Stuart Cosgrove - Young Soul Rebels: A Personal History of Northern Soul

Make Life Worth Living: Leeds, 1970s. Northern Soul clubs Hernies and Leeds Central are being targeted by local drug squad officers. Pharmaceutical company Beechams 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 Ltd
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS

www.polygonbooks.co.uk

Copyright Stuart Cosgrove 2016

The right of Stuart Cosgrove to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted 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 been
made, the publisher will be happy to rectify these in future editions.

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

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

Design by Chris Hannah
Printed and bound by Livonia Print, Latvia

CONTENTS

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 northsouth 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 scenes 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.

Its 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.

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 girlfriends 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 Devils 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.