macca

True, I did miss your point, in fairness you did say current releases. I think the last modern Soul record I listened to was Macy Gray's 'I Try', and that was 2000'ish. Sadly, I find most of these contemporary releases unpalatable, but that's just my taste and tastes are like colours, there are lots of them! My apologies...

Have to disagree there. Chapter Five is massive on the psych/freakbeat scene which is thoroughly populated by nubiles that dance on tables and dudes wearing 'kerchiefs' and hipsters. Their average age is 25 I'd say. When I hit the nightclubs in 1976 I'd have to be arseholed to dance to Disco. Back then I preferred The Del Rays and The World Column to Brass Construction and Crown Heights Affair and to be honest I still do. I don't see that playing charted material from the 70s is going to pump vital blood into an ageing UK scene.

dark brown leather-soled loafers (with red socks) for me. around 1978 we (my group of friends) started to wear moccassins. the bag, up to 1976, was a white adidas jobbie, which I later ditched for a plain khaki millets tool bag. I carried three shirt changes, deodorant and v-neck lambswool jumper, which I'd wear for the first hour, until hyperventilation set in. I never liked polyveldts or the flat cap craze, though I did wear a beret for a very short period, till common sense got the better of me.

We've been down this road soooo many times. Many of us were Soul fans before we got into 'Northern Soul'. The artists had obscure names like Percy Wiggins, Herb Ward, Sam Williams etc, but they were evidently Soul records and therefore instantly appealed. So for me, the Soul quotient was important. I didn't care for the deluge of 60's Brit Pop in 1978/9 and still don't, so the Northern Soul embraces all argument for me never really washed, at the risk of being labelled a purist, soul snob/police or whatever. One doesn't have to like it any more than one has to like Soul.

It's not really worth falling out over, is it? I never went to the Torch/cats. Had I been born two years earlier, I may well have gone, but I wasn't. Ever since I got into this scene, I've heard people eulogising rapturously over the earlier venues, but each person has their time and place. If I really could choose, I'd be a claret slurping, wench shagging toff on a grand tour of Italy and Greece in 1820. Bugger Northern Soul.

So the first time I heard Tamala Lewis in 1977/8, I was hearing a new oldie then? I disagree, respectfully of course.

In 1976/7, I remember grumbling about funk & disco, not newies. As Kev said, a newie was a record that a jock was trying to break, whether a 60s recording or a 70's recording. That's the way I remember it, at least.

So what category do records like the nightliters, cal tjader, and the dynatones fall into then? Not northern?Webby, if you're going to quote Dylan in your opening post, get the bugger right. It's 'I'm a poet, and I know it, hope I don't blow it.' I think you may have blown it. R&B is the bedrock, nay, the very cornerstone of the all-nighter scene, I know that 'cos I bought the Kent Birth of Soul CD.

An opportunity to recant, followed by confession under duress, and then the stake (or the snake)...

What a wonderful site this is. Never fails to amaze me, liver withering responses included. How could anyone term the Jack Jones record 'gritty'? A rum old do, as they say in Dereham.

Winter In America is a masterpiece I never tire of. His dad was the first black to play for Celtic, I believe.

Great educative thread chaps. Nobody's mentioned Barbara Acklin Am I Still The Same Girl? I'm no expert on this genre, quite a 'pagan' in fact, but listening to some of the sound files you're posting, I reckon it would fall into the Crossover category. A lot of Tyrone Davis's tunes as well. Is it because they're ten a penny and therefore not so desirable? Someone mentioned Ty Karim 'Lighten Up Baby'. I thought that was more your typical 'Northern' tune. Enlighten me por favor...

In colloquial Spanish, 'me es inverosimil' is the equivalent of 'I don't care one way or the other'. The things one learns on here...

Maybe the sanctimoniousness of the older guys regarding this undoubtedly historic appearance is due to the fact that their perceived seniority at the time, all of 20 years, led them them foolishly to believe they were guardians of the sacred flame, just like the Ulams in Quest For Fire. Bugger me, them goji berries are having an effect on me.

how did those hats and caps stay on?

Come to think of it, the tune very often mattered even less. Even at 4am on the main floor of Wigan circa 76. Some people were so smashed, tunes like Joe 90 were slipped into playlists with the greatest of ease. Getting all precious about Footsee now, 35 years later, is pointless. Pete has all the right in the world to love paula parfitt, lynn randell, samantha jones, jeanette harper, peggy march et al, because they're all a part of this scene, whether one percieves them as crap records or not. Oldies venues should definitely air them in my opinion. Warts and all NS, whether some of us like the term or not...

The kazoo was used to perfection by many a blues songster, such as henry thomas. it has a long history, and is of african origin, so it's links to NS are unquestionable. Deeve, I didn't say we played footsee at the youth club, I'm just saying we were 'moved' by the dancers on TOTP. If you were 15, types like Jethro were to be looked up to.

I can say that our badges attracted a whole lot more attention at the school tuck shop after that broadcast. We were all talking about it, including the pop fans. There were much more folk 'nosing in' on us at the youth club after it too. Till that point we'd been hidden away in a storeroom. After footsee on TOTP we were allowed to go out into the main hall... with our records of course. When the school closed for summer, the discos in the youth club continued and began to draw people well over school age from all over the area, purely because of the 'scene' we had going. Gary Spencer and Andy 'Smudge' Smith, then around 18 years old, used to bring their latest Soul Bowl acquisitions down as well, so they were exciting times. :-)

A weekend soulie is a person that has a life from sunday to thursday... I assume.

Or the British villain of The Patriot, the Mel Gibson movie. Apparently it was so distorted that his descendents decided to sue. Gibson's reply it's just a f*** movie for chrissakes!

Mickyb has opened a can of worms.

You should take to the stage Simon. I don't think this is exploitation. What is there to exploit? How can anyone relate a bunch of kids clapping along to Tainted Love on a film set with the sheer diversity of today's Rare Soul scene? The Northern Soul scene, as portrayed in the film (and I've only seen the trailer) is merely a period piece, a costume drama that captures a mere parenthesis in the lives of the film's characters. Nothing lasts forever, Wigan was a fleeting moment for many, and 8 years, when compared to what's been and what's to come is exactly that, a fleeting ephemeral moment. I visited a paleoarcheology exhibition yesterday and had the opportunity of peering into a very life-like (it's thought) reconstruction of the face of Atapuerca Man, Homo Antecessor. I speculated on his life 800,000 years ago, his triumphs, his failures and his ultimate destiny, that of extinction. Whether the director of this particular film manages to capture or not the essence of the Wigan era is largely irrelevant, he's not exactly going to challenge anything in the process, is he? Those that 'came out of the cave' remember what it was like inside, the damp, the baby's poo colour scheme, the ultra-violet lights, the flooded areas where one risked life and limb, the balcony that allowed us a glimpse of the cave's dome, stimulating our primitive minds into imagining herds of long extinct bovines etc. I can remember scoffing at the implausability of Quest For Fire. Three different Homo species sharing the planet at the same time? Absurd, but at the end of the day it's cinema, an imaginary world, a parenthesis (that word again) from the real world, an escape of sorts, for the want of a better word.

This has become so protracted that I've forgotten who the good guys and bad guys are. Could someone remind me or will I have to go trawling through all that bile from last year? Now we have a finished product, I think it's incumbent on us all to see it and then pontificate at length once we've drawn the necessary conclusions. I will ask one question though, are a film-makers connections to the subject matter of vital importance in regard to the veracity of the plot? Clint Eastwood 'Letters From Iwo Jima' and Ken Loach 'Land & Freedom' spring to mind. Who's at fault here? The director for having the audacity to tell the tale, or his advisors for leading him up the garden path? Or is it that this is a tale that can't be told in this particular medium?

Son House for many was the Delta Blues personified, the guy that had to put up with a precocious whippersnapper by the name of Robert Johnson pestering him to teach him slide technique and songs. Unfortunately, by the time of his 'rediscovery' his playing was seriously 'whiskey challenged', there's a clip on Youtube of him heckling, of all people, Howling Wolf, apparently resenting the fact that a younger guy should 'lecture' a roomfull of older black men on the blues. His 20's & 30's contemporary Skip James on the other hand was as stunning in 1964 as he was on those old 78s. A mean character by all accounts, and pretty dismissive of the Folk Blues Revival. His Devil Got My Woman album, recorded around 1968, is about as stark and foreboding as anything ever put on record, an absolute master on the guitar and equally compelling on the piano with a unique percussive style.

And it ain't gonna be first or last of its kind, is it? Quadrophenia, SNF, the Todd Haynes movie about Glam Rock, Stardust, etc, etc... The Bari Track sounds good, I must say... M