It is more a matter of which genre. I could have picked reggae, Motown or glam rock but I'd most like to write about Northern Soul, how I was deprived of the Wigan Casino and how, at this late stage, I like to think I belatedly keep the faith.
At our school, among a troupe of sullen 14 year olds, it had dawned on me that the rock music orthodoxy was not the right answer. I realized that I didn't care if Deep Purple were the loudest, Judas Priest the most satanic or who was credited with the longest scream. I simply didn't know who was the best guitarist and as we dutifully sloped off to see Led Zeppelin's film, The Song Remains the Same, I knew deep down inside that the other kids who bought Motown Chartbusters albums, watched Colour My Soul with Jimmy Helms and knew about Bob Marley before we did had it right. I thus spent the year of the third form listening almost exclusively, it seems to me, to Beethoven and Shostakovich, before re-emerging to buy Al Green cassettes, Soul Motion and a few Motown compilations.
I can't claim to have been any part of a Northern Soul scene, which is probably a mercy because that dour 14 year old, wrapperd up in his Shostakovich String Quartets while reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn wouldn't have been fit for the flamboyant exuberance of the back flip or any other of the requisite dance floor maneouevres. At that stage, I was aware of Donnie Elbert, Tami Lynn's I'm Gonna Run Away From You, and Archie Bell & the Drell's Here I Go Again from the UK hit parade but obscurity being the point of northern soul classics, one wasn't supposed to know about Frank Wilson's Do I Love You (Indeed I do), now widely regarded as the most sought after masterpiece, and thus one didn't. But I'm glad we do now.
I have long cherished the search for the rare, non mainstream classic whether it was in progressive rock, folk, baroque or any other genre. To list among your all-time favourites a few things that nobody else has ever heard of has traditionally been an especially recherche type of oneupmanship but in northern soul the discovery of rare 1960's Detroit records was the whole enterprise. These are heartfelt expression of love, but more commonly heartbreak, that were once a hidden cache of pop music treasure and the northern soul movement made it its business to find them. A quick check on just how good they were can be made by comparing Doris Troy's I'll Do Anything (He Wants Me To Do) with the cover version by Lenny Gamble. Lenny Gamble was Tony Blackburn and the point often made that a cover version needs to add something to the earlier version was rarely better made.
At our school, among a troupe of sullen 14 year olds, it had dawned on me that the rock music orthodoxy was not the right answer. I realized that I didn't care if Deep Purple were the loudest, Judas Priest the most satanic or who was credited with the longest scream. I simply didn't know who was the best guitarist and as we dutifully sloped off to see Led Zeppelin's film, The Song Remains the Same, I knew deep down inside that the other kids who bought Motown Chartbusters albums, watched Colour My Soul with Jimmy Helms and knew about Bob Marley before we did had it right. I thus spent the year of the third form listening almost exclusively, it seems to me, to Beethoven and Shostakovich, before re-emerging to buy Al Green cassettes, Soul Motion and a few Motown compilations.
I can't claim to have been any part of a Northern Soul scene, which is probably a mercy because that dour 14 year old, wrapperd up in his Shostakovich String Quartets while reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn wouldn't have been fit for the flamboyant exuberance of the back flip or any other of the requisite dance floor maneouevres. At that stage, I was aware of Donnie Elbert, Tami Lynn's I'm Gonna Run Away From You, and Archie Bell & the Drell's Here I Go Again from the UK hit parade but obscurity being the point of northern soul classics, one wasn't supposed to know about Frank Wilson's Do I Love You (Indeed I do), now widely regarded as the most sought after masterpiece, and thus one didn't. But I'm glad we do now.
I have long cherished the search for the rare, non mainstream classic whether it was in progressive rock, folk, baroque or any other genre. To list among your all-time favourites a few things that nobody else has ever heard of has traditionally been an especially recherche type of oneupmanship but in northern soul the discovery of rare 1960's Detroit records was the whole enterprise. These are heartfelt expression of love, but more commonly heartbreak, that were once a hidden cache of pop music treasure and the northern soul movement made it its business to find them. A quick check on just how good they were can be made by comparing Doris Troy's I'll Do Anything (He Wants Me To Do) with the cover version by Lenny Gamble. Lenny Gamble was Tony Blackburn and the point often made that a cover version needs to add something to the earlier version was rarely better made.
Northern Soul was a tribe and we all needed a tribe to belong to in those days even if it was only the tribe of maverick outsiders and so one can only admire it from the outside and in hindsight. There was nothing the least bit pretentious about the music because it had all been and gone and been forgotten once. It wasn't being produced with its new audience in mind. Many of the singers couldn't be traced for 'where are they now' purposes. It was dance for dance's sake, a celebration of the music and artists who, rather than traverse the USA in their own jet aeroplane to bore stadiumsful to a standstill with their status, antics and dull, self-indulgent doodlings, had simply turned up and done a turn before returning to their day jobs. Why would anyone buy a Coldplay album when you have Linda Grinder's Goodbye Cruel Love. We will only find that out when someone cares to write about Why I Buy Records Even Though I'm not Interested in Music.
Because for all the energy and athleticism of the dancing, and not all the songs were about the boy-girl relationship in crisis, the main theme for me was dancing on your own spectacularly 'breaking down the walls of heartache', because what else would you do, the greatest of them all being Timi Yuro's show-stopping It'll Never Be Over For Me.
