Amsterdam Russ

First time I heard "Cool Off" played at an allnighter, I thought it was the backing track for a radio or TV advert for a cool drink aimed at a local black audience. That dj's had dug into Black Culture that deeply impressed me immensely as a youngster in 1983! Some time later, I heard 'Mighty Lover' and I was even more convinced: "Cool Off" was a reworked song made for an advert and "Mighty Lover" was the original. And it still sounds that way to me.

Glad to see this has been picked up again. Seems the last thread about this was largely ignored. Got to be essential reading without a doubt!

This is brilliant! The distance between John O' Groats in Scotland and Land's End in Cornwall is 874 miles by road. In such a small land mass as the UK with relatively easy traveling distances and with such a concentration of Northern Soul punters and promoters, date clashes are almost unavoidable. The distance between Adelaide in Australia and Pattaya in Thailand is 4120 miles or 6,626km - approximately 9 hours of flying time. That's the same as travelling from Heathrow to New Delhi, or Heathrow to Minneapolis! It's a quarter of the way around the world. Yet you call it a clash! For goodness sake, where the hell do you guys go for a local night out? :lol:

Absolutely sublime in my book - and absolutely amazing to think it got released in the UK all those years ago to a public that completely ignored it!

Not a soul tune, but Les Baxter's swinging jazz tune I DIG. The Jubilee Singers announce SMS/text messages with a cry of "Good news, the chariot's coming. Good news..."

Ditto!

It's not so strange a decision if you understand what was happening with the markets at the time, and particularly the Gospel boom as the clippings below testify. Today we see Gospel and Soul as two clear 'genres' with the latter owing its genesis to the former, which in turn was something that had had its heyday with the post-war jubilee style. The Gospel group, The Golden Gate Quartet wasn't just successful, they were a world-wide phenomenon. Check YouTube for some marvellous footage of their Saigon Tour in 1958. To show how highly Gospel music was held in society at this time, when JFK was elected President of the USA in 1961, he chose Mahalia Jackson to sing at his inauguration. For goodness sake, you can't get much more of a seal of approval than the Presidential Seal of approval! What I think we don't often appreciate is that Gospel fed Soul and Soul fed Gospel as far as music markets were concerned - each owed at least some debt to the other in commercial terms. Of course, history shows that Soul outshone Gospel commercially and culturally in the end. But not for the want of trying on the part of record companies, particularly Columbia, to resurrect Gospel in the first place and turn it into a holy cash cow which they labelled "The Authentic New Pop Gospel Sound"!! Hallelujah and Amen!

Funny this crops up now. Someone was telling me just the other day about the Sweet Chariot, a gospel nightclub set up with the support of Columbia Records in 1961. The house gospel group were The Sweet Chariots, who later became The Chariots, the group fronted by Tony Amaro on Loma. Gospel music, of course, was at the very heart of soul music and Columbia (who had made a lot of money out of Mahalia Jackson over a number of years) wanted to commercialise what they perceived as the crossover of church music into the pop/R&B mainstream and the fast growing interest for gospel itself. Not only was the Sweet Chariot a club where folks could go be entertained, but it provided Columbia with the possibility to record and consequently market live performances on LPs. At least one LP was cut entitled The Sweet Chariot - The Sensational New Pop Gospel Nightclub with "Soul". The title says it all! Here's a track from that LP... Unsurprisingly, gospel, nightclubs and alcohol were too toxic a mix and the place folded after about six months. Here are some clippings I dug up on the subject from... you guessed it - Billboard... Sorry, with hindsight maybe this is a bit too far off topic. Maybe worthy of a thread of its own?

Emidisc is just the name of a UK brand of the metal-plated lacquered disc known as acetates. Acetates were legitimately produced for a number of reasons by record companies. For example: * to demonstrate songs for other artists/producers * as reference copies for producer/artist/record company staff before a track is released * as samples of potential releases. Record execs would meet and listen to acetates (emidiscs) and decide what would get (or not get released) * as advance promotional copies to send out to radio djs and get airplay (and thus interest) before a track gets officially released * to record one-off tracks, for example, a special version of a song that gets used in a TV show. The Northern Soul scene (and others) used emidiscs and other branded acetates because they were easy to make if you had a cutting machine. Exactly as you say, emidiscs could be made to order. The emidiscs in this thread are all 'real' as you put it. Well, I can vouch for the ones I've added

Exchanging a couple of emails with Sidney Barnes after buying a copy of his autobiography, I said I'd post up a link to it for him... https://www.sidneybarnes.net/shop.htm Here's a scan of the front cover...

Gotham City acetate for "You're really getting to me" by Jonelle Allen. I believe the song is unreleased, but do let me know if that's incorrect. She made a name for herself on Broadway before crossing over to movies and TV. She appeared in a few films including Cotton comes to Harlem. TV credits include Police Woman, Love Boat, Hill Street Blues and Cagney & Lacey. Her biggest role was as the character Grace in the series, Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman!

Posted this up elsewhere recently, but it's worthy of this thread, methinks... A Bell Sound acetate of The Toys "I got a man" credited to lead singer Barbara Harris. Not released in the US on 45.

No matter how many variables you throw in, one is an original item and the other is a digital copy.

But that's the difference between having an original release on 45 and a digital version of it! I've happily bought single page ads from Billboard and Record World and will continue to do so if I find ones that are of interest. Just because Billboard is available online doesn't devalue the desirability certain aspects of the original publications. On the other hand, I've also taken screen grabs of news items and have no desire to buy a whole issue or just a page for only couple of column inches or the briefest of mentions of a specific artist or label.

Have been dipping in and out of various resources in Google Books for a couple of years now and it always amazes me what turns up. I also like the fact that you can create and build your own 'library' of articles, etc, which is great for developing an archive of material relative to your own areas of interest.

Oh, yes! Got to get a copy of this. Email sent

Have woken up with this playing in my head for two days in a row now!

If Jimmie does the internet he may find a whole heap of disciples here! No flippancy intended in my comment, but seriously, there are lots of people here who would love the opportunity to speak with and hear from 'Jimmy Delphs!' - more than you might appreciate!!

Unlike Billboard who have made their archive available to the public, NME and Melody Maker want to turn a profit from theirs. This might be of some limited use... https://www.rocksbackpages.com/library.html

Not quite - look to Berry Gordy first. It was he who had the tiff with the Jobettes!

Chris Calloway/Something else... easy beat, smooth rocker loaded with teen commercialism. Sounds rather different to how it would be described today - that's if anyone could agree on the terms and genres that could be used!

That's why I specifically mentioned that tiffs were used by those "who require higher resolution images in a non-compressed format"!

Still used extensively by photographers and many others who require higher resolution images in a non-compressed format.

Following on from Virgil Henry on Colossus, you can't go wrong with this marvellous mid-tempo cheapie from the Festivals! Brilliant!

Looking for a good, clean copy of this excellent double-sided cheapie Over you/Every day by Aaron Neville on Minit. Ex condition both sides including labels, please. Let me know by PM! Bet you thought it was going to be Hercules!