Young Soul Rebels E-Book

Stuart Cosgrove

• Herausgeber: Polygon
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 511

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Ultimate History of Northern Soul. Young Soul Rebels is the intimate story of Britain's most fascinating underground music scene – northern soul. Stuart Cosgrove has been a well-known collector on the scene for decades, and here he takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey to the heart of this secret society: the iconic clubs – The Twisted Wheel, The Torch, Wigan Casino and the Blackpool Mecca, the infamous bootleggers, and the DJs and crate-digging collectors who voyaged to America to unearth rare sounds. The book sweeps across fifty years of social and cultural history, taking in the rise of amphetamine culture, the brutal policing of the youth scene, the north–south divide, the rise of Thatcherism and the miners' strike, and concludes with a picture of northern soul today: as popular now as it was in its 1970s heyday.

Leseprobe

‘Make Life Worth Living’: Leeds, 1970s. Northern Soul clubs Hernie’s and Leeds Central are being targeted by local drug squad officers. Pharmaceutical company Beecham’s subsequently merges with Smith, Kline & French (SKF), the manufacturer of the all-nighter Mod drug Drinamyl. © Nick Hedges

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.Birlinn LtdWest Newington House10 Newington RoadEdinburghEH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright © Stuart Cosgrove 2016

The right of Stuart Cosgrove to be identified as the author of this work has beenasserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders. If any omissions have beenmade, the publisher will be happy to rectify these in future editions.

ISBN 978 1 84697 333 8eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 894 0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Design by Chris HannahPrinted and bound by Livonia Print, Latvia

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1 The Amphetamine Rush 1971

Chapter 2 Locusts in the Night 1967–1971

Chapter 3 In Search of Obscurity 1967–1973

Chapter 4 The Road to Wigan Pier 1973–1981

Chapter 5 Red Riding, West Yorkshire 1973–1981

Chapter 6 The Deep Sea Where the Music Roars 1974–1984

Chapter 7 Soul Not Dole 1974–1990

Chapter 8 Ticket to the Freak Show 1978–1986

Chapter 9 The New Model Army 1980–1985

Chapter 10 London Calling 1984–1990

Chapter 11 The Twisted Wheels of Technology

Glossary of Terms

Index

© Kenichi Images

FOREWORD

The recent success of my cult book Detroit 67: A The Year That Changed Soul has convinced me that readers yearn for ideas that connect soul music to the wider society. So I have written about things than ran parallel to the rare soul scene: amphetamine abuse, police raids, the north–south divide, the Yorkshire Ripper murders, the miners’ strike, the collapse of the industrial north, and the rise of new technologies, which against all expectations have breathed new life into the northern scene.

Many people have helped me with their memories and they are credited within the book itself, but I want to single out three people who gave me encouragement and personify what the northern soul scene is about. Dave Molloy from Bolton is one of the northern soul scene’s great minds, and he holds in his head a repository of knowledge and perspectives. I owe him many thanks, as well as Maureen Walsh from Dewsbury who helped me to connect the big social stories of the day to the scene, and was a touchstone for what really mattered in our young lives, and my long-time friend Mike Mason who grew up with me in the same housing scheme in Scotland and has remained a great friend across many years and through numerous scrapes.

Thanks to the editorial team who helped me to prepare this book for publication – especially Alison Rae from Polygon Books and designers Chris Hannah and Mark Swan – and my immediate family and the wider soul family who I have met on the way. Thanks also to those who have helped with interviews and personal memories, knowingly or otherwise, especially members of social media groups and the daddy of the rare soul forums, soul-source.co.uk. The striking cover image is of Stephen Cootes, a painter and decorator from Penicuik, crowned World Northern Soul Dance Champion in Blackpool in 2011. Remarkably, Stephen was born ten years after Wigan closed.

It’s 5 a.m. at a soul all-nighter in a local community centre in Glenrothes, Fife – The Exit Centre. A dancer entranced by soul looks up to the heavens.

1

THE AMPHETAMINE RUSH 1971

Independence is a heady draught, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does. It does not matter that its taste is not always appealing. It is addictive and with each drink you want more.

Maya Angelou

Nothing will ever compare to the amphetamine rush of my young life and the night I was nearly buggered by my girlfriend’s uncle in the Potteries. It was a lumpy bed, upstairs in a red-brick terraced house in Tunstall, near Stoke-on-Trent, a few streets away from a famous northern soul club called the Golden Torch. My would-be molester was ancient, hopelessly drunk, and in a deep sleep. His vest stank of Woodbines, stale ale and the old ways, and he had the roughened hands of a seasoned foundryman. It was obvious from his determined grasp that he had stuck his rod in hotter things than me. I clung desperately to the edge of the mattress, wheezing with asthma, as his hands groped ever closer towards me. For a few uncomfortable hours I clung on, fearful for my anal membranes, but as the night ticked gradually by it became clear I was a shifting fantasy in his drunken dreams. Through the haze of drink and hard-ons, he thought I was Emma Peel from The Avengers.

Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who triggered an obsession.

When he awoke in the new light of the morning the old man was visibly disappointed. Far from being a sex siren in long leather boots, I was a stick-thin teenager from Scotland with atopic eczema and an insatiable appetite for the music of the American ghettos. Soul music had consumed my life, and I was on the first stumbling steps on a journey to forbidden places. Malcolm X had a phrase for it, ‘by any means necessary’, and not even the humiliation of being trapped in a creaking bed with a grunting drunk could deter me from northern soul and the first all-nighter I ever attended.

Letham, where the author grew up. © Robin Stott via Geograph

Saturday passed slowly as I browsed around local market stalls. Then night slowly fell and we walked through the backstreets of Stoke along cobbled terraces. The army of leather feet resonated like a drum solo, building percussion in our speeding heads and raising the adrenaline of anticipation. A swell of people hung by the door of what looked like a wartime cinema, and a blackout curtain seemed to have closed across the north of England. It was virtually impossible to make out faces or detail; everything was sound. A pounding noise escaped through the doorway and the wild screeching sound of saxophones pushed through the fire escapes, desperate for air. We paid at the ticket booth, but even in the foyer, an intense heat much like an industrial oven scorched through the thick aggressive air, and the noise was so pure, so fearless and so commanding, it dragged you inwards into a scrum of lurching bodies: hot, wet and demonic. This was in every respect the Devil’s music, and I had travelled hundreds of miles from home to sip with the deranged serpents that slithered so gracefully on the floor. There was no going back. No music later in life would ever touch its uniqueness, no rock concert could match its energy, and no rave could come close to its latent illegality. This was northern soul: the reason they invented youth.

My early life had been troubled and economically deprived. But the gods had plucked me out of ordinary life and thrown me into the most extraordinary youth culture Britain has ever produced. I had grown up in a single-parent family in a council housing scheme in Scotland called Letham. My dad died when I was an infant and so the hope of suburbia or even an ordinary upbringing suddenly vanished. It scarred me then and it hurts me now. My dad was a giant in my life, a left-wing lorry driver who had travelled to Russia as a trade unionist and had met the famous spaceman Yuri Gagarin. The week before he died, in a gesture of man-to-boy kindness, he had sent me a postcard extolling the virtues of the Soviet space race, with Yuri Gagarin resplendent on the front. It was rare, the only one that anyone in my class had ever seen, and the stamp was authentic Soviet-era philately, with a rouble sign and two space dogs on the top left corner. Before the postcard arrived on my doorstep, he was dead, killed in a car crash on a road winding through the east of Scotland. The Cold War postcard took on a near religious significance in my life. I kept it tucked away in a drawer, too precious to put a pin through or leave on the kitchen table. In the terminology of northern soul, it was ‘rare’, a ‘one-off’, a ‘fucking dobber’, the only Soviet postcard anyone in Letham had ever seen. Kids crowded round me to look at the stamp. It featured a wee dog called Laika, a mongrel who had been plucked from the streets of Moscow by Soviet scientists and fired into space in Sputnik 2. I loved Laika like an emotionally needy child, not realising that within a few years I was about to be plucked from the streets like a stray mongrel and thrust into the intense heat of the Torch.

In the months after my dad’s death, I took comfort in making lists on pages torn from a school notebook, a list of Soviet sputniks, space-age dogs, and cosmonauts: there was Gagarin, Titov and Popovitch, but the darling of them all was Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. She looked like a stern schoolteacher with her head in a goldfish bowl but she helped prepare me for the journey to come. Compiling lists and recording obscure detail is part of the everyday autism of northern soul, and it was one I had begun to master early in life. Psychologists have spent decades trying to understand why people make lists. For me, one of the most credible is the so-called Zeigarnik Effect, which is what psychologists call our mind’s tendency to get obsessed with tasks we have not done rather than those we have completed. It is a disorder that I was already trapped in: every new record I bought was swamped by the lists of those I had heard, those I needed to own, and a special few that were out of my reach, records so rare that only one or two existed in the world. But those glorious days were yet to come, and while I lived in a ghetto of sorts, a grim but likeable post-war housing scheme with windows that rattled like an old washing machine, it was not the ghettos I yearned for. Around the age of fifteen, as the rawest pain of my father’s death had begun to heal, I became increasingly fixated on inner city America: the high-rise blocks on the Chicago South Side, the sparse prairie ghettos of Detroit, and the graffiti-strewn subway stations of New York. It was a love affair that was rich in discovery and one that would never end.

Northern soul is a scene founded on obscure music from the African-American society and works according to codes of behaviour that baffle outsiders. It is a world I have tried and failed to explain, but rather than confuse outsiders with minutiae it is best to point to images. One is a boy and the other is a girl; both are dancing, but by their movement and style they say everything about the scene. The boy is lost in the music, caught in a trance . . . His feet, sprinkled with talcum powder, navigate a wooden floor. He is looking skywards to the heavens and his hands are clasped to his chest in a near religious experience. The implication is clear: soul is more than a music, it is a spiritual calling and a route to all-night fanaticism. The girl is more controlled. She’s staring into the distance, her cropped peroxide bob cut elegantly short. Her Fred Perry-style shirt is miraculously white, her bright red lips glow through the night, and her long heavy suffragette skirt angles down to the floor. It is a timeless style that could have been worn at Blackpool Mecca or on the pier at Cleethorpes in 1975, and it screams through studied coolness. Northern soul is all of that: it is the fanatical height of spiritual cool.

A favourite game on the northern soul scene is, what was the first record you ever bought? The answer determines when you joined the scene. Was it in the Mod days of the late sixties, at the high point of Wigan Casino, or in the latter days of an all-nighter in Stafford (brazenly called Top of the World)? My answer was suitably vague. I had learned a lot from my older sister, a first generation Mod, who collected R&B imports and 7-inch vinyl discs by old bluesmen like Jimmy Witherspoon, Howlin’ Wolf and Rufus Thomas, names she lovingly wrote on the brown paper covers of her schoolbooks. I was too young back then to get those cool cultural references and was so besotted by Scottish football that everything was seen through its smudged prism. I spent a baffled summer seeing the exotic names on my sister’s schoolbooks – names like Wilson Pickett, Lee Dorsey and Otis Redding – assuming that they must have signed for Dundee United. Why else would they be written on a school jotter? When I was asked what my first record was, I cited ‘The Boogaloo Party’ by The Flamingos (US Philips, 1966), because I liked its exuberant title and its risky promise of ghetto fun. But deep inside me was a niggling act of contrition. As a Catholic lad who had been an altar boy and could still recite chunks of the Latin mass, it was not a wholly accurate account of my young life. To put it more crudely, it was a flagrant lie. The first record I ever bought, admittedly for my mum’s birthday, was ‘Dominique’ by The Singing Nun. It was 1963, and I went into the Concorde, a record shop in Perth, to buy a record I knew fell tragically short of hipness. Rather than just take the thing and retreat in embarrassment. I stupidly asked to listen to it in one of the plywood record booths of the era. To my eternal shame I overheard two mouthy Mod girls in the next booth suppressing full-scale laughter at my choice. To this day, it is a record that makes me shiver with embarrassment. I take only a small sliver of comfort from the fact that The Singing Nun ended up as a depressed lesbian who failed to pay her taxes and committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates. I can only hope that those mouthy Mods are now fat grannies from Muirton who smoke Embassy Regal and drink Diamond White behind the Asda Superstore.

My older sister was already going to clubs that played music on the fringes of northern soul – mostly Modernist cafés and youth clubs. The first place was the Knack Bar, a small youth club hanging perilously on the banks of the River Tay, which flows majestically through Perth. The second was the infamous Ingleneuk, an R&B haunt tucked away beneath old railway arches behind a garage forecourt. Like many of the big northern soul clubs of the sixties, it had emerged from a late night blues café called the Blues Workshop, an after-hours shebeen where musicians improvised into the early hours. ‘Ingleneuk’ is a Scottish term for a small inlet or corner, but the venue belied its cosy name and attracted rogues, bandits and pop pioneers, driven to hell on Lambretta scooters. It played imports and hosted R&B singers, and the local house band, The Vikings, became the nucleus of a much more famous seventies funk outfit, the Average White Band. Although it was a small town, Perth had talent. The first person I heard singing soul was a guy called Dave Amos, whose nickname Papa Stone conjured a delta bluesman plucking a box guitar by a parched cotton field; in fact he lived on a bleak council scheme called Hunters, which festered by old railway yards and had never seen the sun. Dave sang as if he had been born in a Bourbon bar and specialised in great cover versions of Chuck Woods, Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. At a dancehall in nearby Dundee, he was once told by the Vikings’ manager Andy Lothian to ‘lay off the ballads’ because it would provoke the crowd. ‘They just fight when it goes slow,’ Amos was warned.

It still gives me a daft boyish thrill that it was guys from Tayside who would become the first white band to go to number one in the black American charts. On 22 February 1975, by which time I was a regular at Wigan Casino, the Average White Band’s ‘Pick Up The Pieces’ (Atlantic, 1974) knocked Linda Ronstadt off her perch at the top of the Billboard 100. James Brown, the egocentric Godfather of Soul, was so hacked off with AWB’s success he recorded an answer record under the mysterious name AABB – the Above Average Black Band. By then, the Ingleneuk had closed down, in part due to problems with noise and amphetamine abuse, and frustrated that I had been too young to get in, I went one day with my friend Mike Mason to track it down. After a few false starts we found it tucked away down a lane to the left of a junk-ridden garage. All that was left was an intimidating wooden door with a sliding rectangular peephole. This club was gone but so many of those things lay ahead: the furtive lanes, backstreet clubs, old forecourts, railway arches – the cherished habitat of underground soul clubs.

By my late teens I was a regular at the Letham Community Centre disco, a magnet for babes and psychopaths. Every Scottish housing scheme has characters like Francis ‘Franco’ Begbie from Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, guys with an innate and intimidating capacity for random violence. Our local sociopaths were called the Mental Pack, skinheads and periodically suedeheads who wore the fashions of the day: Sta-Prest trousers, Monkey boots and Arthur Black shirts. I can name them with trepidation to this day: Snitcher Meechan, Johnny Burns and a terrifying guy with a Crombie coat and an exaggerated limp called Crooky. His real name was Jimmy Cruikshank and the limp was real, too. In a whispered exchange under the noise of sixties soul, a mate in the know told me that he had lost his leg due to frostbite, after escaping from Polmont in the midst of a snowstorm. Polmont was Scotland’s terrifying young offenders’ institution, and the whispered detail only added to the climate of fear. Despite the constant worry of being ‘dug up’ – local vernacular for being physically threatened – Letham Community Centre became my second home, and the place I first heard ska, Motown and Stax. What I didn’t know back then was that this music was only the shimmering surface of the untold wealth of black America.

Hunting for soul in Perth was limited to a few racks of cheap albums next to the pick‘n’mix in Woolworths. It was there, dodging the authoritarian ‘floor walkers’ who had been employed to stop shoplifting, that I first encountered style: Edwin Starr dressed as an FBI agent, The Temptations in matching pink suits, and the Four Tops shimmying at a garden party, on the cover of their Greatest Hits. I had yet to dig deeper and discover the hidden symbols of ghetto chic: Chuck Jackson’s pinkie ring, Levi Stubbs’ iridescent trousers and Holly Maxwell’s peroxide afro. The real pleasures were yet to come.

Holly Maxwell, Chicago’s original peroxide blonde and Chuck Jackson.

By the age of sixteen, I was so deeply immersed in soul music that even my dire secondary school could not stifle the joy of life. Much as I had loved my primary school, which had looked after me during childhood bereavement, I loathed the suffocating rules of my secondary school. Fortunately, in the backroom of a failing pub called the Corinna, a small soul club had opened up and I fluttered to it like a moth to a bulb. This was the Perth City Soul Club, the first real soul club I ever attended. Even in its infancy, it was following the Hezbollah rituals that define the northern soul scene. One night, a DJ was brought in front of the committee charged with playing a Bowie record; he was given a stern warning and a second chance, but there was a noisy faction on the committee who wanted him hounded through the streets in sackcloth and then burned at the stake outside H Samuel. I was among that zealous throng and I have not mellowed since. For a child raised in the church by my mother and tutored in the ways of socialism by my late father, I had discovered a new overarching ideology: the fundamentalism of northern soul. That First Commandment has stayed with me throughout my life: there shall be no other music before soul.

Childhood asthma is a gift. For reasons best left to pharmaceutical science, Perth skinheads had discovered small brown pills called Do-Dos, a legal substance dispensed to people with mild asthma or bronchial infections. Unknown to the helpful counter staff at Boots in the High Street, Do-Dos contained ephedrine, a substance similar to amphetamine, and so could be used as fake speed. Every Saturday before the football, I was dispatched to the counter at Boots to get Do-Dos. They were then doled out in the Cutlog Vennel. Perth is an old medieval city and narrow alleyways called vennels cut through the town. When my family first arrived from Galway they lived in the Meal Vennel, an old slum where my dad had been born. These tiny lanes had once been the trade thoroughfares of the old town but had become a place to hide or to dodge the law. Do-Dos were my first naive and tentative exploration of the ‘Mod drug’ amphetamine – you got a wee buzz and your wheezing chest cleared up – but there would be better jube-jubes to come.

By eighteen years old I was a student in Hull and prone to pretension. The poster above my bed was a quote from Italian poet Cesare Pavese: ‘We do not remember days, we remember moments.’ My mission on leaving home was to relish those moments, gorge on experience and dig deeper into the genius of black America. The Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull was called ‘the Liquorice Allsort’, with its six layers of black-and-white floors stacked on top of each other. The librarian was England’s most famous modern poet, Philip Larkin. You could sometimes spot him among the shelves: bald, speccy, and scurrying around in bookish disarray. I once scared him by appearing unexpectedly in the same aisle of books and he shied away like an agoraphobe who had been caught in the light. Larkin was a jazz buff and that proved to be critically important. With a huge academic budget and the power to buy what he wanted for his library, Larkin had dedicated the top floor to two subjects: theology and jazz. The rows of books were crammed with the origins of soul: books on slave songs, gospel, ragtime, jazz, ghetto poverty, the civil rights movement and R&B. Many were hardback tomes, some impenetrable to the casual reader, but I scoured the shelves tirelessly for three years, reading anything and everything about the music and the social conditions of black America. Larkin deserves my eternal respect. Famous for his line ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’, I was more taken when he drifted to jazz and blues as in the poem ‘Reference Back’:

The author planning his first trip to the Torch, 1971, in a Ben Sherman shirt and an Argyle House jersey – then the garb of Scottish soul boys.

Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now

I shall, I suppose, always remember how

The flock of notes those antique negroes blew

Out of Chicago air into

A huge remembering pre-electric horn

The year after I was born

It was on Tuesday, 12 October 1971, that my northern soul voyage seriously began. The university Union ran a weekly disco and it was there that I met my mentor – an already seasoned northern soul girl called Pat Wall. Pat stood out from the crowd. She was distinctively dressed in what was known then as a Tonic suit and wore clumpy loafers adorned with leather tassels. Her hair was cropped on top, and feathered at the sides. Her accent was deep, friendly and unashamedly working-class. It was not quite love at first sight, more a moment of catatonic disbelief. Neither of us could quite believe the other actually existed: two suedeheads jostled together in a sea of hairy students. We simply moved towards each other and started to talk. Pat was from Rochdale and was studying PE at a training college next door to the university, but we never really talked about subjects or seminars or essays; we plunged straight into soul. Meeting Pat Wall was a life-changing moment. She knew much more than me, she had better records, and access to the northern soul scene in ways I’d never imagined. It was a lesson in so many ways. Mentors were meant to be older and wiser men, but Pat Wall was a teenage girl, a few months younger than me and a fund of new knowledge. She spoke of places I’d never heard of and people I wanted to meet. Her front teeth were slightly crossed at the front, and she modestly covered them with her tongue as she spoke, partly shy and partly self-effacing, but it endeared me to her all the more. How could anyone this cool be modest?

We agreed to meet again the next day, but even before we had parted on that first night, she had mentioned a Manchester club called the Twisted Wheel, which had just been closed by the police, and gave me an old C60 cassette tape that was like an initiation rite into a secret cult. In the inner sleeve, scribbled in smudged Biro, were the names of people I’d never heard of before – Alice Clark, Lenis Guess, Butch Baker – but would come to savour in years to come. Pat said that we should go to the Torch in Stoke and that she had an auntie there who would put us up. My mind was like a pinball machine, names rattling around like a steel ball. She called the next day from a coin-box to say she had spoken to her auntie and it was fine for us to stay. Ominously she warned me that it was a cramped house and that I might have to sleep with her uncle.

It was the longest night I ever spent, longer than any soul all-nighter, but it was the beginning of a great adventure and the first tentative steps in my life as a young soul rebel. I was going to one of the most famous all-nighters in the history of northern soul – the Golden Torch.

Pat Wall, gifted dancer at the Wheel and Wigan Casino, in a back garden in Rochdale in the early seventies.

The Mod legacy lives on – dancing to sixties soul in 2015. © Kenichi Images

Locusts in the night: two soul boys in a photo booth hold up their Twisted Wheel membership cards. The sunglasses disguise the dilated pupils of amphetamine users; the boy on the right bears the telltale signs of ‘speed bumps’ on his mouth.

2

LOCUSTS IN THE NIGHT 1967–1971

They prefer the dark night to daylight, they dance like there is no tomorrow, and they spread the virus of drug abuse wherever they go. They are not of this world, they believe in very different things to you and I, and like many young people, they arrogantly believe they can make their own laws.

James Anderton, speech to the British Institute ofManagement, Manchester 1975

Cyril James Anderton, the bearded Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, was a man of fastidious habits. Each morning he woke at 7 a.m., had breakfast in bed, brought to him on the same reinforced plastic tray and served up by his dutiful wife. The food rarely varied: bacon and eggs, and then grapefruit. A small book with scribbled notes sat next to his bed within easy reach, and Anderton would start the working day by writing down his dreams and organising them into patterns of recurrence, underlining those dreams when he came face-to-face with God. He would then rise to take a shower, where he prayed to heaven, eyes staring upwards into the jet sprays of hot water, his beard dripping on the tiled floor. For ten minutes or more, he allowed the water to wash away his sins as he held private ministry with the Lord.

According to his biographer, Michael Prince, Anderton had arrived back in Manchester on a mission to clean up the city and complete a task that had begun over ten years before. ’He came in like a storm and the wind continued to rage throughout his turbulent reign,’ Prince wrote in God’s Cop. Anderton’s reach was substantial. He had seven thousand officers, covering a region of over five hundred square miles and with responsibility for a population of over three million people. Remarkably, for someone who held such high public office, he was neither bashful nor embarrassed about his beliefs. He proudly espoused reincarnation and told those close to him that in a previous life he had once been the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell. Like the Lord Protector he used biblical language and described Greater Manchester as a city which had become ‘engulfed by the forces of the night’. The once grand industrial buildings of Manchester were falling into disuse and ugly brownfield sites pockmarked the city. Anderton saw a connection. He believed that economic decline paralleled a decline in moral values and that Manchester’s poverty was not only material but spiritual. On his desk was a folder crammed with arrest sheets for drug-related crimes, particularly burglaries and break-ins at pharmacies. It was not good news for the turbulent children of the northern soul scene; since his early days as a beat bobby Anderton had watched the scene grow and in his mind ‘corrupt the values of a decent city’.

By 1975 Anderton had risen to the rank of Chief Constable of Manchester. For over a decade, Greater Manchester Police had been ruled by high-ranking officers whose Christian fundamentalism shaped their attitude to crime and punishment. Anderton was not unique but he became the most notorious of a lineage of Christian coppers, who the Mods of the sixties called the God Squad. Anderton had joined the force in 1953, leaving for promoted posts in Leicester and London, and then returning north to Manchester. His return came at a critical moment in the history of the northern scene. Two of the major clubs – the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and the Torch in Tunstall, near Stoke-on-Trent – had both fallen foul of the law and been closed down. The passions that they had unlocked for all nightclubs playing imported black music was not curtailed, though: on the contrary, the passions had spread unchecked across the north of England, and a new club called the Casino had opened twenty miles west of Manchester’s city centre, in a decaying old ballroom on Station Road, Wigan. On a busy night, the Casino could attract up to 2,000 frenetic dancers, its popularity having spread largely by word of mouth and tiny adverts in the small-circulation soul press. By pure coincidence, the Casino had opened against a backdrop of seismic change in policing too; a nationwide restructuring that favoured scale over community meant that Wigan was absorbed into the Greater Manchester Police region, and came under the uncompromising sway of James Anderton.

God’s Copper. Manchester’s disciplinarian police chief Cyril James Anderton. © Sefton Samuels/National Portrait Gallery

Wigan Casino felt preciously close to home. Anderton had been born the son of a miner into red-brick poverty in Wigan’s Goose Green and grew up as a God-fearing teenager in the town’s Pemberton area. He had been drafted into National Service at the age of eighteen, having taken guidance from his great-uncle Nehemiah Occleshaw, a police officer in Wigan whose name alone conjured a Dickensian past. His parents had courted at Wigan’s Empress Ballroom and married before the Second World War. The furthest the family travelled in his infancy was on an annual working-class pilgrimage to Blackpool, where they unwrapped their Pac A Macs, trudged the wet sands and ate sodden sandwiches. It was a conventional upbringing that resisted the distractions of fashion and youth culture. The passage of time had been unkind to coal miners, to the Pier at Blackpool, and to the cavernous ballrooms that had been built across Britain in the dance-band era. New patterns of entertainment had ravaged the old ways, mobile discotheques were undermining the need for live music, and big bands had given way to disc jockeys. Down-at-heel ballrooms like the Empress in Wigan were on their last legs. In a last desperate bid to stave off closure, the Empress had rebranded itself as Wigan Casino, and to Anderton’s personal fury became the epicentre of the north’s rare soul scene.

Anderton loathed everything Wigan Casino had come to represent: the drugs, the pounding black music, and most of all the surly and unruly teenagers who flocked to its doors. He once described them climbing off buses like ‘locusts in the night’, and as an advocate of the Lord’s Day Observance Society he hated the way that northern soul all-nighters were eroding the sanctity of Sunday. In Wigan, a couple of shops stayed open to serve the hordes – a burger van parked close to the club and sold them a roll and regurgitation, or as they say in Wigan ‘botulism on a bap’ – and the local swimming baths, where Anderton had learned to swim, was where the exhausted soul dancers went to hang out before their trains home. For Anderton, Wigan Casino had become a post-industrial Gomorrah, with the Sabbath being flagrantly desecrated by teenagers who danced to obscure music and treated pharmaceutical pills as if they were the unholy Eucharist. He saw them as a weird sect – and they probably were – but whatever his views, he could not stop the weekly pilgrimage to Wigan.

Anderton’s hatred of black music did not begin with Wigan. Nor did it end there. It had been ignited over a decade before when he was a beat copper walking the streets of Manchester’s multiracial Moss Side, policing the illegal blues parties of the fifties. It was on the streets of Moss Side that he met his long-time colleague – and ultimately his rival and nemesis – John Stalker, then a uniformed officer about to be recruited into the plain-clothes vice squad. From the forties onwards, Moss Side had catered for the night: first, African seamen that arrived by ship from Liverpool to Salford Docks, and then immigrants who came with government support to find work in the National Health Service and public transport. This was the notorious era of ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’, and in the north of England it was Moss Side that hosted blues clubs, playing ska and reggae alongside American R&B. Moss Side and Hulme, near Manchester’s city centre, had been particularly hard hit by economic malaise and had been razed to the ground twice in thirty years. Victorian slum housing was demolished during the sixties after the biggest demolition project in Europe. The red-brick terraced houses were replaced by high-rise flats and huge concrete crescents, which only served to foster crime, indifference and alienation. As Anderton trawled the streets of the inner city he became convinced that God was the ultimate copper and that morality was the guiding principle of good governance. He shared the unshakeable Christianity of the American Deep South where preachers described R&B as the Devil’s music. He preferred the term ‘beat clubs’ and refused to dignify nightclubs with the word ‘soul’, as if it was a word stolen from the Lord. The police were tasked with policing a pocket of illegal shebeens, brothels and nightclubs, including the Reno on Princess Road and Moss Lane, which had begun its life as a Salvation Army hostel for African seamen. An upstairs bar known as the Nile Club was on their watch list, the Public Services Vehicle Club in Hulme (known as the PSV Club) was frequently raided, and another target was the Russell Club, which in a later life would play a crucial role in the evolution of Manchester’s indie scene, Factory Records and the emergence of the city’s super-club, the Hacienda.

Northern soul has always been an enigma. Somehow, through its obsessive yearnings, it has managed to forge links between Britain’s most forgotten industrial towns and the ghettos of black America. At its rousing best – shrieking vocals, blaring horns and sexually depraved saxophone breaks – northern soul can be traced back to early post-war Britain, when cafés emerged across the country, providing a third space where young people could escape from home and work. Back then, sociologists described a new kind of consumer – the ‘teenager’ – who was attractive to advertisers, and a source of delinquent concern for the authorities. It was famously in London’s Soho, far from the industrial north, that a professional wrestler called Paul Lincoln opened a café called the 2i’s. Situated at 59 Old Compton Street, it was a musical melting pot where jazz, skiffle and calypso were played live or via the café’s jukebox. One regular session guitarist, Joe Moretti, claimed that ‘in 1958 the 2i’s was the fuse for the explosion that was to come in the world of UK rock and roll . . . it was just a little café with an old battered piano in the basement in Old Compton Street. But it had a soul and a buzz.’ The 2i’s became Britain’s first recorded all-nighter, and its equivalents were beginning to spring up in towns and cities elsewhere, among them the Left Wing Coffee Bar in Manchester’s Brazennose Street, which in time would evolve into the first of the great northern soul clubs, the Twisted Wheel. A lesser known northern café called the Plebeians, across the Pennines in Halifax, also prospered, hidden from the glare of attention, to become a home to jazz buffs, bohemian blues fans and eventually the scooter kids, Modernists and rare soul fans of North Yorkshire.

Parisian beatniks at an all-night soul event at the Bus Palladium club, 9 December 1965. © Jean-Claude Deutsch / Getty Images

It was at the Left Wing Coffee Bar in March 1961, with a live jazz and blues set from John Rowland and the Jazz Unit, that the first ever recognisable ‘northern soul’ all-nighter took place. Classified ads in the Manchester Evening News used the historic words ‘music from midnight to dawn’. Only coffee was on sale and no alcohol licence was required, so the event took place beneath the radar of the police. That was never likely to last. The very notion of listening to music until dawn soon attracted the attention of a clique of high-ranking senior officers at Manchester Police’s Divisional Headquarters in Bootle Street and triggered a war that was as much about the cracks and divisions in post-war Britain as it was about soul itself. Chief Constable John Andrew McKay was a strait-laced Scot from Blantyre in Lanarkshire. He was military through and through, and once claimed that Manchester Police were obliged to work against the emergent R&B café culture to combat ‘the moral decay of the innocents’. McKay had been a military governor in Palermo during the Second World War and was a station inspector in Gray’s Inn Road Police Station during the London Blitz. He believed his wartime experiences gave him an elevated status in peacetime and often came over as a pompous man who talked down to people. McKay shared many of the character traits of his namesake, the prison warder Mr Mackay in the television sitcom Porridge; an officious man who marched rather than walked, he managed Manchester as if it were a barracks compound, for ever suspicious of the ‘Fletchers’ of northern soul and the locusts of the night. In many ways, he was unsuited to manage the sweeping progress that was changing Britain. A gulf had opened up between the police – the majority of whom had seen military service – and the post-war generation of ‘baby boomers’, who society readily dismissed as anti-authoritarian wasters. Anderton learned under McKay’s tutelage, but was not yet senior enough to spearhead the war on nightclubs. That role went to another disciplinarian Scot, a formidable chief inspector called Alan Dingwall. More than any of his contemporaries, Dingwall harboured a deep-rooted dislike of soul clubs and made it his life’s work to see them closed down. He worked tirelessly against the forces of the night and drafted a policy document on what he described as the city’s ‘Beat Club problem’, which influenced politicians, the city fathers and other towns far from Manchester. Whatever its merits, it was not in any sense an objective document: it read like a moral diatribe and argued forcefully that clubs were not only immoral but the hub of a growing amphetamine-related crime wave.

Music and society were in flux. The precursors of northern soul lurched from jazz to skiffle, onwards to blues and R&B, while teenage ‘style’ evolved from beatnik to Mod. But much else was shaping Cold War Britain, not least the resistance to nuclear weapons. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was in the first throes of protest. Marches to Aldermaston’s Atomic Weapons Research Centre in Berkshire and the US Polaris base at Holy Loch in Scotland were annual pilgrimages, which attracted righteous fervour and a new kind of music fan fascinated by urban blues and the rhythms of disaffection coming from segregated America. In time, the Holy Loch became a gateway. Black US servicemen brought R&B music with them, setting up local clubs in Dunoon and Glasgow, playing music to those they met, and selling records on ‘precious’ labels such as Chicago’s Chess Records.

The arrival of R&B music into Britain’s dockland communities was even more pronounced in Liverpool where in underground clubs such as the Mardi Gras, the Cavern and the Jacaranda imported music was played by local DJs Bob Wooler and Billy Butler. This helped to stimulate the local Mersey Beat bands and shaped the set lists of The Beatles, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and Gerry and the Pacemakers. Influences were coming from Europe, too, where Parisian bohemian café culture was embracing a new beatnik underground fuelled by black music, radical theory and narcotic distractions. One café which came to influence the Twisted Wheel in a subtle but lasting way was the Bus Palladium, a beatnik all-nighter on Rue Pierre Fontaine; young kids were bussed in from the suburbs to central Paris and stayed up all night infused by jazz, blues and Captagon, an amphetamine-like substance brought to Paris nightclubs by French-Algerians (and today’s drug of choice for Syria’s warring factions).

Anxiety about teenage behaviour was fearfully exaggerated in the daily newspapers of the day, and one event stood out as a landmark of change. On 31 July 1960, a riot at the Beaulieu jazz festival in the New Forest made headline news, with running battles between trad jazz fans and Modernists. The stage was destroyed, lighting rigs were torn down, a building was set alight, and thirty-nine people were injured. BBC television’s outside broadcast stopped six minutes before it was scheduled to end with an awkward live comment: ‘Things are getting quite out of hand. It is obvious things cannot continue like this.’ Nor would they. Britain was staring change in the face, and it was being driven by the young.

The Left Wing Coffee Bar in Manchester and the Plebeians café, which began its life in a disused mill in Halifax accessible from the town’s Upper George Yard, became hubs for new music nearly a decade before those pioneering spaces transformed into northern soul. The duffle coats, jazz and blues sounds, and the CND badges had yet to be purged, before amphetamines and urban soul arrived in earnest. The Left Wing Coffee Bar was one of a number of cafés to fall foul of the police’s moral crusade, and investigations spread out to a cluster of other teenage cafés near Manchester’s Albert Square, including the Three Coins, the Kardomah and the Oasis, a cult R&B café, situated in a narrow street parallel to the original Twisted Wheel, off Manchester’s Deansgate. In time it would bequeath its name to one of the city’s most famous pop groups.

As society changed it brought increased anxiety about the misuse of pharmaceutical drugs. In February 1964, in an unusually perceptive article for the time, society journalist Anne Sharpley wrote an article for the Evening Standard on the cult of Mods. Under the intriguing headline ‘Purple Heart Trip in Soho’, Sharpley focused on a Soho nightclub called ‘The Scene’, hidden away in a mews off Great Windmill Street. ’They [the teenagers] are looking for, and getting stimulation not intoxication,’ she wrote. ‘They want greater awareness, not escape. And the confidence and articulacy that the drugs of the amphetamine group give them is quite different from the drunken rowdiness of previous generations on a night out.’ James Brown’s ‘Night Train’ was the club’s anthem, and organ instrumentals by Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff cranked late into the night. Although it claimed to be reportage, Sharpley’s feature was part of an editorial partnership with the MP for North Paddington, Ben Parkin, a vocal opponent of the slum landlord Peter Rachman and by the mid-sixties an enemy of Mod drugs such as Drinamyl, or what were more popularly known as purple hearts. The racy tabloid press exaggerated society’s concerns. The Sunday People even ran with a sensational exposé of Everton’s 1962–63 title-winning football team, which the paper claimed had won games blocked on amphetamine. In 1964, Parliament passed the Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act, which added amphetamines to a list of previously restricted drugs such as opium, morphine and cocaine. Almost overnight, Mod clubs already under the watchful eye of the law became the subject of a determined campaign to close them down. Back in Manchester, Alan Dingwall, James Anderton and John Stalker were now frontline officers in a city-wide clampdown on nightclubs. Emboldened by new laws banning illegal amphetamines, the police focused on break-ins at chemist shops across the north of England, where the newly proscribed drugs were locked away in special cabinets. From 1965 onwards, amphetamines went underground; they became harder to get from doctors and were often only available via forged prescriptions, or increasingly by burglary and forced entry at chemists. It was this latter crime that made the Twisted Wheel a priority target for Manchester’s drug squad. In a joint operation with their colleagues in Yorkshire, targeting Halifax’s Plebeians café, Dingwall’s squad tried to arrest a young Yorkshire Mod called Ernest Hardiman from Bradford, accusing him of breaking into a chemist’s shop in Crumpsall in North Manchester and feeding an amphetamine supply chain based at the Twisted Wheel. Hardiman’s alibis stacked up and he evaded arrest, but that did not ease the pressure on the Wheel when a widely circulated police report from the Salford area claimed that forty-seven local chemists had been burgled in one calendar year alone.

The Twisted Wheel changed lives. It was a soul venue like no other and most of those who went there returned with a sacrilegious fervour. By 1965, the days of the socialist reading rooms at the Left Wing Coffee Bar were long gone; it had adjusted to the prevailing winds of change and hosted more R&B nights, becoming a meeting place for record collectors bewitched by the sounds coming from the American ghettos: Chess Records in Chicago, Duke Records from Memphis and Peacock Records in Atlanta (a nascent R&B label headquartered at a nightclub in the Deep South). The venue was taken over by a group of enterprising brothers from Burnage in Manchester Southside called the Abadi brothers – Jack, Ivor and Phillip. They renamed it the Twisted Wheel and hired a bookish DJ called Roger Eagle who described himself as ‘more Teddy Boy than Mod’ and had been a regular at the Left Wing. Eagle was a committed anti-nuclear protestor, and, importantly, had a formidable collection of old blues records. It was through his pioneering direction that Jimmy Witherspoon, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley came to be played on the Manchester club scene. Roger Eagle was destined to shape the music policy of the Twisted Wheel in its formative years until the overwhelming power of the Mod movement – with its razor-sharp style and elegant Lambrettas – drove the scene inexorably towards urban soul and the sounds of the sixties.

The Twisted Wheel became the template by which all subsequent northern soul clubs were judged: the intense atmosphere, the rare soul music and the extravagant dancers. Soul seeped through the walls of the venue on Manchester’s Whitworth Street, in a forgotten edge of the city adjacent to the dark industrial arches of Piccadilly Railway Station. Ivor Abadi ran the club on behalf of his brothers, defying commercial logic by only serving soft drinks and snacks, and accepting from the outset that the Twisted Wheel was unlikely to be granted a liquor licence. As crowds flocked there from across the north of England, it became clear that its unique music policy and the forbidden allure of amphetamines was what drove the Mod clientele. The main venue was a converted warehouse, with a coffee snack bar on the ground floor and a series of rooms in the cellar. Back-lit iron wheels decorated the painted brick walls, and twisted metal in the shape of spokes and wheel rims hung around the lower spaces where a stage, a caged disc-jockey area and the main dance floor dominated. For five or six years it attracted the best of new British music: some clung to the blues, others were determined to stay in touch with American soul, some were truly original, and others were just very good cover bands – among their ranks John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Zoot Money, The Graham Bond Organisation, Wynder K Frog, The Alan Bown Set, The Spencer Davis Group and Georgie Fame. They shared a circuit with visiting artists from Jamaica and the USA, including Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band, Millie Small, Roy C, Jr Walker and the All Stars, and Jimmy Cliff.

By 1967 the music policy had hardened. For many dancers, the vinyl had become more important than the live acts, and the Twisted Wheel had built a catalogue of sounds many of which had been unavailable at any other clubs in the UK. Eventually blues pioneer Roger Eagle ran out of patience and resigned from his role as resident DJ, claiming that he was fed up of the impact of drug overdoses and the pressure to play soul. ‘I was tired of being the one to phone the ambulance,’ he told the club’s unofficial historian Keith Rylatt. ‘I was bored of the same Tamla requests over and over again.’ The Detroit soul label Tamla Motown had surged through British pop culture with a catalogue of hit records by The Supremes, The Temptations, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, cementing a lifelong connection between the northern soul scene and the city of Detroit. Then, in damning testimony in his biography Sit Down! Listen to This! Eagle admitted that ‘the first two years were fun but in the third it became boring quite frankly because the music became too similar all the time, it was just a fast dance beat to keep dancing all night’. Eagle’s impatience with his devoted following had soured into contempt. ‘They were blocked [soul term for being up on amphetamines] out of their heads on “Blues” or whatever they were taking and you were just a human jukebox. You’d put one record on after another and if you tried anything different they would yell at you because all they were interested in was dancing.’ Eagle’s eclectic tastes had come into conflict with the rigid rules of a new subculture where the music had to be the rattling on-the-fours beat of classic sixties soul. The Twisted Wheel had abandoned its bohemian roots and become a fully-fledged Mod club. Soul had become a religion, one that the chosen few of the deep north would remain devoted to for decades yet to come, and as attitudes hardened the scene became intolerant of music that didn’t reflect the lifestyle. Some followed the vagaries of fashion and drifted towards counterculture, psychedelia and the new hippie movement; some settled down into marriage and the straight world; and others found the scene too intense and happily joined the legions of everyday pop. Those who remained vigilant about the values of being a Mod formed the vanguard of an entirely new youth movement – one that as yet had no name but would become northern soul.

Rare soul DJ Phil Saxe at the decks of the Twisted Wheel.

No one is entirely sure where the term ‘northern’ soul came from. The most likely explanation is that the term was in casual use hundreds of miles south in a record shop called Soul City on the busy Deptford High Street, in south London. One of the shop’s owners, the Motown pioneer and journalist Dave Godin who became an intellectual beacon on the rare soul scene, claims the term was first used in his shop to classify up-tempo soul, the imported records that would appeal to northern customers, many of whom were fans of Manchester United, Liverpool and Leeds United down in London for away games. The shop kept a box tagged ‘northern soul’ behind the counter, and through Godin’s journalism in the weekly music magazine Blues & Soul the term stuck. The explanation had long been a settled truth until a Preston-born soul fan, Stuart Raith, unearthed an old advert for a Manchester cover group the St. Louis Union, who performed at the Twisted Wheel back in July 1965. The advert described St. Louis Union as ‘the group on the Northern Soul Scene’, which raises the prospect of the term having been in colloquial use in Manchester before England won the World Cup and long before even the most avid followers imagined. Whatever the truth, the term confused the uninitiated and visiting soul artists. How could records forged in the studios of the Deep South, in Memphis and New Orleans, suddenly defy geographic logic and be classified as northern soul? It is an anomaly that remains fiercely difficult to explain.

One thing that Dave Godin was adamant about was that the north and London were different places. He visited the Twisted Wheel in the winter of 1970 and became the club’s greatest journalistic advocate, often arguing against his London-based colleagues. Many years later, in a deeply honest interview with the Ormskirkborn northern soul collector Pete Lawson, in his short-lived fanzine The Gospel According to Dave Godin, Godin set out a key difference. ‘One of the things that maybe bound the Northern Soul scene together is it’s a similar sort of thing to the black American experience,’ he commented. ‘It’s almost ghettoisation, because the Northern Soul scene was so scorned by the majority of the people in the south, and in people who had access to the media.’ Godin ploughed a lonely furrow. For nearly ten years he was the only serious journalist who saw value in the underground north; most commentators – trapped in a metropolitan bubble – saw it as a distant irrelevance, while the Manchester police saw it as a festering problem on their doorstep.

The Twisted Wheel had many enemies. As far back as 1964, in an excoriating Annual Report, Chief Constable John McKay condemned the rise of teenage cafés and nightclubs in Manchester and linked them to a parallel rise in burglaries of chemists and doctors’ surgeries. The report was distributed to politicians and compliant journalists. Police briefings singled out the Twisted Wheel, making exaggerated claims about local teenage deaths – most of which had nothing to do with nightclubs, or even amphetamine abuse – and local journalists at the BBC and the Manchester Evening News helped to fuel anxieties. McKay admitted that his senior staff had been demonising clubs in the press and impeding licences wherever they could, and in turn the vigorous war on soul music gave shape to new legislation in the form of the Manchester Corporation Act. In Westminster, Lord Parker of Waddington raged against the nascent northern soul scene from the benches of the House of Lords:

Before turning to the Bill itself, may I spend a few minutes dealing with what I am convinced makes legislation along these lines a matter of urgent necessity today . . . It was in 1964 that entertainment clubs of a kind were introduced in Manchester. They go by different names – coffee and dance clubs, beat clubs, jazz clubs and the like. They are clubs at which refreshments of the coffee, snack and soft-drink variety are available, and they offer evening and often all-night entertainment in the form of ‘pop’ music . . . These clubs naturally attract the young, and those of a more disreputable nature, in particular those with no fixed abode, abscondees from approved schools and other institutions, as well as those who desire to escape supervision by their parents, and indeed supervision by any adult control. They wander about from so-called club to club. It was quite common to find a girl sleeping in a different club every night, and even during the day, when the clubs were supposed to be closed. Many clubs were, in fact, really nothing more than common lodging-houses . . . it was found that dangerous drugs were being sold, distributed and taken on such premises. True, most of these were of the Indian hemp, ‘purple heart’ and other drugs of the amphetamine class, but activities were certainly not confined to those and extended to heroin, cocaine and morphia.

The Act of Parliament gave excessive new powers to the police, delivering them the whip hand over local licensing regulations. Henceforth, no one could now own a club without the prior permission of the police, and opening hours were framed in a way that curtailed the concept of the all-nighter. One recommendation meant that the police could restrict the opening hours of clubs that extended into the next day, whether they sold alcohol or not. It was a law deliberately scripted to curb the popularity of all-nighters. Many clubs simply closed; others ducked and dived by moving to new premises and re-emerging with a new name. The Twisted Wheel tried to tough it out, but the club’s notoriety weighed against it. Before McKay’s campaign, there were over 220 nightclubs across the Greater Manchester area. By 1967 it had become a few dozen, and by 1971 only three major nightclubs survived. One of those was the Twisted Wheel. However, with new laws and a crusading police force stacked against it, the Wheel was isolated and ultimately doomed.