had on her drinks. Come night’s end, she went to the loo with her friend and when I was the last person left in the Highland Room, I realised I’d been had-over for half a dozen lager and blacks (for which I probably ‘borrowed’ the money, ‘cause I was always skint): the girls had done a side-shuffle through the alternate exit in the lobby.

At 4 am I was sitting on the steps of a deserted Blackpool Mecca, considering whether I should climb the walls of the bus depot behind the Mecca and sneak onto a comparatively warm yellow bus until morning (not for the first time). A drunken local wobbled towards me, on his way home from a lock-in at one of Blackpool’s working men’s clubs (remember those?).
‘What’s up, lad? Nowhere to stay?’
I told him about the runaway brunette.
‘Come on. You can have the couch,’ he beckoned.

Latterly, I would’ve been wary of such an offer. But I made the gut judgement that this bloke had no cloaked intentions. He lived with his Ma in one of the streets off Bloomfield Road, and I sat chewing my face off on the living room settee until his mother got up. Withstanding my protests, she insisted on cooking me a full English fry-up:- for reasons I am about to explain, getting it down my throat was problematic and for years afterwards I couldn’t look an egg in the eye without nausea.

The elephant in the Northern Soul ballroom has always been amphetamines, often skirted over with a nudge and a wink and dressed up in blurry euphemisms; one such, from Blues and Soul Magazine in the 70’s, stated that ‘there was enough energy at the Torch to light up the whole of Stoke’.
And probably Staffordshire and Shropshire, too!

But the fudged detail was that this energy was fueled by medical grade amphetamines, manufactured by pharmaceutical giants Riker in Loughborough, and Smith, Kline & French, which had been jemmied out of local chemists, busted out of Barnes & Crompton in Preston (see Northern Soul 2), or siphoned from your aunt’s bottle of slimming pills. Put plainly, ‘speed’ was as integral to the Northern Soul scene as the vinyl spinning on the decks, and without it there would have been no all-nighters and not much of a ‘scene’.

Back in the day, my weekend started at Sale Mecca’s Blue Room on a Thursday (Fridays were optional), on to Blackpool Mecca for Saturday night, Wigan Casino until Sunday morning, and ended in a twitching, exhausted heap after a Sunday all-dayer like The Ritz in Manchester, which still lives up the road from what was the Hacienda (sadly, O2’s rebranding has tainted the historic facade).

When I left school I got a job at a textile mill and on my way to the 6 am early shift on a Monday, I was so delirious through lack of sleep I sometimes thought I was being followed…by my own shadow!

Even at the time I did not consider my pill-popping to be right and proper behaviour, and much of the youthful attraction was owed to the fact that it damn-well wasn’t.

But wherever drugs are part of the story, hypocrisy and double standards are never far away, and the drug ‘tell-all’s’ employed by band members, actors and former sports stars like Andre Agassi, to provide a marketing pedestal from which to launch a book, are a no-no for people in lesser paid (though far more responsible) professions, who aren’t allowed blemishes in a world hell-bent on rewarding liars and cheats for their success rate.

I should point out to a general readership that enforcing the reality of ‘what was/is’ isn’t an endorsement of Class A culture; rather, it’s a reaction to the platitudes, lies and interminable PR-speak, which poisons the well of all good writing and journalism.   

In the case of Northern Soul, it is also an inconvenient truth for the marketeers who want to sell you the next (old) new look without the stigma, and which talking heads like Russ Winstanley seem happy to edit out… (for a fee?)

‘You were part of a wonderful, friendly, atmospheric movement,’ platitudinizes Wigan Casino’s original DJ, for a ‘documercial’ masquerading as something else.
Geddafuckinway!

That it was artificially induced is conveniently thrown out with the bath water so you can be sold the bubbles. I suppose the funniest example of selective editing has to be the healthy-living breakfast cereal ad (that none of us were ever in a fit state to swallow… before Wednesday), which must’ve inspired many a titter in old-school pill-heads.

In those days, each sizeable town had a duo of drug squad detectives.
Bolton’s double-act was Creme and Turner and in Blackpool they went by the names Abbott and Tasker (no prizes for guessing their nicknames).

I first got up-close-and-personal with Detective Tasker when getting off the X60 bus early one Friday evening, at the terminus that used to live just inland of The Manchester pub, when he confronted me at the exit carrying my ‘soulie’ travel bag.

‘We don’t want your sort in our town,‘ he stated whilst shunting me back inside the bus station, where I was instructed to get on the next bus home (‘Why certainly, Officer!’)

As soon as he turned his back, I pegged it across the concourse – by then, I knew those backstreets as well as a local – and couldn’t wait to tell Mouse and my Blackpool mates of the encounter, to top up my street cred..

Anyhow, it was Abbott and Tasker who provided the first memorable challenge to my blind acceptance of an indulgent lifestyle. I can’t now recall the location, but we ran into this double act on a night out in Blackpool, when a rum lad and supplier-of-plenty called Rob Brock** had the balls to confront Messrs Abbott and Tasker, about why they were intent on stopping us having a good time?

‘Babies are born into this world every day without limbs and without food to survive. And here you lot are, just fucking yourselves up. So don’t talk to me about a good time.’ snarled Abbott with genuine conviction.
Thud! Our smirks hit the floor. Each looked to another to muster a riposte but nobody stepped up – Abbott’s words left an indelible mark on this Catholic conscience, though they made little impression on Rob, and we were soon back in his dank Poulton-le-Fylde council flat chatting endless dry-tongue fluff-balls on a(nother) downer.

At the core of Northern Soul was one of the most powerful cocktail’s ever mixed by a generation, and this maelstrom of elements amounted to an almost unbreakable (and often fatal) spell.

Start with a punishing rhythm and add amphetamines to bounce you to the beat. Throw in hymn-like blood-vocals to inspire weekly worship, spiced with simple, mantra-like lyrics to stir both yearning and acute sentimentality. Then, elevate rare vinyl to the status of Holy Relics, throw in some reactionary ‘nobody gets us’ ardour and – when the initial big bang starts to fade – (self?)appoint some Inquisitors with skin in the commercial game, to enforce the orthodoxy of the past.

Like I say, one of the most potent cocktails known to teenage (wo)man. But if you take either of the two main ingredients out of this potion, the spell is broken and real life will gradually creep back in.

Even for healthy teenagers, such excess is hard to maintain, and the only kind memory of  my working week was the lunchtime retreat to the wall of the M61 motorway, which sped noisily alongside the mill (which still stands, and the traffic still does).

Perched high above the busy tarmac, I dreamt of faraway places like Stoke, Leicester, Wolverhampton and Blackpool, where my fellow soulies were similarly trapped in mundane workdays and we mourned each passing weekend until sufficiently rejuvenated to look forward to the next one.

In fact this is a neat definition of most people’s time of youthful glory and dangerous living:- half a week recovering and reliving the past, and the other half living in expectation of another unhealthy fix of fast living.

Strangely, the thing I least remember about Wigan Casino is the dancing. I suppose this is because one dance blurs into the next, and each buzz was dependent on your condition when your favourite intro broke free of the speakers. But I often did more bla bla than dancing, and sometimes it took me four hours to talk my way out of the cloakroom.

Soon, we’d be plundering milk bottles from the blocks of flats near the Casino, and made to feel unclean by the pungent whiff of chlorine at Wigan baths. Then it was back to Blackpool in sufferance, or to an all-dayer for more of the same, until my bloody shadow was chasing me down the street again.

The real Northern Soul was a contradictory phenomenon, because it was a cutting edge dance movement that was inspired and sustained by music from the past, and although it (eventually) became famous around the world, it was played out on a relatively small provincial stage; hence the subsequent years of politicking, back-biting and parochial bickering about whose version of The Faith is kosher.

In the days of the Torch in Stoke-on-Trent, and particularly the glory years of Blackpool Mecca, there was a rich seam of undiscovered musical nuggets waiting to be mined.

But as I later outgrew the restrictions of the Northern Soul badge, and a dress code that plummeted sharply from ‘mod-cool’ to daft Dex’s Bay City Rollers, it seemed clear that Northern Soul had sowed the seeds of its own ruin in the collector’s rule of rarity. I mean, how ridiculous that black American musicians had to remain undiscovered and condemned to a life of poor obscurity, so that us lot had something suitably rare to dance to!

Downstairs for dancin’, upstairs for thinkin’, people – if rarity is a foundation stone (the fewer pressings the better), and ‘original vinyl only’ a requirement on the turntables, how the fuck is a thriving music genre even possible?
The fact is it isn’t and never was.

But one (wo)man’s loss is another’s gain and DJ’s, club promoters, traders in rare vinyl and even bootleggers have made more from those records than many of the musical performers who gave them life – performers more talented than any of the aforementioned.

Musical boundaries are not redefined and expanded upon in dusty Stateside warehouses or King’s Lynn Soul Bowls, but by musicians and songwriters with living skills; preferably with the ever-rarer desire to communicate something more worthy than X-factor fame-lust: – so many singers – so many desperate to be looked at – so many agents – so little substantive art.

To my ears, the meaningful album attained a flawed perfection in Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’, in which Marvin soared (fleetingly) above the trappings of the musical production line, fame and a fucked-up personal life, and for me this album has never been bettered (there’s a telling snapshot of Marvin’s flip-side, seen through the rear-view mirror, in Bobby Womack’s autobiography).

In a burst of one-upmanship, I once proudly told one of the lads I used to work with that I saw Marvin perform at the Apollo in Manchester. He one-upped me back by telling that he’d actually gone out to Belgium when he learned Marvin was staying there and pretty much ended up living with his entourage for months – now that’s how you one-up a soul boy!

Because Northern Soul’s keepers of the status quo have always held label rarity to be of greater value than musical quality, and Penny Black-type rarity is NOT the mother of artistic invention, the standard of Northern Soul discoveries were destined to fade into mediocrity and un-danceable slowness, as the fount of superlative commercial failures dried up.

In truth, I was uncomfortable with the quasi-religious status bestowed upon The Faith from quite early on; particularly the over-simplified exaltation of rare soul’s unknown soldiers, who had supposedly been martyred on the commercial altar of souled-out junk.
Why?

Primarily because the good folk on whose efforts Northern Soul was built did not perform and make music to keep a rare vinyl industry afloat with their poverty. Like every artist, they wanted to be recognised and make a living from their skills, not traded on obscurity at Wigan Casino and Cleethorpes Pier, and patronised in later years with scraps from tables of those who profited massively from the artistically null-and-void status quo.

In the main, lyrics were cobbled together from strands of common sentiment and then ‘cut on a shoestring’ by some wannabe Berry Gordy: ironically, had they fulfilled their ambition to be successful, we would never have shuffled a brogue to their thumping beat (they would’ve been just too darn… too darn… too darn commercial).

As I grew older, there was also the problem identified by Kant, in that whilst music might inspire feelings, it rarely gives more than fleeting shape to ideas  -  challenging people with ideas is the realm of the written word, which trumps every other medium of expression (and which is subject matter for words with greater ambition than those you now read) for – in the words of Churchill – only words last forever.

Artistic interpretation of anything with cult/quasi religious status is notoriously difficult, and the cutting room floor of many a screen venture is littered with good intentions.

Tony Palmer’s 1977 Northern Soul documentary fell short because the edgy kids didn’t want to be in front of a lens, the drugs were omitted (they had to be, otherwise he would’ve shut the place down for us) and he insisted on projecting the ee-by-gum Wigan working classes onto the story, when the reality was that Northern Soulies were from every walk of life and background.

However, using Dave Withers as a point of focus was certainly an inspired choice, for few have been more sincere (and obsessive) about the music than Dave. But the out-takes that someone put on youtube told a fuller story – a long queue of wide-eyed folk who were clearly all off their heads.

More recently the film ‘Soul Boy’ paid attention to period detail and I resist criticising Elaine Constantine’s Northern Soul film, primarily because of the Herculean efforts it took to finish it. And whilst it is not enough to raise it up above tribute, many dance scenes do look authentic, she rightly put the drugs at the centre of the film and she shows a skilled photographer’s attention to darkness and light.

But the hazards of placating the history boys, whilst appealing to (and educating) a mass audience, is nigh impossible, and without the fiery spark of inspiration most scripts descend into dumb-down mediocrity along a cheap necklace of cliché-encrusted platitudes.

I believe there’s still a good television story in which Northern Soul can play a major part, but it needs freeing from the inflexible custodians and owners of Northern Soul Inc., who’d have us dancing forever backwards to the same old playlist through rose-tainted speakers.

One lesson to be learned from films like Northern Soul and Soul Boy is how famously good  former Rolling Stone magazine writer Cameron Crowe’s script / movie ‘Almost Famous‘ actually is, reaffirming the case for a writer’s full ownership of the story, and putting a great script above (and before) all other film-making considerations… which is why mediocre TV drama is everywhere and why so few truly great movies ever get made.

Richard Searling (see separate piece) is one of the original Wigan Casino DJs, a soul venue promoter and arguably Northern Soul’s main player, and the two of us go back a long way.

I have fond memories of my time on the road with Richard, and I danced the Six Million Steps from the Va Va to jazz funk nights at Angels in Burnley, which he hosted with dance club veteran Paul Taylor before the rave scene properly exploded.

As a Blackpool regular, I saw a lot of Ian Levine too, though I had much less in common with the testy clever-clogs.

With a look of Billy Bunter on dress-down Friday, and the microphone manner of a school Librarian who’d been asked to step in and run the disco, Ian ‘and this one goes something like this’ was possibly the most unnatural microphone DJ I’ve ever encountered (apparently they can’t shut him up between discs these days: is he back on the Billy?).
But BOY does Ian know his musical footnotes.

A curious amalgam of obsessive collector and impatient seeker of the next big thing, Ian Levine was (still is) a walking-talking archive of soul music knowledge, and for those who put dates-and-detail before dance steps (and you’ve probably guessed that I do not), Ian is quite possibly the king – and as custodian of his own legend, I feel sure he’d fully endorse my opinion ;).

Blackpool Mecca’s Highland Room

Ian Levine played Blackpool Mecca with Colin Curtis (Tony Jebb was before my time), and the difference between the Mecca’s Highland Room and Wigan Casino is tricky to synopsise (as many of us went to both), but I’ll have a go.

In addition to hardcore Northern soulies, the Highland Room attracted a relatively small band of trendy Blackpool kids, plus regulars from further afield, who rarely went to Wigan, didn’t do much speed and who basically came along because the scene was different from the usual Saturday night vomit.

These lot were refreshingly cool dressers, and from ’73 to 1977 Blackpool Mecca pretty much trounced everywhere else for imaginative, groundbreaking dancers, because – unlike Wigan, from perhaps ‘75 onwards – these people both dared and wanted to be different, as opposed to being fearful of not fitting in with the daft dance code forming in the wings (those fcuking cling-on Conservatives again).
A uniform of bags, ninety four pockets, back-drops and sweaty vest was too naff for them, and you knew that neither Blackpool nor an insular music scene could contain them for long.

These and other (often passing) progressives were attracted to Levine and Curtis, because they were always pushing boundaries and breaking new records, and to the Highland Room in particular because you could dress up and also get a night’s sleep…assuming you wanted one.

By contrast, you simply had to be off your nut at Wigan, and the Casino became nostalgic for its past almost as soon as it got started: one hurtling forever forward, the other destined to look forever backwards and ‘Listen to those Memories‘, as a Casino badge from the oldies all-nighters aptly stated.

As Levine and Curtis shifted towards jazz-funk and fledgling disco – namely, new music – and the staunch Wiganites became evermore entrenched with the ghosts of vinyl past, the opposing poles of progressives and retros used to collide at the Ritz all-dayers in Manchester every few weeks, which for a time was an uneasy mix of the two musical genres. But when Chris Hill turned up to do a set, with a crew of southern soulies from Canvey Island, most of the old school went the way of Elvis and followed Shelvo’s ‘Levine Must Go’ banner out of the building.

Northern Soul’s rule of rarity meant that those with rarefied labels pretty much ran the show (and still do), and you didn’t get those records without money.

Contrastingly, the House and Garage revolution was truly democratic because kids were finally free to turn out dance music for themselves, without the strings associated with a Motown-like production line (whether failed or successful) so entertainingly documented in Standing in the Shadows of Motown.

Admittedly, there was no one to oversee the musical output, so a large percentage of it was destined to be repetitive, drug-inspired gar(b)age. But I suppose that’s one price of the freedom to express.

Historically, it is the rule breakers who kick-start real underground cultural movements. But cutting-edge bad boys and lime-lighters rarely flourish in the same environment (unless, like ‘selfies’, lime-lighting is the sole point of the ‘look-at-me’ exercise), and when television lighting brought a mainstream media glare to Wigan, the edgy types, who were an essential ingredient in Northern Soul and Wigan Casino’s air of cool, took cover in the shadowy lanes that led to House Music and the rave scene circa 1988/9, and backdrops for the cameras were sprung by latecomers clambering onto a well-lit bandwagon.

A premium regret about the Northern Soul days is that I was stupid enough to ‘lose’ all my photographic prints and negatives: like a tit, I just stuck boxes of them in the bin when having a tidy-up tizzy fit.

In those days, my enthusiasm as a photographer lacked vision, but I took my Praktica to many venues and I had quite a collection of photos, including Richard at the Casino (and everywhere else), Colin Curtis, Larry Lightening, Smokey and a regular rogues gallery lining the walls of the Highland Room, as well as the lovely Les Cockell, Bernie Golding and a host of others, and dance floor photos from the Mecca’s Highland Room, Wigan Casino, the Blue Rooms and Carolines in Manchester.

I suppose the person who should be happiest at my loss is Ian Levine, as pictures of him snogging the pocket rocket Christine Goika in the Highland Room didn’t show his truer side (not a match made in Heaven that one, eh Ian?).

Contrived talk of a Northern Soul revival seems to run on a loop, tethered to money-spinning ‘anniversaries’, and the indomitable engine that rumbled towards Elaine Constantine’s eventual film did nourish enthusiasm and some good dancers, for which much credit should go to Brent Howarth. But the reasons many in the Class of 2013 adopted a soul role out on the floor probably had more to do with getting into film & television, and many (both arrived for and) left the soul scene with the film crew.
Anyhow, why hang around in a music scene on which you can have little influence?

The music has already transported many (backwards) from youth to retirement, and the embargo on musical innovation guarantees there’s no new batch of soul martyrs in sight.
Contrastingly, look at rock music and how it clearly flourishes because the genre is continually being expanded and reinvented by its practitioners.
Similarly black music, house, dance music and all the related sub-genres, where the young are always doing new things and pushing their own boundaries: here, at least, the old stuff can be reinterpreted in the mix, particularly now with the use of stems.

But Northern Soul has to be the only music culture on the planet, where newness is forbidden and the people who listen and dance to the music – unlike clubbing DJ’s – will never be allowed to reinterpret as they see fit, nor rewrite the rules to ring in the new.

So Northern Soul arrives back at the same old paradox: how does it survive?

Well it does survive: in fact you could say its dusty stagnation has flourished in the past two decades, as parents with empty nests returned to scenes, sounds and habits of youth.

I’m not immune to the power of nostalgia and I still turn out for a periodic dance and at one of Richard’s Blackpool Tower extravaganzas, which are a triumphal Northern Soul version of Last Night of the Proms, I got to pondering a question others have asked: who are all these people, and why – if they went to Wigan – do I not know any of them?

The answer is they most likely didn’t (and therefore I don’t), but then if your Casino membership card was a qualification for entry it would’ve died out ages ago.

The fact is that Northern Soul has morphed into the opposite of what it originally was: rather than an exhilarating and dangerous youth culture, it is now a safe, ready-made scene for people of a certain age, and the one dance culture in which it is permissible for you to join up late and learn to dance later.

I suppose this is no bad thing, because it provides a solid social scene for people of a certain age, who would otherwise have none. But youngsters joining the party must understand – and be happy with – the fact that all their best lines (and moves) will have been spoken (and danced) before.

However, like the first time around, free-thinkers and musical innovators will soon be on the move, to fertile pastures where individual skills and vision can blossom into fullness and flourish. Or, more likely, they’ll be nowhere to be found.

I still love the music, I made many lifetime friends on the scene, and I feel privileged to have been there, for that spectacular, spontaneous combustion – which can never be re-created, only re-enacted – and I’m even happier I survived with body and soul intact, for there were many who did not.

We danced, we lived dangerously and it was unique.

But if I could go back in time, would I give the floor a final dusting for one last bob and shuffle?

Maybe. But my time might be better spent finding the youths I knew but didn’t, if you get my meaning, though this time when they were ON their heads and OFF the dance floor, because the real Northern Soul life was dependent on an unnatural weekly high, and the subtleties of friendship just got bulldozed by the Saturday night rush and shat on by the inevitable come-down.

But unless Mr Levine can arrange it with the good Doctor and his Tardis, it cannot be.

So I settle for warm remembrance of how beautiful you all were in the glory days of youth.
Our youth.
When we were the epicenter of every dance floor and the known universe, for we were soulies once and young.

In memory of Sutty, Bootlace, Ged Rudd, Les Cockell and many others. And one lad I did get to know whilst ON my head, the lovely Paul Crane from Blackpool, who died last year-but-two.
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Northern Soul 2 – The Drugs