The kids of Northern Soul brought the swelling energy of American music to working-class Britain
Dance all night, from Motown to Wigan Casino
If you were an aging soul musician in the American South in the 1970s, a casino in a depressed, riverfront town in the north of England might be the last place you’d expect to hear your songs. But that’s precisely where a lot of very rare soul was playing.
“The moment you walk through the doors into the all-nighter, you are immediately accepted for what you are — a soul fan,” writes David Nowell in The Story of Northern Soul: A Definitive History of the Dance Scene that Refuses to Die. “Small, tall, black, white, male, female, wealthy, poor, it makes no difference. You are on the scene now, and the scene will look after you and treat you like a member of the family.”
That “family” Nowell is referring to is the 1960s and 70s soul community that comprised young, working-class Brits from the bleak, industrial towns dotting the north of England.
They worked or went to school during the day, then gathered at clubs — Wigan Casino, the Highland Room in Blackpool, the Twisted Wheel in Manchester — to dance until morning.
The idea of pasty, young Brits dancing feverishly to American soul records may seem a bit farfetched, but affection for black music among the British underclass was well established. (That’s where they got rock n roll.) And the harshness and monotony of working class life knows no national borders. In fact, the back streets of Manchester had a fair bit in common with those of Detroit.
Northern England could be a rough, grey place, and spinning and gliding around the vibrant, sweaty hotbox of the dance floor was a transcendent release. The music itself — songs like Chris Clark’s “Love’s Gone Bad” or The Flirtations’ “Nothing But a Heartache” — was often about rising above heartbreak, sadness, and hardship. And it was all delivered in the spirited, uptempo swells that are soul’s signature, and played loud by DJs who competed to find the best, floor-filling tracks. And not just the mainstream Motown tunes most Brits would recognize from the radio.
The Northern Soul scene was typified by devotion to obscure soul recordings from smaller labels like Okeh, Tamla, and Chess. For some fans, the rarer the music was, the better. English record stores began importing American soul, and many fans collected and traded vinyl, especially 7” records, or 45s. And well known DJs like Richard Searling, who spun records at Wigan Casino, spent a lot of time across the Atlantic hunting through bins in American cities for the best rarities and B-sides.
The scene also developed its own athletic dance style, involving complicated footwork, high kicks, drops and splits. “Bruce Lee meets B-boy” is how former clubber and filmmaker Elaine Constantine described it. And dancers weren’t paired — as with many drug-fueled dance trends that followed, Northern Soul dancing was a solitary trip, though intimately shared with the others on the floor. In fact, many of the moves pioneered on Northern Soul dancefloors went on to influence disco and breakdancing.
Soul music had been steadily exploited by white artists and labels, who profited massively off of covers of songs written by black musicians. Within the Northern Soul scene, there was a degree of pride in circulating and elevating the work of undervalued artists. Still, many of the tunes that became beloved hits on soul dancefloors in the UK weren’t popular enough to support the artists who’d written them. In The Story of Northern Soul, Nowell writes, “Many Northern Soul icons would quit the music business and end up as office janitors, cab drivers, or just plain broke.” In their book Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton write that Northern Soul was a “genre built from failures.” Poor, wannabe Motown artists were being picked up by working class kids in places no one cared about. For its enthusiasts, that simply added to the romance.
Though early Northern Soul fans were heavily into the mod aesthetic — Ben Sherman and Fred Perry shirts and Sta-Prest pants, form fitting skirts and dresses — their real mandate was all-night dancing. As a result, over time, the clean lines of mod attire gave way to fuller skirts, baggier pants, and more breathable fabrics. “Soulies” often brought leather athletic bags bearing stickers and patches from other venues to all-nighters. They were filled with vinyl singles to trade, extra clothes for when they’d sweat through their first outfit, and sometimes “blueys,” the amphetamines that kept them up and shaking it from midnight until morning. After all, a big part of Northern Soul’s thrill was flipping the grueling workaday schedule on its head. As one former soulie put it in the 2012 documentary Keep On Burning: The Story of Northern Soul, “I was going out when other people were going to bed. For these people, the night is over. For me, it’s just beginning.”
Many clubs that hosted Northern Soul “all-nighters” didn’t even open until after midnight, which meant they couldn’t get a liquor license. As a result, there was a near total absence of alcohol in the scene. One soulie in the documentary This England: Wigan Casino says he was “slightly embarrassed” to talk to people who weren’t in the Northern Soul scene because “they have a total lack of understanding.” They couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to drive to a small town like Wigan just to dance to a club with no booze. His friends asked if there are lots of girls at the club. “Yeah, there’s a lot of girls there,” he reports answering. “They mean plenty of girls there to pick up, but I mean there are plenty of girls there, like, friends.”
In spite of loads of uppers, there was a certain purism to the Northern Soul scene. In his piece, “Northern Soul and Working-Class Culture in 1970s Britain,” Barry Doyle writes that “traditional northern working-class conservatism and respectability” were on display, and that the demands of dancing all night kept people from looking for trouble. Unlike other British subcultures where violence was central, Northern Soul was characterized by a kind, communitarian spirit. No alcohol meant very few fights. And the combination of sweat and soul produced a euphoria that turned casual fans into gleefully obsessive devotees — and friends — overnight. Soulies who traveled to other towns for all-nighters were greeted happily by the local fans. As Doyle writes, Northern Soul, unlike other subcultural movements, was not an all-out rebellion, but rather a “culture of consolation,” a joyful place apart from the quotidian grind.
The Northern Soul scene went on to influence disco, and its culture of genius solo DJs inspired the house and electronic music scenes. As for soulies themselves, many retain the messianic ardor they felt decades ago, and Northern England has witnessed numerous surges of nostalgia and all-nighter reunions. As with mod and skinhead culture, a new crop of young Brits has revived the scene, even hosting competitions for dance prizes. Nostalgia for Northern Soul can also be felt across the U.S., where bars and clubs in most major cities still host Northern Soul nights. Ironically, though the music is homegrown, the aesthetic is taken from the British scene.
In 2014, former soulie Elaine Constantine made a feature film (Northern Soul) about the beloved scene, meant to appeal to old soulies and young people alike. “If you were there, you’ll know,” she said of filmgoers. “If you weren’t there, you’ll wish you had been.”
