Tag Archives: PAUL WELLER

The UK’s 1970’s & 80’s allegedly drug-fuelled & controversial underground youth culture movement …. Northern Soul – now down here in the South of England on display alongside The Quadrophenia Collection … at Littledean Jail

Posted on by
1

  

Set in Lancashire in 1974, the film follows Matt and John as they leave behind a humdrum life of youth clubs and factory lines to chase a dream of travelling to the US, unearthing unknown soul 45s and establishing themselves as top DJ’s on the Northern soul music scene. Their dance and amphetamine fuelled quest brings them into contact with some of the darker elements of the scene and tests their friendship to its limits

A BRIEF INSIGHT INTO SOME  OF THE GREAT MANY EXHIBIT ITEMS ON THE NORTHERN SOUL FRONTS ON DISPLAY AT THE “TASTE OF NORTHERN SOUL DOWN HERE IN THE SOUTH EXHIBITION “….INCLUDES ORIGINAL WIGAN CASINO,  TWISTED WHEEL  AND OTHER NORTHERN SOUL MEMBERSHIP CARDS, FLYERS, ORIGINAL AND VINTAGE WOVEN CLUB PATCHES , VINTAGE PATCHED SPORTS HOLDALLS,VINYL  AND OTHER ASSOCIATED MEMORABILIA .

FW

Because of the scarcity of the original single and the high quality of the music (it was one of the most popular records in the Northern Soul movement), it has been championed as one of the rarest and most valuable records in history (along with other “impossible to find” records by such acts as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, and the Five Sharps).

HERE BELOW IS A VERY , VERY BRIEF INSIGHT GALLERY INTO A FEW OF THE ORIGINAL  NORTHERN SOUL MEMORABILIA ITEMS HERE ON DISPLAY . DO COME VISIT TO SEE WHAT IS UNDOUBTEDLY ONE OF THE LARGEST PRIVATE COLLECTIONS OF SUCH SOUGHT AFTER MATERIAL .

  DO SEE MORE PICTORIAL CONTENT IN SOME OF OUR PREVIOUS  POSTS ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE AS TO FURTHER EXHIBIT ITEMS HERE ON DISPLAY IN OUR “A TASTE OF NORTHERN SOUL DOWN HERE IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND EXHIBITION”

Open The Door To Your Heart by Darrell Banks: ‘Holy grail’ Northern Soul single sells for £14,543

i

A single dubbed the rarest record in the world sold for £14,543 at auction tonight.

Derek Smiley, a Northern Soul DJ in Cambridge, was among the bidders for Darrell Banks’ club classic Open the Door to Your Heart, but gave up when the price went “out of his league”.

John Manship, who hosted the online auction at raresoulman.co.uk, said the website crashed as “thousands upon thousands” of people visited the page as the auction came to  a close at 6pm.

He said: “I’ve never seen anything like it before. The winner came in a few seconds before the end which is just a ridiculous thing to do, but he’s won it fair and square.”

He said all the bidders were previously known to him, apart from the winner, who he said lived in Britain. —————————————————————————————————————

Northern soul

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Northern soul
Stylistic origins Soul
Rhythm and blues
Gospel
Cultural origins Northern England
Typical instruments Strings
Horns
Guitar
Vocals
Mainstream popularity From late 1960s onwards
Derivative forms Modern soul, Madchester, Mod revival, rave culture
Other topics
Motown Records, Mod subculture, Skinhead

Northern soul is a music and dance movement that emerged from the British mod scene, initially in northern England in the late 1960s. Northern soul mainly consists of a particular style of black American soul music based on the heavy beat and fast tempo of the mid-1960s Tamla Motown sound. The northern soul movement, however, generally eschews Motown or Motown-influenced music that has met with significant mainstream success. The recordings most prized by enthusiasts of the genre are usually by lesser-known artists, and were initially released only in limited numbers, often by small regional United States labels such as Ric-Tic and Golden World (Detroit), Mirwood (Los Angeles) and Shout and Okeh (New York/Chicago).

Northern soul is also associated with particular dance styles and fashions that grew out of the underground rhythm & soul scene of the late 1960s, at venues such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. This scene (and the associated dances and fashions) quickly spread to other UK dancehalls andnightclubs like the Catacombs (Wolverhampton), the Highland Rooms at Blackpool Mecca, Golden Torch (Stoke-on-Trent), and Wigan Casino. As the favoured beat became more uptempo and frantic, by the early 1970s, northern soul dancing became more athletic, somewhat resembling the later dance styles of disco and break dancing. Featuring spins, flips, karate kicks and backdrops, club dancing styles were often inspired by the stage performances of touring American soul acts such as Little Anthony & The Imperials and Jackie Wilson.

During the Northern soul scene’s initial years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, popular Northern Soul records were usually not recent releases, and generally dated from the mid-1960s. This meant that the movement was sustained (and “new” recordings added to playlists) by prominent DJs discovering rare and previously overlooked records. Later on, certain clubs and DJs began to move away from the 1960s Motown sound and began to play newer releases with a more contemporary sound.


[edit]

History

Photograph of a sew-on patch featuring the clenched fist symbol adopted by the northern soul movement

The phrase northern soul emanated from the record shop Soul City in Covent Garden, London, which was run by journalist Dave Godin.[1] It was first publicly used in Godin’s weekly column in Blues and Soul magazine in June 1970.[2] In a 2002 interview with Chris Hunt of Mojo magazine, Godin said he had first come up with the term in 1968, to help employees at Soul City differentiate the more modern funkier sounds from the smoother, Motown-influenced soul of a few years earlier. With contemporary black music evolving into what would eventually become known as funk, to differentiate the tastes of the die-hard soul-lovers of the north, whose musical preferences seemed to have stalled somewhere in that classic mid-’60s era of Motown-sounding black American dance, Godin referred to their requests as ‘Northern Soul’:

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 in the black American chart. I devised the name as a shorthand sales term. 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’.[3]

The venue most commonly associated with the early development of the northern soul scene was the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and the Room at The Top in Wigan. The club began in the early 1950s as a beatnik coffee bar called The Left Wing, but in early 1963, the run-down premises were leased by two Manchester businessmen (Ivor and Phil Abadi) and turned into a music venue.[4] Initially the Twisted Wheel mainly hosted live music on the weekends andDisc Only nights during the week. Starting in September 1963, the Abadi brothers promoted all-night parties at the venue on Saturday nights, with a mixture of live and recorded music. DJ Roger Eagle, a collector of imported American soul, jazz and rhythm and blues, was booked around this time, and the club’s reputation as a place to hear and dance to the latest American R&B music began to grow.

Throughout the mid-1960s, the Twisted Wheel became the focus of Manchester’s emerging mod scene, with a music policy that reflected Eagle’s eclectic tastes in soul and jazz, and featuring live performances by British beat musicians and American R&B stars. Gradually, the music policy became less eclectic and shifted heavily towards fast-paced soul, in response to the demands of the growing crowds of amphetamine-fuelled dancers who flocked to the all-nighters. Dismayed at the change in music policy and the frequent drug raids by the police, Eagle quit the club in 1966

Commemorative sew-on patch similar to those worn by Twisted Wheel members.

By 1968 the reputation of the Twisted Wheel and the type of music being played there had grown nationwide.Soul fans were traveling from all over the United Kingdom to attend the Saturday all-nighters, with resident ‘All Niter’ DJ Bob Dee compiling & supervising [5] the playlist and utilising the newly developed slip-cueing technique to spin the vinyl between 1968 and the club’s eventual closure in 1971 .[6] [7] After attending one of the venue’s all-nighters in November 1970, Godin wrote: “…it is without doubt the highest and finest I have seen outside of the USA… never thought I’d live to see the day where people could so relate the rhythmic content of Soul music to bodily movement to such a skilled degree!”[8] The venue’s owners had successfully been able to fill the vacancy left by Eagle with a growing roster of specialist soul DJs.

The Twisted Wheel gained a reputation as a drug haven, and under pressure from the police and other authorities, the club closed in January 1971. However, by the late 1960s, the popularity of the music and lifestyle associated with the club had spread further across the north and midlands of England, and a number of new venues had begun to host soul all-nighters. These included the King Mojo in Sheffield, The Catacombs in Wolverhampton, Room at the Top in Wigan and Va Va’s in Bolton.

[edit]1970s

Commemorative sew-on patch similar to those worn by Golden Torch members.

Northern soul reached the peak of its popularity in the mid to late 1970s.[9] At this time, there were soul clubs in virtually every major town in the midlands and the north of England.[10] The three venues regarded as the most important in this decade were the Golden Torch in Tunstall, Stoke (1971 to 1972), Blackpool Mecca (1971 to 1979) and Wigan Casino (1973 to 1981).

Although Wigan Casino is now the most well known, the best attended northern soul all-night venue at the beginning of the decade was the Golden Torch, where regular Friday night soul “all-nighters” began in late 1970. Chris Burton, the owner, stated that in 1972, the club had a membership of 12,500, and 62,000 separate customer visits.[11] Despite its popularity, the club closed down due to licensing problems in March, 1972 and attention switched to soul nights at Blackpool Mecca’s Highland Room, which had started hosting rare soul nights in late 1971.

Commemorative sew-on patch similar to those designed by Russ Winstanley and sold at the Wigan Casino.

Wigan Casino began its weekly soul all-nighters in September 1973.[12] Wigan Casino had a much larger capacity than many competing venues and ran its events from 2am until 8am. There was a regular roster of DJs, including the promoter Russ Winstanley. By 1976, the club boasted a membership of 100,000 people, and in 1978, was voted the world’s number one discotheque by the American magazine Billboard.[13] This was during the heyday of the Studio 54 nightclub in New York City. By the late 1970s, the club had its own spin-off record label, Casino Classics.[14]

By this time, Wigan Casino was coming under criticism from many soul fans. Contemporary black American soul was changing with the advent of funk, disco and jazz-funk, and the supply of recordings with the fast-paced northern soul sound began to dwindle rapidly. Wigan Casino DJs resorted to playing any kind of record that matched the correct tempo.[15] Also, the club was subjected to heavy media coverage and began to attract many otherwise uninterested people whom the soul purists did not approve of.[16]

Blackpool Mecca was popular throughout the 1970s, although the venue never hosted all-nighters. The regular Saturday night events began at 8pm and finished at 2am, and initially, some dancers would begin their evenings at Blackpool Mecca and then transfer to Wigan Casino. In 1974, the music policy at Blackpool Mecca sharply diverged from Wigan Casino’s, with the regular DJs Ian Levine and Colin Curtis including newly released US soul in their sets. Whilst the tempo was similar to the earlier Motown Records-style recordings, this shift in emphasis heralded a slightly different style of northern soul dancing and dress styles at Blackpool Mecca and created a schism in the northern soul movement between Wigan Casino’s traditionalists and Blackpool Mecca’s wider approach, which accepted the more contemporary sounds of Philly soul, early disco and funk.

Other major northern soul venues in the 1970s include The Catacombs in Wolverhampton, Va Va’s in Bolton, the ‘Talk of The North’ all-nighters at The Pier and Winter Gardens in Cleethorpes, Tiffany’s in Coalville, Samantha’s in Sheffield, Neil Rushton‘s ‘Heart of England’ soul club all-dayers at The Ritz in Manchester and the Nottingham Palais.[17] As the 1970s progressed, the northern soul scene expanded even further nationally. There was a notable scene in the east of England with all-nighters at the St. Ivo Centre in St. Ives, the Phoenix Soul club at the Wirrina Stadium in Peterborough and the Howard Mallett in Cambridge.[18] Other towns with notable northern soul venues at this time included Kettering, Coventry, Bournemouth, Southampton and Bristol.[19]

[edit]1980s and later

When Wigan Casino closed in 1981, many believed that the northern soul scene was on the verge of disintegrating. However, the 1970s mod revival, the thriving scooterboy subculture and the acid jazzmovement produced a new wave of fans. The popularity of the music was further bolstered in the 1980s by a wave of reissues and compilation albums from small British independent record labels. Many of these labels were set up by DJs and collectors who had been part of the original northern soul scene. The 1980s — often dismissed as a low period for northern soul by those who had left the scene in the 1970s — featured almost 100 new venues in places as diverse as Bradford, London, Peterborough, Leighton Buzzard, Whitchurch, Coventry and Leicester. Pre-eminent among the 1980s venues were Stafford‘s Top of the World and London‘s 100 Club.

Today there are regular northern soul events in various parts of the United Kingdom, such as The Nightshift Club all-nighters at the Bisley Pavilion in Surrey and the Prestatyn Weekender in North Wales.[20] In an August 2008 article in The Times, broadcaster Terry Christian argued that northern soul was undergoing a distinct revival in the late 2000s.[21] Christian cited the popularity of regular revivals of Twisted Wheel soul all-nighters at the original venue (in Whitworth Street, Manchester) plus the Beat Boutique northern soul all-nighters at the Ruby Lounge and