Northern Soul,
now that’s a difficult one to explain.
p
The Mods
started at some point in the fifties to early 1960’s and petered out in about
1966. A big chunk became hippies and a minority became skinheads. Some just got
old and walked away or gave up because the music died.
But
not everyone did that and not everywhere. Rather like a tribe hidden in the
Amazon rainforest, people who loved the music kept listening to it, mainly up
there in Northern England. They just went on dancing.
z
Except,
even when people want to keep things the same forever, subtle changes happen
all the same. As time passes the changes get more obvious.
Gradually,
they got a bit bored with the same old Motown and Stax stuff and started hunting
out the rare grooves, soul records with a hard R ‘n B Beat, records no one had ever
heard before, hard to find imports.
k
In
fact it became a mania, a search for the ever more obscure record. Some rare singles were worth thousands.
It
became insular and competitive, a world of its own. Very athletic and
fanatical. It also, by the late 1970’s had become very popular, if only in a
limited area. Retired and long forgotten minor American soul stars were dragged
back on the road by their agents and flown off to Northern England, where to their surprise they
found themselves mobbed by thousands at concerts in old industrial towns.
j
Record
company executives were puzzled by requests from England for licenses to
reissue obscure singles from the 1960’s that no one in the record company had
ever heard of.
By
the 1980’s it was really big, have a look at ‘Northern Soul’ on Wikipedia or
YouTube to get an idea.
By
then they were wearing flared trousers and baggy clothes, moving towards sports
and casual wear – far from the classic 1960’s MOD clothes I tend to choose. The
dancing was hard and athletic rather than what I like to think of as cool. But
each to their own and they are dancing to really great sounds.
I
remember being in Charity shops in London and the South in the 80’s hunting for
1960’s clothes while the staff were frantically trying to find unwanted flared
trousers to send in bulk to their Northern Branches.
In
the 1970’s, down in the South, Paul Weller and The Jam had rekindled the old MOD
thing, first as a re-creation and then by taking it somewhere new as part of Punk.
That’s where I came in. By the end of the 70’s there was a whole revival scene
which petered out in the 1980’s. Unlike them, Paul Weller developed and changed
– creating The Style Council, which was perhaps the most perfect Mod band ever.
There was a definite move from the hard punk of The Jam towards Soul and a
tinge of Jazz, which is why The Jam had to come to an end.
But
Northern Soul just kept on dancing and ‘Kept The Faith’, which is why it still
goes on today on vinyl, at high speed and with its own particular style.
By
the late 1990’s, the people into Northern Soul and the Mods had all kind of
ended up in the same place although it had taken 30 years and about 300 miles
to get there.
And
Me? Well I stick out a bit, a Mod amongst the Soulies. I dance differently,
dress different. They don’t seem to mind too much and neither do I.
Neil Harris
