- #Wigan young souls cracked#
- #Wigan young souls archive#
- #Wigan young souls full#
- #Wigan young souls mods#
The sheer lack of emotional restraint is a straight lift from African-American chapel singing, and for me makes “gospel on the subject of sex” a better description. The DJ Richard Searling described it as “deep soul with a dance beat,” but there are just as many traces of doo-wop, jazz (Da Costa was a jazz diva) and above all gospel. If you take three Northern Soul masterpieces-Frankie Karl’s “ You Should’o Held On”, Rita Da Costa’s “ Don’t Bring Me Down”, or The Precisions’ “ If This Is Love”-you can hear what made them different to commercialised soul.ĭancers gather outside Wigan Casino. But the white audience in Wigan wanted different. Paradoxically, much of this was done to make soul acceptable to a white audience. The entire operation – we still called it Tamla – was there to commercialise black music, to create hits with strings, saccharine harmonies and choreographed dance routines. What had made most of these tracks flop was probably the very existence of Motown. Most were made between 19-the golden age of soul before Motown moved to LA. This was already the music of a time past: the demo tracks of one-hit wonders, the short-run vinyl pressings of local singers, sold out of suitcases as they toured the soul clubs of industrial America. The term itself was coined by writer Dave Godin in 1970, when he noticed northern football fans in his London record shop asking for stuff nobody had heard of. I’m clearer now what makes a Northern Soul record. Even if you’d never taken any you couldn’t avoid the brand names-Riker, Filon, SKF: they were tattooed all over people’s arms and, for the really committed, necks.
Soon I learned to obsess about obscure labels – like Okeh, Ric-Tic, Mala and Cameo Parkway-and about the different pharmaceutical types of speed. It sounded like Motown, only rougher the bass was louder and the emotions more raw.
#Wigan young souls cracked#
For a good 12 bars it’s just a black guy singing a capella a cracked voice, soaring through a melismatic story of lost-girlfriend grief.Īnd then it cranks into rhythm: it’s Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes singing “Get Out (And Let Me Cry).”Īt this point I had no idea what the music was. At the age of 14, it explodes into my life at a youth club in Leigh.Įverybody is dancing like zombies, Top of The Pops style, when suddenly they put a record on that clears the floor.
#Wigan young souls mods#
In a handful of clubs the evolutionary process that quietly morphed late-stage mods into suede-heads and then soul boys is underway. To alleviate the tension there is something called pop music, spoon-fed to you via “the charts” by, among others, a guy called Jimmy Savile. Not just the strikes and power cuts but the ordinary chaos that surrounds us: sports violence, knifings, terrorism, violent teachers, and paedophile priests. The country is spiralling into social unrest.
#Wigan young souls archive#
Picture the scene: the first Wigan allnighter opens on 23 September, 1973 amid a world of bleakness that even the brown-stained TV archive cannot do justice to.
#Wigan young souls full#
Northern Soul’s latest karmic go-around involves very young kids from Wigan-aged 15 to 18-not only dancing to rare vinyl but wearing the full outfit: wide trousers and white socks copied from Tony Palmer’s 1977 documentary Wigan Casino.īut the second law of sociology is cruel: all members of revived subcultures are doomed to run into people who’ve survived the original thing and have kept it going underground, defiantly wearing the fashion even as the waistbands have to be let out. It’s the first law of sociology that all youth subcultures eventually come back. It was an endless, graceful movement, hands wedged to his hips, eyes fixed to a space beyond the horizon. There, in a steam-bath humidity that reeked of Brut, sweat and cigarettes, I executed spins and back-flips until I dropped-which was about half past four, doubled up with stomach cramps from the Bronchipax.īy 8 AM, I had recovered to the point where the following memory could imprint itself onto my brain: a kid with a quiff, in a leather jacket, doing long, slow spins through a shaft of sunlight. I shoved my way, like everybody else, through the door to the Casino and onto its vast, sprung maple dancefloor. That got us into a café nearby, packed-not with soul boys as I expected-but with music journalists from London, cool Italians in micro-sunglasses, American vinyl collectors and other global bohemians.īut I cared nothing for them. We reached Wigan Casino around midnight with my mate’s cousin who was a “face” on the Northern Soul scene.