Northern Soul

Northern Soul refers to music and associated dance styles and fashions that were popular in the dancehalls of northern England, starting in the late 1960s. more...

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In the beginning, the dancing was athletic, featuring spins, flips, and drops. The music originally consisted of obscure American soul recordings with an uptempo beat, very similar to and including Motown Records and more obscure labels (e.g. Okeh Records). By 1970, British performers were recording numbers for this market, and the scarcity of soul records with the required rhythm led to the playing of stompers, which were records by any artist that featured the right beat. The phrase northern soul was coined by journalist Dave Godin after a visit to the Twisted Wheel Club sometime around 1970 for his column in Blues and Soul magazine.

History

A large proportion of Northern Soul's original audience came from the mod movement, with their love of soul music. As some mods turned away from these sounds to embrace the psychedelic movement of the late 1960s, many mods - especially those in northern England - elected to stick to the original soundtrack of soul and ska. Some became what would eventually be known as skinheads, and others formed the basis of the northern soul scene. Early northern soul fashion included bowling shirts, button-down Ben Sherman shirts, blazers with centre vents and unusual numbers of buttons, Trickers brogue shoes, baggy trousers or shrink-to-fit Levi's jeans. Many dancers wore badges representing membership in clubs organized by dance halls.

The first club that effectively defined the northern soul sound was Manchester's Twisted Wheel Club. Other early clubs were the Golden Torch in Stoke, Wigan Casino, Blackpool Mecca, The Catacombs in Wolverhampton, North Park in Kettering, The Mojo in Sheffield, Cleethorpes Winter Gardens (still a Northern Soul venue today) and Va Va's in Bolton (where Richard Searling used to DJ).

The music reached its peak of popularity in the mid to late 1970s, when Wigan Casino was voted the world's number one discotheque. Thousands of people visited every week, but the exclusive and underground appeal of the music was lost and many of the hardcore soulies drifted away. In 1981, when Wigan Casino shut down, many feared the death knell had been sounded for northern soul. But the mod revival in the late 1970s and the later scooterboy subculture produced a new wave of fans.

The 1980s, while often dismissed as a low period for the northern scene by those who had left in the 1970s, actually 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. Top of the World drew small crowds by Wigan Casino standards, and it eschewed the 'pop' northern soul which had been adopted in the latter days of Wigan Casino. Where once most of the records played had been 100mph stompers, now the DJs also played mid-tempo tunes, ballads and modern soul (new releases of the 1980s).

Read more at Wikipedia.org