Is there a Future?
Northern Soul – Pondering the legacy for future generations.
I’ve been pondering this question for decades; more-so since rethinking and rewriting these essays, and adding a couple more to wrap up the project.
But indulge me for a few paragraphs before giving shape to my considerations.
In the 1990’s, when I was traipsing a bag full of tennis rackets around local schools to promote my tennis courses, I drafted a television script originally titled THE LAST SOUL MEN (with a nod to one of Bobby’s albums).
The underlying story was about systemic sporting snobbery and the lack of sporting opportunity for the rest of us (see Tennis: A Personal Odyssey).
But a further thread within the script was the arrival of an inspired/inspiring teacher at a tough urban school, who is what you might call a traditional Northern Soulie…(I couldn’t bring myself to taint him with vest, bags and badges, and instead chose a classier two-tone mohair suit).
Some of the kids at the school are already skilled at mixing and when they get hold of his record box, they remix and mash up the lot (to his initial horror) – his students want to remake everything with youthful skills and vigour, whereas he guards memories and vinyl pressings like holy relics, and there’s much humour and also enlightenment in these conflicting attitudes and interests.
Contra to every screen offering about Northern Soul, which – like the latter-day ‘scene’ – are all backward-looking, towards the one period when Northern Soul was fearless and new, my idea was to reinvent the genre for a fresh generation by freeing it from the past. Although film director Ken Loach said he loved the script – and at his own suggestion, gave me a personal introduction to the William Morris Agency – it never got before a lens (a full re-write of a radical musical mash-up is on my to-do list).
Anyhow, my point within the script was and is this – there’s a musical revolution waiting to re-happen with the whole Northern archive, but before it can ignite, the oeuvre needs freeing from the grip of the current artistically null vinyl attitudes.
So back to the question: is there a future for Northern Soul?
The musicians and core catalogue of music is amazing, and – assuming it continues along its current blinkered course – there will always be a geeky niche for dance students, obsessive collectors, Radio 6 DJ’s and blossoming undergraduates discovering the past, similar to the way many discover The Beatles in their fresher year: in short, it will always seem cool to some, and generate business and/or kudos for an ever-shrinking group of others.
But zipped inside the original straitjacket, the future is a pale shadow of what it was and might’ve been, if a greater number of the original innovators had put up a bloodless fight with the collectors for control of the NS Spectrum, instead of escaping to the comparative artistic freedom of contemporary soul and House Music.
Certainly, if Northern Soul is ever going to appeal to new generations, in numbers similar to the originals, a digital democratization of the entire archive is necessary – sack off The Inquisitors Handbook, get rid of the name-tag, rip up the vinyl p(l)aybook and and let youth do what only youth can do??
Owing to the fact it’s been stripped back to a music scene dominated by collectors of rare 60’s and 70’s labels, which has attracted a disproportionate number of folk with the same change-resistant collectors gene, this simply won’t happen on the current watch.
But even within the ‘original vinyl only’ commandment there is some room for innovation and much needed dynamism.
Firstly, Mixing.
A majority of Northern Soul DJ’s are not DJ’s in the modern dance sense – they’re record collectors who spin vinyl on the decks, and for anyone familiar with the work of great house DJ’s like Carl Cox, Frankie Knuckles or Sasha at his finest – who’ve developed skills equal to the artists they play – the continuity at a NS gig can be irritatingly disjointed: –
dance stop…HISTORY LESSON… fast slow… fast slow… HISTORY LESSON… get cramp!
Employed largely for their vinyl collections, most have little idea how to work a crowd, build up momentum and keep a dance-floor bouncing, by drip feeding dopamine hits at perfectly measured intervals (a characteristic of all the best dance DJ’s in-the-mix).
Vinyl mixing is itself a waning discipline, but if people with well-developed mixing skills were allowed to re-interpret a Northern Soul record box, all the familiar tunes would be reinvented at every session – without fail.
That’s what mixing is about. Each DJ set is a process, which relies on individual skill to time-and-again translate the familiar into something exhilarating and new.
Take Ty Karim’s Lighten Up Baby as an example of the possibilities. How many titles use the same backing track – is it four or five?
Anyhow, the permutations those 4-5 versions offer up to the hands of a skilled mixer are endless. And because innovative DJ’s see things differently, and they’re always experimenting and improving their skills (not to mention striving to be the best), those few versions of one backing track can be served up in a thousand imaginative ways.
In their desperation for something new and partially original, some NS folk are stripping the vocals off Northern tracks and introducing new layers, and some are very good. Obviously we’re wading into murky copyright waters here, which is different story, but owing to the bonkers protectionism of ‘vinyl only’, the best chance you have of hearing any of these rare shards of innovation is on youtube – occasionally you’ll hear one on the decks, but only if its been written to vinyl (and preferably if the DJ has the only pressing – same OCD, different half-century).
Secondly, Rare ‘house’ Vinyl?
There’s another vinyl collectors nirvana waiting to explode in the (tens/hundreds of?) thousands of forgotten/overlooked garage and house music tracks from the late 80’s and early 90’s, and a good place to start digging would be Sasha’s early playlists (many tracks listings are still marked as ‘unknown’ – now there’s a worthwhile project for the OCD crowd!).
Other than the fact that this still panders to Luddites and old media, there are obvious flaws in these theoretical mix-quick-fixes. One being that whilst the thousands of great, attention-grabbing intros – like Johnny Sales, the Vel-vettes and Gene Chandler – are dance-floor euphoria waiting to re-happen, the 2-3 minute duration of those tracks isn’t ideal for mixing in the plateaus, which allow those out on the floor a breather between the peaks that work constructively towards swirling crescendos –it’d be all peaks and no plateaus.
(‘Er… whadeejustsay?’ Luddites didn’t understand a fekin’ word of that).
But this weakness could lead to an enduring strength, because it would force mixers to look outside of the officially sanctioned playlist, towards extended versions that help graduate the build-up process, starting with Tom Moulton’s 12” Philly classics (apparently Tom mixed 5,000 tracks in-all), Jazz Funk, garage-soul and the thousands of roof-raising early house tracks that can bamboozle even Shazam’s algos.
However, the best outcome for any such quick-fix could only be an 8th room at the Winter Gardens or a 6th floor at Blackpool Tower, which changes nothing for future generations. For any lasting change – (r)evolutionary change – innovative change – Northern Soul’s Old Guard will probably need to pass on to the great record box in the sky, so the musical seeds can be re-planted in more fertile media than those aged vinyl gro(o)ves in which nothing new can grow.
I do understand the resistance to digital change, and am also aware of the different set of difficulties for artists trying to make money from their work (photographers are plagiarized by knock-off illustrators the world over and AI threatens more scraped plagiarism on an industrial scale).
But it couldn’t be any worse than the scraps they’ve earned to date, and I’ve yet to hear a coherent case for the status-quo: like many articles of the faith, it defies logic and seems to have been accepted without any thought beyond the here-and-now.
As a digital for instance, I’m an avid reader and when ebooks became an option, I was more than sceptical – I’ve always appreciated good design and typography (Eric Gill’s Perpetua being a favourite typeface) and I love the look, feel and even smell of printed media.
So why would I want an ebook reader on my tablet?
Because I’m a reader, not a collector: I could now get 5,000 books in my pocket, which can be filled with free classics from the ever-growing archive at gutenburg.org – why read shallow shite, when the greatest authors of all time are out of copyright and free?
Not to mention the ability to both highlight text without ruining the page, and copy and paste all my notes into a text file when I’ve finished – click, click, done!.
I took a little winning over, but putting the excellent Moon Reader on my tablets was a revelation, and I’ve read more books in the subsequent ten years than the rest of my days combined.
But here’s the point I’m flogging my powers of reason to establish – both paper page and vinyl disk have little-or-no intrinsic value.
Rather, they are merely the medium/media that transports the message – carries the work – because true art, life, meaning and worth live not in inanimate objects, but in the musical notes and words that’ve been pressed or printed onto them.
And whilst I would be ecstatic to chance upon a first edition of, say, George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the power and beauty of the sentences they contain are of infinitely greater value to humanity than the monetary price they might fetch at an auction, and a Penguin Classic is equal in truest value to even the rarest edition – as is a FLAC file of a Jay Boy re-release of a Keymen original.
Were I ever to acquire a priceless copy of a written work, I would feel very uncomfortable owning a rare edition if I knew that, by doing so, I may in some way be limiting someone else’s access to the contents:
Re-Publish and be Damned! I’d say.
In the case of vinyl, I’m not advocating that people should stop collecting rare pressings or playing them – such should be your choice. Rather, I’m pointedly suggesting that the ‘original vinyl only’ rule on the decks is counter-productive, illogical and it has been killing off the musical geese that laid Northern Soul’s vinyl egg since it’s inception.
I’ve often wondered who first thought of OVO ‘original vinyl only’ and made it a hard-and-fast rule at NS dance venues?
To my mind, it can either be those with a vested interest in selling rare vinyl – its a business slogan cynically woven into the Northern Soul badge – or it is an inverted version of the cultural tyranny and elitism, which the originals made a stand against in the first place!
I mean, should great writing only be read from parchment that’s been inscribed with original quill and ink-pot?
Movies shot on Super 8 and stills on Fuji Velvia?
Home video watched on Betamax and Debbie Does Dallas still passed between sticky fingers on VHS tapes? (sorry about the last one – I couldn’t resist).
Really, though: who on the dance floor can tell if what’s being played is vinyl or not, other than by the often audible scratches, particularly noticeable on radio?
Ultimately, Dance music is as dance music does.
It enters through your ears and hopefully inspires your mind and heart to move your feet – if it takes two huge video screens, either side of the decks, to show you the label before you can enjoy what’s playing, it has zero to do with the creative arts or music and everything to do with stifling protectionism and the shallow end of snobbery.
And look on the digital bright side: you won’t get mugged or robbed for a La Cie rugged hard drive or get a hernia carrying CD’s!
I realise I’m pissing in the wind with reactionary soulies of my own generation and it might be easier convincing the Taliban that education-for-all is a win/win.
Certainly, many of my oldest friends disagree (we argue grinningly every time we go out), and – at a multi-DJ soul event at the Band on the Wall – one of them irately shouted ‘play some vinyl’ at digital soul DJ Mike Stephens, even though he’s got nothing to do with Northern, and as such exempt from its draconian vinyl rules.
But they’ve yet to offer me a coherent counter-argument… except ‘We like what we like, so fuckin’ shuddup and stop making sense!’
In 2021 I made a first (and last) visit to those Christmas party gigs in Blackpool, which I quickly realised are a depressing derivative of those turkey and tinsel hotel do’s, where it is customary for people of a certain age to get pissed as a fart and do a conga (er, no fanx!).
Whilst stood to one side of the stage, feeling somewhat superior to the throbbing party hats on the dance floor and regretting my decision to be there, a pretty blonde woman caught my photographic eye (a term I employed whenever my ex caught me side-longing other photographically sound subject matter).
She moved from under the balcony towards the stage, leading an older lady by the hand, which I presumed to be her mother.
Having steadied mum to wait alone between two tables beside the dance floor, she set off to find them both a seat and my first thought was ‘…a seat? At Blackpool Tower? Good fekin’ luck with that!’
But then I saw in Mum’s eyes shades of the Dementia that had infected my own Mother, prior to which none of us knew anything about the Alzheimer’s journey visited upon so many unsuspecting families, and for which nothing can fully prepare you (and which only love helps ease the road ahead).
Here was a daughter, lovingly transporting her mum to the scenes, sounds and motions of her youth; perhaps in the hope of tethering her to the here-and-now a while longer, before losing her to the inevitable abyss.
As the lady stood waiting, with that familiar undulation of fear and fractured reality flitting about her eyes, I noticed two sets of people at tables either side of her. The group at one table had clearly been on the piss all day, and at the other they were in a wide-eyed state of awareness – this second bunch also looked like they’d ended up at the wrong venue, and although they sternly sat out the The Northern Soul Train, at the appearance of the conga they’d surely be heading for the exit.
But the confused lady standing amongst us served as a kind of Ghost of Christmas Future, and – as happened with my mother – the poignancy of her fast-receding life somehow diminished my own petty concerns and self-indulgence, and the two of them – particularly the younger woman – became unwitting representatives of life’s higher purposes.
Although my opinion that musical genres should primarily be the preserve of the young will not change, the humanity on view at an otherwise uninspiring event highlighted that the Northern Soul of now – what it has become – has benefits for many people.
Certainly, those who’ve run venues come rain or shine for the past 40 years, may well have contributed to the capping of musical innovation. But the same vinyl stubbornness has ensured communal continuity, which in turn has guaranteed people of advancing years have always had somewhere to go for a night out, and where people can join the party late, learn a few dance steps on youtube and attend venues where elderly lives are not surplus to requirements.
Does it matter if they weren’t there in the beginning?
Does it matter if they can’t recite the NS catechism and Okeh archive?
If it means folk don’t have to stay home lonely, trawling social media and soulless television that would turn anyone’s heart and mind to mush, it has to be a good thing.
I reckon the triumphalist, thrice-a-year venues that have monetised sentimentality over recent years will probably be Northern Soul’s swansong. And now Stuart Marconi has ticked The Proms off the NS bucket list, Strictly Northern dancing classes and a Vinyl Antiques Roadshow could well follow, as The Northern Soul Train belt out one last song from the band stand of the sinking NS Titanic (’Washed Ashore’, perhaps?).
Fortunately for posterity, the music and dancing is too good not to be rediscovered – remixed, re-modelled and re-invented – by youth, when times of plenty once again return after the forthcoming Ice Age 😉
And whilst I won’t be around to see it, I do hope future custodians jettison the controlling vinyl attitudes that smothered the twins innovation and artistry at birth by hugging way too tightly, ensuring a musical sub-genre would never make music of its own and condemning it thus to the most drawn out of long goodbyes.
evvy evvy 
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