Northern Soul: The Film Soundtrack

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Originally intended to be recorded by Gloria Jones and the Tiaras, Jones‘ vocal was eventually replaced by new Dore Records signing Rita Graham following a disagreement with management. Winstanley won’t say who he thinks might have obtained the copy from the Motown files. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. I mean, I know it was 50 years ago, but…”

Northern soul is a culture based on chance finds, crate-digging and word-of-mouth recommendations. That’s why it would be redundant to fill this list with the titles everyone knows, although it would be churlish not to include some obvious selections, like Out on the Floor, for starters.Winstanley says 500 vinyl demo copies of the song were produced to send to radio stations, but then all but one were destroyed when it was decided not to release it. Although The Twisted Wheel was the birthplace of Northern Soul, Wigan Casino was its most popular venue. It was once named the best disco in the world by Billboard magazine and at one point boasted over 100,000 members. Its all nighters, which began at midnight and ended at 8am, are the stuff of legend. Despite the name, most Northern Soul music actually came from the States, where DJs dug up obscure singles and limited releases from pretty much unknown artists. In fact, the term Northern Soul was coined by a London record shop owner to describe the obscure requests of Northern football fans. Record label RCA Victor released many of Northern Soul's most popular records, representing the likes of The Dynamics, Garland Green and The Celestrals. When he returned, he had one final statement. As with A Storm In Heaven’s “Blue,” brought in at the last minute, “History” would point towards The Verve’s next record: a stately acoustic ballad drenched in strings and which would resonate further than anyone could have imagined. “We were like, ‘F__king hell! That’s an incredible song,’” Jones recalls. The band recorded it that night. McCabe, however, declined to add a lead guitar part, feeling the song was perfect without him; Ashcroft would misread this as McCabe’s refusal to be a part of a song he hadn’t written. Regardless, the end result stands as the perfect encapsulation of the “pained” emotion Ashcroft’s northern soul had experienced. The legacy

If you're looking for something to dance the night away to, you've come to the right place. Our Northern Soul collection on the musicMagpie Store includes some of the best Northern Soul compilations and artists around. To get you started, here are 10 of our personal favourites. The northern soul DJs were very competitive and protective about their finds, and to stop rivals knowing what he was playing, Winstanley says he covered up the label with a fake one, proclaiming the record to be by “Eddie Foster”. This double album includes Drift Away and Gray's follow up album Loving Arms, named after his popular cover of the soul standard. Yet the Jersey Boys hitmakers showed off their differing colours with their all but forgotten 1972 LP Chameleon, released on Mowest, the West Coast division of the legendary Motown label. The album flopped initially, but Northern Soul enthusiasts unearthed it later on, with The Night finally charting at number seven in the UK, three years later in 1975.Iggy Pop’s riotous icons weren’t the only influence. As with A Storm In Heaven, The Verve brought a seemingly conflicting bunch of inspirational figures to bear on their new work. Having looked to Dr. John for their predecessor, Peter Salisbury now immersed himself in Tiki Fulwood’s drumming on the early Funkadelic albums, along with the sonic assault of NWA drum loops. McCabe felt that his guitar reverb tapped into a “dribbling, wibbly” Barry White thing. Experimental Japanese music and Miles Davis’ post- Bitches Brew explorations filtered into the likes of “Brainstorm Interlude”’s psychedelic swamp and the heavy fuzz of “This Is Music.” Russ Winstanley, of Wigan, is the self-proclaimed man who “discovered” the song. One of the founders of Wigan Casino – which attracted thousands of soul fans from 1973 until its closure in 1981 – he DJ’d at the club on its very last night, and the final song ever played there was Wilson’s Do I Love You. And Winstanley says he’s the man responsible for it being an underground hit. If we’ve missed off your favourite, let us know. Spread the love, but most importantly, keep the faith. Dobie Gray's Drift Away was one of the biggest hits of 1973, selling over 1 million copies and becoming a staple of dancefloors across the North. The record was deleted from Motown’s catalogue because at the last minute they decided not to release it. Wilson, who died in 2012 aged 71 from prostate cancer, gave an interview to Searling in 2001 and said that just before the record’s scheduled release on 23 December 1965, Motown founder Berry Gordy took him to one side to tell him he had a choice: did he want to be an artist, or did he want to be a writer/producer? According to Wilson, it was a “no-brainer”, and he went on to work with artists including Marvin Gaye, the Supremes and the Four Tops.

The Marvelettes were one of the most popular girl groups in Northern Soul, with Please Mr Postman their biggest hit. Although they're still very much a soul group, The Marvelettes poppier sound makes them a good gateway to the more obscure stuff.

The context

Dwarfs were a Pennsylvania garage band fronted by singer-keyboardist Robert Zimmerman (not that one), and the piledriving Stop Girl, based on a filthy fuzz guitar riff shamelessly indebted to the Stones’ Satisfaction, would nowadays just as likely be deemed freakbeat as northern soul. It felt like I’d been through an emotional storm,” Ashcroft would later tell the NME. “But I got something out of it. Out of all the torment, I had a diamond. And that’s what great groups survive on.” As it happened, the band, in this incarnation, would barely survive the year. A Northern Soul, however, would go on to become of the defining albums of the mid-90s: soul music, palpably real, torn from the core of something intangible.

Few scenes in the history of popular music have endured and inspired as much dedication and devotion as Northern Soul.

Release

But the intensity took its toll on the band. Somehow, they came to the belief that 10pm at night was the only time they could capture the sounds in their collective heads. Recording until four or five in the morning, they’d sleep for 12 hours, get up and do it again. “It was all about waiting for the inspiration… And if it wasn’t there, we’d get really, really depressed,” Ashcroft would recall. “After six weeks of going up and crashing down, everything you’ve been doing takes its toll. You start losing it.” Searling, author of a northern soul history called Setting The Record Straight, says: “The copies of the record that were in the Motown vaults were … borrowed. Then Soussan sent one to the Casino in about 1975. He’d already put a new label on it, saying it was Eddie Foster. Nobody had any idea it was Frank Wilson until a long time later. It was Soussan who discovered the song.” And where is he now? “Out there somewhere,” says Searling. “Probably.” Do I Love You was the only single ever released by the Motown producer, who co-write hits such as the Supremes‘ Stoned Love and Marvin Gaye‘s Chained, and with only 250 copies of the single pressed at the time, it’s believed there are only three copies left in the world. Playing live became our forte,” Jones says, recalling how A Northern Soul was largely written in six weeks on the road, the group firing on all cylinders, treating audiences to new songs the day they were written. “We’d read about The Stooges going in and recording an album in six days and that was what we wanted to do.”