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Northern Soul is a style of music with associated dance styles and fashions that developed in the north of England in the late 1960s. In the beginning the dancing was athletic, featuring spins, flips, and drops. The music originally consisted of obscure American soul recordings with an uptempo beat, very similar to and including Tamla Motown, plus more obscure labels (e.g. Okeh) from northern cities like Detroit and Chicago (in contrast to southern styles like Memphis soul). By 1970 British performers were recording numbers for this market, and the scarcity of soul records with the required beat led to the playing of stompers, or records by any artist which featured the right beat. The phrase 'Northern Soul' was coined by journalist Dave Godin sometime around 1971 when writing his column in Blues and Soul magazine.
A large proportion of Northern Soul's original audience came from the mod movement with their love of obscure soul. As some mods turned away from these sounds to embrace the psychedelic movement of the late sixties, many mods - especially those in northern England - elected to keep faith with the original soundtrack of soul and ska; some becoming what would eventually be known as skinheads and others forming the basis of what would be known as Northern Soul.
Early Northern Soul fashion included bowling shirts, button-down collar shirts, blazers with centre vents and unusual numbers of buttons, and baggy trousers. Many dancers belonged to clubs organized by dance halls and wore club badges issued at each dance.
The first Northern Soul Club proper, which effectively defined the Northern Soul sound, just prior to its closure, was northern England's Twisted Wheel Club. Foremost among the other early clubs were those at the Torch in Stoke, Wigan Casino, the Blackpool Mecca, the Mojo in Sheffield, Cleethorpes Winter Gardens(still a Northern Soul venue to this day) and Va Va's [one where Richard Searling used to DJ].
Northern Soul is amongst the most expensive of all musical genres to collect and the movement has set new heights in the resale market of obscure vinyl. Many hundreds of 7" discs have now broken the £1,000 [c.$2,000] valuation barrier, with some even dwarfing that sum. For example, Frank Wilson's "Do I love you" was sold, several years ago, for £15,000 [c.$30,000]. The value of many discs has appreciated due to a combination of factors such as the quality of beat, melody and lyric [virtually always deeply touching the listener, by expressing heartache / pain / joy due to the vagaries of romantic love] in combination with rarity. Most Northern Soul artists were having a go at stardom without all of the necessary ingredients being in place. Low-budget, independent labels simply couldn't deliver the necessary promotion, nor radio play. Thence, the often very talented artists with superb compositions, had to go back to their day jobs, thinking themselves failures, with the records being poorly promoted and sinking into obscurity, never to be heard outside of Northen England again! Many Northern Soul artists have been pleasantly surpised by 'phone calls from fans in northern England who have managed to track them down and tell them that the record that they had recorded 20-30 years earlier and had probably forgotten about, had in fact been played continuously in the Northern Soul clubs of England and that they were actually Northern Soul superstars with their records being avidly hunted and changing hands for huge sums of money! A lot of acts have therefore been over to England to perform their golden oldies at all-nighters, often many years after the original release.
Songs by the Fascinations and the Velvelettes that were previously released in the 60's became top 40 UK hits in 1970. The Fascinations made #30 with "Girls Are Out to Getcha" and the Velvelettes made #35 with "These Things Will Keep Me Loving You."
In later years many Northern Soul fans thence went on to expand their collections and horizons and accommodated the richer and more complex Modern soul sound in the early-70s and beyond (tracks such as Garfield Fleming's - "Please don't send me away" exemplify this).
In the 21st century Northern Soul is still going strong with a thriving worldwide scene. Rare unknown 1960s soul sounds are still being discoverd by passionate fans and played at many UK events every weekend.