It made me wonder about values, intrinsic and acquired.

And these were pieces - including the famous Wigan Casino “3 before 8” triptych of Dean Parrish’s “I’m On My Way”, Tobi Legend’s “Time Will Pass You By” and Jimmy Radcliffe’s “Long After Tonight Is All Over” - for which collectors parted with fortunes in their original 45rpm vinyl incarnations.

I needed cheering up, and I was close enough to Nottingham to be thinking fondly about 1960s nights at the Dungeon and the Beachcomber, when the sounds of Stax and Motown laid the foundations for what later transpired in the clubs of the north.Īnd then I realised what I was getting: 100 tracks for £9.99. Mood and location were behind the impulse purchase. Sometime last year I stopped at a service station halfway up the M1 and, while paying for my petrol, picked up a four-CD set of Northern Soul favourites. Details of the film, including the trailer, are on its website: * The photograph above is a still from Northern Soul. And if she can get close to the mood captured three years ago by this fine Dean Chalkley short, Young Souls, she’ll be all right. I’m sure that, after all these years, there’s room for both approaches to a fascinating subculture that refuses to lie down and die. I hope the new film’s thunder hasn’t been stolen by Keeping the Faith, the excellent documentary shown on BBC2 a few weeks ago (you can find it here). It’s more interesting and personal than that, and it certainly whets the appetite.

It’s not a Northern Soul greatest hits collection, but there are plenty of those around. I was extremely pleased to be reminded of “I Surrender”, by the wonderful Eddie Holman. He went on to channel his productions in the direction of Hi-NRG dance music, with considerable success.Īnyway, Constantine’s soundtrack album contains some great stuff, running the gamut from Shirley Ellis’s sublime “Soul Time” to a fabulous eccentricity like The Crow’s “Your Autumn of Tomorrow”. Johnson’s “Your Magic Put a Spell on Me” as being the other finished masters Ian brought with him. I remember Evelyn Thomas’s “Weak Sport” and L.J. Sadly, it turned out to be not the sort of thing the Island promotion and sales machine was good at handling in 1976. They included Barbara Pennington’s “Running in Another Direction”, which we put out. When I was at Island in the mid-’70s, Ian had approached me with the idea of releasing some recordings he’d been making in Chicago with American singers. The clip of Legend (real name: Bessie Gupton) was filmed at the behest of Ian Levine, the former Blackpool Mecca DJ, who tracked her down in Canada in 2007. It lives on in this special music, in which the whirl of authentic emotion is all that counts. “Feeling everyone was your pal.” What a wonderful memory to have. Remember oldies night and the nicotine and sweat dripping off the ceiling. This song takes me back to the last moments of dancing and grabbing your bag to get home on the train to Wigan. Scroll through the comments under the YouTube clip and eventually you’ll come to this, posted five years ago by someone called “cherry blossom”: Give yourself a better chance, because time will pass you right on by.” (A few years ago my Guardian colleague Laura Barton wrote an eloquent column about it.) Many years later the singer was filmed, miming to the record. “Life is just a precious minute, baby,” she sings. There’s no better example than one of the most famous of them all, Tobi Legend’s”Time Will Pass You By”. The inherent poignancy of so many Northern Soul records springs from an undertow of regret in the lyric or the voice, carrying the suggestion of a moment of pure happiness that can never be recaptured. In the 1960s we didn’t know, as we danced to “Candy” by the Astors, or “Earthquake” by Bobbi Lynn, or “1-2-3” by Len Barry, that we represented merely the prelude to something much bigger. Now I listen to the records I never danced to, the stuff dug out by DJs in the early ’70s - the Fuller Brothers’ “Time’s a-Wastin'”, David and the Giants’ “Ten Miles High” or the Ad Libs’ “Nothing Worse Than Being Alone” - and experience a strange pang of thwarted belonging. Listening to Constantine’s choice of tracks revived an old yearning to have been born five or 10 years later, to have stayed in the Midlands, and to have taken part in the Northern Soul phenomenon. The soundtrack album arrived the other day: a CD of 27 songs featured in the movie, a second disc of another 27 favourites for which she couldn’t find room, and a DVD including interviews with the director and Richard Searling, the DJ at the Wigan Casino. Elaine Constantine’s much anticipated feature film Northern Soul is finally due for its release in mid-October, some 17 years after the project started to form in her mind.

Wigan young souls