The northern soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of sixty-year-olds and several generations of new converts, and its celebration of 1960s soul has an international following. This co-produced book brings together newly commissioned essays together with pivotal earlier articles that have defined the field so far. These chapters are interspersed with key journalistic articles, evocative photographs, and interviews with the directors of northern soul-themed films. This anthology is the first to provide a wide variety of perspectives on the history and contemporary nature of the scene, and creates a forum for vibrant dialogue and debate amongst academic researchers, students and those immersed in the scene. Representations of the scene from different media, and different historical locations, are juxtaposed to construct a rich and diverse statement about the music, people, places and practices that constitute the northern soul scene in the UK and beyond.
What began as an underground 60s Mod scene in unlicensed, no-frills clubs in the North West of England became a youth craze that has long surpassed all others. The Northern Soul scene has confounded its critics by surviving and growing into an adult dance phenomenon whose followers share a passion for the music of Black America unrivalled anywhere else in the world. The Story of Northern Soul takes the first ever in-depth look at the culture, the music, the artists and the people frequenting the all-night venues which are synonymous with the British Soul Scene. Packed with memorabilia and anecdotes from the Twisted Wheel in Manchester to the mighty Wigan Casino, The Story of Northern Soul is the definitive history of a dance scene that refuses to die.
The view from the dancefloor: this book strips away misty-eyed nostalgia and provides a blunt, honest, firsthand and often humorous account of this crucial 1970s club scene
The author of Detroit 67 captures Northern England’s underground music scene of the 1970s and ‘80s in this candid memoir of late nights and heavy beats. Young Soul Rebel is a compelling and intimate story of northern soul, Britain's most fascinating musical underground scene. Author Stuart Cosgrove takes the reader on a personal journey through the iconic clubs that made it famous, like The Twisted Wheel, The Torch, Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca and Cleethorpes Pier. He also details the bootleggers that made it infamous, the splits that threatened to divide the scene, the great unknown records that built its global reputation and the crate-digging collectors that travelled to America to unearth unknown sounds. A sweeping memoir that covers fifty years of British life, Young Soul Rebel places the northern soul scene in a larger social and historical context that includes the rise of amphetamine culture, the policing of youth culture, the north-south divide, the decline of coastal Britain, the Yorkshire Ripper inquiry, the rise of Thatcherism, the miners' strike, the rave scene and music in the era of the world wide web.
The story of Northern Soul is one of practically total immersion, dedication and devotion, where the plain concept of the 'night out' was elevated to sacramental dimensions. Where devotees pushed their bodies, their finances and sometimes their minds to brutal and unforgiving extremes. For those who went through that involvement every test of faith or endurance was worth bearing. - From Northern Soul: An Illustrated History. 'It was a drugs scene, it was a clothes scene. It was about dancing. It came out of this thing. It was about pills that made you go fast. To go fast to make the scene happen.' - Chris Brick In the late 1960s, a form of dance music took a feverish hold on the UK, finding its heart in the north of England. The music of 1960s-70s black American soul singers combined with distinctive dance styles and plenty of amphetamines to create what became known as Northern Soul - a scene based around all night, alcohol-free club nights, arranged by the fans themselves - setting the blueprint for future club culture. Northern Soul tapped into a yearning for individual expression in northern teenagers, and exploded into a cultural phenomenon that influenced a generation of DJs, songwriters and designers for decades to come. Acclaimed photographer and director Elaine Constantine has brought the movement to life in her film Northern Soul - and that film was the starting point for this book, Northern Soul: An Illustrated History. However, what started out as a project largely comprising of Constantine's stunning on-set photography, featuring her young, talented cast and highly authentic production, has turned into a unique illustrated history of Northern Soul. In its final form, the beautiful new photography holds the book together thematically, but its real depth lies in the material from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that Elaine and Gareth have researched and pulled together. Of course, no book can claim to represent everything about a culture. But Northern Soul: An Illustrated History concentrates on individuals' personal stories from that heady era, as well as being crammed full of truly atmospheric contemporaneous photography - not from press photographers, but from the kids themselves. Be it snaps of soul fans in car parks, hitching a lift or mucking around in photo booths, the combination of real people plus real (and often very dramatic) stories - not to mention the complete absence of label scans and DJ's top tens - means that the book stands out as a very different proposition from anything yet published on Northern Soul. We would like to think that above all, this book attempts to give you a feel for what it was really like to be there at the time.
This book, which builds on a three-year immersive ethnographic study, argues that what scene participants do and say within the northern soul scene constitutes a claim to belong. For younger members, making claims to belong is problematic in a scene where dominant notions of authenticity held by insiders are rooted in a particular past: the places, people, events, and soundscapes of particular venues during the 1970s. In order to engage with this past, young men and women participate in a range of discursive practices. This book argues that these practices, and the ways they intersect and deviate from dominant notions of authenticity, represent shared and individual negotiations of the 'true soulie'. In doing so, it reveals the rich experiences of the younger generation of this multigenerational music scene, and the ways they establish a claim to belong to a scene first formed before they were born.
This book examines the development of northern soul, its clubs, publications, and practices by locating it in the shifting economic and social context of the English midlands and north in the 1970s. Using fanzines, diaries, letters, and oral testimony it presents a vivid insight into the scene. It makes a major contribution to our understanding of the connections between class and music in post-war Britain.
This book provides a vivid historical ethnography of the 1970s Northern Soul Scene, drawing on the author's personal involvement in this as well as extensive research. The book examines how cultural patterns and normative standards are established through individual practices and group interaction,and aims to show how participants in the scene became converted to actions that they once thought unacceptable - for a substantial majority this was amphetamine use, and for a minority, opiate use and burglary. The book shows how early social background experiences influenced how quickly participants started using amphetamines and whether they subsequently became involved in criminal activities such as the burglary of pharmacies, and suggests a link between burglary of chemist shops, opiate use and fatalities from drugs overdose. Such high-risk behaviour is associated with previous delinquency and early social background, rather than the nature of involvement in the subculture.The book shows how early life influences have a powerful impact on shaping social identity, attachment to the subculture, and involvement in crime. How and why individuals become involved in the subculture, and the impact it had on identity, are central themes to the study. The findings suggest that while involvement in the Northern Soul Scene provided valued memories and friendships, it did not impede movement to the conventional roles and responsibilities of adulthood. The book concludes with a summary of its implications for the sociology of adolescence, subcultural theories and deviant careers.
