NORTHERN SOUL

My first experience with Northern Soul was not, unfortunately for me, with actual Northern Soul music. It also wasn’t with the electrified style of dance that made the subculture famous, or the highly stylized way that the dancers dressed themselves to make all of that unbelievable movement possible. My first exposure to Northern Soul was instead a reference in the lyric of another song, in a totally different genre of music, probably used mostly as a convenient rhyme for the phrase ‘white plimsoles.’ This makes sense because I’m American, and Northern Soul is one of those quintessentially British subcultures for which Americans have no answer.

What’s ironic about that last statement is that what is generally considered to be Northern Soul music the heart and soul of the entire shebang, the purpose behind the fashion and the drug culture and the all-night dance parties¾ is actually American. The tracks considered Northern Soul were, when the phrase was first coined in the late 1960s, slightly dated, Motown-influenced American soul. In another ironic twist, it was London-based journalist and record-store owner Dave Godin that gave the movement its name. As he told Mojo Magazine in 2002, ‘I had started to notice that northern football fans who were in London to follow their team were coming into the store to buy records, but they weren’t interested in the latest developments… It was just to say “if you’ve got customers from the north, don’t waste time playing them records currently in the U.S. black chart, just play them what they like – ‘Northern Soul”.’

Northern Soul reached its height in the middle of 1970s and stayed strong through the end of the decade, with clubs in every major city in the north hosting raucous Friday night all-night dance parties to up-tempo American soul. The best attended of these venues, The Golden Torch in Tunstall, Stoke, reached the height of its membership in 1972 with 12,500 members. During those long nights a new style of dance developed a highly acrobatic, energized method of movement involving back flips and the splits across talcum-powdered dance floors (the talcum ensured that rubber-soled shoes could slip adequately across wood).

Such a style of dance necessitated a special wardrobe. The Northern Soul movement originated as an offshoot of the Mod culture of the 1960s (Northern Souls’ less savory cousins, as it happens, were the skinheads). In the early stages much of the Mod style stayed intact button up Fred Perry shirts, brogues, and shrink-to-fit Levis. As the style of dance evolved, the dress of the dancers evolved along with it. To allow for more athletic dancing and greater freedom of movement, dancers began to wear light, loose trousers and sports vests covered with sew-on patches representing memberships to various Northern Soul clubs (these patches, in another appropriation of African American culture, often featured the fist motif first used in the States as a symbol of the Black Power movement of the 1960s).

In his book Northern Soul: Music, Drugs, and Subcultural Identity, Andrew Wilson, who was himself a member of the Northern Soul movement in its heyday and returned to write a sociological study of the subculture, writes that the Northern Soul Scene is unique in its longevity. While the decline in popularity since the height of the Scene in the 1970s is undeniable (and, like all cultural shifts, unavoidable), Northern Soul has continued to be a major influence in the lives of the people that participated, and the focus of a major revival in recent years.