Northern Soul - Keep the Faith The Culture Show

MUSIC: "You're Gonna Make Me Love You" by Sandi Sheldon

Northern soul is the musical religion that refused to die.

Based on a devotion to obscure American soul music,

this underground dance scene exploded across Britain in the 1970s.

At its peak, people travelled hundreds of miles to dance

all night, defying mainstream fashions and the charts.

For a time, places that had been music hall jokes hosted

some of the coolest nightclubs in the world.

Northern soul was the birth of late-night dance

culture in Britain and I was there.

# You gonna make me want you You gonna make me want you

# You gonna make me need you, baby You gonna make me need you

# You gonna make me love you You gonna make me love you... #

It's the 40th anniversary of the first Wigan Casino all-nighter

and this music still haunts me.

For its devotees, Northern soul is a way of life and even now,

it is perhaps the biggest underground music scene in the UK.

But why?

We were young, white, working class, thin,

for reasons we'll come to, but we loved obscure black music.

This was pre-Thatcher, pre-punk - welcome to the mid-1970s.

This is how we looked.

This is what was on TV.

MUSIC: "Love Me For A Reason" by The Osmonds

And this is what we were supposed to dance to.

This is how we reacted.

MUSIC: "Self Soul Satisfaction" by Earl Jackson

So, picture the scene - electricity blackouts have cut the working

week to three days, there's industrial unrest...

..football violence...

terrorism and bad fashion.

Though I'd like to be able to pretend that,

as a future economics journalist,

I was gripped by the crisis we were living through

but I was bored with it, bored with pop music and now,

right on my doorstep, was something underground and dangerous.

One Saturday night, I left home with a change of clothes,

telling my mum I was staying with a friend but that was a lie.

In fact, age 15,

I was going to probably the greatest nightclub in the world.

MUSIC: "Blowin' Up My Mind" by The Exciters

At its height, Wigan Casino was pulling in crowds of up

to 2,000 people every Saturday night from 2:00am

until 8:00am on a Sunday morning.

You'd get to Wigan around midnight

and all the ordinary people had melted away and the streets were

just full of hundreds of young kids ready to dance to Northern soul.

Take it easy, please!

By 1:30am, the queue was about ten-deep and you had to shove

your way in and then edge along the wall till you got to the front.

All the while, people were buying and selling records and drugs

and as for the door policy, one bouncer and you were in.

Stop pushing at the back!

MUSIC: "If This Is Love (I'd Rather Be Lonely)" by The Precisions

On the dance floor, it felt like, well, freedom.

It felt like finding a new family.

And a small part of me is still always there.

But what is Northern soul?

All we knew then was that we loved the music, it was like Motown

but rougher, the emotions more raw.

This was music made by unknown black singers in tiny

studios for local labels in America's industrial heartland.

Most of the time, we had no idea what they looked like.

Some tracks were only ever demos and for many of the records,

only a few hundred were ever pressed.

And it was this obscurity that fascinated us.

Soul music had exploded into the British charts during the 1960s.

MUSIC: "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" by Stevie Wonder

But the super-cool mods,

who went to clubs like the Twisted Wheel in Manchester,

wanted harder-edged sounds to distinguish themselves from the mainstream.

Some DJs started going to America to dig through crates of old vinyl,

stacked up in warehouses, to feed our appetite for soul.

Northern soul was about wanting records that had flopped

because they had been overlooked,

it was about finding the hit that nobody else had found.

It's artists trying to be The Supremes, The Temptations

or Marvin Gaye who didn't have the money to make sophisticated

records so the records are slightly out of tune

and slightly rough round the edges.

You'll never find a bad Northern soul record, you know,

the quality control is out of this world.

Unbelievable.

You know, you listen to those records, you think, "Why wasn't this

"a smash?" We thought that at the Twisted Wheel but we didn't

care cos we didn't have anything to do with the pop world, you know.

We thought pop music was for morons.

MUSIC: "It's The Beat" by Major Lance

The term "Northern soul" was coined by music journalist Dave Godin

when he noticed that northern football fans,

coming to his record shop in London,

kept asking for heavy dance beat records nobody had heard of.

I think the soul music you might hear on the radio would probably

have been sugary sweet, a lot of them.

I mean a lot of the labels started to add strings about 1964-65,

and that was to get into a larger audience, a white audience.

There was a more earthy feel to Northern soul.

I mean I did once term Northern soul as "deep soul with a dance beat."

I think it was the joyous coming-together of the writers,

the musicians, the arrangement to create a record like The Velvettes -

"I've Gotta Find Me Somebody", which is

almost like a religious experience when you listen to that record.

Just the intensity that's gone into it all.

MUSIC: "I've Got to Find Me Somebody" by The Velvettes

# I'm gonna find me somebody

# Whoo! Gotta find me somebody

# I'm gonna find me somebody

# Whoo! Gotta find me somebody... #

The Twisted Wheel was shut down in the early '70s

but the flame had been lit.

A circuit of all-nighters sprang up, places like the Golden Torch

in Stoke and Blackpool Mecca would become legendary.

Suddenly, the venues our dads and granddad had danced

ballroom in were repopulated but with black music.

Bit by bit, youth clubs,

which had been home to kids dancing like zombies on Top Of The Pops were

infiltrated by soul boys practising their back drops and their spins.

And Elaine Constantine's soon-to-be-released feature film

"Northern Soul" captures perfectly what happened for a lot of us.

So this is what? This is the Torch? This is the Twisted Wheel period.

Twisted Wheel. You can really see the mod influence then.

And then it changes when it gets to Wigan.

Yeah, the hair got longer, the sideburns got longer.

God, I remember that.

Working class culture was very pub-orientated,

it was very pop-orientated. Mm-hmm.

What were Northern soul people doing

when they created that sub-culture, do you think?

It was an elitism, kind of aspirational thing.

There was a kind of special thing about Northern soul that

elevated you out of the day-to-day. Let's see you on that floor.

Frankie Valli's "The Night."

The idea that it didn't sound cheesy and commercial was a big appeal cos,

you know, no-one wants to be spoon-fed shite from the charts, do they?

I was in a youth club

and the whole experience of the music with these lads who

were like older lads from school who would never show any emotion

were suddenly in this, kind of...

You know, dramatic situation where they were a spectacle

and they didn't give a shit.

I said to my cousin, my older cousin, "What's this?! What is it?

"What's going on?" She went, "Oh, it's Northern soul."

MUSIC: "The Night" by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons

We sort of took over when we got going

and there were still people hanging around who were into Status Quo

or whatever who were really annoyed about it

but there was nothing they could do.

For me, Northern soul, more than anything, is about the people.

It's about the characters that it attracts,

how extreme they are, how obsessive they are.

You know that every single person is going through every

beat of that record with you and you know that when you do that...

CROWD CLAP IN UNISON

..it's all going to happen at that moment

and it's that sort of feeling of like...

It's almost like you're all running the same race together,

do you know what I mean?

And then that break's coming up, you're like,

"Here we go, are we all ready for this? Right."

Bang!

And you're up there and you're spinning and whatever and you can just...

In your periphery, you can just see it all happening around you

and everyone else is locked into it as well.

You're making me remember a lot, actually.

It was quite exotic in a way cos we were listening to black

people's voices from America and that was weird, you know.

We didn't even know any black people,

there were hardly any black families in our town.

So, it was like something very special.

This Northern soul, it's actually from America.

MUSIC: "I Want to Testify" by The Parliaments

# Friends

# Inquisitive friends

# Are asking me what's come over me? #

There's something weirdly romantic about unknown black kids

from no-hope towns in America making these records that then

communicate across time

and space with white kids from equally no-hope towns in Britain.

It's only a few years ago that I actually got to go to Detroit

and Chicago.

I covered the housing crisis there and it was

heartbreaking to see the birthplaces of soul reduced to slums.

But I met people quite surprised to find a white guy obsessed

with soul singers few people in Motor City could still remember.

What's also striking is the way those records go on communicating.

Many of the original people are still on the scene,

having followed that old Wigan motto:

"Keep The Faith."

This is certainly the case for Pete and Susan Davies from Nottingham.

They're getting ready to go to the Stoke all-nighter,

one of the biggest in the country.

I don't think it's changed,

it doesn't change even from when you're sort of 15, 16, to even now.

Oh, no.

You know when people say they're living for the weekend? It's true.

The rest of the week's just a rest period in-between.

On the Saturday, it's a soul nighter, then on Sunday,

an all-dayer, then probably another nighter.

And there's one on the Bank Holiday Monday as well.

Yeah, we do that as well, don't we?

I mean a lot of us lasses, you know,

we wanted to go out with lads who were dancers.

Didn't want to know anybody else.

If they were a good dancer, they were there, I'll tell you.

It's me, you mean? Exactly.

I think it was a bit of one-upmanship, you know?

They started with really quite wide trousers,

they got wider and wider and wider as people tried to better each other.

Multiple pockets, multiple buttons on the sleeves.

They are all the same shoe but different colours.

That's my baby, that is. That one there.

Over the years, we've seen our friends, including ourselves,

go through divorces and things like that.

I mean they've not had partners that are not...sharing that love.

It can be very...

..very stretching for a relationship.

And they can't understand that passion, that drive,

that you need to go.

It's something you need to do.

MUSIC: "'Cause You're Mine" by The Vibrations

# I don't care what your friends say

# Oooh

# I'm going to love you anyway

# Cos you're mine You're mine

# Mine You're mine

# Mine Mine, mine, mine

# Oh, baby, you're mine Mine, mine, mine... #

I was born in 1961.

I'm one of the originals, back in the day, still on the soul scene

and it doesn't matter where I go, I always feel welcome.

You meet different people from all walks of life.

Believe it or not, you get judges, solicitors, police, you know,

all sorts of people.

MUSIC: "You Should O' Held On" by 7th Ave Aviators

# There's been something that I've

# Been longing to say

# It's been on my mind for such a long time... #

It just took over my life, basically. It is a way of life.

It's like when a song comes on and you know it,

I just go in my own world, I sing it, and that's me,

no-one will disturb me through that song.

# And all I've got to say is

# You shoulda held on just a little tighter

# Cos when I needed you, you were never there, girl

# You shoulda held on just

# A little tighter

# And showed me that you cared... #

I love dancing.

If I haven't danced half the night, I haven't enjoyed it.

If my wife said to me, "It's either me or Northern soul,"

Northern soul would come on top every time.

And you can print it.

MUSIC: "I Feel Alright" by Turley Richards

# All right

# Hey now

# I've found a new lover

# She's everything that I could need

# And I feel all right

# I want to feel the feel of her touch

# And feel all right

# You know that I feel like shouting

# And I feel like screaming that I feel all right

# I feel all right

# I feel all right... #

I haven't been to an all-nighter for over 30 years but I think somewhere,

I must have some kind of muscle memory of how to do the dancing.

Fran Franklin first went to Wigan in 1975, the same year as me.

If you remember, back then,

guys weren't really upfront on the dance floor,

they were sort of more like standing along the edges,

eyeing up all the girls thinking,

"Oh, I'd love to get a slow dance with her." But it wasn't like

that on the Northern soul scene, it was pretty much a blokes thing.

Where do we think the dance style came from?

Do we know whether American dance styles had anything to do with it?

I don't think so because I think, at the time, it was

all about Soul Train and that's all about hips and boogie

and disco and stuff like that so I think it came from Bruce Lee.

Really?

All them rugged boys that had been to see

Bruce Lee at the cinema...thought, "Oh, you can use these moves..."

..show off...

be damn hot on that dance floor

and all the girls will come flocking to us for a change.

I think that's the secret. It didn't completely work for me but...

SHE LAUGHS

I've got a memory of being like this - one, two, three and one,

two, three. My mind goes in threes.

Yeah, two, three, but it's not, it's... One, two...

Well, what am I missing? What should I be doing? Go on, go on.

One, two, three, turn, one, two, three, four. One...three...

See, I'm missing one. I can't seem to...

When you're doing your change-over, that's a one-two.

When you change direction, that's your fourth step.

So do you want to give me a spin? Right, OK.

You can't do it by thinking about it, it's this. Oh, you just do it.

That's it. And you keep... With the right shoes, it's fine.

That was pretty good. Then you finish it with doing that. Yep.

But I'm not sure I can even get away with touching the floor.

Get down and do a drop, there you go! I did it.

But you've got to push your knees in a bit more

and have your knees over your feet.

You've got to get your knees over you feet? Yes. Right.

I don't think we'll be practising that one today.

You've not got the right shoes on, we'll leave it at that.

Shall we do a bit of Northern soul dancing? Shall we? Let's have a go.

MUSIC: "Out On The Floor" by Dobie Gray

# Yeah, yeah, yeah

# Babe, it's out of sight... #

What did Wigan mean to you in your life?

This is the bit that gets me. It meant everything.

Like, I grew up in a place called Muirhouse in Edinburgh

and my mum was on her own, there was four of us, and I spent most of

my time as the big sister, I had to cook and do all the chores and stuff.

So the minute that the soul scene started, my mum was like,

"OK, that's your outlet. Off you go."

What did it feel like to be black in that immensely white,

working class scene?

Well, for me, it was like I fit in, I've got a family.

Every single person that I ever met on the scene

felt like they were my brother or my sister.

We were all...we are the Northern soul crew.

We went through good times, we lost people together,

but we came together at the end of it as one.

THEY LAUGH

I haven't done that for 30-something years.

You had to be fit to dance Northern soul but not just that.

Here you go, mate.

Illegal drugs, speed, usually amphetamines

stolen from pharmacists, were a big part of the sub-culture.

Essentially, dancers were overdosing on slimming pills or

anti-depressants and you had to be as expert in the names of drug

companies as record labels.

How dependant was Northern soul on amphetamines?

Very dependant.

It couldn't have happened without the drugs? No. Why?

The music was fast.

You couldn't drink and maintain that kind of energy.

It was a completely nocturnal lifestyle.

For a lot of kids, it became all-encompassing,

they couldn't keep their jobs down, they couldn't live a normal life.

It was an obsession. Yeah.

When the rave scene happened at the end of the '80s,

it was almost exactly the same as Northern soul to me.

It was essentially 4/4 beat music with thousands of kids going

to all-nighters.

Swap speed for ecstasy and you've essentially got the same scene.

By the late '70s,

Northern soul was beginning to splinter into different factions.

Some people wanted to stick with the old '60s sounds

but I'd become more interested in how black music was

evolving into disco, hip-hop and funk.

# See that black boy over there runnin' scared

# His old man in a bottle

# He done quit his 9 to 5

# He drink full-time and now he's livin' in a bottle... #

In 1977, a Granada film about the casino was seen by up

to 20 million people.

It helped put what had been a small,

underground scene in front of the whole country.

But the casino was forced to close its doors for the last

time in 1981 for a civic centre extension that was never built.

For many, this was the end of an era.

If Wigan shut down, I wouldn't know what to do. It'd be like...

Instant nostalgia, that would be it.

You'd think, "God, I'm going

"to be looking back for the rest of my life."

I wouldn't really be able to cope.

That was how a lot of us felt then.

We couldn't imagine life without the weekly buzz of Wigan.

But as Dave Withers, star of the original Wigan Casino film,

proves...

..life does go on.

I got married, had two children, got divorced,

spent a lot of time in America buying records and ended up moving up there

about 12 years ago,

and I occasionally visit England probably about once a year.

So, yeah, life goes on.

But the Northern soul scene also carried on.

It's the first law of sociology -

all youth sub-cultures eventually come back.

In a small hall in Wigan, people from the Spotify

generation are wearing, well, very wide pants and dancing to vinyl.

They call themselves Wigan Young Souls.

Our aim was to bring a younger audience in, we knew that

if we did play this music that this younger audience had never

heard before, that they would grow to love it.

In the '70s, there was stuff like Bee Gees being played

and now there's stuff like...

I don't know, Rihanna and what not but it's not the same as soul music.

It's not pure.

MUSIC: "There Was A Time" by Gene Chandler

# There was a time

# When I used to dance

# There was a time

# When I used to prance

# Dig me now, baby, ha

# Don't worry 'bout later, ha

# Here's a dance I used to do

# They call the mash potatoes

# Ahhh... #

More and more young people are getting into it and we are

passionate about the music and we're passionate about us dancing.

It's just life. Mmm.

Like, if I was to go clubbing, it just wouldn't be for me.

The music's rubbish, people usually start fights and stuff.

At soul nights, everyone's like a family.

And it's an expanding family.

Dozens of events take place every week with an all-nighter

happening somewhere in the country almost every weekend.

Northern soul today has become part of a global culture.

There are nights held from Tokyo to Dubai.

MUSIC: "Tainted Love" by Gloria Jones

It's influenced musicians, designers and choreographers

and some of the scene's best-known songs have been re-imagined

and remixed into global hits.

But I'm still not sure what it'll feel like to go back after so long.

I've not been to one of these for 35 years

and my big fear in coming here was that it would be a bunch of old,

sad Northern blokes re-living their youth but it isn't, really.

However, we can do something about that.

MUSIC: "I'm Where It's At" by The Jades

# If you want someone to love you

# I'm where it's at Where it's at

# And if you need someone to hug you

# I'm where it's at, baby Where it's at

# And at night when your feet are cold

# I'll be there...

# I'm where it's at Where it's at

# Baby, baby... #

What it feels like now is what it felt like then except

plus 35 years in a body that can't really do it.

But that music just takes hold of your body

and it took hold of my body

and finally made it remember how to do that step I couldn't do before.

It's not just nostalgia because what is the same is the music

and some of that music captures not just something about black

America, it captures something about working class Britain

and it captures something about me.

It is the music that still communicates with you over

continents and over four decades.

I think once you're locked into that record,

it provides that escapism that you want from music.

You're thinking the lyrics, you're thinking the beat.

You can hear the pain and the love and the glory in the music.

You feel like you belong.

Northern soul in the end, for me, is all about emotional truth

and what life should be like.

MUSIC: "Time Will Pass You By" by Tobi Legend

# Passing seasons all but fade away

# Into misty clouds of autumn grey

# As I sit here looking at the street

# Little figures, quickly moving feet

# I'm just a pebble on the beach

# And I sit and wonder why

# Little people are running around

# Never knowing why

# Life is just a precious minute, baby

# Open up your eyes and see it, baby

# Give yourself a better chance because

# Time will pass you

# Right on by

# Time, time is going to pass you by so quickly

# And it waits for no man

# This big, old world is spinning like a top

# Come and help me while we make it stop... #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd