1960s ' "
Tainted Love" The term "Northern soul" emanated from the record shop Soul City in
Covent Garden, London, which was run by the soul music collector
Dave Godin. It was first publicly used in Godin's weekly column in
Blues & Soul magazine in June 1970. 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. Godin referred to the latter's 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'". The music style most associated with Northern soul is the heavy
syncopated beat and fast tempo of the mid-1960s
Motown Records, usually combined with soulful vocals. These types of records, which suited the athletic dancing that was prevalent, became known on the scene as "stompers". Notable examples include Tony Clarke's "Landslide" (popularised by
Ian Levine at Blackpool Mecca) and
Gloria Jones’ "
Tainted Love" (purchased by Richard Searling on a trip to the United States in 1973 and popularised at Va Va’s in Bolton, and later, Wigan Casino). According to Northern soul DJ Ady Croadsell, viewed retrospectively, the earliest recording to possess this style was the 1965 single "
I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" by the
Four Tops, although that record was never popular in the Northern soul scene because it was too mainstream. The venue most commonly associated with the early development of the Northern soul scene was the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. 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. Initially, the Twisted Wheel mainly hosted live music on the weekends and
Disc Only nights during the week. 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. Pubs such as the Eagle in
Birmingham were frequented by young blue-eyed soul singers such as
Steve Winwood, who released songs similar to the early U.S. soul music. By 1968 the reputation of the Twisted Wheel and the type of music being played there had grown nationwide, and soul fans were travelling from all over the United Kingdom to attend the Saturday all-nighters. Until his departure in 1968, resident 'All Niter' DJ Bob Dee compiled and supervised the playlist, utilising the newly developed
slip-cueing technique to spin the vinyl. Rarer, more up-tempo imported records were added to the playlist in 1969 by the new younger DJs like Brian "45" Phillips up until the club's eventual closure in 1971. 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!" The venue's owners had successfully filled the vacancy left by Eagle with a growing roster of specialist soul DJs including Brian Rae, Paul Davies and Alan 'Ollie' Ollerton.
The Sapphires, especially their songs "Slow Fizz", "Gotta Have Your Love" (which reached No. 33 on the
Billboard R&B chart), "Evil One", and "Gonna Be a Big Thing", became popular in the Northern soul scene, including during the early days at the Twisted Wheel Club.
1970s In America, Holland-Dozier-Holland's successful acts on Invictus Records were
Freda Payne and
Chairmen of the Board. They also released
Parliament's first album,
Osmium. The label was distributed by
Capitol Records from 1969 to 1972 and then by
Columbia Records from 1973 onwards. In September 1970, the British music magazine
NME reported that Invictus had the UK's top two
singles. Freda Payne's "
Band of Gold" was No. 1, while Chairmen of the Board's "
Give Me Just a Little More Time" was No. 3 on the
UK Singles Chart. Both records were million-sellers in the US, but neither topped the pop or R&B charts. Invictus had two other gold records: Freda Payne's "Bring the Boys Home" and
8th Day's "
She's Not Just Another Woman", both in 1971. Northern soul reached the peak of its popularity in the mid- to late-1970s. At this time, there were soul clubs in virtually every major town in the Midlands and the North of England. Some nightclubs regarded as the most important in this decade were the
Golden Torch, and
Wigan Casino (1973 to 1981). In 1972, white soul group
the Four Seasons released the song "
The Night" from their May 1972 album
Chameleon, a
disco song which appealed to the Northern soul scene, and as a result, it was successfully re-released in the UK in the spring of 1975. appearing at a Wigan Casino reunion event in 2002 Wigan Casino began its weekly soul all-nighters in September 1973. 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 Russ Winstanley, Kev Roberts and Richard Searling. By 1976, the club had a membership of 100,000 people, and in 1978, it was voted the world's number-one
discotheque by
Billboard. 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. By this time, Wigan Casino was coming under criticism from many soul fans about selling out the format and playing anything that came along. The 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. As a result, Wigan Casino DJs resorted to playing any kind of record that matched the correct tempo. Also, the club was subjected to intense media coverage and began to attract many otherwise uninterested people of whom the soul purists did not approve. The Northern soul movement between Wigan Casino's fans and Blackpool Mecca's wider approach accepted the more contemporary sounds of
Philly soul, early disco and funk. Ian Levine broke from the Northern soul mould by playing a new release by
the Carstairs ("It Really Hurts Me Girl") in the early 1970s: Back in England I found this dealer called John Anderson who'd moved from Scotland to King's Lynn. I told him I wanted this Carstairs record and he'd just had a shipment in from America of 100,000 demo records from radio stations. We went through this collection, me, Andy Hanley, and Bernie Golding, and we found three copies of the Carstairs record. Went back to Blackpool, played the record and changed the whole scene. Blackpool Mecca suddenly became the home of this new Northern soul sound. I would've heard this record in 1973, when it was supposedly released, but not obtained it until 1974. 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. As the 1970s progressed, the Northern soul scene expanded even further nationally. There was a notable scene in the east of England: Shades Northampton was one of the leading venues in this area of the country during the early 1970s until it closed in 1975. Later came the 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. Other towns with notable Northern soul venues at this time included
Kettering,
Coventry,
Bournemouth,
Southampton and
Bristol. and Lascelles Gordon. Both played that brand of obscure American import records, singles and albums ("looking back retrospectively"), that they had in their collection. These were bought from specialist import record shops such as Moondogs in East Ham and Contempo record shop at 42 Hanway Street in the West end of London, owned by John Abbey, founder of
Blues & Soul magazine. The magazine also had its own record label (also called Contempo), releasing music from the 1970s, which, starting in 1984, played at a club previously known as Whisky-A-Go-Go, founded by Rene Gelston in
Wardour Street. Norman Jay's show was a collaboration with DJ
Judge Jules, featuring a mainly urban soundtrack from the 1970s and 1980s mixed with early
house music. Tracks similar to "rare grooves" had begun to see a following in the 1970s Northern soul movement, which curated a collection of rare and obscure soul. 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 such 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. In an August 2008 article in
The Times, broadcaster
Terry Christian argued that Northern soul was undergoing a distinct revival in the late 2000s. 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
MMUnion in Manchester. Many who ceased their involvement in the late 1970s have now returned to the scene and regularly participate in such events. In 2009,
Paul O'Grady included a
Northern Soul Triple in his weekly
BBC Radio 2 show. He played three Northern soul hits, often at the request of his listeners. The Northern soul movement inspired the film
Soulboy (2010), directed by Shimmy Marcus, and at least one novel:
Do I Love You? (2008) by
Paul McDonald. In June 2010, theatre director Fiona Laird wrote and directed
Keeping the Faith, a musical based on the Wigan Casino scene and featuring Northern soul music. It was staged at the
Central School of Speech and Drama's Webber Douglas Studio, with a revival at the same venue in September 2010. According to
Will Hermes of
Rolling Stone, the 2008
Raphael Saadiq album
The Way I See It is an original evocation of "classic Northern soul". The music of
Yorkshire singer
John Newman has also been described as 'Northern soul', including his No. 1 hit "
Love Me Again". One version of the video for the song features stereotypical Northern soul dancing; additionally, the track samples the famous soul drum break from
James Brown's "
Funky Drummer", performed by
Clyde Stubblefield. ==Northern soul music==